Long-time lurker on the forum over here and at reddit. I have been using Tactical Barbell for the past 6 months so I thought I would give something back to the community and report my progress, what worked for me and what didn’t. I always love reading progress reports so here is mine, hopefully some of you guys can get some inspiration/ideas from it. So maybe my “transformation” is nothing special for you guys, but for me it’s really awesome. I have never seen such a strength increase / drop in body fat on another program than TB.
Seriously this program (and hex bar bulgarian squats) changed my life in some weird way. I trained with my GF before but she had mobility issues with her squat and was not willing to fix those so she joined a commercial gym and did some low weight style of lifting.
After 3 months I was getting my old body back but without the back pain. My girlfriend started noticing the gains and was willing to give weightlifting another shot. She tagged along and because the bulgarian squat is very easy to teach she had no trouble following the program. The first 2 weeks I had to drag her to our gym but after that she got hooked and now sees it as “quality time”, especially since we do some supplemental cardio
after the workouts.I have been running operator for 4 blocks. 3 blocks while eating around maintenance and the last block while eating a major deficit of around 800-1000 kcals. I am a desk jockey so I figured I can go pretty low in kcal while still being able to work.
Results from me (before and after pic)
The first pic is 6 weeks ago and the other two are from last week.
https://imgur.com/a/GXXMQxz
Would appreciate if somebody with experience can estimate my bodyfat. The cheap scale with bioelectrical impedance analysis says 14.5% but according to a fat caliper and my GF I am around 12%? I started from around 17%, so I lost a good 3%-5% of bodyfat.
GF results
Here are the before and after pics of my gf ( permission from her to show them). She is a total newbie and has been lifting for 4 months now on the TB operator + black protocol with the last 6 weeks also cutting along with me (1200 kcal).
https://imgur.com/a/ziwbcfp
Story
I have been lifting on and off for the last 7 years or so. Got introduced to Starting Strength and used it as my beginner program. In the first 2 years it worked pretty good for me as a skinny teenager (72kg) and got me the following lifts: Squat - 150kg, Bench 92kg, deadlift - 167kg while following the GOMAD diet. For me these were some impressive results especially since I have always been a lower back patient.
But every summer we would go to the beach and I would look at myself on pictures and see a fat guy that could lift some good weights. Rippetoe got me impressing numbers but in the process also got me a bodyfat of around 20%. I weighed around 95kg with my height of 194cm looked good/buff with clothes but fat without.
And this is where my stalling began, I was afraid to switch up programs and stayed with starting strength because all the so called internet experts were telling me that I was still a novice and needed to milk out my gains. Also as soon as I was dropping weight I started to look smaller and this messed with my head and my lifts.
Adding weights every workout while being in a deficit was taking it’s tax on my body and also my mind. I would stall and do a reset bringing my lifting numbers down. After a few weeks I would start eating more to compensate and bring my numbers back up and also my bodyfat.
I got really fed up with this and became a program hunter, always looking for the next best program to get me better results. Coming from Rippetoe I always thought I needed to do squats, deadlifts and bench. But with a nagging lower back pain after each workout (strained muscles) I got tired of training. I trained with a Olympic weightlifting coach, got a online form check by Mr. Rippetoe himself, went to a crossfit barbell courses and everybody told me my squat/deadlift looked good. But I would still get the backpain and my physio recommended me to stop squatting for a while.
It sounded like blasphemy to me but last summer I decided to just stop lifting for 3 months. While on vacation I was browsing reddit and found the Tactical Barbell forum. Intrigued by what I read I bought both the books because the kindle price was a absolute no-brainer. I read both books during my holiday and got really excited to give this program a try.
