A day late here, I realize. Storms over the weekend knocked out our internet Sunday which did two things: 1) it made me feel like I was living in the dark ages and 2) made me a day late posting A-Side Meal Prepping pt. 2. Fortunately it was a long weekend for most of us so a Monday post sort of felt like a Sunday.

For me, at least.

My long weekend was definitely long and also definitely a weekend. I spent my non-internet day re-reading Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl comic series and playing Uncharted 4. I made Monday my meal prep day and spent most of the day putting together shrimp and broccoli stir fry, steamed rice, roasted green beans, roasted sweet potatoes and grilled chili peach chicken.

I had a bit of fun on the smoker, too, though I regret not having any photos. I grilled burgers but in a way I’ve never done it before — I started with beef short ribs that I ground together with the remainder of my homemade bacon then portioned the mixture into four 8oz patties. Following some advice from my boy Meathead, I set out to make the perfect steakhouse burger. I set up my grill for two-zone cooking, dumped some red wine barrel wood chips onto my fire and put my burgers on the grates over indirect heat.

Those babies smoked for 15 minutes or so until they were 157 degrees (according to my handy dandy iGrill mini) at which point I brushed them with avocado oil and moved them directly over the flames, flipping them every 30 seconds or so to give them a nice crust. When my burgers’ internal temperature was 160, I moved them to the top rack of my grill and covered them with thick slices of sharp cheddar cheese. They got nice and melty while I toasted the burger buns on the grill…

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You know from above what my meal prep looks like for this week and you know from last week’s post that I’m still taking a half-break. Still no running until next week and no boxing classes that I’m not scheduled to teach. Boxing this week is happening Wednesday morning at 6am, kickboxing Wednesday afternoon at 5:30 (yes, two that day) and then I’m teaching class and running the front desk on Sunday at 1pm.

Weight lifting is still going strong (pardon the pun) and this week will conclude my phase 4 workouts. This week I’m looking at the highest weight and highest number of reps of my program until this point:

Upper/Lower Body Days
Weight: 100%
Sets: 6
Reps: 2

Today I did my upper body split and it was a killer. I should be lifting legs on Friday morning. You should come hang and pick up something heavy. Including my body after I finish the 60 jump squats and 60 TRX hamstring curls I’m scheduled to do.

I’m excited to detail my workout plan for next week. I will be running four days a week and cross-training one day. Said cross-training will likely be in the form of weight lifting utilizing phase 5 workouts, vertically loaded. I haven’t built it yet but it’ll be yuuuuuge.

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I served my burgers with a sliced tomato, properly caramelized onions and homemade french fries. This method of grilling my burgers took twice as long as my normal method but it yielded twice as many benefits. So much flavor packed into those little burger patties with a nice grill char holding in the smokey flavor. And juicy as shit! Despite being cooked to medium-well, they were juicy like a med-rare burger.

I’m kind of in love with my little starter pit, y’all.

I’m also in love with you guys. Let’s make it look good this week.