Growth and Rebirth

Been quite a while since I've posted anything in this space. Had some thoughts on the run this weekend that it might be time to change that a little.

So Sunday morning started as my Sundays often do with a run. This Sunday saw me, again as I often do, climbing the hill north of the apartment which has Talliesin West, fancy house made by Frank Lloyd Wright. As I was running up and down the hill in the morning air I had some thoughts. I am not the man I once was, nor am I the man I thought I would be. I'm better.

Years ago I participated in a charity walk up South Mountain for cancer research, a noble cause and something I'm glad I did. Someone affiliated with our group ran up the mountain that day and I remember saying to him after the fact, by way of congratulation, "I could never do that". For the longest time I thought that was true. That there were some things that I just wasn't able to do because that's not who I was. I'm happy to say that I've managed to prove me wrong. I can do that. While I've not done that specific event or run I've done that. I've run a half marathon, two of them even, I managed to just run 14 miles on Sunday because I could (and I almost certainly could have gone further had I bothered to bring any water). I've done things I literally used to think I'd never be able to do. I'm a better me than I used to think was possible.

I've realized through my life experiences that many of the limits that I've taken without question in my life were self imposed. Things I never thought I'd do, foods I didn't like, things that didn't interest me. Many of them were only foreign to me because I'd either decided I wanted them to be or just decided that's the way things where. It's only when I've begun to question those notions of what my limits are, what things I've never tried might be fun or tasty or possible, that I've been able to find my way past my assumptions into unexplored and amazing territory.

While up on the mountain as it were I was struck with some inspiration. Not just about the running, which I do because I love it regardless of how beneficial it may or may not be to my overall health and fitness, but also about some goals and some plans for achieving them regarding my general training. Firstly I came back reinvigorated with a desire to work on gymnastics/bodyweight skills as a way of improving not only my strength but my body awareness and my flexibility. As a result, and most likely with some help from the wonderful nerds over at NerdFitness I'm gonna be putting together a new training plan, and you all know how much I love designing training plans. So far I'm thinking 2 parts pushing, 2 parts pulling, and 1-2 parts legs done about 3 times a week with the other days being filled with some skill work and some core work. That plus my running should help give me a decent base of fitness to enable me to accomplish most things that get in my way.

So with a general format for a training plan in mind what the hell are my long term goals? Well thanks for asking! Firstly a running goal, I'm gonna finish a marathon, and beyond that I'd really like to try and run a sub-3:00 marathon at some point. That's a really long term goal though so for now I'm gonna set my goal as finish and my not-goal as do it under 4:30. Really that's my only specific running goal and I'm ok with that for now. Eventually it'll probably expand to include a HM PR shooting for 1:55 or something but that won't be happening for a while yet.

That leaves me with some strength goals next. I'd really like to be able to do a muscle-up for a couple reasons. First it's a really impressive looking skill and being able to do one is therefore pretty sweet. Secondly, and a little more helpfully, it would actually come in handy for me at work from time to time to be able to grab a platform edge over my head and be able to lift myself up onto it. It's also a skillset that should transfer to rock climbing which is something I'd like to get into doing more often because it's always been fun when I've done it in the past. Second strength skill I'd like to master is the pistol squat and it's close cousin the weighted pistol. I'm already making some really great progress on this front and should hopefully be there within the fairly near future. The increased leg strength seems already to have helped my running slightly and I'm hoping that the practice will help further in injury proofing my body if not in increasing my speed or endurance. The third strength related skillset I'd like to master is back related. I'd like to be able to go from a standing position into a bridge and back to standing (also from the bridge into a handstand would be nice but that's a separate goal path). Again I'm making some pretty good progress already just need to focus in a bit on it. My work on this one over the past months seems already to have helped with some back pain I was having and not unlike the muscle-up this skill is a neat party trick. When people see me press up into a bridge from the floor it's pretty impressive so I'd imagine it's only more so to be able to get there from a standing position. Being a cool-looking skill is a good reason to make something a goal right?