So around october last year I started Operator + Black protocol and have not looked back since. I altered one thing and that is I am not doing squats anymore, I bought a hex bar and I have been doing hex bar bulgarian squats. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VGmqdlb9Bg)
Body stats 6 months back
Height: 194cm
Weight: 93kg
Bodyfat:17,3% (electrical impedance scale)
---- Before cut ----
Weight: 89,8
Bodyfat: 16,8% (electrical impedance scale)
--- After cut ----
Weight: 84kg
Bodyfat: 12,4% (bodyfat caliper, 3 points)
People have started noticing my fat loss and it goes 2 ways: With clothes on I get worried remarks like: “Are you eating enough?” “You look so small in your face”, “Wow, are you stressed?” And with my clothes off I get remarks like “Holy shit dude, sick gains”.
Lift stats
Bulgarian Split squat
Starting: 37kg (empty hex bar)
Start Cut: 90kg
After: 96kg
Bench
Starting: 50kg
Start Cut: 100kg
After: 95kg
WPU
Starting: BW+10
Start Cut: BW+40
After: BW + 50kg
Note: I train in a fasted state in the morning.
Cardio
I did nothing fancy. We have a little steep hill that take about 10 seconds to conquer. So I did hill sprints for those hills as prescribed in the book.
Why I love Tactical Barbell
The flexibility and the steady gains. You are really waxing the groove without constantly fatiguing yourself and this cannot be underestimated. With starting strength it was constantly a psychological battle; “hope I can lift 5lbs more than last time”. With TB I just step into the cage and wax the groove. I have not missed a rep since I started with TB. Also the dieting flexibility is something I really love. One day of shitty eating is not going to make such a impact on my TB lifts while it did massively for me on Starting Strength.
Next few months
I am going to slowly add more kcal from this point on. The next couple of weeks I am abroad so I won’t be doing any lifting. After that I will go to 2800kcal a day for the next couple of blocks of operator + black. I will be doing the maximum prescribed sets and for the bench work up to 8 sets during the week (probably 6,7,8) to get some more volume. Would you guys recommend working up to more than 5 sets on the pulls and squats? Or is this going to impact recovery?
After each block I will be fasting for 3 or 4 days (water fast) to shed some fatgains. I have no idea if this is going to work but I will be posting my findings over here.
My findings
- For cutting I have found fasting and intermittent fasting to be very very effective. I did a 3 day fast to start my cut and most of the past 6 weeks I only ate between 16.00 and 21.00, prolonging the fast around 12.00 with some lemon water whenever I was hungry. This was really a eye-opener for me as I did not lose any strength even during a 3 day fast. Will be using this from now on to shed fat quickly.
- Everybody on the internet is lifting huge ass weights and can get away with eating 3000 or 4000 kcal while cutting. The hard reality for me was that as a desktop jocky I needed to eat very low and I had much more fat to lose than I thought. So find out what works for you and not for the internet.
- Only ate around 70-100 grams of protein during the cut but did not felt any muscle loss or strength loss.
- Black coffee really is your best friend during a fasted training and also during the day when hunger strikes.
- Did a little abs accessory. But probably not necessary
- During the cutting block I just focussed on keeping my weights the same and not improving them. This really helped set a mindset of progression and success. So the 5kg decrease in my bench did not really felt like a setback.
- And the last one: I can’t stress this point enough, but consistency trumps everything (I am starting to believe that consistency is the key to a succesfull life). So I often see posts on reddit/bodybuilding.com talking about what is best; keto or carbs, morning training vs evening training and so on. After not missing one training for the last 6 months I now know that these things are like 1% of the actual results. So I am not a morning person, but when I started with TB I moved my evening workouts to the morning before I got to work. I did this because every month I would miss some workouts due to social events. Am I weaker in the morning? Hell yeah! But by lifting in the morning I made sure that I would not miss a workout and this got me way stronger.
It’s the same with my squat history, at one point I just had to be honest and accept that a strong squat was not going to happen for me any time soon. So I started looking at alternatives and have been using the hex bar bulgarian squat with great success, lifting more on one leg than I did on two in the last few years. And always nice seeing that teardrop definition on your legs
Been using Operator + Black with great success, dropped around 12lbs in the last 6 weeks and will be using this program for a very long time.
So this turned out to be quite the story, but I am really loving this program!
