Day 482:

Woots! Finally hunted down and bought my 1.25kg Olympic plates. These ones are trigrip and rubber coated, meaning the inner part is actually steel as you can see at the core. Came wrapped new in plastic and real good stuff overall. Costed RM25 a pair but well worth it.

Never ever leaving my precious plates in any gym anymore ever.

Physique update:

It's been 1 month I've been training properly since my heat stroke/BB break incident. I've build back up from 63KG back to 64.4KG in a month while maintaining BF%. Current state at 64.4KG, about 15% BF, No pump, no filters nothing:


I've currently passed the Novice rank on key lifts as on http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/...hStandards.html
However I'm still below approx 5~10KG on my maxes in order to reach the Intermediate rank.
So I'm somewhere in the middle of Novice & Intermediate now.
I am also 100% injury/issue free now. My trap is fine now and I've completed my accutane course last month. So most of the isotetrin/accutane is out of my system and my joints feel waaayyy better.

Nutrition Philosophy update:
Currently I am just eating at maintenance, I guesstimate all my calories, and I don't count macros. After counting calories for over a year I'm pretty much at a point where I can guesstimate my maintenance and maintain pretty well.

I'm just gonna hover at 64.5 ~ 65KG and train till my BF% drop to near 10%. I can plan a cut, and a lean bulk and all that like I did last time, however I find it to be useless cause life is unpredictable so I don't care much anymore. So just eat +-200 cals of my 2300 cals maintenance daily, simple, SUSTAINABLE.

Training Philosophy update:
I've reach a point in my life where I've read/watched/followed every damn book/video/blog on this subject that I hardly have anything new to absorb anymore. I am actually sick of anymore info, nowadays I only follow strengtheory.com.

So with that massive amount of information over 6 years,..
I came to conclusion it's all about training optimally > recovering from that training > repeat. If stall change rep ranges, if still stall increase training sets.
That's all, nothing else. As simple as that.

I also no longer train to failure on every set.
Example for 3x8, I do 1st set 8, 2nd set 8, 3rd set fail at 6 maybe. Same weight for all 3 sets.
Failure meaning no longer able to do another rep with good form.
All sets are kept around RPE 8 with last set reaching RPE 9 or 10.
Once I get 8 reps for all sets I increase the weigh by the smallest increment.
Simple.

About the gym not having 2.5KG plates, I've told them I need it and they ordered the plates from China already last month, shud be arriving this week. So nice of them to actually respect my request instead of making fun of me.