A lot has happened...

So it turns out I'm awful at keeping blogs up to date. But a lot has happened and only the talk of blogging last night made me actually thing about starting it back up again so here we go again I guess.

I left off moving onto my second season of american football. I came back to the team in a different position, ready to learn again from scratch. Turns out I was pretty much a natural at it although to be honest I didn't think I was actually doing much. What I do know now is that a good corner  back is like gold dust in the NFL and a position that does get a lot of the stress and blame from being scored on.

This was something that never actually happened to me in my entire British career (my Italian one is a different story) so I think I'm pretty lucky to have had such a decent time playing that position even if it did mean I fell apart after my 7th successive season. Only 4 more seasons on from there and I have actually retired from all American football related activities. I thought about blogging about that too but it was a sad, sad day and not much at all to talk about.

We played that season at Stags going undefeated. 12-0 smashing every record along the way. The culmination of pure athletes amongst great coaches and tactics, I have the best seat in the house to watch some incredible football. I don't think I've seen it replicated since!

Training continued as expected. MONDAY light lifting, TUESDAY practice, WEDNESDAY lift & classroom sessions, THURSDAY practice, FRIDAY lift and SUNDAY game-day/practice. Saturday would be our day off. Usually consisting of chickenland, youtube videos and generally chilling out. My boy Chevy Green was at my flat every Saturday pre-gameday night for this ritual and we still say sleeping at 5am for a 8am wakeup was the key to our success (except for that Reading game where we all watched the Mayweather fight and conceded one score in the very first drive, then hammered them by about 40 points)

Personally while I trained I did a lot of quick powerful movements. People told me I was cheating while I was benching 100kg for 10 x 3 sets cause I was doing them so quick. But I still saw no problem with it when I was levelling receivers off the line, and I don't think many of our receivers enjoyed playing up close against me.

It wasn't until I played receiver where being able to lift a heavy set in more slow movements, that it would come in handy to slow it down. Picking up a defensive linemen twice your size who doesn't gym was always a great feeling. (running into a 6"6 linemen who actually trains on the other hand.....brain damage)

Only recently have I attempted to diet properly for weight loss and it sucks. I still have incredible will power when I want to achieve a certain goal but i'm not sure how much longer I can last. My diet while I was at University was simple. EAT LOADS. Whether it was pizza, pasta, fried chicken or whatever junk or healthy foods it was I just ate as much as I possibly could and it was always a much happier time. (right now I'm salivating over the thought of some Dominos)

As long as you have your goal of what you want to look like in your own head I believe you can achieve it. But only if you really want it. My family constantly ask me why they aren't getting any smaller and how to train etc but all they seem to do is eat as if they have the metabolism of a 12 year old anorexic child. Even I can't do that any more which is why this bout of proper dieting has become so difficult.

I play sport possibly once every two weeks IF my body allows me. But otherwise I try to keep in cardio in my training programme at the gym every other day or so. Otherwise my goals would simply not be achieved. What's the point in having a goal if you KNOW in your mind that what you're doing is detrimental or just isn't going to help you get to it. That how I know the difference between someone who has an end game and someone who doesn't. We work hard for something we know we want but never for something we don't that would just be silly. But if you want something that sort of is a dream type of situation, like a body like Schwarzenegger, then you have to actually want it, not just think you do. But have in your mind every day, that image of 'YOUR PERFECTION' so don't imagine your head on Arnies body but rather YOU on YOUR perfected body.

That's all I have to say for now and I most probably will leave it too long in between my next post. For anyone who does read this and wants to discuss anything with me, find me on either facebook. Soheil Maleki or email me at soheil_maleki@hotmail.co.uk

A new year, a new challenge.

So i'd completed my first year of university and I decided that joining the american football team was a good idea because I had gotten quite built up and always was a pretty fast and athletic person. I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into.

I started with the Southampton Stags and I was fasting for the first month of training with them which didn't help my body at all. In all honesty I wasn't really that good, barely stepped foot on the field and got injured halfway through which put me out of any kind of sport for about 10 months till the next season rolled around.

Something I started to learn though, was about in season and off season weight lifting. Putting that much stress on your body kills the will to train for bulk. We sure as hell tried but it is very difficult to achieve, which is why it's well known that the off-season is for bulking up (not known at all to me back in those days)

When we were in season, I could only really train anything that wasn't hurting (a feat easier said than done these days) so I would mostly train my upper body which wasn't a bad thing as I wasn't bulking and my legs were effectively being trained from all the running. As mentioned before, never neglect training your legs, my earlier blogs explain why.

