Something Beats Nothing Every Time – Page 21 – Extreme Home Fitness From P90X to Crossfit to Russian Kettlebells – Proof that at any age you can still give it the beans and be your own hero!

R11D48 – Days Off Work

I usually take my birthday off work since there is nothing I want to do less than be at the office on my birthday. This year I took off Thursday and Friday and took the opportunity to do some hybrid cardio workouts involving the treadmill intervals. I did a 45 minute workout on Thursday with Oly lifts at 135lbs and jogging and according to my HRM it was about 500 calories burned. Friday I did another 45 minutes with bench and cardio mixed and again was around the 500 calorie mark. So for Saturday I thought it would be good to compare the burn from T25 so I opted to do Speed 3.0. That was a challenging workout! It was far more demanding than most of the others I have done so far but even so, after the 25 minutes I was only looking at about 350 calories. That said, I am wondering just how low my calorie burn was during some of the other workouts that were easier. I am going to try and keep some cardio going through this Body Beast phase so I don’t gain too much weight but it already appears that doing the heavy bench and lifts have added a pound or two. It will be interesting to see if I can really keep my weight in check as I try to increase my strength. I will probably be taking some creatine or something similar that tends to have a bloating effect on me so I expect a few pounds at the start but it should taper off as we go along. I have been keeping my stats private for now, but I will probably publish a weekly update.

I know it sounds counter intuitive to gain weight when I am already over my stable goal weight but in the end I think it is inevitable as I transition from what I consider to be inadequate volumes of work into the strength and size based workouts that Body Beast provide. The best I can hope is that I can keep it in check with insanity workouts, or maybe Speed 3.0 since it kicked my butt! As we get into the 3 or 4 week point I should start seeing my weight come back down but then again it’s all just hyperbole now, the results will speak for themselves. I just want to make sure I end up after the next 40 days or so closer to my ideal composition of 15% fat at around 230lbs.

R11D45 – Half Way Turnaround

I think things have to change, I am coming to the conclusion that these 25 or 30 minute workouts are just not HIIT enough for me to get a great workout. It may be that they are sporadically sprinkled throughout the last 45 days and as such I haven’t really got the full effect. Well if that is the case then the next 13 days I am going to attempt to finish the T25 and P90X3 workouts that remain:

P90X3
The Challenge
Incinerator
The Warrior
Eccentric Upper
Eccentric Lower
Triometrics

T25
Rip T circuit
Dynamic core
Upper focus
Speed 3.0
Rip’T Up
Extreme circuit
The Pyramid

Tomorrow is my birthday and it’s as good a time as any to make some changes. I know I am only half way through the 90 days, but I didn’t really commit to one methodology for the duration. I think what I am going to try is to finish the above and then move into some Body Beast with Insanity. I feel like I need to get my strength back in line and I know that my weight isn’t really moving like it should be. So starting tomorrow I will be documenting more, working out more and setting my sights on getting my 230 lb body back by the end of the 90 days, that’s 45 days or 6 weeks which should be plenty of time. Of course, that is dependant on my not being 258 like the scale said this morning. I have a feeling I may be up at 252 which means dropping 20 lbs in about 6 weeks. I am shooting for a bit of a re-composition so I will be trying to track my fat% etc with my fancy scale at home and posting the results.

I am not sure about the exact workout schedule yet but for the next 2 days I will be visiting my Crossfit box for my workouts, after that I will try to pick and choose from the following:

Build section of Body Beast

Chest / Tris
Back / Bis
Legs
Shoulders

Insanity Favourites

Plyometric Cardio
Pure Cardio
Core Cardio and balance

I think it’s also about time that I listed some of my favourite workouts because if I am honest I can’t really tell the difference between them unless I really think back. So I will post some of my favourites with the content so I can keep track.

