19NorFan’s 6-Week Post Contest Rebound Log | Team US Pharmacies

That much weight gain was not part of the plan. I miscalculated the rebound + the effect that the new gear would have. This is my first time coming out of a phase that lean and it's something I'll need to account for next time around based on this experience.
 
9/6/2026 - Shoulders & Calves

Cable Iso Upright Row
35x11
35x11*
35x5** + 25x3**

Lever Iso Side Delt
90x10
90x8*

DB Chest Supported Delt Raise
10x20
10x17*** + 4***
10x13*** + 3***

Paramount Lever Shoulder Press
170x11*
170x8** + 110x4**

Icarian Calf Raise
320x17
320x15

KB Iso Dorsiflexion
20x15
25x6*

Indicators
* Set went to failure
** Drop set went to failure
*** Set went to failure, with forced partials

Notes: This shoulder is mainly composed of non-pressing shoulder movements, in an effort to spare the joints for Tuesday's Chest & Triceps workout. The isolation work provides a good amount of stimulus to the front and side delts, and pre-exhuasts the entire shoulder for the final 2 sets of shoulder press. Although I went to failure on both shoulder press sets, it was done with minimal stress to the elbows. The shoulder failed well before the triceps, due to the pre-exhaustion. If you have unusually long arms, pre-exhaustion is a useful technique to fatigue target muscle groups before a compound movement. Otherwise on failure sets for compound movements, your arms will fail well before the chest or back for example. I will at times start a workout with a compound exercise to failure, but I'll always follow up with isolation work and then one more final compound exercise as a finisher.

Regarding the water retention mentioned yesterday - the majority of the inflammation and pressure is gone. After that first 24-48 hours of reducing dose, it's as if I deflated overnight. Eating a few bananas per day over the last few days helped as well. All of the fluid build up in my legs is gone. On Thursday I had trouble walking for 30 minutes due to shin pumps. Today I had no issue walking for a little over an hour. I'll leave the MENT at 10mg/day and increase the HGH to 6iu/day once my weight gets back to the ~ 240 - 245LBS baseline.

I started this shoulder day with iso upright rows. Having the correct form with this exercise is very important, there's a very specific plane of motion that you want to follow to ensure that tension stays on the front and side delt, and doesn't turn it into a trap movement. That plane of motion will vary for everyone, quite significantly, due to variances in limb length, which affects mechanical advantage. My tips for this one are, move up close to the cable, keep the path of motion as close to your face as ROM will allow, and do it deliberately slowly, particularly on the negative. You have to maintain contraction the entirety of the set. Overall, this is my favorite exercise to target the side delts.
 
Next I go into the lever side delt raise. This is a good one to better isolate the side delts, whereas the iso upright row does have some front delt involvement. To really target the side delts, I recommend getting up close on the machine, so that the lever is on the side of your hip. As opposed to in front of you - that's less of a pure side delt movement, IMO.
 
To target the front delts, I'll do these chest supported delt raises. This is a higher rep exericise, done to failure, with forced partials. Most of the stimulus with this one is at the very top of the movement and on the negative. You want to deliberately go to full ROM at the top of this one. You will feel some rear delt involvement at the top when you finish out the contraction.
 
And finally, 2 sets to failure on the the shoulder press. For most shoulder pressing movements, I prefer a neutral grip. This reduces mechanical advantage by putting more of the tension on the front delt, whereas a pronated grip does have some chest and a good a mount of triceps drive, requiring a heavier weight to be used.
 
9/8/2026 - Chest & Triceps

Hammer Strength Incline Press
290x4*
290x7*

Icarian Lever Fly - Supinated Grip
80x12
80x12
80x12

Smith Machine Floor Press
225x14
225x12

Cable Straight Bar Triceps Extensions
65x14
65x13*
65x8

DB Overhead Iso Triceps Extension
30x10
30x8

*Indicates set went to failure

Notes: If you haven't noticed, I tend to bias volume on chest days towards incline movements. I find that the upper pecs require more work to engage, while my lower pecs still get plenty of stimulation from the incline movements and the few sets of flat movements. Leaning more heavily towards incline movements develops a more proportional chest.

This was also a machines only workout, which is uncommon. This modification was done to give the shoulders less work, considering that a shoulder day was done 2 days prior. With the exception of the Hammer Strength Incline Press - which certainly had a good amount of front delt involvement - I did a sufficient job at isolating the chest on the other movements so as to not over work the shoulders.