As it turned out I was playing for the then, current national champions but we lost we in the southern final, which brought on the off season and probably the most amount of gym training i've ever done. Rain, shine, morning and night I would be in the gym. With team mates or alone I was building for a better season although my legs were still killed from injury, bulking was something that was to only later make it worse. But for the time being, what I was doing was actually just in time for what was to be an incredible season and year.

Peace!

Ok ok I lied i'm sorry :-\

So I just went 6 months in between posting even though I said I wouldn't leave it so late again...ooops. To be fair there has been super amounts of different things going on both in the "real world" shit, going on and the "my body is so broken it hates me" department.

Currently suffering from possible hip impingement, definite golfers elbow and deteriorating muscle damage to my neck and the upper right-of-centre of my back. All sport and exercise had ceased up until about 2 months ago or so when I finally felt good enough to start seriously training again as back in August most of these injuries hit me at exactly the same time.

But feeling in almost perfect shape at the moment (apart from the hips which are super messed up) and am in the mood to let everyone know im back up to benching BIG :D

But this isn't to say that i've been totally neglecting my legs. I have also added size and definition, mostly to my calves but generally having bigger stronger legs and it feels great.

So this evening I went to the gym with a my good friend Randy. I walked in and decided today was my 1 rep max day of 130 (something I haven't attempted in over 6 months) and POW I bitch slapped that one rep outta the park following it up with the second with help from my friend spotting me.

Feeling super pumped I also decided to attempt a one arm 30kg dumbell curl which i've attempted about 3 weeks in a row and not even come close. It would seem this evening I decided to become superman just for the night as I also slowly but surely curled the weight all the way to the top, and again with my left arm as well which left me in a shock-awe situation feeling good about myself.

This is something I think people need to be able to break through when training on a regular basis and feeling like they aren't improving on their strength and gains. As most pro's know a key factor of adding mass is adding more weights to whatever your pushing, pressing, pulling etc. So if you're stuck, like I have been since I started back training you need to have a day like I did today.
Just walk into the gym and say to yourself

 F#@K YOU (ARMS, CHEST, SHOULDERS or whatever) today i'm going to kill you and that's whats up.

I genuinely had no idea whether I would be able to press this weight when I walked in but I just decided that being stuck on 100-110 fluctuating between reps just wasn't good enough and I didn't just go in without taking precautions making sure Randy knew exactly how I wanted to be spotted to feel comfortable with attempting whatever it was I wanted to do.

I talk about mind a fair bit because with the wrong mentality, you will fail at everything. Just like my mentality these past two weeks with my diet (I lost 10kgs and have now gone back to being lazy/eating everything including chickenland on a regular basis) I need to get back on track if I want the tour body I envisage for myself for when the time comes. Which is also only 40 days away (SHEEEEEEETTT SONNNNN)

So stay strong up there as well all around your body! Push some mental weights and shift that fat, add some mass and get HENCH/TONED/FIT!!!!

Half a year!

So i've been gymming about half a year so far. Then end of my first year at uni is very close and so far all I seemed to have learnt came from university of bodybuilding.com :-\ My first lads holiday was only a few months away in August so I got on my own case hard!

While everyone left my town to go get fattened up by their parents, I already lived with mine. So i'd cook almost all of my own meals. Thanks to student loans I didn't really need a job during the summer which made it easy for me to settle into my old routine; upper body, upper body and more upper body!

I would wake up, have breakfast, get to the gym, have lunch. LUNCH brings me to my next subject.

Food for beginners!

You can probably go online and search almost anywhere which will give you a whole different range of diets and nutritional information and although I now can do the same, back to basics I feel is what starters need as I once did. What I did helped develop me in such a way that people couldn't believe how quick it was all working.

Three words, which seems to be a thing at the moment; Tuna, Pasta and chicken. If you've ever thought black people like chicken, you haven't seen a body builder bulking. But i'm not too sure whether it's a 'like' as much as it is a necessity.

I would eat piles of tuna and pasta, and after a stint in Rome playing American Football (which doesn't come for another year yet!) I had perfected a delightful recipe. Can't really put up measurements really but it's kind of trial and error more than anything, and what's perfect to me might be a disaster for you (not that anyone has complained yet).

I would start off by boiling some pasta, whatever type you prefer is the best as its perfect for you. But spirals and shells are probably the best choice as they seem to cling onto the most tuna so you don't end up having to just scrape it off the bottom of your bowl at the end, by which point you may be too full to even eat it and it is the most important part of the meal really.

