Similar to what dirtyman said, I try to stay away from cheap/random protein brands because they have no regulation and can be anything. It's one thing I wont buy cheap, always buy name brand protein. (It's also been proven, there was a reddit poster who took various samples and tested it for protein %, some of the results were pretty shocking)

That's untrue, the FDA considers dietary supplements, which includes protein powders by the way, as "foods" and therefore are regulated as any food would be.

Its not , look it up.

Sorry you are correct about FDA, to an extent.
FDA and helath Canada regulate it to an extent. That does not mean you can blatantly lie in the nutritional facts.

But no, protein powder is not essential. Far from it actually, as it's pretty easy to get the maximum amount of protein that's beneficial through food. (None of us need 200g of protein in a day, ever.)
For someone who doesn't eat as much meat though, or is pretty poor, this is a good buy in order to maintain the protein on days where you seem to not be able to hit your protein amounts.

Lastnight after doing back, I was feeling kinda depressed at a lack of progress (or so it seemed...). I decided to take a look back at last year what my 1 RM were and compare to this years. I gotta say it made me feel a lot better, it's a good idea for all of you to take pictures / write down lifts and compare on a large scale. Definitely puts things in perspective. Personally this was my progress:

Deadlift:
205x1 -> 335+ x1
Squat:
225x1 -> 315+ x1
Bench:
115x1 -> 175x1 (I don't know why I cant bench I really fucking struggle with it... that feel when you can OHP almost as much as you can bench...)
OHP:
85x1 -> 145x1

Also -- I'm going to go on a cleanse starting February 1, basically restricted diet and you take these herbal pills. Both my sister/mom have gone on it and said they lost ~10 lbs in a couple weeks and to them most of it was waste/undigested garbage in your digestion track. I'm interested to see what kind of results I have, I'm going to make sure that for one I'm strict to the diet and that I'm eating enough calories. Interested to see if it was just them being on a caloric deficit or if it was the fact that this cleanse actually did remove some of the excess waste you carry around.

i dont even want to state my initial bench cause it was so damn pathetic, along with everything else

squats and OHP are great
gj



please i wanna know so i don't feel bad about myself (lol)

This post was edited by Patches on Jan 9 2014 02:21pm

I know that feel. I'm a big guy naturally and could barely do 30 pushups when I started.

/e I mean total, throughout the day lol.

This post was edited by dxlightning on Jan 9 2014 02:28pm

Man, I wish I could go back to the gym

Herniated my t9-t12 discs.

Surgery is too risky, there is a chance it'll kill me

lol damn. i can do a little north of that in one sitting but im lanky. hated going over to the bench in the beginning cause id put on such little weight so i was just using dumbells

lets just say i recently hit gsg's initial bench not too long ago lol. however thats what i rep

This post was edited by partank on Jan 9 2014 02:35pm