Sawce gets (back on) the SAWCE

Health, fitness, and nutrition freaks, lets see those gainz.
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SAWCE
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Here we go. Gave some background info in the general bro thread, but happy to go back over that in here if anyone has specific questions.

Starting this blast at 400mg test per week, 400mg masteron per week, and 25mg anavar per day. After 8 days I’ll ramp the anavar up to 50mg/day, then up to 75mg/day in another 8 days, and then I’ll pull it out of my cycle. Anavar is being taken orally, the test and mast are injected. Debating on pinning 2 or 4 times a week. I lean towards 4 because I like smaller shots and the most stable blood levels that come with more frequent injections; but there’s something to be said for not stabbing yourself more times than necessary. After 10 weeks I’ll assess progress and decide if I need to bump the injectables up by 50-100mg/week. I’ll run a total of 20 weeks, then come back down to a TRT dose for 6 weeks to let my body rest and recover.

Current starting point is 217lbs. My goal will be to gain at about a rate of .5-.75lbs per week. That’s fairly aggressive for muscle growth, and I’ll store some fat over time but the fat gain should be minimal at that rate. Training day macros and calories are starting at: 425c, 410p, 70f for a total of 3970 calories. Rest days are lower at 275c, 390p, and 90f for 3470 calories. On top of the gear, I’ll be using some insulin on training days to shuttle carbs and keep myself carb/insulin sensitive.

My training will be following Dante Trudel’s DC training, with some slight modifications for my knee injury/rehab. Lifting 3 days a week on a 2-way DC split, eventually I’ll move to 4 days a week on a 3-way DC split. I can post links to the training program if people want to check it out. Low-volume, high-intensity stuff. I enjoy it. Cardio will be done daily, and ramp up over time. Currently hitting 15 minutes a day on my resistance bike with the level set at 12. Goal for this is just to keep my heart rate up and get those health benefits.

Health is of course a concern when blasting gear. To mitigate some of the side effects, this is my supplement stack:
Leviathan Nutrition - IRE, 6 capsules per day
Leviathan Nutrition - Hemo Flow, 2 capsules per day
Leviathan Nutrition - K2 + D3, 1 capsule per day
Jarrow Formulas - IP6, 4 capsules per day
Animal - Pak, 1 pack per day
Animal - Omega, 1 pack per day

I’ll probably proactively start drinking my hibiscus and hawthorne tea to keep my blood pressure from getting high. I also ordered some cialis which I’ll run at 10mg/day to help with blood pressure and to get some sick pumps in the gym.

Other supplements I use: Animal ISO Whey, Animal Clear Whey, Gatorade powder, Animal Nitro, Animal Flex, Animal Primal, Nutrition Wolf Big Bad Pump. I’ll update this list as time progresses. Again, happy to answer any questions about these as well.

Think that’s it for now. If you want detailed breakdowns of what I’m doing for food, I can list all of that out. I’ll update in here with my weekly weigh in, probably won’t throw up weekly progress pics unless people want to see them, I’ll post training log stuff, updates to food, gear, etc. Hopefully at the end of these 20 weeks the before/after pics will show dome solid growth. Ask any questions you want along the way, I’ll be transparent and share pretty much anything.


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coogles
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Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the progress!

Only initial reaction is that seems like a lot to "balance out" the gear use. Definitely a lot to keep up with.

How does :tits: feel about the gear use? My wife would be SO pissed at me if I ever decided to go this route.
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SAWCE
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coogles wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 2:51 pm Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the progress!

Only initial reaction is that seems like a lot to "balance out" the gear use. Definitely a lot to keep up with.

How does :tits: feel about the gear use? My wife would be SO pissed at me if I ever decided to go this route.
I used to not do all the health stuff, and my bloodwork was never too crazy, but as I get older and especially now with the kid my risk tolerance is lower, so I’m trying to be more proactive about that stuff as I’m using what I consider to be a moderate amount of gear..

