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- Joined
- Oct 3, 2005
- Messages
- 6,701
I haven't created a new post here in many years, but thought this might be helpful to some, or fun to read. Or just a nice way for me to type out some thoughts 
I have a 16-year old nephew (who lives a few hours away) who doesn't have the most stable home life, but has expressed an interest in weight lifting and physique change, so I offered to coach him a bit as a way of offering
some stability and goal-setting and accountability (he doesn't have a regular father figure in his life right now). He's gotten into trouble before (small stuff) so maybe this will help give him a bit of direction, and it's just a good way for us to connect, too.
He has about a year of weight training experience, and often texts me about new bench press PRs, squat and deadlift PRs, etc.
For reference he's about 145 pounds at maybe 5'7.
He doesn't have much money and doesn't always have a way to get to a gym (though just started a weight-lifting class in high school) so I showed him a bunch of
bodyweight exercises he could do at home and gave him some bands to work with too.
I asked him to keep a diet journal for a few days and it was quickly apparent that he wasn't eating anything very supportive of his goals (would often not eat anything until later in the day, then it would just be sporadic junk food, mostly)
I wanted to keep things super simple to start with, so as not to overwhelm him too much, but provide some general guidelines that he would see results from.
So last week we started with 2 rules, which I dubbed "Project Protein":
- eat 40-50 grams of protein within the first hour of waking up every day
- get a total of 150 grams of protein each day
(then I told him cheap sources of protein, to try to eat maybe 3-4 times a day, etc.)
Super simple, and easy to track.
And he emails me once a week with new pics, his body weight, and what he ate each day with the protein numbers listed.
After the first week he's already looking a lot better (his first update was this morning) and he replied:
"I feel a lot stronger overall and I’m already noticing differences in my forearms and some in my legs as well, I still get hungry but I’m not snacking on junk nearly as much.
I went from 165x4 to 185x5 on squat in just a week"
So this week we're working on keeping the Project Protein rules in place, and increasing calories, mainly from carbs.
Anyways, maybe I'll update this periodically as he progresses.
Cheers
I have a 16-year old nephew (who lives a few hours away) who doesn't have the most stable home life, but has expressed an interest in weight lifting and physique change, so I offered to coach him a bit as a way of offering
some stability and goal-setting and accountability (he doesn't have a regular father figure in his life right now). He's gotten into trouble before (small stuff) so maybe this will help give him a bit of direction, and it's just a good way for us to connect, too.
He has about a year of weight training experience, and often texts me about new bench press PRs, squat and deadlift PRs, etc.
For reference he's about 145 pounds at maybe 5'7.
He doesn't have much money and doesn't always have a way to get to a gym (though just started a weight-lifting class in high school) so I showed him a bunch of
bodyweight exercises he could do at home and gave him some bands to work with too.
I asked him to keep a diet journal for a few days and it was quickly apparent that he wasn't eating anything very supportive of his goals (would often not eat anything until later in the day, then it would just be sporadic junk food, mostly)
I wanted to keep things super simple to start with, so as not to overwhelm him too much, but provide some general guidelines that he would see results from.
So last week we started with 2 rules, which I dubbed "Project Protein":
- eat 40-50 grams of protein within the first hour of waking up every day
- get a total of 150 grams of protein each day
(then I told him cheap sources of protein, to try to eat maybe 3-4 times a day, etc.)
Super simple, and easy to track.
And he emails me once a week with new pics, his body weight, and what he ate each day with the protein numbers listed.
After the first week he's already looking a lot better (his first update was this morning) and he replied:
"I feel a lot stronger overall and I’m already noticing differences in my forearms and some in my legs as well, I still get hungry but I’m not snacking on junk nearly as much.
I went from 165x4 to 185x5 on squat in just a week"
So this week we're working on keeping the Project Protein rules in place, and increasing calories, mainly from carbs.
Anyways, maybe I'll update this periodically as he progresses.
Cheers
