What I’ve Learned So Far

Nothing fancy.

• Warmed up with hard foam roller on lats, traps, and lower back.
• Lever row machine: 8 reps x 100# warmup, then 3 sets x 8 reps x 160#
• Felt stronger with each set.
• EZ-bar curls: 3 x 8 x 85#
• Form tip: Be sure not to clench your jaw or throat as you do curls; expend that energy doing the work of the exercise instead.
• Oblique crunches 3 x 20 per side

As an experiment, I’ve been giving myself 4-minute rests before every work set. It seems to allow me to lift more and better.

This was just a good, simple workout. Weightlifting need not be fancy to be effective.

Since we traveled back and forth to see my parents for Thanksgiving, I didn’t get in the full complement of workouts this week. I did, however, get in a few sessions in the weight room, plus a couple of walks.

Biggest note to share: this morning I set a new personal best by bench pressing 180# for three sets of eight reps, which, as far as I can remember, I’d never done before. (My current bodyweight is 172#.)

Now that I’ve done 3 x 8 x 180#, I’ll progress to 3 x 5 x 185# for my next workout. Three sets of five reps is a low number, but I find it’s a good way to edge into my next progression. Once I can get 3 x 8 x 185# (a minimum of four workouts from now, but it doesn’t matter if it takes ten workouts), I’ll repeat the process at 190# and so on.

The point isn’t to make rapid progress, but to make inexorable progress.

~

(Photo source, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

We’re into the second half of November? 2009?

I would ask where this month went, but the more burning question is: Where the hell did 2009 go??

Please leave any clues on the current whereabouts of the first 10.5 months of 2009 in the comments.

At some point I’ll explain my current training cycle in detail. For now, understand that this workout was the “B” day for chest and triceps.

~ ~ ~

Workout for Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Warmup:

• Hard foam roller on pecs.

Chest / triceps:

• Narrow-grip incline bench press: 6 x 95#, 6 x 105#, 6 x 115#, 6 x 115#, 10 x 115#
• Tricep pressdown machine: 3 x 8 x 70#
• EZ-bar seated French curls: 3 x 10 x 45#

(Pressdowns and French curls done in alternating sets.)

~

(Photo of Dave Draper via David van der Mark, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

. . . but THREE workouts in one post — because I forgot to post them as they happened over the weekend.

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Workout for Saturday, 7 November 2009

Warmup: Read the rest of this entry »

At some point, I’m sure I’ll talk less here about physical fitness and more about all of the other things I like to talk about, but for now I’ve got this whole set of topics on my mind, and at least some of my audience has expressed an appetite to hear more. So, here goes:

Reaching your Big Physical Goals (BPGs) — if you’ve picked decent goals at all — will take a while.

Period. If you want to go from 25% bodyfat to 10% bodyfat, it’s gonna take a while. If you’re a couch potato and decide you want to run under 3:00:00 in the marathon, you’ve got a long row to hoe. Same if you’d like to squat twice your bodyweight, or earn a black belt, or completely rehabilitate a serious injury. Make your own list — serious goals take time to achieve.

If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be serious, eh?

BPGs and LIGs

The good news is that BPGs can always be broken down into LIGs (Little Interim Goals). Indeed, it must be so, because incremental adaptation is the way that human bodies react to healthy changes in stimulus or inputs.

There are a lot of incremental wins along the path from 25% to 10% bodyfat. There are many milestones from the couch to the sub-3:00:00 marathon. (Milestone 1: “Got off the couch.”) There are a lot of baby steps from squatting 0% of your bodyweight to 200%. (”Read up on good squat technique.”) And so on.

My advice: Celebrate these baby steps. You won’t get to 10% bodyfat without passing below 20% first, so why not give yourself credit for it? Give yourself credit for graduating up to an orange belt en route to the black belt. Give yourself credit for foregoing one beer or one cupcake, if you know that beer and cupcakes don’t support your fitness goals.

(If it need be said: don’t celebrate your restraint by treating yourself to an ice cream cone.)

My own goals

I’m thinking of this now because of what the scale has been telling me lately. Every morning for the past few months, I’ve been tracking my weight on a spreadsheet. My goal is to add a certain quantity of lean mass between now and my 40th birthday, which is coming up in a couple of years. (Please pardon me for not sharing too many details about my goals — I’d rather celebrate them when they happen than open them up for discussion prematurely.)

Experience tells me that it’s easy to get frustrated when you pursue a goal like this. Teenage boys can stack on muscle in a hurry; 37-year-olds of average genetics, not so much. You eat right (and eat a lot) day in and day out, you lift heavy weights on an intelligent schedule, you work hard to stick to a schedule that ensures adequate rest and recovery.