Michelle doesn’t love the gear use, but she understands that it’s just a part of who I am/what I do. Throwing all the health stuff in is also for her peace of mind. The only thing that she really doesn’t want me using is insulin, since it has an acute risk of death if you’re stupid with it, so that one is being kept in the dark and I’m using about half of what I could use… standard dosing is 1 unit of insulin for every 10g of carbs; I’m dosing at closer to 1 unit of insulin per 20g of carbs and pushing up closer to 1:15 pre-workout.
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SAWCE wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 3:22 pm me using is insulin, since it has an acute risk of death if you’re stupid with it, so that one is being kept in the dark and I’m using about half of what I could use… standard dosing is 1 unit of insulin for every 10g of carbs; I’m dosing at closer to 1 unit of insulin per 20g of carbs and pushing up closer to 1:15 pre-workout.
so thats how you eat all those carbs and stay trim
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SAWCE
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golftdibrad1 wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 7:36 am
SAWCE wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 3:22 pm me using is insulin, since it has an acute risk of death if you’re stupid with it, so that one is being kept in the dark and I’m using about half of what I could use… standard dosing is 1 unit of insulin for every 10g of carbs; I’m dosing at closer to 1 unit of insulin per 20g of carbs and pushing up closer to 1:15 pre-workout.
so thats how you eat all those carbs and stay trim
We’ll see. This is my first time trying this out. The only time I’ve used insulin before was when I’d been running growth hormone for a while… using GH increases your blood glucose levels, and my fasting BG level had crept up to 110+, so my coach had me throw a few units of insulin in after my GH pin.
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First night back at my old gym tonight. They expanded and moved shit around since I’ve been gone. Had to spend some time hunting machines down, but I figured out my A1 movements:

Incline smith machine press
Hammer strength shoulder press
Dip
Hammer strength DY row
Deadlift

It might be in my head, but it feels like my appetite is already taking a hit from the anavar. I’ve only tried running orals outside of contest prep once before, Anadrol back in like 2020 or something 50mg pre workout, and it absolutely crushed my appetite. Made no sense for my coach and I to keep it in when I couldn’t eat what I needed to. Drugs are important, food is more important. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, but I’ll run this lower 25mg dose for a little longer than planned and see how my appetite feels. At this point I’m still able to get the food down without feeling like I’m force feeding, so I feel comfortable leaving the var in.

Speaking of food, I figured I’d detail my training day meal plan. Rest day will be similar, but with the lower carbs and higher fats, and I’ll decide how I want to make that work as I go tomorrow. But training day is as follows:

M1: 0c, 36f, 65p. 3 whole eggs, 7 egg whites, 3 slices bacon, avocado. The amount of avocado varies depending on the cooked weight of the bacon. I make the meal total 30g of fat: 15 from the eggs, the bacon today was 8.8g (roundup to 9 because while I’m pretty anal, I’m not a fucking lunatic), and that called for ~41g of avocado to fill in the 6g of fat I needed. The other 6g of fat come from my Animal Omega. Protein ends up at 65g +/- 2-3g. I add micro greens, cherry tomatoes to my eggs, but I don’t count calories from stuff like that.

M2: 0c, 15f, 65p. 228g 93% lean beef / 99% lean turkey blend, 35g avocado. This meal gets half a head of romaine lettuce, micro greens, and more cherry tomatoes.

M3: 100c, 8f, 65p. 228g chicken breast, 120g (uncooked weight) white rice.

M4: 100c, 8f, 65p. 228g chicken breast, 120g white rice.

M5: 100c, 0f, 65p. 273g shrimp, 120g white rice.

Intra-workout: 25c, 0f, 20p. 26g Gatorade powder, 25g animal clear whey.

M6: 100c, 3f, 65p. 34g animal whey isolate, 377g nonfat Greek yogurt, 118g mixed frozen berries, 26g granola, banana, honey. Similar to the fat in M1, I vary the amount of honey based on how many carbs I get from the banana after I’ve peeled and weighed it. Tonight’s banana was 116g for ~27c, so I used 28g of honey to fill in the last 23c I needed.
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Hit my B1 day last night. Gym got a few new pieces of equipment while I was out, so tested some stuff out.

Nautilus preacher curl
Reverse wrist curl
Donkey calves
Laying leg curl
Leg press

The DC method for training calves absolutely sucks ass, but it will also absolutely grow your calves if you can stick with it. After a couple warm up sets you do a single set, but each rep has a 5 second eccentric followed by a 15 second active stretch at the bottom of the rep. You’re trying to push your heels down and really stretch the fuck out of your calves. From there you go right back into a hard contraction with a nice squeeze at the top of the rep and then back into the 5 second eccentric. Your rep range is 10-12 reps to failure, so when all is said and done you’re spending 3-4 minutes on that set. It sounds bad, it feels worse.