R11D40-43: Another Weekend Away Plus Back Stretches

This travelling is getting tedious and honestly I am losing my enthusiasm for hotel beds and pools. This weekend we were out in Peterborough where the best hotel room in the whole town was only $129. On Friday I rested and coached 3 hours but on Saturday before we left I managed to squeeze in a bench workout with barbell and dumbbell because my back was a little sore. It was destined to get worse as the days passed too. I benched up to 235lbs around 10 sets total with chasers of dumbbell presses and flies. Sunday after we returned I was going to do some Olympic lifting but again my back was a little tender and after I had finished my 5 sets of 5 deadlifts I decided to hop on the treadmill and ran a mile pretty much without stopping (although my pace was rather pedestrian). My ITB was tight and sore, and I have a feeling that stretching it is what is causing my back pain. I have to say here that I am a little confused at why this happens, I remember following the Supple Leopard in stretching my ITB and hips before my recent surgery and I remember having nothing but acute hip pain for months after moving into hip stretches. I was better for it relating to my back but my hips were in agony. Not only that, but after being laid up for a few days after surgery when I started walking again it was my hips that gave me the most pain. I have also noted that I don’t have any stretching instructions in this blog, at least not any that are easy to locate so I am going to try and put together a few of my favourite stretches, or maybe find where I have done it before and re-brand the page. Then Monday which was Family Day I once again opted to stay off my back and it was even more sore than before up into the mid right side feeling like a muscle pull more than anything. I did manage to get about 30 minutes of heavy bag work done with some direction from P90X3 MMX.

I am often asked about back pain, having had 2 back surgeries I am what you would consider to be experienced with it. The first thing I do is recommend stretching the ITB and hamstrings and hips in order to try and release whatever compression surrounds the area. How to do that? Do this:
This is one of the best for my back and hips. It does make loud cracking noises in my spine however and you should do it every dayâ€¦ you should do all of them every day really.

Very simple stretch to help loosen up the back and abdominals

Very good for tight hamstrings that can cause all kinds of back problems

More advanced for hips, this is actually quite hard if you are male

Another very good stretch for hips and sciatic problems. You should feel the stretch in the buttock and hip of the leg that is crossed over, in this case the left leg.

Very basic, can be done in conjunction with an arching motion every time you stand up

A little more difficult for some, and also hard to control but once you can do it, it is very effective.

Be careful with this if you have pinched nerves, but the leg in front takes the load off the spine somewhat.

Cat stretch, also can be alternated with seal stretch where from the starting position you drop your hips to the floor and keep your arms straight.

Swiss army knife stretch, very good for hips and back

Basic and similar to the front bend, but this is a standing version of the cat stretch / seal stretch.

R11D39 – P90X3 Accelerator and Decelerator

Tuesday I went back to my old gym for the yearly bring a friend week and it was just how I remembered it, ridiculous teens doing things that are dangerous and stupid and old men doing things that are about as beneficial as the vegan lifestyle. Two kids in particular were doing kettlebell “swings” by lifting the bell like a front raise and holding it overhead like some jungle head hunter would display the heads of it’s victims. Obvioulsy the staff either don’t care or don’t know the difference, but to be honest, it really devalues the gym and poses a danger to the other users. However, most of the other users were women cruising the treadmills and ellipticals in an oblivious cardio coma like prisoners chained to a torture device. It was pretty grim if I am honest. I did manage to get some shoulder work done, mostly because my basement ceiling is too low to do presses so I made the most of that and also used the cable machine to do pulllups since my pullup bar on the deck has 3 feet of snow underneath it. I didn’t do cable pullups… not sure what they would be, but the pullup grips are positioned in the middle of the crossover beams on the cable machine. Anyway, I got a decent workout but it’s never going to be enough to get me to go back.

Wednesday I did Accelerator and Thursday I did Decelerator and to be honest I am having a hard time remembering the difference. I think the Accelerator was the one with legs and pushups while the Decelerator was legs and pullups. Accelerator was more like the old plyo with chest thrown in but Decelerator was more like eccentric movements with pullups. Both were cardio workouts at their heart and were OK, not great, but OK. I still think that P90X should try and stay away from the cardio workouts and leave them to Shaun T. In fact, what would be really good would be if they would just put the P90X /2 /3 workouts with Insanity and be done with it.

