I’ve gained six pounds in a week

1 month after surgery

I am now just over a month removed since my colon surgery, and back to training in my garage gym.

Admittedly, I started easing back into training earlier than I probably should have, but I was going a bit stir crazy.

I also felt is if I was wasting away a bit, as my weight was staying below 180 pounds.  It hadn’t been that low in over 30 years.

I started doing a little bit of exercise on January 2nd.  One of the big reasons I got out into the gym that day was due to the passing of our beloved golden retriever Piper just two days before.

Mentally, I just needed to do something.

Since I absolutely had to avoid engaging the core muscles, I did a few pushups from my knees, some dumbbell shoulder presses with light weight, a few reps to target the biceps and triceps and I worked the legs a little bit with the horse stance.

I went back to it on January 7th and added a few more exercises such as a lat pulldown, barbell curl and Bulgarian split squat.

These added exercises were done with light weight or no weight for the split squats in order to avoid engaging the core.

Over the next week, I experimented with my training and finally settled on my program for the next few months.

I will lift weights four days per week utilizing a three-day split routine as follows:

• Chest/Back
• Legs
• Shoulders/Arms

The typical weekly training schedule will be to lift on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

These workouts are rotated so that each one is performed four times in three weeks.

Every third week I will train Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday so that the Shoulders/Arms workout and Chest/Back workout are not done back-to-back.

I effectively started training this routine on January 14 when I only trained the legs.

I woke up the next day and the weight was 180.6 pounds.

My goal is to get the weight back up close to 200 pounds over the next three months, maybe as high as 205 as long as I am not adding too much body fat.

After that, I will focus more on conditioning and reduced body fat while maintaining as much muscle and strength as possible.

To help achieve this goal, I started taking creatine, and I am trying to get my protein intake to average close to 150 grams per day.

The initial effect of creatine is to cause some water retention, and therefore I’ve gained nearly six pounds in the last week.

As of this morning my weight was 186.0 pounds.

With that said, I am already feeling much stronger and more robust.

I’ve started my training at conservative weights… more conservative than I have in the past.

I am combining a few different approaches into my training as well with the goal of adding more muscle than I have in the past when I was training more for strength.

This Thursday I meet with my surgeon, who will check up on my healing progress from the surgery.

He is a lifter as well, so I am hoping he can give me some insights on when I can add squats and deadlifts back into my training.

As I progress, I will provide more details regarding the training routines.