Mission: "Getting muscular in 2019" - Accomlished! :D
Last day of the year, time to make a little résumé of my personal 2019 fitness journey! :)
All in all this has been an extremely exciting and fun run! I started the year right in the middle of the process of getting rid of the extra body fat I had accumulated over the years, so the first 4 months were dedicated to fat loss in the first place with alot of cardio, completed with a moderate amount of strength training.
Around mid to end of April I had reached a point I felt happy with - at that time I had dropped a total of 21 kilos in what I consider a sustainable and enjoyable way, ending up at 74 kilos. But since this made me look a bit skinny and since I really enjoyed the whole project of working on myself, I kept the momentum and just changed my goals to building strength and some muscle mass. So for the next 7 months, I aimed for a moderate energy surplus of round about 200 calories per day and did alot of strength training (FB Flex and FB Strong for the win! :D ), slowly but steadily increasing my performance on these exercises.
By the beginning of December, I had gained 4.5 kilos of weight, felt alot stronger and was generally pretty happy with this strength building episode. Now all that was left was to burn the extra fat that came out of the prolonged energy surplus, so I made a cut throughout the last month of the year (bit weird to chose December of all months for this project, but hey, at least this was the very first time in my life that I changed my body composition for the better in this month. x) ). All in all I dropped 2.5 kilos, ending up at roughly the same body fat level I had in April, but 2 kilos heavier.
My wife just took a couple of funny flexing pictures to document the results and I have to say that I am really happy with them. If somebody told me a year ago that I would get to this point in the next 12 months, I would have had trouble believing it.
The best about this is that I finally managed to make fitness a firm part of my life, which I enjoy so much and get so much energy and motivation from. I have a couple of minor fitness goals for 2020... wanna learn handstand, increase my flexibility and mobility further, continue my way towards 80 well-conditioned kilos... but my biggest goal is just to keep it up like this year and keep enjoying the whole process as much as I did in 2019. :)
Mission: "Getting muscular in 2019" - Accomlished! :D
Last day of the year, time to make a little résumé of my personal 2019 fitness journey! :)
All in all this has been an extremely exciting and fun run! I started the year right in the middle of the process of getting rid of the extra body fat I had accumulated over the years, so the first 4 months were dedicated to fat loss in the first place with alot of cardio, completed with a moderate amount of strength training.
Around mid to end of April I had reached a point I felt happy with - at that time I had dropped a total of 21 kilos in what I consider a sustainable and enjoyable way, ending up at 74 kilos. But since this made me look a bit skinny and since I really enjoyed the whole project of working on myself, I kept the momentum and just changed my goals to building strength and some muscle mass. So for the next 7 months, I aimed for a moderate energy surplus of round about 200 calories per day and did alot of strength training (FB Flex and FB Strong for the win! :D ), slowly but steadily increasing my performance on these exercises.
By the beginning of December, I had gained 4.5 kilos of weight, felt alot stronger and was generally pretty happy with this strength building episode. Now all that was left was to burn the extra fat that came out of the prolonged energy surplus, so I made a cut throughout the last month of the year (bit weird to chose December of all months for this project, but hey, at least this was the very first time in my life that I changed my body composition for the better in this month. x) ). All in all I dropped 2.5 kilos, ending up at roughly the same body fat level I had in April, but 2 kilos heavier.
My wife just took a couple of funny flexing pictures to document the results and I have to say that I am really happy with them. If somebody told me a year ago that I would get to this point in the next 12 months, I would have had trouble believing it.
The best about this is that I finally managed to make fitness a firm part of my life, which I enjoy so much and get so much energy and motivation from. I have a couple of minor fitness goals for 2020... wanna learn handstand, increase my flexibility and mobility further, continue my way towards 80 well-conditioned kilos... but my biggest goal is just to keep it up like this year and keep enjoying the whole process as much as I did in 2019. :)