My thoughts after completing the first three phases of Paul Carter’s LRB-365 program.

Coming into this program, I’d been doing Jamie Lewis’ Predator Diet & Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 for about 10 months.

Phase 1 - First 12 Weeks: Strength Peaking

This phase went well, a good introduction to Paul Carter’s Strong-15 program. As he said, the first 6 weeks were fairly light and I was able to really focus on bar speed, which contrasted nicely to the grinding the last few cycles of 5/3/1 had been for me. The greater number of working sets was nice too. I was fairly beat-up coming into this, so it was a nice strength- and confidence-booster.

Diet

Pretty much followed the LRB diet given in the book, shooting for around 3000 kcal/day.

In between Phases 1 & 2

Because it seemed pointless to deload going from strength-peaking to a conditioning/recovery phase and because I didn’t feel like testing maxes, I did a Chaos & Pain-inspired week of killing myself, doing a push, a pull, and a squat for 30 reps of each, done in sets of no more than 3, every day for a week. Fun stuff.

Phase 2 - Weeks 13-18: Rotational Split with Ultra High Rep Sets

I very much enjoyed this phase. The weighted vest walks in the morning were a lot of fun (and unlike running, made me feel like I was doing something useful) and the super-high rep lifting is a nice challenge of a different sort than lifting as heavy as possible.

Diet

I was originally intending on doing the same diet, just reducing calories - however, I found that as I cut things out, carbs naturally got evicted so I ended up essentially doing keto again. I think something in my particular biochemistry is well-suited to this sort of diet, as I’ve never really experienced the negative symptoms I hear about (just a gradual running out of gas when cheat/refeed days are spaced too far apart), and I find that carbs tend to upset my stomach.

Phase 3 - Weeks 19-25: Conditioning Acceleration Fat Loss, Conditioning Peaking

Event more fun than the previous phase! Doing small workouts in the morning 6 days a week was fun, especially as they would be so different (two days of lifting/bodyweight exercises, two days of vest walks, two days of hill sprints). The hill sprints were particularly fun, mostly because the hill I was doing my sprints on was frequented by people walking giant packs of dogs. Anecdotally, running with dogs seems to greatly improve times!

The improvement in my “gas tank” was most notable in the bodyweight exercise ladder circuits, where I went from dying just completing the workouts to being able to easily cut out rest periods quite quickly.

Diet

As with the previous phase, I kept with a keto diet, keeping calories to around 2500 kcal/day, with once weekly refeed/“cheat” days where I wouldn’t track. The leaning out was very noticeable: I got leaner than I’ve ever been, veins coming out all over the place, and even got some random fellow on the street to stop and ask me how to get abs (he was even taking notes on what I told him!).

A Little Variation

Another fun wrinkle I introduced was to do micro-workouts throughout the day, taking advantage of the fact that I 1) work from home, 2) have a home gym, and 3) consume a huge amount of water. What I would do is, every time I’d go to the washroom (which is at least a dozen times per day), I’d run down to the gym and do one of a rotating selection of exercises:

Static lateral holds with 35lb plates for as long as possible Pullups w/45lb x10 Dips w/45lb x10 Hanging leg raises x10 Split squats w/135lb x5/leg

Just a fun little thing, but very enjoyable, I feel like it sort of kept my body “primed”.

Progress Pictures

An album of progress pictures

Bonus album of post-cut posing