I am not really seeing much change with my weight as of yet, I am down maybe a couple of pounds but I am feeling a whole lot better. Not only that, my strength is back and I am sure I have probably just about finished filling out my muscles to their capacity. Next week I am only working 2 days and it’s my birthday week so I will be taking it easy and getting in as many workouts as I can and I may even be able to get to my Crossfit Gym! It may be Oly lifting tonight if I have the time.

R11D37 – Weekend Away

We had a night away on Friday in Niagara Falls at the Marriott Fallsview. It was a nice hotel but because it was 700 below with the wind and blowing a gale the fact that it wasn’t actually attached to the casino was a little inconvenient. We did take a cab one way but my decision to walk home via the front of the casino meant I was in the wind the whole way, I seriously thought I was going to get hypothermia or frost bite since I had no hat. Anyway, the rooms are very nice, we had a falls view with 2 queens which was perfect. The bathroom was nice, a single function rain type shower head into a tub. The TV was a big flat screen which is expected nowadays I suppose and the place was overall very clean. We got $25 coupons for Milestones so we went there and had dinner (Steak and yam fries) which was pretty good, it is also noteworthy that we had another coupon for a free breakfast buffet and $25 casino play cash. Not a bad value at all since we only paid $149 for the room.

Before we went to dinner I went to the gym which was small but nice, some dumbbells and a large rack type pulley gym. Also, several treadmills and ellipticals. My workout was largely dumbbells something like this:

25 lb db 10 press 10 pullups
30 lb db 10 press 10 pullups
35 lb db 10 press 10 pullups
40 lb db 10 press 10 pullups
45 lb db 10 press 10 pullups
50 lb db 10 press 10 pullups

25 lb 10 fly 10 cable lat straight arm pulldown
30 lb 10 fly 10 cable lat straight arm pulldown
35 lb 10 fly 10 cable lat straight arm pulldown
40 lb 10 fly 10 cable lat straight arm pulldown

Finish with some low cable chest fly pulling up to head height

Saturday after we got home I decided to do an RKC workout with my 55lb KB as follows:

Clean and press, alternating arms
33333

Doesn’t seem like much, but it killed me to do the cleans from the floor and I think I was not smart not to use shoes, it’s been a long time since I did RKC with no shoes and it’s different than barbell cleans for your feet.

Monday I took off since today I am supposed to be going back to my old gym (Super Secret Hideout Gym) on a guest pass with my cat.

Saw the La Rocca Cake van again today and I was reminded how much their logo reminds me of something…

R11D31-32 – Winter Olympic Lifting

The opening ceremonies for the Sochi Olympics are this morning. I know that the Winter games don’t have the lustre of their summer counterparts and to imagine those poor Canadian Hockey players suffering needlessly in their shared rooms is almost too much to bear but it is the Olympics so I am suitably excited. Not about Hockey of course which to me is more like chicken fencing where you can’t whack someone with your stick until they hit you first just like Toronto’s little Â bitch coward Kessel did. Anyway, that’s only one uninspiring thing about the winter Games but there are plenty of other mouthwatering spectacles like the luge, snowboarding and of course ski cross. Add to that skeleton, slopestyle and aerials and you have yourself a smorgasbord of entertainment.

And one more thing, if you think that ski jumping is easy, think again, there are times when it doesn’t go so well, and I am not talking about Eddie the Eagle, sometimes making it off the end of the ramp isn’t a guarantee.

That said, it was really just a filler for the fact that it’s winter and I did my Olympic lifting rotation again, however I am happy to announce that I managed to complete more this time, doing all 5 rounds of deadlifts and hang cleans and 4 of 5 power cleans with 135. I am thinking by March I should be able to see if I can get my deadlift up to my PR which is (I am sorry to admit) only 200lbs, however, after 2 back surgeries and only about a year actually doing the deadlift (not counting the lifts I used to do 20+ years ago) it’s not so bad.

R11D29-30 – One Third Done!

