r/veganfitness

What %bf do you think I am? I have no clue lol

3 rounds, 24kg/53lb kettlebell

10 Single Leg Deadlift, each leg

10 Swing

10 Squat Clean

10 Overhead Press

10 Renegade Row, 5 each side

Been a while since I played with these things, I’m definitely gonna start working on my Lsit and tucked planche again

Mid 20's, 6'1" tall, 220 pounds, vegan for 10 years, for referance.

Hey guys, I'm just sharing this with the community to give anyone in a similar phase some ideas to help them out.

Here's the little cheat sheet here and I'll show you exactly what I'm giving to my client as she gets ready for her first bodybuilding show prep with me.

We're in a pulldown phase right now. We're taking some fat off here. We're going to take a look at her diet.

So we've got a two savory, two sweet meal approach.

The first meal is going to be her sweet edamame puff protein bowl. We've got edamame puffs, frozen fruit, vegan yogurt and sunbutter for healthy fats.

Second meal. We just updated this one. She had the asparagus, the Just Chicken, the hummus, and the potato, but we wanted to move another savory meal into this one so we could make room for another sweet meal. So we moved the nutritional yeast and the salsa into this meal.

Moving to the next meal, meal three, it was savory, no longer savory. We've got her with some protein pancakes. We're using the Birch Benders plant protein mix. Got some blueberries in there, a little bit of sugar-free syrup, Vedge Protein, walnuts for healthy fats, and a little bit of soy milk to mix it up.

Her meal four is always her training day meal. So this is going to be her intra-workout drink. We've got EAAs, highly branched cyclic dextrin, salt, and creatine monohydrate.

And then her meal five, back to savory, something to finish off the night with.

If you're in a similar phase as her and have any questions, please feel free to ask me and I'll do my best to help you out.

After three years away from competing, I finally returned to the platform.

I've been vegan for 4.5 years and have been training for strength for about 5 years.

I competed at 85.5 kg (188.5 lb) bodyweight and pulled 210 kg (463 lb) in the deadlift, setting a new meet PR.

It might not be a huge number in the powerlifting world, but after an injury, getting older (I'm almost 37), and losing bodyweight over the last few years, this lift means a lot to me.

Just wanted to share this with the community. 🌱💚

In January I asked for advice in this subreddit about whether to recomp or lean bulk and received a lot of great (and conflicting!) information. I just got my 6 month DEXA results and it turns out I kind of did both?

TL;DR: I have gained 5.1lbs of lean mass, and lost 2.2lbs of fat in the first six months of this year! My visceral fat stayed at 0lbs and my bone density was still off the charts (in the right direction).

I guess I don’t know whether I would classify this as a lean bulk or a recomp, but I will classify this as a win. My ‘realistic’ goal for lean mass gain for 2026 was 5lbs because everything I’ve read about perimenopausal women and muscle gain suggested that 5lbs would be the ceiling (I still set myself a stretch goal of 8lbs because I like to be a bit delulu).

Even if the outcome doesn’t show it, my strategy was to lean bulk because all my health markers (blood pressure, heart rate, visceral fat, A1C) are excellent - it’s just my body comp that’s out of whack. And because I was starting at really low lean mass for my height, I knew that it would be harder to gain muscle than lose fat, so I wanted to tackle the harder task first.

In no specific order, this is what my program has been so far, and what I’ll be changing for the back half of the year.

Nutrition: I started at 2400 calories in January and lost weight, and crept up to 2800-2900 by April. Given I’ve only gained 2.8lbs, this is a surplus of ~50 calories per day. I want the scale to continue to trend upwards over the next six months, but I’m happy with the rate of gain so far so probably won’t bump calories by much.

Protein: Because I was made aware of so many headwinds (low estrogen levels, age, potentially lower bioavailability of vegan proteins - although it seems like this is fearmongering and not science) I decided to hit 1g of protein per pound of body weight. My average for these six months turned out to be 162.4g per day, so bullseye! I’m going to stick to this, even if it might be more than I truly need.

Leucine: Some people say this is overthinking, and I can’t a/b test my own body, but basically to hit the leucine threshold with plants you need to hit ~35g+ protein per feeding. Seeing as I’m getting 160g per day anyway, it was easy to break this down into a few meals with over 40g of protein each, to make sure I clear this threshold a few times a day. I cannot say whether it had an impact, but it wasn’t something that was difficult to do, so I did it.

Training: I am doing four 75 minute lifting sessions each week.  Interestingly my results show no muscle gain in my arms, even though my arms have started getting the most compliments! I guess I must have lost more fat from that area, or my shoulders are doing a lot of heavy lifting (pun intended) so I need to rework my program to balance this out. The majority of my gains were in my torso (+2lbs) and legs (+2.8lbs) so that part of my programming must be working.

