Week 1 Blog Post

For my Senior Project, I decided to choose a hobby that I have been very passionate about since the start of the pandemic, which is Fitness and Nutrition.  For the last 14 months, When I was not in class, I could usually be found at the gym working out or on my computer researching ways to improve my diet. When I found out that two of my friends had a similar idea for their senior project, we decided to group together and work as a cohort. What separates my cohort’s senior project from a lot of the rest is that our project is dealing with a complete lifestyle change. We are trying to do everything we can to optimize our diet, workouts, and sleep. Coming into the project with a lot of prior fitness knowledge definitely helped get the planning done quite early. Being athletes, we all knew the intensity we would be working out with. 

To create our project, we did a good amount of research about how to optimally diet and work out. Starting with the diet, we use an app called Myfitnesspal that allows us to scan barcodes of food we consume and it gives us all the nutrition information about the product. We all have personal caloric benchmarks we aim for each day and we enter our net calories on a spreadsheet we created. Next, we break down what these calories are composed of (fats, carbs, protein) and type them into the spreadsheet. All of our meals are usually high protein but relatively balanced in carbs and fats. 

Now let's get into the workout plan that we crafted. We decided that we would work out 6 days a week hitting each major muscle group twice a week. We decided that we would do the Push-Pull Legs split. What this means is that on Push, we train the muscles that are involved in pushing motions (chest, shoulders, triceps) and on Pull, all the muscles that are active when pulling (back, biceps, posterior chain). Finally, Legs is self-explanatory. We also added aerobic exercise for cardiovascular endurance every other day and abs on the days when we don’t do cardio. There is tons of literature that support the Push-Pull Legs split. An example of why Push Pull Legs is optimal is that for some exercises like the bench press, focus on the chest, but also work the triceps and shoulders. Since you would do the bench press on Push day, you don’t have to worry about fatigued triceps and shoulders because you will be training them later in the workout rather than a day or two before. 

Overall, I think that this week went really well. We seemed to be really on top of everything. The most important thing is that we worked hard in the gym which I would say we definitely did. We’ll see how long we can continue to consistently work at this intensity given that some level of fatigue is inevitable. The cooking also went really well. We were able to make delicious high-protein meals. We have spent a lot of time together (even more than we initially planned) but since I have no other time constraints, this is not a problem on my end. My goals are to just keep enjoying the workouts and cooking, see some level of progress in the gym(more reps at a certain weight), and maybe build up some more cardiovascular endurance.