Heat some olive oil in a pan and put one or two cloves or very finely chopped garlic in until slightly browned. If you like spicy food as much as I do, you need to get hold of some pepperoncino, which is dried hot chilli peppers usually very small. You can take the stems off and simply rub the pepper between your fingers rub until its all powdered in. I would only use 2-3 myself as they are quite potent.

Grab some passata sauce preferably with mixed herbs, it just tastes nicer, and mix it in with the oil, chilli and garlic. Let the spices infuse for a couple minutes. Grab a can of tuna and mix it into your sauce using a fork so that you can flake it up instead of just some massive chunks in your pot as trying to break up the clumps that way can result in ruining your non stick pots, or so that's what mum used to moan at me for doing all the time.

Draining your cooked pasta, simply serve in a bowl with the tuna and sauce on top, just like bolognese. If it still isn't spicy enough for your tastebuds, add some tobasco sauce to the pot just before the tuna.

This, for me, was the meal of champions. Since my days of being 70kgs I go up and down as and when I like between 80-90 although usually levelling out at about the midway point. The amount of food that I would eat was my regular portion until I felt full...and then I would force myself to eat some more. I wasn't exaggerating when you look at this on your plate it will look like a mini plate mountain and it may even get cold by the time you've mustered up the courage to eat it, but if you're in the right frame of mind like I was and are looking to put on those pound then this is the way to go.

I won't leave it so late next time, it's the month of fasting at the moment but it's over in a week so I will return with some more of my story.

Peace!

Only a quick one....(Lats or Wings)

So just a quick one before I get to the gym.

The lats (lattissimus dorsi) are what gives people the 'V' shape that people so often talk about and look to achieve, large wings down to a small waist. My method for creating this has worked a treat, for a guy who never really focused in on training my lats in particular, I pretty much look like I can fly when I flex them out hah

As I said in my first post it was a regular routine of mine to work out my upper body about 5 times a week. So training my back was pretty regular and by the end of my first year or building my back in general was pretty defined and quite large. With a combination of lat pull downs and lat rows it pretty much sent them well on their way to the size they have become, but I believe the key to my success was due to the fact that every single training session, no matter what I was training. I would do a series of sets of pull ups.

Depending on your size and initial strength you may not even be able to do a single rep, if you are at this level you should start by getting a step up so that you are high enough to do a negative rep. So you start at the 'pulled up' position and try to stay in this position once you have stopped supporting yourself with your feet. Start off with as many as up to 5 per set and three sets per day. Slowly building yourself up and soon you will be able to do full pull ups, you can move on to eventually doing up to three sets of seven reps.  Now once your are at this position you can then start to add weights to your workouts, keeping your reps low and increasing the weight will stop the increase in muscle pain.

Don't get me wrong you will still feel the pain, lets be honest the phrase 'no pain no gain' couldn't be a truer statement for lifting and building. BUT by not over exhausting your muscle you can reduce DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) so that you won't feel as much pain as you would if say you could do 3 sets of 20 reps.You must remember I did this every single training session so I still had to go and lift my entire training sessions' worth of weights. Most of the pain will originate from the coming down phase of each reps. Eccentric muscle contractions such as the lowering of the bar when your are bench pressing or simply walking down the stairs, your muscles are forced to contract when they are lengthening.

You may hear a lot of things about how over training the same muscle group is detrimental to your progress but not only have I experienced it first hand and found it to be more than just a success, but I've also seen it in others that I've trained with over the past 6 years.

So remember, this exercise must be done every day and as always have the determination to continue. Hanging from the bar will also be a good way to warm up to it, something that I will explain in later posts.

Peace!

Secrets behind my achievements (Biceps)

So I've decided to give a few specific tips as to what my secret behind a few areas that a lot of people struggle with. Determination and will aside,  without doing the right thing won't make the slightest bit of difference, I watched many many times when someone would do everything they possibly could, lift big and do cardio and eat right as much as they could and yet they still would end up looking like a blob or just mass, not the physique that people strive for.

I will be big headed as to say a lot of people would strive to have a physique such as mine, although of course not the same size legs but up top, pretty much all round in good shape. Some body parts improved better than others and reacted differently to how I would go about training each part.

