Heya & some advice please :-)

[Ptown]

Hey guys

I'm 29, 95 kg's, & around 6 ft.

I've on my 2nd year of gym & am happy to say I've gained a lot of muscle in comparison to how I was before I started :-)

I've been pretty slack over the last month or so with xmas etc. however I'm back into it tomorrow & am planning to hit it hard.

My goal is to drop some fat & build some more muscle. I seem to carry a lot of fat around my chest specifically around the side of the chest under my arm....not sure why it seems to gather there - I had bad asthma as a child & ended up on a lot of different medications including steriod type medicines & put on a lot of weight on my chest that has stayed with me until i started working it & building a bit of muscle on there.

Ideally I'd like to drop some overall weight & target building muscle on my chest, arm's, and shoulders etc. before I started at the gym I was around 110 kg's & droped through diet to 88 kg's then with the training I dropped some fat & settled on 95kg's...I've stayed around that weight for over a year now.

My training routine consists of usually an hours worth of weight training & 30 mins crosstrainer 3 times a week & I'll be changing my diet again from tomorrow.

With the idea of dropping fat & building muscle is 30 mins of crosstrainer 3 times a week enough combined with a healthy diet?

Anyway I'm open to suggestions & idea's on achieving my goals. I have used & will get back into protein shakes & have had success with sessions of creatine for the weight training.

Cheers

Ptown

[Pseudonym]

Hey Ptown. Welcome to the forums.

Yeah, I think 3x cardio sounds like a good starting point, and you can always tweak it up or down as you go. If you can schedule the cardio for non-workout days, so much the better.

As for continuing to build muscle, you need to make sure you're eating enough. What does your "healthy diet" look like?

[Varven]

That fat under your arm/lower chest could be gyno.

Many males who grew up being fat, have gyno from their puberty phase.

The only way to be sure it is not is to get your body fat down really low and see what it looks like.

If you still have the fat/droopy appearance, it should be gyno.

[bigred8]

"Ideally I'd like to drop some overall weight & target building muscle on my chest, arm's, and shoulders etc. "

Forget about targetting specific msucles and just work to a good all-round program, looking to achieve realistic all-round strength gains and muscle size increases.

"With the idea of dropping fat & building muscle is 30 mins of crosstrainer 3 times a week enough combined with a healthy diet?"

The crosstrainer is going to do little or nothing to build muscle (perhaps you were not meaning this implication).

The critical factor in losing fat is a rigorous diet - lots of good examples of such diets on this site. As some who post workout journals here have recently found, even with good training if you stray too far from a good diet plan you won't strip much fat. You have to STICK to it!

A good guy friend of mine has recently switched from powerlifting to a phase of bodybuilding. In only 4 weeks he has reduced his body fat from about 12.5% to 8%, as at a week ago and its still dropping. He has average genetics. How has he achieved this? Great dietary advice and he has stuck to his diet RIGOROUSLY and has trained consistently over the Christmas New Year period. What exercises? Workouts based on "hard" exercises. Compound basics that workout the big muscle groups...deadlifts, squats, power cleans. Done right they add muscle and burn fat. What about cardio? He does moderate cardio....walking for approx 1 hour. He was doing this almost ever day upon rising, however he has cut the walking back drastically recently but the fat is still reducing. Tight, consistent diet and hard work doing compound exercises at the gym - it works.

[Hennie]

if you don't have time to do the 1hour walks you can also do a few searches on HIIT cardio, works quite well and has limited muscle loss as compared to other forms of cardio.

[Laver]

Ptown,

From Palmy?

Where training?