My Most Dubious Fitness Journal

Today Lance Armstrong told me that “pain is temporary, but quitting lasts forever.” Good stuff, Armstrong…good stuff.

Click for big, pervs.

One year down, three to go.

I found this post by ikillhostages on SA, and I love it:

You want to get big, become 210 completely shredded or maybe 220,240, 250. Maybe you want just to be one husky motherfucker at 350 lbs, or improve conditioning, or strength to weight ratio. Who succeeds at the gym, who fucking makes it, at every gym you see hundreds of people going every month, doing different routines, eating differently, taking supplements, and some taking steroids, yet 1% of those hundreds look remotely good. They do body building splits, powerlifting splits, everything, you might say genetics, but if you fall for that you might just stop lifting now and go do something else. The variable that determines those who make it to the top is intensity, it’s going day to day and lifting like you’ll get cancer if you don’t beat last week’s max, it’s eating like a fucking starved animal every 2 hours. I see pictures of great lifters handling massive amount of weights, one picture struck me was a picture of Yates with a mountain of plates seemingly on top of him as he’s pressing another rep on the leg press, I thought to myself ‘how did he get there, how did he get to the point of moving such weight’ and I realized he had to go each week and go against what his body telling him, and add more weight and work harder and increasing his intensity until he finally climbed a mountain.

I know many people who spend all their time researching the effects of bananas on protein synthesis and perfecting their macro-nutrients and maximum effectiveness and just absurd things and yet the most important thing, their training is garbage. Getting big is about old school fucking lifting heavy shit and getting tired, if you think you can gain weight without being in pain when you lift and waking up the next day feeling like you got hit by a truck last night good luck. Everybody can use at least 50% more of their weights they are using now for the same amount of reps and sets only if they tried harder. 50% strength increase immediately when you harden the fuck up, it’s very simple. Eat, sleep, and when you go to the gym you have one fucking chance to prove to yourself that you’re not a fat weak piece of shit and you are capable, it’s that important, it’s only 40 minutes every other day, if you can’t have intensity in those 40 minutes then just stop and take up knitting or cake baking because you were never meant to look different.

One smart motherfucker.

Update: I’ve made a terrible mistake.

Well, not really. I have discovered after almost a year of working out that my shoulders appears to be my best feature. That’s nice, since I like tank tops. Who knew? BUT NOW FOR THE BAD NEWS: My nice expensive suit that I wear twice a year? It looks completely ridiculous on me now. If I stand up to fast I will rip it at the back like The Hulk. Looks like it’s time to finally take advantage of living in Japan and get some new big people clothes before I head back to the States for interviews.

Who wants a free ticket to the gun show?!? THE WII GUN SHOW!!!

…This concludes my review of Wii Fit.

I hurt my hand. My forearm, more accurately. I hope it’s not too serious, but when I have been doing curling motions my right forearm and wrist have been hurting. I am going to go easy on everything for at least a few days and hope that things are back to normal by my workout on wednesday night.

At this point in my life, working out is such a habit that skipping makes me irritable and I think about it all the time I’m not in the gym. It could be worse, I guess. I could do the same thing with meth. If I do have an injury, though, I need to balance out my desire for working out against the danger of injuring myself further.

In more mundane news, my first bulking cycle is coming to a close. After another 4 weeks I am going to be cutting back on calories so that I can my body ready for another 3 month cut starting on May 1st. Though I am not looking forward to re-instituting the seemingly boundless level of self-control that I used during my first 6 months of fitness, I am anxious to see what kind of progress I have made building muscle lately. I have seen quite significant strength increases, so I can only hope that under my “winter coat” I have some new muscle waiting to appear, like cherry blossoms opening in the spring. (Only less transient.)

Over 2 months since my last update. Oops. Lots has changed:

I went back to America and worked out. Good news - American gyms are awesome and I can’t wait to get back to the States to work out. Bad news - now I’m back in Japan and I pay out the ass for a gym that is not anywhere nearly as nice.

I am currently working on a few different goals. First and foremost, I am no longer trying to lose weight. I am trying to eat like it is my job right now in order to gain weight and get a lot stronger.  I am definitely doing both. My lifts are all increasing at a rate that keeps me happy, and my weight is going up (nearly) every week. I’m definitely putting on a little “winter coat” too, as the bodybuilders call it. A little extra fat all over, but that’s to be expected with the amount of food I’m eating. Psychologically it has been difficult, though. After all, I spent a half a year (my FIRST half a year in fitness) trying to lose weight. Hoping to get bigger and see the scale go up still hasn’t quite sunk in, yet.

I think I’m going to continue my bulk until the middle or end of April, depending on how I’m feeling and how my lifts are going. That will give me May, June, and July to cut before heading to my new home in Hawaii. And then I get to hit the American gyms and watch the fat melt away. Once I can see my abs, though, I’m going on a 24 month bulk, or until I can’t stand to eat anymore. Whichever comes first.

My two goals for outside of the gym right now (after mastering pullups last time) are to: close the Captains of Crush #1 gripper for 3 sets of 10, and do 100 pushups in a row. I hope to have both goals met by May 1st. If I do, I move on to the #1.5 gripper and trying to do handstand pushups, freestanding. Wish me luck.

…or I will punch you.

It’s been 6 months.

It’s said that you’re always you’re own harshest critic, and in my case I think that’s definitely true. I don’t feel ready to post these pictures, but I told the Internet that they were coming, and here they are.