After hitting leg curls, I did some backwards walking on an incline treadmill to get my knees ready for my quad movement. Took that from kneesovertoes guy. I went with a standard leg press last night. Threw a band on each weight arm to overload the top of the rep and deload my knees at the bottom. Felt fine during the movement, but I definitely worked up too high in weight and my right knee is not happy today. Hopefully I didn’t fucking tear it again. I’ll do some of my at home PT moves over the next couple of days and feel things out. Only worked up to four plates per side, but I really should have just stopped at two, and used that as a base to start slowly building up from over time. I’ll be smarter going forward on whatever movements I pick for my next two B days, and a drop down to that two plates the next time I hit this B1 day. Fingers crossed I get to even do that and didn’t actually wreck my shit last night.
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One week down. Weight is up from 217.0 to 218.2 this morning. Yesterday I bumped my anavar dose to 50mg/day. I’ll keep my calories/macros where they are this next week, since gaining over 1lb a week is going to get sloppy quick.

Trained A2 day on Friday. Was great. The gym picked up this old-school converging incline chest press machine from Cybex, so hit that for my chest movement. Smith shoulder press, smith close grip bench, an old Nautilus lat pulldown machine, and then this strive row machine for upper back that lets you load weights on different arms to change the resistance profile. I had the top of the rep range deloading slightly where the muscles are a little weaker.
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Welp. Flu or whatever it was knocked me out for basically a week. So that sucked. Skipped training last Monday, felt well enough to train Wednesday and Friday, but still could barely get food down. My weight plummeted to 211, but as of this morning is back up to 215.

In actual cycle news, I pulled the anavar out shortly before getting the flu. My appetite just couldn’t keep up while I was on it. So I’m just running the test and mast now, still 400mg/week of each.

I donated blood yesterday, and my hemoglobin was down to 16.5. This is the first time in over a decade that I’ve seen a number in the healthy range. Mine tends to hover around 18, but it’s been mid 19s before and occasionally mid-high 17s. Very happy to see that new lower number. I attribute that in part to no longer running deca (I had been taking a very low dose last year to help with healing my knee tendon.. 40-60mg/week) and in part to that hemo flow supp I’ve been taking. I pulled the deca back in November when I did my 6 or 8 week clean out phase I did, and chose not to risk adding it back in for this cycle. I likely won’t ever touch deca again. I’ll keep on with the hemo flow, and in 16 weeks when I’m able to donate again we’ll see if I have an even better hemoglobin number (16 weeks because I did a double red vs a standard donation).

Bump in calories up this week to try to start making up for lost ground. Appetite still isn’t what I’d like, but I’m gonna try a big 100c jump.
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Small rebound in weight again last week. Back up to 216.2 first thing in the morning after relieving myself.

My appetite still wasn’t what it should be post-flu last week, so going into this week I made a little tweak. Rather than hitting 2 cups of rice each at 4 of my meals, I dropped a cup from each meal and replaced those carbs with dried fruit. A cup of cooked rice is ~150g for 50c, but I can get that same 50c from ~75g of dried fruit. I went with apricots and tangerines. I could have done something even more calorie dense, gummy bears and Swedish fish ( :crang: ) are popular in the bb world for simple sugars, but this way I’m getting a few benefits like a wider array of micronutrients, a little bit of fiber, etc. Started that today and meals went down much easier. On top of the smaller food volume at each meal, it’s nice to have additional flavors and textures to break the monotony of white rice up.

Training is improving. I lost a lot of strength from my time with the flu and all the weight I lost. Added a few reps to every single lift tonight, so that was :fuckyeah:

Current macros are:
525c, 410p, 70f on training days.
400c, 390p, 90f on rest days.

I missed a few meals last week, so expecting another increase in my weight this week, and I’ll try running these macros/calores for another week before adding some more in. Might do something easy like 10g of fat every day for a quick 90 cals. But we’ll see how things feel with my stomach/appetite/digestion when I get there.

No changes to gear yet outside of having pulled the Var. No plans to tweak anything on that front either. I should be good running these doses for the full 20 weeks I planned. I’ll assess that as I go though.
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Forgot a few other tweaks I made to reduce food volume. Now that my hematocrit is in a healthy range, I feel more comfortable including some more iron-rich foods like red meat. Breakfast has become 5 omega-3 eggs, 115g top sirloin steak, and 35g avocado. Same macros I was hitting before with 35f, 65p.

I dropped the ground turkey today and am going straight ground beef for that second meal of the day.. Ground turkey is disgustingly dry and flavorless, and I’m relieved to not be eating it anymore.
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max225
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Missed this post. I have been trying and (Failing) to get back into the palace of hard dudes/weights.
Between work/tennis elbow and kid shit I completely neglected myself...

Any tips of starting over? I was thinking of going in at 50% of what I used to do just about 2 years ago and slowly building back up... Not looking to gear up or anything...