So there's a brief list of goals for the next little while and some ideas about how my training might look. It's not completed nor is it a perfect plan but it's something and it's something I like and that I can work toward, and more importantly inform my training. So there you have it, a revelation from the mountain top about the path that has led me to be the me that I am, and which will lead that me to be the me I can become.

Until next time, be the you you want to be especially if it's a you you never thought possible.

Changes

So it's been another rather long gap between posts, and this one is where I announce some changes going on over here.

As some of you who follow me on twitter may have seen/heard I'm currently working through a Whole30 challenge. This limits my food choices to things which are health promoting and eliminates things which are not health promoting. That's a pretty big simplification but it's all the detail I feel like getting into here, if you want more feel free to look into the information available at the website of the challenge authors, Whole30.

As part of it I'm abstaining from weighing myself for the duration of the challenge, in using it as an opportunity to stop tracking most of the other things I have been tracking for so long, body fat, mood, calories, water, sweat rate while running, body temperature, heart rate while running, all of these things are going out the window for at least 30 days, possibly longer. The only things I'm still tracking are my daily mileage for walking and running, my workouts, my sleep, and my resting heart rate (and that's not really being logged so much as measured to protect against the mild chance of overtraining as I ramp things up toward my half marathon on Labor Day Weekend).

At the start of the challenge I was sitting at around 205 pounds and a not terrible body fat percentage, and there is good chance the challenge will improve that, but that's not the point. The point is about becoming healthier in my life, my relationship with food, and with my body. So far I'm doing alright with it and hoping to continue to do so. While I'm still highly interested in improving myself and hopefully providing a useful template for others I'm not sure what avenue that will take going forward and what it will look like. I'm going to continue working to improve myself and offer advice and well researched opinions to anyone who seeks them.

In the meantime, take steps today to be the version of you you wish was staring back at your from the mirror. If you want to lose weight, do something to make it happen, if you wish you were stronger, go lift something heavy, if you want to be faster, go run faster. If what you've been doing isn't working try something else and see if maybe it does. Take matters into your own hands and make sure that you do something today, right now, to make yourself into what you wish to be.

Weekly Weigh-in (Week 88)

Sunday once again and time for an update.

Big changes in my fitness plans this week that I'm really liking already.

Firstly, this weekend Lara needed some new jeans so like a good bored husband I went along to help. While out I realized I have only one pair of jeans so I might as well try some on. Turns out, I now wear a size 34. I cannot actually remember when I last wore a 34, the other pair I have is old, from a couple pants buying generations ago, and was a 38. I've dropped 8-10 inches from my waist size in these past 88 weeks, and I feel pretty good about that.

So what else have I been changing this week? Well, last week I mentioned that I'd probably be picking up a pull-up bar, and Sunday afternoon I did. So this week I actually worked out every evening after work with some squats, pushups and pullups. My arms are not liking the pullups, probably because I tried to go straight into full pullups without much lead-in, so I'm going to be pulling back from that and working on progressing toward pullups a little more gradually. I've also been working on increasing the range of motion on my squats and improving my technique on my pushups. I'll likely be adding a couple more exercises into my newly rekindled bodyweight workout fixation in the coming weeks. Handstands and eventually handstand pushups come to mind, leg raises as well (enabled at some stage by the pullup bar). I've found some interesting reading material on progressive bodyweight training recently that I've been going through and hopefully I can start putting it in practice in my workouts and see what kind of results it will get me. I will say that my upper body seems to have gotten a lot of increased definition for a weeks worth of time, so I'm hopeful.

The other big change in my workouts this week was that I started getting up early pretty much every day and going for a run. Some of them had to be adjusted from my plans going into the week, and due to issues with my work-sleep interaction and the water at our apartment I had to skip two of my planned runs, but 5 of the last 7 days have seen me out for a run and that's an improvement I'm proud of. Hopefully I can improve on that in the coming weeks.

