Starting February 1, I began my “Rock’ing for 30 Days” challenge to eat and train like Dwayne Johnson for 30 days. As it ended on a Tuesday, I finished out the week, completing a total of 33 days of the challenge.
Three weeks ago, I shared all the details about the eating and workout plan, so I won’t repeat it here.
TL;DR SUMMARY
After eating 5300 calories a day for 33 days, more than 23 hours of cardio, and almost 80lbs of cod!, I gained a total of 1lb. After over 28 hours of weight training, I got leaner and gained some muscle in my upper arms (most triceps), upper legs (mostly quads), my upper chest (you can see it pulled my chest up). Here are the before and after photos.
THE ROCK’S RESPONSES
I blogged every day during this month and a few articles got written about the challenge. They came to the attention of The Rock, who had a few things to say on Twitter about it. He doubted me at first, but then came around. Here are screengrabs of The Rock’s tweets.
LIFTING RESULTS
I got stronger, though I hadn’t done much isolated lifting in years, so definitely a lot of beginner gains here. I probably increased weights around 10-15% or so. Just to pick two random exercises for an example: In the beginning of the month, I started the incline bench at around 115lbs (4x12/10/8/6), and now it starts at 150lbs. I was originally doing the 200 reps of leg press at 160-180lbs, now it’s at 220-240lbs.
One change to the workout: in week 3, the lack of ab work became quite apparent, so I added 3 ab exercises: leg raises, russian twist, and stir the pot. More details are shown in the Google doc below.
SO NO WEIGHT GAIN?
Apparently not. I didn’t skip a single meal, ate every bite, and had nothing else besides this food the entire time. I thought I would put on a few pounds, so getting leaner was a surprise. I had never really subscribed to a pure “calories in, calories out” belief, and this experience killed it for me. It’s more than how much you eat, what you eat makes a huge difference. Here’s a photo gallery showing meal prep.
HOW I FELT ALL MONTH
Terrific. Even with so much food, I never felt overly full. Every morning I would do 50 mins of cardio, then eat 10oz of cod, 2 cups of oatmeal, and 2 hard boiled eggs (at the gym!) then weight train. I always used to work out on a mostly empty stomach (just a shake) so I thought this would make me nauseous, but it felt good.
Even with all the workouts, I never felt sore. All the food seemed to be fueling my recovery. Even the little aches and pains of being in your late 30’s went away. I also was serious about stretching/foam-rolling at the end of the workouts, so I didn’t feel very tight either.
WAS IT WORTH IT?
I decided to do this as a challenge to myself, to see if I had to discipline to wake up at 5am everyday, do all these workouts, prepare all this food in advance, eat every meal, have no cheating, and live my normal life. I have no aspirations to get huge like The Rock, and 30 days wouldn’t do it anyway. Overall, it was an extremely positive experience, and I highly encourage everyone to push themselves to try something new for a month.
If I had to do it over, the only change would be to take a ton of measurements, pictures, body scans, blood tests, etc beforehand. Would have been nice to quantify it more. There seems to have been a nice change in my body fat %, would have been great to have those numbers (anyone want to make estimates?).
Would I suggest this plan to others? If you’re chasing the physical results, you’re almost certainly better off putting together a routine and meal plan specifically for you. It’s also extremely expensive, at $42/day. While cod is an excellent source of low calorie, low fat protein, that benefit doesn’t outweigh the cost of, say, chicken breast.
WHAT IS WORTH INCORPORATING?
You could probably eat more, as long as it’s the right foods. Experiment with increasing your protein and overall calories with good, clean food, and see what happens.
This is personal preference, but I liked doing cardio first, then weights, which I had never done. It’s a good warmup, and it’s nice to be done for the day after you lift that last weight.
Mastering efficient food prep is key. Not having to decide what you’re eating at every meal is a pleasure, and not having to cook it. And with practice, you get a ton of return on your time investment. I can make 18 meals in about an hour now. I’ll keep prepping food every few days.
I have eaten mostly keto for years, but man, oatmeal is delicious. Starting every day with it moving forward.
WHAT’S NEXT
I want to follow a more sustainable version of this program for longer, starting with another 30 days. So far, I’m doing the same workouts 5x a week. I changed up the diet to have 5 meals, no cod, and comes in at 3579cal/451C/59F/294P. So far, I have noticed I’m getting a bit sore now, in a way I wasn’t before, so I’m going to keep experimenting here to come up with a better version. If there is interest in me sharing that diet, or putting up an update post after following a tweaked plan for 30 days, let me know. Or if anyone wants more detail on any specific piece of this, let me know.
DOCUMENTS TO SHARE
In case anyone wants to try any of this, here is the full meal plan and workout in a handy Google doc (I have this saved to my phone and followed it at the gym), Also, here are the food costs, nutritional info, and a data dump from my Fitbit.
Questions, thoughts? Hit me.
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