Also what is the quickest way of getting a T test done?
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SAWCE
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max225 wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2025 1:53 pm Missed this post. I have been trying and (Failing) to get back into the palace of hard dudes/weights.
Between work/tennis elbow and kid shit I completely neglected myself...

Any tips of starting over? I was thinking of going in at 50% of what I used to do just about 2 years ago and slowly building back up... Not looking to gear up or anything...

Also what is the quickest way of getting a T test done?
I think the 50% plan is solid. Not that you’ll necessarily need to only use 50% of the weights you were using, but I’d scale the volume back by 50%. We’re older now, so recovery takes a hit, plus lack of sleep with kids, and life in general feels more stressful than back then, all of that will play a role in how much you can recover from.

I’d go in with a plan for either an upper/lower split and just alternate days, or a push/pull/legs split and rotate through those three days. 2-3 days of training, followed by a rest day would likely be a smart strategy. If you do go upper/lower, you could even just train every other day and get a day to recover after each session.

For volume with number of sets, I’d limit it to 6-8 working sets per muscle group each training session. So pick 2-3 movements you enjoy hitting, do a few warm up sets, then go balls to the wall for 2-3 working sets. Give yourself 1.5-2 minutes to recover between those working sets to maximize your efforts. Rep range isn’t super important, but higher rep sets will lead to more systemic fatigue, so I’d not go too crazy with the rep counts. Targeting failure in the 10-12 rep rage should allow you to use a light enough weight that your joints and tendons aren’t barking at you without going so light that you’re just burning energy for 3/4s of the set before you really start getting some good tension on your muscles.

Happy to throw a sample plan of each routine down for you if interested.

Stretch. It’s annoying, and it takes time we feel like we don’t have, but it’s worth doing. Do it after your lifts, and try to push the stretches hard. Passive stretching yields passive results.
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SAWCE
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Re: T test, if your doctor gives you push back, you can order bloodwork yourself from a number of sites and then take the requisition they give you to your local Quest Diagnostics or Labcorp. Alternatively, you can reach out to one of the many hormone clinics that has popped up over the last few years, they can order bloodwork for you, and then you’ll go hit a QD or LC for that blood draw and the clinic will call you to go over your results.. if you go this route, you’d have the option of then using the clinic to get on TRT if you think that may benefit you. I have used, and would recommend, Helix HRT out of Vegas. Some of my friends use Transcend as well and are happy with their services.
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max225
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Awesome write up TY. Def down to read/note a sample routine!
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No problem! I’ll throw something together this evening.
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max225 wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2025 2:36 pm Awesome write up TY. Def down to read/note a sample routine!
Here you go dude!

Upper/lower split:

As many warm up sets as you feel you need on each movement, then 3 working sets aiming to hit failure in the 10-12 rep range.

Upper:
Incline press machine (smith, hammer strength, etc)
Chest flye (machine or cables)
Shoulder press of choice (db, bb, machine)
Lateral shoulder raise (I don’t recommend dbs for these, would stick to cables or machines)
Cable tricep extension
Lat pulldown (shoulder width or slightly wider grip)
Upper back row (bb or t-bar)
Preacher curl

Lower:
Hip thrust (or other glute specific movement)
Stiff legged deadlifts or Romanian deadlifts
Seated leg curls
Quad extensions
Squat pattern (back squat, leg press, hack squat, etc. pick what feels good for your knees)
Adductor machine
Calf raises

On the upper day I only threw in one movement for each arm muscle since you’ll get some stimulus in them from the compound movements on chest, shoulders, and back.

On lower day, stiff legged deadlifts are going to be more hamstring biased, while the Romanian deadlift is more glute/erector biased. I can find videos breaking down execution differences if you want/need.

Happy to answer any questions you may have or help offer suggestions for swapping movements if some stuff just doesn’t feel right for your anatomy.

For a push/pull/leg routine, I’d stick with the basic layout of this, but just move the back and bicep work to its own day. If you were to do that I’d throw a second movement for each set of back muscles. Lats, my choice would be a close grip row, and upper back I like deadlifts, rack deads, or just another row variety.

To bias lats vs upper back in your row movements you’ll adjust your upper arm path. Drive your elbow down and back towards your hip to bias your lats, and for upper back keep your elbows high (just under shoulder height feels good for most people) and wide and focus on squeezing your shoulder blades together and getting your elbows as far behind you as possible.
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max225
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I love my suace man! And willing to pay him :) ty
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SAWCE
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max225 wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2025 10:33 pm I love my suace man! And willing to pay him :) ty
Happy to help! No worries on payment; but if you ever want more personalized training and/or nutrition coaching, then we can chat about that!
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