But first! My statistics for the first 6 months of training.

6/2/07:

Height - 170 cm

Weight - 72.5 kg (160 lbs)

Waist - 86 cm

Arm fat - 13 mm

Leg fat - 18 mm

Body fat percentage - 30.4%

Weight in fat - 21.8 kg

Weight in lean mass - 50.2 kg

————————————————

12/01/07

Height - 170 cm

Weight - 62.2 kg (137 lbs)

Waist - 76 cm (-10 cm)
Arm fat - 6 mm ( -8 mm)

Leg fat - 9 mm ( -9 mm)

Body fat percentage - 16.6% ( -13.%)

Weight in fat - 10.2 kg ( -11.6 kg)

Weight in lean mass - 50.2 kg ( +1.4kg !)

…and the pictures.

The front.

and the back.

I figure I should make at least one more post here before The Big Day on December 1st. I honestly haven’t been doing as well as I would like lately. My food measurements have been forgotten in favor of portion control and eyeballing, though I have still been eating healthy. I haven’t been running, either, as it has been far too cold and I can’t afford new running gear at this point.

But! I have been losing weight, and my lifts are going up, so what I’m doing now is working, I guess. Honestly at this point it seems kind of pointless to rebuild the food/calorie database I lost in my OS upgrade when I am going to be eating completely differently in three weeks when I start my first bulk.  And as for the running, I am getting back in the cardio saddle with some good old fashioned indoor biking tomorrow morning, so I don’t feel too.

The title of this post is in reference to my next exercise goal: handstand push ups. Seeing as I can’t even do a handstand right now, the idea of free-standing upside-down push ups seems like an impossible dream.  3 months ago I thought the same thing about pull ups, though, and now I’m a regular machine. A machine that is powered by eating pancakes and then craps out pull ups. So I know that if I follow a regular regimen that eventually (no idea on a time line yet), I will have mastered another bodyweight exercise.

Keep on truckin’

I was scheduled to run for 32 minutes tonight. Instead I ran for….0 minutes. After getting up at 5:00 AM, driving 2 hours, teaching classes, and generally running on coffee and gumption for 12 hours, my body was just not up to exercising tonight. Instead I mean to get up tomorrow morning (after heading to bed earlier than usual) to do today’s run.

It’s definitely important to listen to one’s body when doing anything physical. My problem is that I love my schedules so much that it’s very difficult to deviate from them once I’ve written them out, even to the detriment of my health or progress. To give you an idea, I have every one of my runs (4X/week) planned out for the next 7 weeks. So skipping one run throws off nearly 2 months of scheduling. Clearly, that would be insanity.

The scheduling does work for me though. For example: yesterday I did 31 pull-ups in just 6 sets. My first set? 9 (NINE) pull-ups. Coming from being able to do 0 just a few months ago, that was huge for me. And I owe it all to my unyielding compliance to the pull-up schedule I have in iCal. It’s the same thing with my food. If I enter all of my food for the day into CalorieKing, I have no problem eating healthy and staying on track for nutrition. If I don’t, though, I quickly find myself mentally justifying the consumption of 10-12 lemon sugar cookies. That’s about half a stick of butter alone, for those of you keeping track at home.

Is my scheduling a crutch? I honestly have no idea at this point. I see it as necessary to my continued progress, though, so until (unless) I start exhibiting more willpower without it, I will continue to check iCal 6 times an hour to make sure I did enough push ups that morning.

One weekend of debauchery. That’s all it took to negate one week of progress. Not completely negate, mind you. With my running I build endurance each time I head out, and I am constantly getting stronger, but fat loss? Oh, mai.

Last weekend Heather and I ate like…well, normal people do. It was tremendously fun…mostly, but seeing a 2.7 KILOGRAM (that’s 5.95 pounds for you ‘Merkans) increase in weight from Friday evening’s weigh-in to Monday’s? Ouch. Intellectually I know that it takes 3500 kcals to add one pound of fat to the human body, and as such I would have had to have eaten about 27,125 calories over three days to put on that weight as fat. I know that it was mostly water and glycogen from adding carbs and sodium that my body wasn’t used to. BUT, it still sucked. Powerful sucked. Tonight is my weekly weigh-in (Friday’s are the only ones that I actually count), but it’s looking like I am going to hit just about where I was LAST Friday. So one weekend set back one whole week of effort.

The thing is, I work HARD during the week. Not just running or in the gym, but especially my food intake. It is most definitely not easy eating the way I do, eating almost 100% clean and denying myself many of my favorite foods. One of the things that keeps me going is knowing that I am getting leaner, faster, and stronger every day because of my efforts. But this week every time I ate or lifted or ran I knew I was only playing catch-up to where I was a week ago.

This has had some serious effects on my mental outlook, for sure. This weekend I am going to be limiting my “cheating” pretty severely. But mostly it’s got me looking ahead to Christmas. The average American adds 2-3 pounds of fat EVERY SINGLE HOLIDAY SEASON. Compound that over 1o years and all of a sudden you’re 30 pounds fatter. I’ll be in America for 3 weeks, and as much as I was planning on letting myself enjoy my favorite foods and things (whilst still working out, of course), I will now be thinking of this week’s ‘wasted’ efforts instead.

Sometimes it’s good to put things in perspective.

Also I think I did 5 pull-ups today but I’m not sure. Let’s say “yes.”