Sleep and Recovery: This was something I really needed to dial in. I wear a WHOOP and my nightly doomscrolling habit was killing my deep sleep and recovery scores, so I have developed a sleep hygiene routine which has upped my total sleep by almost an hour, and increased my deep sleep by 45 minutes. My phone goes to greyscale at 8:30pm to remind me to put it down. I am in bed at 9:30pm and read a book until I fall asleep. When I was reading my phone I’d often be awake until 11:30pm, but now I’m out like a light by 10:15pm.

Tracking: I built a tracking dashboard which pulls in data from my WHOOP, all my nutrition from MyMacros, workout data, steps, cycle tracking, body measurements etc. This has allowed me to see everything I’m doing in one place, which helped me connect dots I may have not previously seen. I also built in a muscle growth estimate and it suggested I’d hit 4lbs of muscle growth, which I thought was wildly over estimating, but turned out to be 1lb under where I ended up. I have found this genuinely useful and it’s allowed me to generate the following stats:

• I drank 511 cups of soy milk — enough to fill a bathtub (32 gallons)
• I ate a 6'4" tower of tofu (37.5 lbs)
• In total I lifted two international space stations (governed by earth’s gravity at least) (1,910,762 lbs) 
• I leg pressed more than a blue whale (366,531 lbs)
• I walked from LA to Seattle (2,389,608 steps / ~1,130 miles)
• These TVP overnight oats breakfast are my MVP meal

Misc Observations

• For the first time in my life I don't have any food noise. Recently I've been struggling to figure out what to cook for dinner when this has historically never been an issue, and it only just dawned on me that it's probably because I'm literally never hungry anymore.
• It's only been in the last month that people have started to comment on my body changing (these are appropriate comments from appropriate people). The best was a woman who asked for my help in the gym because "you look so strong and obviously know what you're doing".
• I started seeing a physiotherapist because my left trap got really sore and completely hulked up! It turns out it was compensating for a weak levator scapulae, which I'm now strengthening. This is probably what's been holding back my bench press from progressing so I'm looking forward to some strong gains in H2.
• I had a hate/hate relationship with squats for the first 3-4 months until I learned about long femurs.
• I got a powerlifting coach to make sure I'm not ruining myself. I still hate squats, but now less so.

 My biggest takeaway:

I know it’s trite, but really it’s ‘trust the process’. I was a teenager in the 90’s - I have never deliberately tried to gain weight. The first time I jumped on the scales and saw the number go down and I felt disappointment was really disorienting, but in a good way. I feel like I’ve actively rewired my relationship with both food and my body. Getting stronger is dope AF, and working on a long-term goal feels good for my achievement driven brain. 

With a few tweaks I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing through the end of the year, and get another scan. From there I’ll figure out how much body fat I want to cut in the new year. See you in six months!

First Upper Session of the week

Gym just did a bit of an overhaul and got in a load of Evolve equipment. These machines utilise digital resistance by means of an electric motor, as opposed to the usual craic of gravity and load. You set the resistance on a pad which feels heavier than the number suggests. So it takes a bit of getting used to. But also means you can change certain variables like changing the tension of the eccentrics.

Biggest problem with these is that if you rest longer than like 90 seconds it resets itself and you have to go through the process of adding ‘weight’ etc again. The future is weird man.

Good session anyway. At my lowest weight in about a year now at 87kg, gonna keep pushing though through the summer.

May you all have a blessed week

Since I started working out around a decade ago, I've always put a lot of focus into my back because it's one of the easiest ways for taller lifters to build a more aesthetic physique. I don't train it as heavily these days because my goals have changed, but it's great to see it still stands out.

If you're a skinny guy and want to easily change your frame, work your back, a lot.

10 week deficit wrapped up.

Stuck with it, started doing weekly refeeds every Sunday from week 7 to keep things moving and not burn out. Down 5kg total, 6cm off the waist, 5cm off the thighs and somehow kept all my strength and muscle through it.

Now moving into a slow lean bulk. No stuffing my face, just small surplus + actually pushing harder on the workouts. Chasing big muscles though hahah.

Next update in 10 weeks.

20M 5’10” 149lbs. recovered from anorexia, up from 112 lbs in about three months.

only just started in the gym, enjoying it. barbell routine, can generally only lift the bar. never played a sport or been active previously.

i’ve been eating 3000-3500 cals a day as part of recovery. 120g+ of protein majority from protein powder (vegan).

curious if it’s time to cut back on calories; obviously i am fresh out of recovery, but i can no longer do a chin-up due to weight.