12 Weeks Out

12 weeks to competition (NPA Natural USA Championships Sept 25, 2010). I have been carb cycling and eating 100% clean for the last week and a half, so I've lost the initial water/undigested food weight already. My starting weight is 192, a good 8 pounds ahead of what I started at for the last competition, and 12 pounds away from where I want to be at competition day.

Being a lot closer to my competition weight, I don't need to press as far as cutting down my carbs quite yet. My carb cycle looks like this:

Low Carb - 150g
Moderate Carb - 200g
High Carb - 300-350g

My low carb days are on my off & cardio days, moderate on lifting days, and high carb on leg day & one day during the week. Closer to competition I'll cut down to 1 high carb day a week on leg day, but so far I've been getting good results with this so I'll stick to it for now.

This week I'm going to do 2 very light ab & cardio days (already did one on Saturday).

My last 2 lifts have absolutely sucked. About halfway through I've gotten really tired and nauseous and dragged through the remainder of the workout. Today I couldn't even finish biceps & quads because I thought I was going to puke on the gym floor. I switched my normal preworkout shake the last two days, so I assume there's something in the new stuff that doesn't agree with me. I'll go back to normal on Wednesday and hopefully be fine.

One last noteworthy thing, today I did regular deadlifts for the first time in about a month. 3 sets of 5x345. Form was good, though I must have held my breath because after each set I felt progressively more light headed and faint-ish. Definitely not positive, but the back held up and felt ok which is much more important right now.

Planning for Shoulders on Wednesday and Legs on Thursday. I'll try and get another post in before the week's up.

Lift numbers so far this week:

Chest/Tris

BB Bench 6x245
Inc DB Bench 9x90s
Dec BB Bench 7x225
DB Flyes - 9x60s(2)
Cable Pushdowns - 10x 95
Bench Dips - 9x90
OH Cable Extensions - 8x87.5

Back/Bis
Deadlifts - 5x345 (3)
Neutral Grip Pullups - 5x100(2)
T-Bar Rows - 7x160
Cable Rows - 7x240
Wide Pulldowns - 10x200
Leg Curls - 12x175
EZ Bi Curls - 10x90