First exercise was the Hammer Strength Incline Press, 2 sets to failure. I typically do 3-4 warm up sets prior to failure sets. One thing to note here, there was too much head movement on most of the reps. This is something I'll mention in my training notes, to be more intentional about limiting any other body part movement throughout the set in future workouts. You may have the tendency to move around or adjust and adapt your posture as the set fatigues you. This is a habit to avoid, so as the remove variance from workout to workout. And other reasons.
 
From there, I'll go into the lever fly, with an upper pec emphasis. I do these with a supinated grip on the pec dec. This form set up generates more stretch at the bottom of the movement and due to my hand position, deliberately pulls on the upper pec. I am externally rotating my hand as I do this exercise; there's constant external tension. At the fully stretched position, I can feel the tension through the length of my collar bone. Additionally, the main point of contact on this exercise is my elbow to the pad. All of the drive needs to be through that contact point. A pronated grip, alternatively, has significant shoulder involvement. For the purpose of this exercise in this workout, I want it to be a pure pec movement.
 
Finally, to finish off, I'll do 2 sets of floor presses. If you notice on this one also, my hands are internally rotated, kind of like what they would be if I were to do diamond pushups. This allows me to squeeze the bar just slightly to maintain constant tension on pecs. This also takes the weight off the triceps more. In the first set I did 14 reps to 1-2RIR. For the second set, I adjusted to a slightly wider grip, to provide more mechanical advantage. Kind of like a mechanical drop set but with a full rest.
 

And that concludes today's chest and triceps workout. Most of the grip and form adjustments mentioned, I just adapted over time. I'd encourage anyone to make the adjustments needed to stimulate the intended muscle group. Often times, new trainees will see "correct" form and attempt to emulate it, despite that particular technique being suboptimal for their anatomy. You don't have to commit yourself to any one particular form. Optimal form depends on your individual biomechanics.
 
RawCutlery said:
Very good detailed log here. Don’t get injured and keep going!
Click to expand...

Thank you! That's my whole attitude to this too, I always say health permitting, I'm confident I can go a long way. It takes a lot of diligence not to get injured in the gym, especially when you start feeling the weights get lighter. In and out of the gym, a major component to this is damage mitigation.
 
9/9/2026 - Back & Biceps

DB Pullover
55x12
65x10
75x8

Hammer Strength Lever Pullover
270x12
270x10
270x9*

Cable Iso Pulldown
42.5x12
42.5x12

Icarian Preacher Curl
100x14
110x12
110x11

DB Curl
15x30 + 10x17^*
10x30 + 5x30^

Indicators
* Set went to failure
^ Performed as a no-rest drop set

Notes: This is a lat targeted workout where I start with several pre-exhaustion sets, with pullover isolation exercises. I started this workout with 4 sets of wide grip pulldowns and went right into the dumbbell pullovers. The DB pullover provides the best stretch of any of the back isolation exercises. This one is done intentionally in partial fashion, meaning I am not bringing the dumbbell all the way to the top. I only bring it up as far as lat involvement is still present. Through the entire set, you want constant tension in the lat, in fact if you look at the video below, you can see lat contraction throughout the movement. This exercise emphasizes the stretch.

The Hammer Strength pullover, on the other hand, emphasizes the contraction more. This exercise was also done in a somewhat partial fashion; I did not extend to the fully stretched position. I primarily focused on the contraction with the maximum amount of weight possible for 8-12 reps. Full extending would be redundant with the dumbbell pullover and would require a reduced load.

Lastly, I finish with the modified cable iso pulldown. I'm not certain if there is a name for this exercise but I am sitting on the floor with the cable to the side. This particular set up allows for a longer range of motion than a traditional pulldown. I can get a full stretch up top and then pulldown to the point where my elbow is at my hip. This exercise also allows for a slight side bend at the fully contracted position, to really lock in that contraction and hold.

On the biceps workout, I did 3 straight sets on the lever preacher curl and then a few drop sets with a lighter weight on the dumbbell curl. This was more of a pump workout, particularly the dummbells.