Now the secret behind my arms, apart from of course the extreme pumps I was getting from No Xplode I took on an exercise I found from Bodybuilding.com which was pretty intense. A lot of people dislike this because it also takes it's toll on the outside part of your shoulder. So the reps go like this

First part of set 1 (weight you can do just about 10 reps with)

• 8-10 Full reps of winged biceps hammers
• 8-10 6-8inch pulsing reps up to about a 90 degree angle (so that arms are constantly tensed)
• Half distance rep hold for as long as possible

Second part of set 1 (weight roughly 4-6 kgs lower than the first)

• 4-8 Full reps

 Third part of set 1 (Another 4-6kgs lower)

• 8-10 Full rep followed by half reps
•  10-12 pulses
• Hold for as long as possible

This exercise doesn't concentrate on the main part of your biceps, which you might find odd. In fact it trains a muscle which most people don't even know exists. The brachii is the anatomical name of the main part of the bicep we all love to train and get pumped with, but the muscle being trained here is the brachialis. This is the muscle that sits underneath your brachii and by training this muscle, you will send your arm size skyward. Within a matter of two weeks of using this exercise my biceps grew considerably, enough for a lot of people to start noticing my size.

Also an advantage of this exercise is that it trains the outside part of your shoulder. Now the benefit of this is that it gives the illusion your biceps are even bigger as the part in between your shoulder and biceps seem deeper and more cut the bigger both of them get.

This doesn't mean this is the only exercise you should perform. This is just one part of training your biceps, as all muscles need a kick up the butt every once in a while or a shock to the system to do something different than normal. Muscles do get used to doing the same exercise day in day out, therefore doing bicep curls every day you may feel like a monster because they recover so quick, but they only recover so quickly because they are prepared to do what you put in front of them. Driving in a straight line is also easy, you have to put a few bends in the road to make it a challenge!

I'll try and get some pics up to go with the exercise as soon as I get a chance.

Peace!

So I got big!

So I've gained a total of 20kgs/44lbs of muscle since I started training and yes it was mainly up top. But how is another question. As I said it started of with just blindly following what my two friends were doing and being pushed to failure on everything I did, to be fair, if you aren't pushing yourself to failure then there is no way you are going to get any bigger, lifting the same weight every day does not make you stronger unless you lift to failure, so the key to getting bigger is lifting heavier! Think big, lift big!


Now it wasn't just the lifting that gained me a fair bit of muscle in the first few months, I purchased a muscle and weight gainer from Holland and Barrett from ebay for £5, cheapest 5kgs/11Lbs I ever gained. Then came the winter break at uni and everyone left except me, so I continued my regime along with more studying of online resources from Bodybuilding.com This meant I would have to learn how to train by myself and taught me that in order to succeed in achieving my goals, only I could want and drive to attain them and not just my friends. Drinking that shake was the first step to learning how to deal with certain aspects of drive and determination because I had never tasted a thing as awful as that and anything with a consistency as thick as say hot fudge going a bit cold.

Overcoming certain mental aspects is always a difficult part of any training. I still struggle with the cardio side of things, just last night at the gym I failed to train properly and ended up feeling so sick I was contemplating chucking the contents of my shaker just to puke somewhere without too much mess.

After everyone returned from the 3 week break even my friends who trained with me every day noticed that I was still gaining size at a considerable rate. I had been reading up a lot by this time about different exercises and watching videos of how exactly to do certain things as I had only seen what my friends had taught me. Also as well as being a hub of endless information with forums for users of the site, it is also in fact a super site for supplements, my discovery of BSNs NoXplode is probably the best to date.

Not in any shops in England yet for another year and half or so I decided to order this stuff as it sounded crazy, expecting it to half be a placebo type thing which even my friends said "you try it and we'll see how you do" filled me to the brim with confidence. It's funny because within 2 weeks of taking this stuff my arms looked insane.

The workings behind this product is quite simple really it's Nitrous oxide and different formulations of creatine mixed together. What the N.O does is widen your blood vessels, allowing greater transportation of blood and oxygen throughout your muscles which by itself is a great thing, within 45 minutes of taking this pre-workout supplement you feel like you've done an entire workout when you've only just finished your first set as your arms mainly feel like they are about to burst, but this doesn't stop you from continuing and finishing your training session, far from it, in fact it helps you power through to failure a lot better.

Creatine is of course a well known supplement within the sporting community, popular among athletes and body builders alike, it is a naturally occurring substance which is found in high protein diet. It gives your muscles a fairly larger look as it also stores water in the muscles which is why you have to drink lots and lots of water, this is yet again another supplement that does not taste very nice, you just have to close your eyes and down it. As well as extra "fuel" for the muscles it also aids faster recovery times.

So this is pretty much my second half of university over and I'm going to leave you with this information for today, time to get up and have a protein shake :) (which I have a lot more experience with now so look out for it in later posts)

Peace!