Today was not a great workout but over the last few weeks I have been reticent to do workout with the kids at gym because frankly I am not sure I could keep up. Then again, there is no motivation better than leading any kind of fitness routine. So Monday we grabbed the dumbbells and did a 25 minute full body workout including some isometrics, some eccentrics and even a little abs. It was OK, and it reminded me that I really should be pushing them by pushing myself. It was far from the bootcamps of old but I think for the sake of everyone we should be getting back to the grind of full 30 minute workouts to get them used to what level of work is expected from them.

Tuesday was another “in the wild” workout as I spent another 25 minutes shovelling and breaking ice from the driveway in preparation for the snow that is supposed to be coming tomorrow.

This is a milestone because in the world of at home workouts usually 90 days is the length and again usually they are divided into 3 sections. T25 and P90X3 are no exception, T25 having Alpha Beta and Gamma and P90X3 being divided predictably into 3 months that contain different workouts. This time P90X3 only contains one workout for the third month that has not already been performed but since I have never divided up the workouts like that before, maybe the other DVD sets are the same. Anyway, here I am at the end of 30 days and although I am not actually following a program I am still committed to doing 90 days of the workouts. This 1/3 mark is usually where things start to get harder, the assumption is that after 30 days of their workouts you should already be getting into shape. So how am I doing? 30 days ago when I started I was in pretty rough shape, I had just come off a bout of pneumonia and a trip to England, I had been sick for quite some time and to be honest I was a mess. My weight at work was over 250 but that only means that I was right around the 250lb mark at home. I know my weight went up by 8lbs as I started to work out again which I expected but now, a few days into February I am right around 254 which means I am down about 4lbs or so. I know it’s not much but I really had not been keeping my diet as strict as I would like, and now I have Fitday on my side I estimate a loss of at least 3lbs a week. It is pretty frightening that I am 20lbs away from my ideal weight of around 230lbs but then again, having back surgery will do that to you, the important thing is that I am back on track and heading back to the top. The funny thing is that the only rule I was breaking for my diet was the 100g of carbs, and once I have that under control I am sure good things will follow. It’s easy to get away from that without really noticing or eating anything “bad” but starch after a workout and too much fruit will tip your balance easily. If you don’t think that veg and fruit are able to put weight on you, take a peek at the latest instalment of the “5000 calories a day” guy. He is on a vegan diet and gaining weight all the way.

I had earmarked Feb 1st as a goal for having my Olympic lifts back up to 135lbs which I have achieved, I also wanted to be able to run 1500m in a reasonable time without stopping but I have been staying away from the treadmill in favour of T25 workouts. I wonder how I would fare at a 1500m run right now.

Below is my Fitday from Monday and Tuesday for your enjoyment.

Monday

Tuesday

R11D25-28 – Weekend Away

I took Friday off, which seems to be a pattern for me nowadays, something about making it through the week and knowing I should be able to do big lifts on the weekend. We were out of town this weekend in London, Ontario visiting my alma mater The University of Western OntarioÂ and going to a Raffi concert on Sunday. That meant the usual obstacles to my workouts including an incredibly stressful 3 hour drive in the snowstorm to get there, a hotel full of idiot hockey parents and their equally annoying offspring running around the halls. So I locked myself in my room and did 500 squats, something that even now, 2 days later I am regretting. Once home, I was faced with a fot of snow so I shovelled what I needed to in order to get out the snowblower. It was still a good 20 minute workout getting everything lined up. After that, I decided I would see if I could do 500 pushups but after 250 I gave up since I was in danger of landing on my face. Not the greatest improvisation in the world, I really should have taken my kettlebell and swung it around down by the pool smashing as many ugly hockey faces as I could.

So I have decided to do a short 2 week assessment of my eating habits, I have a sneaking suspicion that my <100g of carbs a day is a little out of whack and I need to get back in line if I am to drop the 10 lbs I have remaining after my surgery. And since it’s coming up on a year, I really have no excuse. All I can say is that I had better be back below 235 before my anniversary kicks in on April 24th. That’s still about 80 days from now or…

80 days can be converted to one of these units:
6,912,000 seconds
115,200 minutes
1920 hours
80 days
11 weeks (rounded down)

Plenty of time, right? I know from past experience that being accountable to Fitday is a great place to start as long as you are honest with yourself. 80 days at an average of 30 minutes per workout and an 80% hit rate is only 32 hours of working out. That seems easy enough!

