Week 1

INTRO:

     Hello everybody and welcome to my Senior project blog! For my Senior project I am working out and learning how to cook better alongside Jaden Edwards and Bowen Blair. I chose this for my project because I have always wanted to go to the gym more often and eat better, but I could never get myself to fully commit to doing so. Doing a fitness-related Senior project will force me into completing this goal, as well as help me develop the self-discipline necessary to stay in shape while I am away at college next year and avoid the infamous Freshman fifteen. 

    During the project, my two mains goals are to learn how to cook more healthy meals and how to independently designed effective workouts. Currently, whenever I decide to eat 'healthy', I always make myself chicken, rice, and broccoli. Although I enjoy this in moderation, I don't think I could eat this meal seven days a week. So, during my Senior project, I hope to discover different alternatives that are both healthy and tasty. Secondly, I currently depend on an athletic trainer to tell me which exercises / lifts to do each day. Although his guidance is helpful, paying for a trainer is quite expensive. Thus, during my Senior project, I hope to learn how to be more independent in the gym and to discover which workout plans work best for me.

WEEK 1:

    We spent the first part of this week planning out our meal plan and workout regiment. Using what we concluded from our research as well as prior knowledge, we decided a Push-Pull-Legs (PPL) split would be most optimal. A PPL is a three-day split where you dedicate a day to train each of the three muscles groups. A push workout focuses on your chest/triceps/shoulders, a pull workout focuses on you back/biceps, and a leg workout focuses (obviously) on your legs. One of the numerous benefits of PPL is that it allows you to get adequate rest for your muscles. For example, when you are benching, you are not solely using your chest, you are also using your triceps and anterior delts. Because we are hitting the triceps and shoulders on that same day, and not in any of the other workouts, we won't have to worry as much about muscle fatigue. We plan to do two cycles of PPL per week (Saturday - Thursday) and then have one day of rest and recovery (Friday). You can see a full overview of our schedule here.

    For our second workout, we are alternating each day between cardio and abs. For cardio this week we did a four mile hike together on Monday and a three mile run on Wednesday. We hope to continue switching up the cardio to keep things interesting and plan to incorporate some sprinting workouts in the near future. 

    As for the eating, we are all tracking our nutrients on app called MyFitnessPal. After entering your weight, height, and whether you want to lose/maintain/gain weight, the app gives you a target calorie amount for the day. So, we have all been trying to keep ourselves around that limit. In addition to calories, we have also been tracking macronutrients (protein / carbs / fats). We try to eat foods high in protein and moderately low in carbs / fat. We are keeping tracking of all of this in this spreadsheet. We have cooked a variety of foods together this week but my personal favorites were the protein pancakes, the turkey melts and the chicken and rice. I attached some pictures of these below. All in all, I am very happy with how the first week went. I think we have all showed extreme dedication and I have definitely felt the effects of the workouts so far. I am excited to keep going because I think we will all see some nice results if we continue at this pace.