In my mid-twenties my body was in pretty rough shape. I was suffering from chronic pain and had terrible mobility to the pain where my quality of life and mental state were being severely adversely impacted.

I was also terrified at the idea of entering a gym.

I worked with an excellent chiropractor in Birmingham (UK) who helped to provide significant pain relief and subsequently referred me on to a physical therapist. Through working with the physical therapist I realised that even without entering a gym, I still had a lot of avenues available to me to improve the state of my body.

Since my last post back in June, I have been steadily eating at a surplus while focusing my training on powerlifting. During this period I have run three different programmes:

• Metallicadpa’s Push/Pull/Legs Split
• nSuns 531 Linear Progression
• GZCL Linear Progression

Metallicapda’s PPL

While I was cutting I was running a full body calisthenics-focused programme three-to-four days a week, but I had been wanting to try a split programme which would allow me to train with more frequency throughout the week. The idea that was stuck in my head was that more volume throughout the week would result in more progress at a faster rate, and given that I would be largely starting from scratch again with the squat, the bench press and the deadlift, this seemed like a good way to get in a lot of practice of those movements.

Some time around early May I decided to change up my eating habits. Since January 2016 I have been working on cutting body fat, conquering my appetite and improving my poor eating habits. By May I felt I had reached a point where the returns I was getting from eating at a deficit were diminishing; my stomach was flat, my abs were visible, and my relationship with food had substantially changed for the better.

At the beginning of 2016 I was overweight. My frame since childhood had been wiry, and through adolescence to young adulthood, finding myself a victim of pop culture’s false dichotomy of intellectualism/athleticism, my activity levels decreased and my percentage of body fat rose. My activity levels as an undergraduate student were already low, but I was not prepared for just how physically static my life would become when I began working. In retrospect, being overweight at the start of 2016 seems like the natural conclusion to the decisions that I had been making over the previous decade.

When I initially set a goal for myself, nine times out of ten it will be abstract and unmeasurable; not particularly useful in the long run, but enough to get me moving in the right direction.

My specific fitness goal for 2017 is to be able to hold an l-sit on gymnastics rings, and this goal is helping to shape my long-term approach to fitness throughout the year. On the other hand, I have not had any sort of equivalently defined goal when it comes to writing; it has essentially just been ‘improve writing skills’.