So what does the scale have to say this week? 208, down a pound from last week. It seems to be nearly equal measure fat and lean if my bodyfat readings are correct, which I'm never really all that sure of. One of these days I'm going to upgrade to the Withings scale and then I'll have a little more confidence in them. Anyway, until next week, be the you you want to be. No matter what you have you can make it happen.

Weekly Weigh-in (Week 75)

Sunday once again and time for the weekly update.

Running seems to be progressing smoothly, weight seems to be holding fairly steady, even been sleeping fairly well this past week so all told most of my measurables seem like they are doing pretty well from cursory examination, though the real numbers will hold out for later in the post.

You may recall from a few weeks ago I talked about doing some work on a plan for trying to trying to put on some muscle, one that I was basing on research into workout plans used by various actors to get into shape for movies roles as seriously buff dudes. Looking over the information I could find about what they all did there were a lot of similarities, so piecing those together should in theory give me results as close to theirs as possible with a smaller amount of effort.

Firstly, diet comes into play. Food is at least as important in these kinds of endeavors as the exercise so it pays to start here. Of course, high amounts of protein are a goal, minimal sugars, minimal processed food, and one somewhat strange common factor was restricting carbs to only the earlier portions of the day (and even then usually rice, oatmeal, or tubers). That one seems strange at first but makes some sense when taken into the context of time of day and it's relation to insulin sensitivity and the insulin response of most carbs. The other common factors were that they tended to eat a large number of meals, often eating every 2 hours throughout the day, and usually supplemented with protein powder and/or creatine. These things combined should help me provide a good base for the resistance workouts that form the other pillar of the research, and luckily they don't stray too far from what I'd been striving for already. The more frequent meals help increase the total amount of calories per day without making any single meal too large, which is a trick that may come in handy as things go on.

For the actual lifting the common themes seemed to be using compound exercises for the lifts, to increase the muscle groups activated in the shortest amount of time, 3-5 sets of a moderate number of reps each. The workouts tended toward splits between various body segments, which for now I'm going to try but may end up shifting things around later on, and minimal rest periods to keep heart rate up so that you burn some fat along with the building of muscle. I'm somewhat limited in my workout options due to the resources at my disposal with the fitness center at the apartment here, but hopefully the plan I've put in place should get me at least tolerable results. Once I get bored of this, get to a proportion I like, or stop seeing results from this I already know what I'm going to move to, but that's for later. For now it'll be 2 days a week of circuits and abs (much like I was doing before) on Sunday and Friday, work on the Chest/Back on Monday, Legs on Wednesday, and Arms/Shoulders on Thursday. Next week I'll report back on how the first week played out, and what exercises each day is composed of, but for now I'm going to sign off after the numerical round up.

So what's the scale say this week? 207, down a pound from last week. Not the best, but we'll see what this new plan does for things I suppose. Until next week, be the you you want to be.

Weekly Weigh-in (Week 64)

Sunday yet again, so here we are for the weigh-in.

This week has been an interesting one. Started work at a different location, lots of things different but many the same, or at least eerily familiar. In addition we've gotten mostly unpacked at the apartment, only the office remains and that because we don't yet have a desk. This week I had some time off, and now access to the fitness center with a weight machine, so I started in on my workout program.

So, for those who don't know yet, which is probably most of you, I came upon a book a while back called The Four Hour Body, written by a one Tim Ferriss. Not entirely unlike myself he is a self-experimenter, but he's been doing quantified experiments using himself as a subject for nearly ten years now, which has resulted in this book. So I'm taking some of the things he discusses and testing them out on myself. My Primal experiment is sufficiently similar to his Slow-Carb diet that I can say with reasonable certainty that it seems to work about as predicted, though since I didn't try that when I had the dramatic amounts of weight to lose that most of the people who have tried it out had I can't quote such impressive numbers. The 4HB is also where I got the idea to try my icing experiment, which also worked out pretty well for me.

