rackham

Sounds like overtraining to me. What's your diet and workout schedule?

What sort of pullups are you doing? If you're doing wide-grip pullups, you can drop the lat pulldown because it works the same muscles. In fact, that's what I'd recommend anyway -- do wide-grip pullups and drop the pulldowns. Otherwise, it seems pretty reasonable.

It depends on how many reps you're doing. The fewer reps, the longer the rest period. Some powerlifters take as long as 10 minutes between sets. I wait 2 minutes between sets and each set takes about 1 minute, so 12 x 3 = 36 minutes for 12 sets, not counting extra time for going to the water fountain, etc.

142 x 18-20 = 2556-2840 calories a day. Aim for that, and if you haven't gained weight after a week, add 200 calories a day until you do. 220g of protein is more than enough.

I don't go to those things anymore... my ass can't take the abuse. There are just some places a vodka bottle should not go!!!

Yeah, I noticed that. My friends' moms, especially, would try to get me to eat more food... "You're so skinny! Eat up!"

Also, don't forget that the longer you workout, the more cortisol your body produces, which starts taking you into catabolic territory. People tend to cite 1 hour as a good upper guideline for limiting cortisol production. It also helps to sip on a carb drink during your workout. This has been associated with significantly greater muscle growth. Details here (free membership required): http://www.medscape.com/px/urlinfo Do a Medline search for "training cortisol muscle".

My suggestion is just to not do so many sets per bodypart. If you want to train only one body part per day, that means you will have shorter workouts. Or you could combine bodyparts for slightly longer workouts and go to the gym fewer days. I'm currently following a very abbreviated workout plan: 4 exercises per day, 2-3 sets per exercise, with a push/pull/legs split. It's short, intense, and I'm making consistent gains. What more could you want?

If you train with proper intensity, you don't NEED a long workout. Measure your workouts by your progress, not by how exhausted you feel! Tommyarmani was dead on when he said, "You can train hard or you can train long, but you can't do both." 18-22 sets for a single bodypart is (in my opinion) training long.

Okay, two things: 1. What's wrong with a short workout? 2. That's 20-30 minutes for only ONE bodypart. If you did one major muscle group (e.g. chest) and two minors (e.g. shoulders & triceps), you'd come in much closer to 1 hour, which is the UPPER limit that you should be aiming for. My workout this morning was 40 minutes for back, biceps and abs.

No, 9-12 sets per major muscle group. That's PLENTY.

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Well, I'm not elitesnautica, but I can tell you that working out much longer than an hour increases production of catabolic hormones and decreases your T-cell count. It will catch up to you if you keep it up too long. Keep your workouts short and INTENSE, and you really don't need to do so many exercises.

My feelings exactly. I'm sure you're doing quality workouts; I just like to give conservative guidelines for the benefit of all the beginning and intermediate lifters reading this. http://www.trygve.com/mfw_faq.html#howmanyexercises

If you're only doing a bodypart a day, it's a manageable amount of sets per bodypart, but only if you're an advanced lifter. I definitely wouldn't do any more than that... and it's definitely too much for probably 90% of people lifting. A lot of people think that more sets = better, but that's not true and in fact the amount of sets that we're talking about here would be overtraining for most people.

Damn... that's a lot of sets! Why so many? How long are your workouts? I do 2-6 sets per bodypart, depending on its size. I do a push/pull/legs split and my workouts generally last about 45 minutes. I've found that I actually get much better results this way than if I try to do more sets and longer workouts.

The time you eat doesn't really matter much... the overall calorie balance is the most important thing. EDIT: In fact, eating a protein-rich meal shortly before bedtime will decrease the amount of lean body mass lost while dieting (i.e., eating before bedtime helps preserve muscle): http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=3761670F.DBB9A89C%40san.rr.com

I don't get it... what's gay about any of this? GAY MEANS YOU'RE ATTRACTED TO PEOPLE OF THE SAME SEX.

My love is like OMG!

Just saw a guy at the GNC buying literally about 20 boxes of these bars... He said he's from England and the Atkins diet is huge over there, but they don't get the bars yet... I think he's planning on reselling them!

You trying to tell me something?

I just started bulking last week for the first time since college... we'll see how it goes!

It's okay, I know the feeling.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl

I'm confused... are you comparing Cell Tech to Pro Performance Whey?