And then you wait.

And wait.

Celebrating progress

Really, I don’t have anything to complain about. I’ve put on a solid six to eight pounds of muscle since midsummer. But that process has slowed, and it’s very easy to focus on how the next weight up the ladder continues not to appear on the scale.

But here’s what I noticed this morning: more and more days are passing since I’ve revisited some of the interim weights that made me cheer just a few weeks ago. When you’re adding weight (or losing it), fluctuations are natural: one morning you weigh 168, the next morning you weigh 169, and the third morning you weigh 167. Our body composition is reliant on too many factors (food intake, hydration, elimination of wastes, etc.) for weight to move in a straight line every single day.

The cumulative effect, though, is crystal-clear. When I started this process, I weighed in the neighborhood of 164 pounds. Now I weigh around 171 or 172 — and it’s been weeks and weeks since I weighed 166 or 167 or 168. Sure, I’d rather be a rock-solid 175 or 180 already, but . . . those increments just haven’t happened yet.

Which reminds me to celebrate the ones that have.

How do YOU celebrate your incremental fitness achievements?

~

(Photo by majorbonnet, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

After asking around on Twitter and Facebook, it seems that at least some of my friends / acquaintances / legion of stalkers followers would find it interesting for me to share the details of my workouts. I’ll be doing that here.

I understand that these posts won’t be highly entertaining to all of you. If it gets to be a problem, I’ll see about setting up an auxiliary blog / feed / digital shrine-to-self so that I can publish workouts on a separate channel. Meanwhile, feel free to skip any workout posts you don’t want to read. Be assured that my ego will survive.

(The photo of Frank Zane is included for general awesomeness.)

~ ~ ~

5 November 2009 workout

Warmup:

• Hard foam roller on lats and calves.
• 8 reps x 100# on lever row machine.

Latissimus:

• Lever row machine: 5 sets x 6 reps x 145#
• Bent-over dumbbell row: 5 sets x 6 reps x 55# (each side)

Lats / chest / triceps:

• EZ-bar pullovers, wide grip: 5 x 6 x 65#
• EZ-bar skullcrushers: 3 x 6 x 65#
• EZ-bar narrow bench press: 2 x 10 x 65#

Calves:

• Seated calf raise: 4 x 15 x 70#
• Standing calf raise: 4 x 15, holding a 35# plate

Forearms:

• Dumbbell reverse wrist curls: 5 x 8 x 17 1/2# (each arm)
• Dumbbell wrist curls: 5 x 8 x 30# (each arm)

~

In case it’s not obvious, I’m the ‘thinky’ type. In my line(s) of work, being smart and intellectual is like being athletically gifted and skilled in sports.

But being athletically gifted, and even being highly skilled, aren’t enough to dictate success on the playing field. The best competitors, regardless of sport, are those who have the best combination of athleticism, skill, and other qualities — psychological qualities — to help them succeed.

Sometimes, great physical attributes come together with great mental attributes, and you get Pele or Tiger Woods or Donald Bradman or Pete Sampras. But many of the greatest sports heroes were notable more for their mental attributes — especially tough-mindedness — than for their physical gifts. (Case in point: Jerry Rice.)

The more I travel through this life, the more I come to believe that talent is a shallow attribute. Great, the kid is a talented Little Leaguer. Great, the marketing VP is really smart. It doesn’t mean much until you see how those talents play out — how the person puts them to use — and that relies much more on mental approach to the task than it does to talent for the task.

So, for now I’ll just say that I’m working on my mental toughness, and doing it methodically. In a later post, I’ll spell out my approach.

What do you think? Is mental toughness as important as I make it out to be?

~

(Photo source.)

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy; where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

Step 1. Buy an annual membership to your gym.

Step 2. Make a two-column chart — a spreadsheet will be useful here — that starts with that multi-hundred-dollar membership sum on line one of Column B. Number the slots in Column A from 1 to, say, 200, if you think you’d like to do 200 gym workouts during the next 365 days.

Step 3. Use the dead-simple formula of “Annual membership cost” / “Which workout am I on?” to pre-populate the chart with the amortized cost of each workout.

Step 4. Motivate yourself to keep going back not (only) because you want to work out four times per week in the abstract, but because you want to get the cost-per-workout below $20, below $10, below $5, and so on.

Example: You pay $399 for an annual gym membership. The top of your chart looks like this:

Every time you do a workout in the gym, you shade out another row of the chart so that you can see your progress visually.

BONUS tip: When you update your workout log (you do keep a log, right?), title your workout with the cost. In other words, don’t call it “Tuesday’s workout” or just “11/03/2009 workout.” Heighten the drama by calling it “The $79.80 Workout.”

Try it. It works for me.