Goals: A Year Out

As I said, I intend this site to not only be a place for me to keep track of my workouts, program changes, and pr's along the way, but also a way of holding myself to certain goals. I've written down numbers that I hope to hit before (many, many times), but those notebooks and pieces of paper tend to get lost. Furthermore, the goals are always a little too short-sighted. If there's one thing I've learned from Jim Wendler, it's to think in the long term. So here, I'm going to what weights I want to hit by the end of the semester, next year.

I'm basically deciding my goals this way: on 5/3/1, at the slowest, I should be able to put 10 lbs on my squat and dead per month, and 5 on my bench and press. normally, I would give a couple months of buffer room to accommodate small plateaus or injuries or whatever else that might set me back, but instead i'm posting these goals now (at the end of February), planning to hit them the first week in May next year - just about 14 months from now. If i treat those fourteen months like they are going to be a perfect 12 months lifting, that gives me some room for mistakes, injury, whatever. That gives me about 120 lbs on my squat and dead, 60 on my bench and press... however, any lifter knows that your overhead press is almost certainly going to be the biggest bitch to increase (although my shitty, shitty bench sure gives mine a run for it's money), so I'm going to knock a few extra lbs off of my press goal, as well. Also, squatting has been going really well lately... and 395 just wouldn't be quite as sweet as 405. So I'm going to push that one, while backing off of my press expectations a little bit. So here are my official numbers, that I will hit the first week of May, 2013

Squat: 405
Bench: 255
Deadlift: 455
Press: 195

And, I'm going to do those weights without being a fat piece of shit. Right now, I'm hanging out right around 198, and at 5' 10" i'm solid, but not huge by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not at all opposed to gaining weight, but I already did the "gain 30 lb's in a couple months" thing, and I just looked and felt fat and sad. So any weight that I gain, I'm going to have to  gain while eating relatively clean. Right now, at just under 200, my body composition is alright - not great, but better than it has been in the past. My plan is to keep eating clean and doing this high-volume shit until my body comp gets  a little better - hopefully get my body fat between 10% - 12%. Then, it will be a slow and steady weight gain from there, trying to keep my body comp the same while slowly putting on more mass. It's going to be a lot of chicken and broccoli, but I think I can do it.

So those are the goals. Better body comp, maybe 10 lb's heavier if I can manage that, and the numbers I posted above. I have a meet the first week in April, the first one I'll have ever done, so that will give me a better idea of where I'm at, and a better comparison point in May of 2013 for how much my lifts have really grown. It's gonna be a ride.