So now, with my weight under control, and my body fat sufficiently low, it was time to try something new, adding muscle. Being the kind of guy who finds extreme claims worth testing, I latched onto the idea behind the chapter in the book called Occam's Protocol. The premise is that by doing a single set to failure of a weight lifting exercise you will stimulate more growth in less time than by doing endless reps broken into multiple sets and with almost certainly lower weight. This honestly makes sense to me, even more reason to try it out. Further, under the idea that the larger your muscles get the more time it takes your body to recover from major strain to them this protocol uses a startlingly low frequency, starting with 2 days off between the A and B workouts, and then building up to 4 or more days between as time goes on. This part leaves me a bit dubious, but I can't say I don't find the idea attractive. Thus, I felt the need to test this out, as the worst case is that I make no progress on putting on muscle, and the best case is upwards of 20 pounds of muscle in a month. I don't expect I'll get results anywhere near that good, but I won't know unless I try, and the "typical" 10 pounds of muscle a month isn't bad either.

So how does it work? Well this is gonna get a little jargony so if you don't know or care about some of it go ahead and skip this knowing that it's essentially 2 types of exercises plus a little extra work each workout. Workout A is composed of supinated close-grip lat pulldowns, followed by shoulder presses, that's the minimum for the workout, I'm throwing in the optional ab exercises which means adding myotatic crunches and something referred to in the book as "the cat vomit exercise", which can be summed up as a gravity assisted resistance exercise for the TVA or corset muscle. The first workout, which I did this week, took me around 40 minutes or so, due majorly to the fact it included the establishment of the baseline values to work up from. The B workout consists of an inclined bench press, followed by leg curls (it was supposed to be a leg press in the machine version of this workout plan but I don't have the equipment to make that workable. Having to choose between Curls or Extensions on this machine I picked curls as the information I got from the book suggests the leg work is mostly to increase overall muscle involvement in terms of volume, and the curls worked the glutes which are some of the largest muscles in the human body.) and the optional exercise here that I added was the two-handed kettlebell swing to work the lower body even further. The B workout finishes up with 3 minutes at 85 rpm on the stationary bike "to minimize leg soreness". The B workout took me also about 40 minutes due to establishing minimums and the fact there were other people in the gym when I went this time around, and only one machine.

For now, I'm going to try this protocol out, keep track of my data the way I have been before, and get weekly photos to track my progress. Between all that I should have a decent ability to figure out what results I get from this plan. I think the hardest part for me is going to be eating enough, a problem I never thought I'd have, as getting nearly 4000 calories per day is not something I'm used to anymore, and getting enough protein in my diet is not proving easy either. As a result this week I'm going to be picking up some protein powder to add into the mix as that should help with both those problems.

So, what does the scale have to tell me this week? 202, same as the last couple weeks. What's not the same as the last month however is my bodyfat percentage, it had been holding steady at 9.5 for most of March, but this week, the day after the A workout in fact, it dropped to 7.3, and the following day to 5.5. It has since leveled out again at 7.3, suggesting to me the 5.5 was a fluke, but that's a fairly sudden change that seems promising at least at first glance. Luckily, I've got lots of data left to collect that will show whether it turns out to be significant or not. Until next week, do whatever it takes to be the you you want to be.

Hopefully the Start of a New Series

Hello to my few readers. Today I am going to start a new series. I can't promise I'll actually stick to this, but I'm gonna do my best to try. Every week or so I'm just gonna show up here, and post my current weight. I'm not really sure why I've decided to post that here, but hey let's run with it. For those of you who don't know me all that well, I'm a pretty large guy. I've been trying to lose weight this year, and I've done pretty well as I'm down 19 pounds from the start of the year. But recently my progress has gotten rather disappointing, with losses dropping to nearly none and sometimes even gaining weight back.

I'm hoping that by posting here I help keep myself a little bit more accountable, as now more people will have the ability to directly see how much weight I'm losing/gaining. Posts won't happen more than once per week, and may not happen that often, but I'll probably drop in every now and then at least to mention the numbers. Currently, I'm at 264.1 down from 283. My next major milestone is ~9 pounds away at 254.7 which will mean I've lost 10% of my starting weight. Until next time, eat what's good.