It's best to separate your cardio times completely from your resistance training times. Your body only has so much glycogen reserves, and doing cardio before working out depletes it, so you can't work out as intensely. If you must lump them together because of time constraints, do cardio afterwards. It's much easier for your body to lose fat and improve with cardio, than it is for your body to synthesize muscles out of proteins. That's the where you need to focus glycogen, on the muscles you want to grow.

I've put myself together an Excel spreadsheet that lets me select food from drop down menus, input the weight, and it calculates my calorie intake for the day. Makes putting numbers on what I'm eating very fast and easy. I was kind of shocked when I put in the portion sizes I *was* eating, it was in excess of 4000kcal! Oats and Brown Rice are killers, it's way too easy to get carried away with the portion sizes.

Here was me thinking it was only ~3000kcal, I've since dialled it down to roughly that now. I'll dial it back further once I've worked out a scheme to balance my meals better.

Weighed myself at the weekend. I'm down to 88kg now which was quite a pleasent surprize. I've a roughly ~2500kcal a day diet carved out for myself that I'm following now. It seems that and increased cardio are yielding results.

Although my diet has gone to shit this week as I'm so busy at work.

Have you noticed any difference in energy or strength because of the reduced calorie-intake?

To be honest I haven't actually tried lifting what I was lifting since I've dialled down the calorie intake. I was deadlifting 160kg for 1x5, but I've held it around 145kg-150kg since, alternating between 1x5, 2x5 and 3x3. They seem a little heavier than I remember alight, but I'm not in the position whereby I'm struggling to complete reps. I've done the same with all the other lifts.

As for energy, I haven't really noticed any difference. I think I was eating more than I actually needed, and I was obviously carrying more bodyfat than I thought. Now, I'm either hungry or getting hungry by the time I come to the next meal which is good.

It'll be interesting to see how low I can get the weight with the simple deficit and more cardio, but based on what i've seen thus far, I might be able to get it closer to 80kg than I previously thought.

I've decided to only work out my upper body and abs. I figure a) girls don't notice a guy's legs, and b) I won't have to eat as much protein. Good idea?

Will intense running or a focus on running as your sole cardio avoid this?

This strat only works if you have a body similar to mine (and in case you can't tell, I'm an Extreme Ectomorph). My upper torso is the same size as my hips and I rarely wear shorts, so the chicks don't get to see my legs.

my legs are already pretty huge. probably not in a good way.
do leg press, though.

Well I think you're pretty much correct, most guys legs are good enough anyway unless you want to compete in sports. However the only excuse for neglecting your legs is sheer laziness. Make sure you do your entire upper body though, including your back, lats and traps, not just focussing on the front muscles of the upper body. I know squats are difficult and hardly anyone does them, but don't give up the deadlift because it builds muscle across the whole back and traps as well.

It depends. If you naturally have decent legs than this will maintain them. It won't build them up too much though. Though I'm not really a good authority on this topic because the "chicken leg" syndrome could never apply to me because as much as my natural upper body composition sucks, I've always had around 17" calves regardless of the effort I put in. Either way I think it's still a good idea to work out your whole body no matter what. It will increase testosterone and production of HGH which is integral to muscle growth.

I think my legs look the best on my body right now. I have extremely strong athletic looking legs.

There is this dude I work with that straight up has chicken legs but a buff upper body, my legs are literally double his in size.

Kind of sucks that women don't look at legs...unless I don't think they do. I actually have a really nice ass as well.

Some do, some don't. But the look that some guys have (you see them at every gym i think), a muscular upperbody and then chicken legs is never good and women will notice this eventually i'm shure unless the guy always wears long trousers or something.

So how is everyone doing in the gym?

Been having some wrist pain so I had to take a few days off but other than that have been super consistent for 2 months.

I'm about to hit 200 on squat which is a first for me and am excited because it is my weakest exercise. My deadlift is at 235 which is also a first as well. At this pace I should be pretty fit come winter time.