Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Akin's Macro Calculator and my body weight work out.


Hello everyone, but of a change this week, a friend of mine , Akin, who wants to talk briefly about his macronutrient work book. It's my birthday today so I'm having a week off from writing, I have uploaded a lengthy video at the bottom of the blog though.

Over to Akin....




Before I get started, I’d like to thank Benny for providing me with an opportunity to get my product seen by more people than I could have myself. Before I continue, I’d like to touch briefly on the importance of ‘macronutrients’ and how they can be the difference between you meeting (...or not meeting) your fitness, powerlifting or bodybuilding goals. In some shape or form we deal with macronutrients on a daily basis. I expect that most readers of this blog are aware of what macronutrients are; but for those that aren’t, they are basically Proteins, Carbohydrates and Fats. Having a better understanding of these components of food will give you a fighting chance of being successful when trying to reach your training goals; whilst being able to harness your macronutrients will allow you to be able to command the results you’d like to achieve, whether that’s hitting that PB on the deadlift, bulking without gaining excessive body fat or getting ripped beyond belief for a bodybuilding show. I could bet my entire bank balance that if I asked a competitive powerlifter, bodybuilder or fitness model if they understand how to calculate their macros, less than one in ten would say “no”.


In a previous post, Benny discussed calorie counting and the benefits of this. He wasn’t kidding when he said it can make your diet a whole lot simpler. To reap the benefits, one must understand the composition of food, or at least be able to decipher the code that is a food label. For example, knowing that proteins are not only obtained from meat sources; but can also be obtained from a variety of plant sources, as well as almost all carbohydrate sources.


This brings me on to the tool that I have created. Despite all my knowledge of training and nutrition, I still find counting calories a timely affair to say the least. I was able to utilise some of the free online databases like ‘myfitnesspal.com’ to help me with some of the leg work. Despite this, I still found working out how much of a food I should eat to be a pain in the arse to work out, especially when I was prepping a whole day’s or week’s meals. Being a bit of a computer nerd, I have been able to make a workbook that significantly decreases the time to prep, whilst removing all the mathematical stress that comes with calorie counting. Since its inception, I’ve pretty much done away with the online databases and only occasionally use them to get food values that I input in to my own personal database to use how I see fit.
The workbook that I have created, allows one to effectively ask how much of a food to need to eat in order to be able to meet my required nutrient values. For example, if I’d like to know how much whole grain rice to eat if I want 72g of Carbohydrates, the workbook will tell me. It will then tell me how much protein and fats I am also getting from that food source so I can accurately workout my other foods. This was something that I found that I couldn’t get from the online databases.



Quickly after making the workbook, I saw potential for it to be useful to others like me who take their training and nutrition seriously. The workbook is available to anyone who wants it for a modest £6.00 or $10.00 of which £1 or $1.60 will be donated to Arthritis Care a charity @Barbell Benny is in support of. If the workbook takes your liking, you can contact me via Twitter Akin_a_f for details. If you found out about The Macronutrient Calculator through this blog, be sure to mention Barbell Benny when you contact me so that I can arrange the donation.

Akin


I'm sure it come to know surprise that I would help advertise this workbook. Any tool that can save time and can increase accuracy should really sell itself.

As I said in the beginning of the post I have made a video of me doing the Crossfit benchmark workout "Angie" which comprises of 100 pull ups, 100 press ups , 100 sit ups and 100 squats. The first time I did the work out it took me just under 24 minutes, since then I have done a CrossFit body weight workout every day as well a my weight training in the gym. On Monday night I did the workout again in 18:25 minutes ! 

I had to speed the video up slightly so I could upload it to YouTube, I also had the camera the wrong way around lol . 

The video won't play on your mobiles because of YouTube copyright laws ... rubbish I know ! I think YouTube and I are going to fall out soon.


This was taken after training yesterday, dieting on high carbs is AWESOME ha ha


Hope you are all enjoyng the sunshine

Barbell Benny
 


P.S. I'm sure you have realised the new website, this was a present from a very good friend of the mine .. I only found out today , pretty cool huh :D


1 comment: