Day 56 – Weekend that was. Phase 3 that will be…

melissa

Rest Week comes to a close.

My last few days of rest week were definitely restful. My diet has not been stellar the last couple of weeks and I can feel myself lacking the energy and the drive I had at the start. I need to concentrate more on my intake and balancing my live food. This weekend we went to Penetang to see the family, but I was able to do 35 mins on the treadmill on Saturday and then Yoga Sunday. However, my diet foibles have cause me to feel like I am going backwards. I am sure that with the final 4 weeks ahead of me I will get the motivation mojo back but right now I just feel flabby and lazy. Amazing what just a couple of days will do to you. As a side note, we saw Melissa O’Neil live in “Legends of Country Music” in Penetang. The show was good, she was amazing and I found it really hard to believe that it was 4 years since the Canadian Idol win.

I really should have done more this weekend but it was so damn hot. Almost 40 outside with the humidex so impossible to do anything really. I even got a sunburn on my arm from driving to the highway, at least when we got there the sun was behind us. Stupid untinted windows.

Anyway, not much to report at this point, the end of rest week which in itself is largely uneventful. The main thing is that I get my diet back on track for the next week when Phase 3 kicks in. I need my energy for the pullups and the cardio since it is really time to step up the effort for the final push.

Day 54 – A Long Way From England

Yoga X.

I do have some body shots from day 1 or thereabouts, but for now this will have to do. Last summer we went to England and I can’t believe in a country of 65 million people nobody mentioned that I looked this bad!

Who ate all the pies, who ate all the pies...

My weight went up and down during gymnastics season and I know that when I started P90X I was not that out of shape but let’s be honest, this was only about 12 months ago and if my math is right, about 40lbs ago. The problem is being able to avoid going there again. I had been there before, lost a ton of weight and ended up back there again. I know why, lack of attention and lack of motivation. I am older now, and even if I am not wiser I am certainly closer to death if I continue to eat like I am 25. I am happy that I have found P90X because it has taught me some really valuable lessons, things that have made me look at fitness in a new way. The thing that occurred to me this morning was the big difference between what I was doing in the gym and what I am doing now. That thing is very simply leaving the ground. With all the training that I was doing my feet never really left the ground. Everything was weights, static isolated weights. With the P90X program and with any circuit training program the key is getting off your feet. Whether it is getting down onto the floor to do bodyweight movements or getting airbourne doing jump training or Kenpo the philosophy is the same, get your body used to the impact of jumping and moving up and down and you will discover a whole new plane of exertion.

Look at that guy, you think he was jumping any fences on that holiday?

The “thing” that makes you feel like you are “fit” or “in shape” doesn’t seem to be size or strength for me, it seems to be mobility and feeling light on my feet.

 

Who ate all the pies, who ate all the pies…

Day 50 – REST WEEK 2 BEGINS!!!

Yoga – Rest Week 2

I made it to rest week 2. I learned from rest week 1 not to expect much of a break but rather to understand that the rest is only to give you a break from pullups and free weights. I thoroughly enjoyed it last time and felt a great deal of recuperative effect from it. This time around I am in a position where my body is sore, I am feeling tired and a little battered but since I know how good the week off will feel I am filled with confidence for the last 30 days of the program.

I am also deep into my nutrition course and learning about the kinds of lipids, proteins etc. and coming to realize just how delicate of a balance good nutrition really is. The human body is an incredibly resilient thing, forgiving even the most ridiculous dietary mistakes however I now understand why when people finally get their diet right they say that they have more energy than they know what to do with. It is largely because it is virtually impossible to accidentally get your diet right. I don’t want to sound negative towards the honest attempt to eat right but in reality even the “more fruits and vegetables” approach leaves gaping holes in the dietary requirements. I would estimate that without specific nutritional knowledge and counselling that a person “eating well” would be able to get around a 75% on the “right diet” scale. The balance of vitamins and minerals, the combinations of nutrients and hydration is so specific that in order to get towards that 100% right diet you really have to examine every single piece of food that your diet contains and combine it specifically with the dietary components in the right amount at the right time. It is something that is extremely complex and worse of all, it is something that like exercise is constantly changing as new discoveries are made. Now, let me just explain that in order to be a healthy person that 75% diet is more than enough. To push past that 75% takes a little more work and a little more time but the benefits are definitely noticeable. To get to the point where you are bursting with energy and feel like a million bucks you are going to have to push past that 75% and up into the 80’s. It is not simple, it is however easy once you know how to build the right diet for yourself. There are several tools included in the course that help you to figure out exactly what you need to hit those high numbers and I will share those as time goes along. I have a new found respect for nutritionists and dietitians though, I can tell you that.

It’s funny, I consider myself someone who knows a lot about working out and nutrition. Reading the Personal Trainer manual for the CanFitPro program I realized that I really do know my stuff in the gym. Reading the nutrition book I realize that I really have a lot to learn about food.

So I kicked off rest week with a yoga workout in an air conditioned basement. It was over 40 degrees today with the humidity so we had the air on in the house. It didn’t stop me from sweating bullets but it did make me uncomfortably cool. Hopefully the humidity will break tomorrow so I can get the basement door open and enjoy the warmth of the afternoon as I do Core Synergistics (I think, I had better check on that!).

I have to admit that when I do Yoga I can see myself in the mirrors on the wall and I am amazed that during this process I have dropped a few pounds and a few inches but I have really maintained my size. I thought when I started that I would shrink as I usually do when I increase my cardio workouts but this time I am happy to say that I appear to be the same size. In fact, I may not be, I may appear so because of my lower bodyfat levels but the most important thing is that I don’t feel smaller. I know, it is an ego thing but when you have spent your life being proud of your muscular size it becomes a defining characteristic of who you are. I am glad that I have not lost that feeling.

Day 47-49 Weekends are fun! Program mixups are not!

I don’t want to fall into a pattern of losing touch with the proper schedule during weekends but for some reason last week’s mess with the wrong workout on the wrong day and then an extra day off really messed things up. It sent ripples of disturbance through this weekend causing me to perform a shortened Yoga workout on Sunday in order to set up for the real Yoga of rest week on Monday.

Friday was Day 47, I was already a day off schedule due to last week so it was supposed to be Yoga but actually I did Plyo since I switched them again, something that would come back to bite me. I do love the Plyo workout so it was easy to complete, enjoyable and easy to push myself. I did find that my legs were sore afterwards, something I was surprised at but I put down to the fact that I had pushed very hard during the lunges at the start. Saturday I did legs and back and found that my hamstrings were very tight after doing 30 minutes on the treadmill in the morning. Maybe it was the very hot weather recently but I find myself a little sluggish and with a very heavy feeling in my legs. I mentioned this last week but I thought for sure it would pass quickly enough. Not yet. I am thinking that on the days when I do double workouts that I am not replacing the glycogen well enough and that is causing me to hit the wall prematurely. It also would explain the lack of fullness in my legs and the sluggishness (I think). Saturday we went to the market early and I don’t recall feeling heavy and slow at that point so maybe it is the extra cardio after all. Sunday was supposed to be rest day on a normal week, this week it was supposed to be Yoga since I had skipped Monday and switched the Plyo and Yoga days. I checked the schedule for next week (REST WEEK 2 WOOHOO !!!!) and found that day 1 is supposed to be Yoga. I had really screwed myself. I knew I couldn’t do 2 days of Yoga back to back so I ended up doing about half the Yoga workout and some extra stretching to make sure I was not Yoga’d out by Monday. That workout was fine, the flexibility piece is getting easier, but the moving savasanas at the start are still a challenge, especially the last one with the half moon and twisting half moon.

I guess it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that if you start to change stuff around you are going to run into problems with the schedule. The fact that it was an accident was little comfort when I realized what the changes had done. Anyway, I am going to be on rest week next week so I will have plenty of time to recover from the mix ups.

So there you have it, end of week 7 going on to rest week 2 and with only the last 1/3 of the program left to do. So far so good and I think this rest week I will try to post some measurements and some body part shots.

Don’t hold your breath.

Days 40-43 Major Malfunction, Long Weekend

So I kind of messed up this week. I did Kenpo on Thursday because I was sure that was the right thing to do. I realized once I checked the schedule that I was supposed to do Yoga on Thursday and Kenpo on Saturday. I actually ended up taking Saturday off (well, I did 45 minutes on the treadmill instead) instead of Sunday and then doing Yoga on Sunday. Then on Monday I built a large TV shelf to sit on top of the fireplace in the living room that would accommodate the tuner, the Satellite box, the DVDRW and both the Wii and the PS3. However, between fixing that up and installing it which took around an hour with the ridiculous amount of cabling involved and the small but significant amount of gardening that I did I managed to miss out my workout all together. So I now find myself on Tuesday without having done my Monday workout which means that I will now have to go without a day off this week.

So here is the plan.

Tuesday: Chest Tri Shoulders
Wednesday: Plyo
Thursday: Back and Biceps
Friday: Yoga
Saturday: Legs and Back
Sunday: Kenpo

This will get me back on track for next week which coincidentally is a rest week which fits perfectly.

So what did I do with my 4 days off? Well, I completely finished revamping the garage so that I actually have room to work and room to park the Jeep again. I built the shelf I just mentioned and installed it however if it works out fine and we like it, I will have to take it down and paint it black so it fits in. I did a good job with it too, routed the edges and everything to make it look professional! I also bought and installed a new stereo head unit for the Jeep, one with a USB port on front so you can use a flash drive for your music instead of CDs. That means I can get an 8GB memory stick and put every song I have ever heard on it! Nicole thinks we need a road trip now so we can listen to all that tuneage!

pioneerp3100I did manage to fix the broken fence on the walkout deck and do some gardening, attempting to rescue our front yard flower bed that I built last year from the grass that has overtaken it. Weird how I still have stupid holes in the actual lawn but the grass grows like crazy everywhere I don’t want it to. I also “fixed” the mirrors in the basement, ever since I installed them I have been meaning to glue them to the wall instead of having them rest on the rail I built for them. I had assumed that if I glued them to the wall they would all be aligned properly and would look perfect. Not the case. In fact, the wall is so messed up that the mirrors are even worse than they were. Oh well, lesson learned that if you want a mirror wall, get a large mirror, don’t try to make one from small mirrors. Actually, it would probably have worked OK if I had stuck the mirrors to a surface I knew was flat and then against the wall. Maybe I will try that if I can get them off the wall now. Stick them to a piece of MDF and then attach that to the wall… hmmm…

So there you have it, a few days of major achievements around the house but not the greatest outcome on the P90X front. Although, even though I missed 2 workouts I added 2 days of cardio. Maybe that will all even out in the long run.

Day 32 – Not this again!

Kenpo – Oops, I mean Yoga.

SERIOUSLYI’m tired.

Seriously, I am exhausted, like kitten on catnip withdrawal tired. Everything hurts again, I can’t even start to imagine how I am going to get through tonight never mind the rest of the next 2 weeks. Every time I move something screams with pain and it’s not that I am sitting on the cat, I checked.

So today I got home from work thinking that it was my favourite Kenpo workout only to find out, to my horror, that in fact today is Yoga X! Suddenly my workout time went from 65 minutes to 95 minutes. It’s not that I hate Yoga, it’s just that if you are psychologically prepared for one thing it is hard to get turned around to do something else. In actual fact, the workout went well, I am resigned to the fact that there are some things I just cannot do at this point, and given the size of my arms and shoulders, may never be able to do. But I am enjoying the process now much more than I was in the past. It is weird even when you are not consciously thinking of pushing yourself harder, each time you repeat a workout you find some small way to make things more challenging. Today I did pushups during each Vinyasa, an optional component! As for the tired thing, once I got home and had a small snack I felt better. In fact, it was more than likely the act of getting out of my chair at work and walking around that made me feel better, but that is the nature of my job.

I often refer to my “size” or muscularity as a barrier to my workouts which is rich in irony however no less frustrating. I will attempt to show you what I mean.

sept 27 08 back of neck

That, believe it or not, is the back of my neck. That is what stops me from being able to do such things as the overhead tricep stretch. Every time I try that stretch I strangle myself as my arm pushes all that muscle mass into my neck – where the air goes!

Day 28 – Twitch

Yoga X

That Crazy Quack electrocutes another victim…

That Crazy Quack electrocutes another victim

Today has been weird. I do feel much better after yesterday’s day off but I am having all kinds of weird muscle spasms. I think I am a little dehydrated and that is making my body do bizarre things. I feel like my phone is vibrating in my pocket where it is actually my quad muscle rippling with spasms. Same goes for my right tricep which has been pulsing like it is hooked up to Dr. Ho with a beat as regular as that new fangled rap music everyone is talking about. This morning my back felt much better. It is still a little stiff but the pain of the pull is almost gone. Nicole spent her day painting the main floor bathroom and I spent mine cleaning the garage, putting up the maps in the basement (which almost caused a fight between Nicole, me and the cat) and furthering my career in NHL09. Once it came time to go to see Tony the Devil I was ready to go. I had also gone to Home Depot after our weekly Costco trip and found a metal bar which is thicker than the chinup bar and that I can have confidence will not break. I am going to install it before Monday’s return to chinups and that should give me a much needed boost in my pull up proficiency. The Yoga X was good, it certainly passed more quickly and I found myself able to do a couple of positions that I had been unable to get up until now. I think it is the Half Moon maybe, anyway, one of the stupid twisty ones that I couldn’t do because I couldn’t reach the floor. I know that sounds really bizarre that someone wouldn’t be able to reach the floor but you have to understand that reaching over a massive leg with a behemoth sized bicep and triceps is not easy. I know many many men who would love to be in the position of having 19″ arms but believe me, it is not all it is cracked up to be when it comes to Yoga. Anyway, I am confident that I am getting more and more flexible as time goes along. I know I have decent balance so I don’t have difficulty with the balance portion of the workout however I feel like even that is improving. I think it is my focus that is getting better. Lifting weights like I have for years takes very short bursts of effort and as such very short attention. Yoga lengthens the amount of time that your mind spends concentrating on each muscle group and as such gives you much better control over them. I have found that as time goes along I have become much better at working the body part that is flexed and being able to relax the rest of my body, my face included. Usually as I struggle below 300+ lbs of bench press my face and indeed my entire body is contorted with effort. I am gradually finding that it is possible to channel that effort solely into the area being worked. Ya, weird I know but it seems to be true.

Day 22 – Rest week is here, yay!

Yoga

Sounds bizarre that rest week would start with the longest and most challenging workout of all but rest simply means no weights. Today is Yoga X and I am hoping for an improvement in my performance after such a hard week last week. The downside to skipping the rest / stretch day is that I am now working on 10 days straight and I won’t be able to take a day off until Sunday. I think at that point I may stretch a little but try to take the day completely off to recuperate before phase 2 starts.

I have to admit I am pretty proud of myself. The end of phase 1 is in sight and I am still fully committed to the process. Having said that, I still have 68 days to go which at this point seems like forever. In fact, when I complete the 90 days it will be (if my math is correct) September 19th which is after coaching starts. I hadn’t figured it out until now so let’s assume that I have to take Tuesday and Thursday off during coaching season. That means that from Sept 8th most likely I will lose 2 days a week. Luckily I will be on day 78 on Labour Day so this will only affect me for a couple of weeks. Potentially then, my finish date will move from Saturday September 19th to Friday September 25th. That all depends on nothing else getting in the way, including not being away at all or, if away, being able to do the workout anyway. That will be a challenge since we have a weekend in Penetang and at least one wedding to go to between now and then.

One step at a time though, it’s my first exposure to rest week including something they call Core Synergistics which makes my abs hurt just thinking about it. I want to get the workout done as soon as I get home tonight because I didn’t watch Big Brother last night and I don’t want to fall behind!

Right there... That is actually me with the big red pain!

So yoga went OK, I found it was dragging for a while around the 30 minute mark and I actually ended up skipping a couple of the twist positions because I had a tightness in my back. The session was OK and it didn’t aggravate it but once I finished I could tell that I had slightly overstretched it. Hopefully with this being rest week it will give me a chance to rest it and heal a little. My back is cracking all the way along now after the workout, I should probably have gone on my inversion table after I finished. So I am a little stiff but it’s probably nothing to be concerned about. Just for future reference it is my left side, lower back from the bottom of my ribcage all the way down to the top of my hip bone. It was probably strained as I went into Warrior 1 from runners pose. It stiffens up and makes it impossible for me to stand up quickly, however once I walk for a few seconds it loosens up just fine.

Day 18 – Stay Puft Vs. The Hulk

Yoga.

On my way...

I don’t think yoga will ever be easy for me. The sheer size of my shoulders and arms make it almost impossible for me to get into some of the positions required. Today for the first time I made contact between my elbow and knee doing the twisting chair pose. This may not seem very hard for most people and I am sure it isn’t but strap a couple of hams on your arms and try it. The main thing is that I am getting better though, and today with the seated two leg hamstring stretch I was able to reach the balls of my feet. Quite a feat pardon the pun. Each workout presents it’s own challenges with weights and reps but the weird thing about yoga is that the effort required to improve is not really tangible. The concentration it takes to extend the back leg properly in most of the warrior poses makes the difference between a casual stretch and balance workout and a devastatingly diffcult yoga X workout. I was concentrating on my leg today and it is ridiculous how hard you have to work to keep that thing straight.

Other than that, the workout was mostly uneventful. It passed fairly quickly given that it is 90 minutes but that was probably due to the fact that this time I knew exactly how many runners poses I had to do and when the breaks came. Just as I am getting used to the timing we are going into a new week. However, the workouts for the most part stay the same, just in a different order. I am determined to see improvements in 2 areas of my yoga, one is my flexibility through my legs, the other is reducing the girth of my core to be able to twist properly because at the moment I still feel a little Michelin. Given that I came from Stay Puft land almost a year ago the transformation is well underway and once I reach Jolly Green Giant territory it’s time to go for the Hulk!

Day 11 Fo’ sho’

“The haves and have-nots can often be traced back to the dids and did-nots” D.O. Flynn

It’s time for Yoga X. I feel a thousand times better today and after some research online and following my own instincts I think I have narrowed my ailment down to salmonella poisoning from spinach. The symptoms fit, both Nicole and I were sick with the same type of ailment, mine being worse because I eat a lot more spinach than she does. Whatever it was, it seems to be mostly gone by now, along with the remaining bag of Costco spinach. So back on track. I am annoyed that I had to take the 2 days off however it gave me a chance to catch up on some Wii tennis, bowling and of course some Wii Fit. No Wii X thank God. My Mii is still obese, poor kid, as you would expect for someone my weight but it just goes to show the shortcomings of the BMI system.

Description Women Men
Essential fat 10–12% 2–4%
Athletes 14–20% 6–13%
Fitness 21–24% 14–17%
Acceptable 25–31% 18–25%
Overweight 32-41% 26-37%
Obese 42%+ 38%+

They say that a male my age should be around 18-25% body fat. Right now I am around 21% which is OK. However, according to the BMI chart I am right on the brink between Class 1 obese and Class 2 obese. To show how ridiculous the system gets, before I started dieting for the wedding I was right on the brink of morbidly obese. That is the kind of language you only hear on programs like “Half-Ton Tween” or “Four Ton Father-In-Law” and even though at the time I would have admitted that I was a fat bastard I certainly wasn’t having to be wheeled around in a $7000 custom made wheelchair big enough for a pregnant hippo. I digress however, only to heap sympathy on my Mii who has a hard time seeing over his enormous chest and for whom I am certain, seeing his feet is out of the question.

Not, I repeat, NOT normal behaviour!
Not, I repeat, NOT normal behaviour!

Yoga X for the second time was, if I can recall the first one clearly enough, a little easier this time around however let me just say up front that even though Yoga is all about peace and tranquility and stuff if I ever find the dude who came up with the revese twist grab back thingy I will personally choke the living daylights out of him. That is not normal, no reasonable person would do that or expect other people to do that. Unless you for some reason are trying to impress the parents of your new contortionist family there is no reason that you would attempt to do something that messed up with your body. Having said that, I was able to do far more this time around including 2 – count them – 2 crane poses of 10 seconds each. The fact that I am happy about that makes me question my sanity but there you have it. I had forgotten (seems like an ongoing trend with me nowadays) that the Yoga was actually a 90 minute session and after the first “section” I was completely bagged. The main reason for this is becasue my recollection was that the really difficult stuff, the runners pose and endless dogs of various types, was about 20 minutes or so. I discovered that it was not until about 47 minutes in that we were allowed off the floor to start on the balance phase. Nicole was at the gym doing her floor hours so I was short on people to whom I could voice my complaints. Regardless, I persevered, which I think in the end is the whole point of this thing. Chalk another one up for me but my feeling that the end of the tunnel is right around the corner is fading fast. There are moments of sheer exhaustion where I can’t even imagine being able to make it through the week, never mind 90 days of this but like so many addicts and dieters before me, I will mutter the famed mantra “one day at a time” under my breath and keep on keeping on. I should have character coming out of my butt by the time this is over!