There used to be a bench that you could strap yourself down into for the dummbell pullover. I think I've seen it in some of the old school bodybuilding videos from the 1980s. Until someone brings that back, for now, I do these right off the bench like so. You can see, I don't take the DB beyond my forehead. I use my line of view as the stop point, roughly. Although it's more important to determine this by the feel of the contraction. You want to stop at the peak of it.
 
This machine sometimes gets heat online for its ergonomics or at least I've come across some complaints. At my gym, I'm pretty much the only person I've seen use it. And I think it's because it's not utilized correctly. Every time I see someone use this machine on social media, they just hold the bar in front of then and do it as a lateral pulldown type of movement. Or their arms are not plush with the lever. You see how my forearm is flush with the forebar... Same with my tricep to the pad. This will give you more control and allow you to drive with the lats, at the exclusion of the other muscle groups. If your grip is sloppy, the other parts get involved, maybe your traps. I've seen people hurt their necks that way with similar machines. Also you need to really belt yourself down to the seat firmly, where there's no slack. This will give you more torso control and allow you to better contract your abs for stability when performing reps.

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To finish off back, I'll do iso cable pulldowns. Excuse the video cropping, both sets were chopped.

To preserve my joints, I do a combination of isolation and compound work for the major groups. You have a budget of sets you can do on any particular movement before the repetition develops into a stress injury. I have a good idea of what my limit is with work volume both quantitatively and qualitatively. We have an idea of how many sets we can handle but you also want to use your own intuition and judge based on feel. If yesterday you did a substantial amount of work that went over your elbow joint for example, today you might want to consider movements the relieve it.
 
Cardio & Inter-Workout Recovery

I do 30-60 minutes LISS, 6 days per week, year round. I have 1 full sedentary day in the week, otherwise 6 days per week, I'm doing weights or cardio, split into separate sessions. For example, I might do a 30 minute walk in the morning fasted and then weights in the afternoon. This split reduces the systemic fatigue that occurs when combining the two. For me personally, doing weights and cardio in the same session on a regular basis is too much. Weights take about 60 - 75 minutes and another 30 - 40 on top of that for cardio is excessive. Doing it separately also allows me to create a better post lifting recovery environment. When I weight train, I ideally want my stress levels to come down ASAP to reduce muscle breakdown and so I can get my post workout meal/carbs/insulin. We want to jump right into that post lifting recovery phase soon after the weights are done. Whether it's during bulking or cutting, I generally don't recommend combining the two in the same workout if you are trying to optimize for hypertrophy.

There are some exceptions to this obviously - in contest prep, you might need to do both just to accommodate scheduling. If you are a casual lifter and don't have time in your day to do weights and cardio separately or only have X hours a week to dedicate to fitness, you are still better off doing them both in the same workout than not doing cardio at all.

Today I did:
20 minute walk, slow pace, just to warm things up. Heart rate 110 - 120
10 minutes on the assault bike, moderate pace. Heart rate 130-140
10 minutes on the step mill, moderate pace. Heart rate 130-140

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The assault bike is very useful for upper body conditioning. Which helps with higher volume upper body workouts, especially with lactic acid tolerance. It also helps realign the upper body, like if you slept awkwardly and feel tight in the neck. 10-20 minutes on the assault bike and some foam rolling can loosen that up in a day or two. Highly recommend the assault bike.

Separate from the weight loss and heart/vascular health benefits, cardio is a true performance enhancer in more ways that can be listed here. It will condition you to train with a greater work capacity, better recovery between sets and sessions, improved nutrient delivery (increase # of capillaries) and so much more.

You can alternatively do step counting. However, I am not a fan of step counting. You need to get your heart rate elevated IMO, to get the conditioning & other benefits of cardio. Just counting steps is useful for weight loss as a metric of work volume, but that activity won't provide all of the benefits. Again, there are exceptions - if this is all you can do, it's still better than no cardio at all.

I also do foam rolling a few times per week. These are brief 10-20 minute sessions after cardio, done at home. It's good to put some heavier clothes on to keep everything warm. Here are a few sample techniques for the back and quads. I have a leg workout tomorrow, so it's important for me to loosen everything up. I'll also apply an electric massager to my adductors and other harder to reach areas. What happens if I don't? My legs tighten over time, reducing mobility and creating imbalances. Injuries can occur this way under heavier loads. I am noticing the more muscular I get, the more I need to align things, do massages, foam roll, etc. But also this could also just coincide with getting older.

 

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