I intend to use potatoes as my primary source of calories for the next two weeks, or perhaps longer, to see if I can maintain my strength and running speed. Up until recently, I've been deliberately overfeeding in order to increase my absolute strength for barbell training. In doing so, I've increased my weight to 170 and set new PR's for all four major barbell exercises - squat, deadlift, bench, and press. I'm hoping that eating potatoes specifically will remove about 5 pounds of fat while leaving my muscle intact. If this works, I'll run faster and do more chin-ups, while also making my barbell lifts more impressive with regard to my lifted-weight: bodyweight ratio. From what I have read, doing this potato hack is marvelous for shedding fat. But some people think that exercising strenuously at the same time is a bad idea, although they never state why.
Anyway, every day I shall be eating:
5 pounds or more of potatoes
unlimited green leafy vegetables (our garden kale is about to bolt, so it must be eaten now or never)
vinegar and spices
tea and coffee
20g of BCAA supplement (From what I have read, these seem useful for maintaining muscle and perhaps even extending longevity. But they probably aren't of major importance or particularly necessary for this experiment.)
My training regime:
Sunday: HIIT sprints, planks
Monday: Weighted chins, DB isolation exercises
Tuesday: BB Squat, leg raise, hip assistance
Wednesday: BB press, chins, dips
Thursday: HIIT sprints, planks
Friday: BB Deadlift, light squats, hip assistance
Saturday: BB bench, chins, dips
I also walk about 15,000 steps per day.
Has anyone else tried using potatoes specifically for athletic performance. Is anyone else interested in doing what I'm doing? After all, the larger the sample size, the better the experiment!