R11D24/5 – Ebb And Flow

I have been careful where I can to make sure I am doing weight, cardio and recuperation workouts with some balance and with that in mind on Wednesday I did the P90X3 Eccentric Upper and it was, in fact, exactly what I had envisioned apart from there are pullups in there. That was a surprise. Besides that, it’s basically some presses, curls and so on, basic moves, but all with the accent on the 4 count lowering of the weight and one count explosion. It’s typical eccentric exercises and despite the lack of real warmup I was not too sore the following 2 days. However, since my sleep has not been ideal I opted on Thursday to do P90X3 Yoga X. I was especially interested in this since I believe in the power of yoga once you can keep up with it and I loved Tony’s One on One Fountain of Youth Yoga. This, I have to say, was a rival for that if only because you are not subjected to endless rounds of the same vinyasa all over again. This was quick, variable and had the yoga, balance and flexibility sections I was looking for. All in all it is a great little short Yoga workout, one that is bound to get lots of use.

I stumbled up on another interesting diet log blog, and although not as entertaining as Fat Head or Morgan Spurlock’s lies it’s an amazing story of one man’s journey to prove that high fat low carb diets are really the way we were made to eat. You can find it but the navigation around the site leaves much to be desired. It’s called Smash The Fat and it can be found atÂ http://live.smashthefat.com/why-i-didnt-get-fat/Â where he explains how he managed to eat 5000 calories a day and actually improve his physique. He is doing a Vegan version now, and after 11 days has apparently already gained 8lbs. Interesting stuff.

R11D22-23 – Shoulder Good, Coordination Not So Much

My plan was to take Sunday off as a day of rest in case I had actually done something bad to my shoulder and then to go straight back to the same routine to see if it held up. I left the bar at 135lbs and planned the following:

5Ã—5 Deadlift
5Ã—5 Hang Clean
5Ã—5 Power Clean

I didn’t want to get too complicated, just to make sure I did every rep of every set and see how my shoulder held up. Thankfully it was fine, not only that, it actually felt better after I was done. I am struggling a little to get the power cleans done since the weight is still a little unstable as I come up but I am able to hang on mostly and get the bar back in shape. I am amazed at how heavy it feels after knowing how easy it was last summer. I also know that it’s a matter of time before I am able to contemplate hitting 155.

That was Monday before coaching and the only residual issue I have is my left shoulder (not the really bad one) is still a little painful. I felt it during bars as I was spotting front stride circles. I will keep updating the issue and the progress. Tuesday I decided I needed a little cardio so I took on T25 Speed 2.0. Since Speed 1.0 was a bit of Â letdown I was hoping that this would be a massive improvement and I was not disappointed. The workout has 2 sets of moves, as far as I can tell designed to simultaneously make you trip over yourself and make you feel slightly remedial in your agility. The good news is that the 2 sections are then repeated with shorter intervals, 8 counts instead of 16. Then, after going through them all a second time, you are then instructed to go through again even faster with 4 counts. Of course then there is a burnout which from what I could see through the sweat was more of a chicken dance meets mosh pit meets full body seizure. Fact is it’s a 2 count run through of the whole thing. I was able to keep up for most of the time however there were a couple of transitions that had me twisting my toes on the foam floor tiles or staring blankly like a 3 year old does when Â you tell them it’s PJ time.

I have to admit I love this format, especially when the moves are challenging which these definitely were. As the tempo increases, the time seems to pass faster and the last 8 minutes or so are just a blur. Unless Speed 3.0 is another quantum leap, I think I will be doing this workout any time I feel like I need an agility boost. I liked is so much in fact that I am going to steal some of the moves for my next cardio conditioning at gym which should be Friday. I can’t wait to see the confusion on their young faces… hahah!