Filthy Fifty – One Day Soon

50beerI found this on the internet today and decided I would give it a shot the next time I am looking for a gut busting, punish yourself for not working hard enough day at the gym

I was looking for something to push myself with in order to banish the sour taste I have in my mouth after my strength and conditioning session with my gymnasts last evening. I feel like they didn’t work anywhere near hard enough and as their coach, that was my fault. I need something to refocus myself and since today is supposed to be cardio day, maybe I will hurt myself instead.

It’s their turn tomorrow…

 

 

The Filthy Fifty

50 Box Jumps (24in box)

50 Jumping Pull-ups

50 Kettle Bell swings (16kg)

50 Walking Lunges

50 Knees to Elbows

50 Push Press (45lb)

50 Back Extensions

50 Wall Ball shots (20lb ball)

50 Burpees

50 Double Unders

R5 D14-16 RKC End OF Week 3 and Bench Day (White Rabbits!)

White RabbitsI have started to add some cleans, clean and press and (this week) some snatches to my warmup on my TGU days. I am not kidding, it is hard!

The swings are now up to 40 per set, not only that, but I don’t think I am getting any better at TGU than I was. Maybe I should be trying with 35 or 25lb instead of my 45lb KB. Doing the cleans and CAP is interesting, I actually really like it, and I can’t wait until the spring when I can get out on the deck and do them outside. It seems like a perfect outdoor exercise!

Last night was bench day and I managed the following:

15×4 @135 (2 sets of close grip)
12×4@185 (2 sets of close grip)
7×4@225
3×4@275

This is not a comprehensive chest workout and I think I may have to start working in some incline bench into the warmup, not only to make sure I get the whole muscle but also so I don’t have to unload the bar after I do my 275’s!

I am getting a hankering for some cardio. I will probably end up doing an Insanity workout this week just to see where my cardio is in comparison to Rounds 3 and 4. I am also getting nervous about hitting my 240 mark for my birthday since it is now February and I have 19 days left. Since going Paleo I have found that my body has discovered a comfortable place right around 250. It’s weird how your body seems to settle at certain points. I am sure that if I push through this plateau that I will settle again at a lower weight, I just hope I can get through this sticking point without burning too much lean mass or allowing my strength to dip. I have always wanted to settle around 240 ever since I put on the muscle I worked so hard for after I left University, I think at that weight I would be relatively healthy, probably around 12-15% bodyfat and certainly looking acceptable. I guess in about 19 days we will find out!

Today I was 251.

(White Rabbits)

R5D13 – Deadlift Debacle Solved (Plus a couple of fun links)

deadliftLast time I was on deadlift day (previously known as back day) I tried in vain to get a power/ endurance program to work. It didn’t pan out the way I had hoped and I ended up only doing 36 reps of each movement. It was supposed to be:

“Deadlifts with 135# plus chinups as follows:

1 per minute, adding one per minute.

Minute 1 – 1 deadlift, 1 chinup
Minute 2 – 2 deadlift,2 chinup
Minute 3 – 3 deadlift, 3 chinup and so on..

I had hoped to get to 20 but my brain intervened and said I should aim for 15. My body intervened quickly after that and due to my lack of experience in deadlifting I was done after 8 rounds.”

This time I wanted to do 5’s and see how far I could go…

So rather than try to extend myself to the full minute, which was the issue, I decided to get to the point where I did about 40 seconds of work maximum. So I targeted 5 moves max as the target like this:

Minute 1 – 1 deadlift, 1 chinup
Minute 2 – 2 deadlift,2 chinup
Minute 3 – 3 deadlift, 3 chinup and so on up to 5 on the 5th minute.

For the 6th minute I went back to 1 of each, cycled up to 5 again and then repeated the cycle with no rest.

The upshot was a total of 45 reps of deadlifts, 45 pull ups in 15 minutes. The workout was not terribly taxing, not as much as two days ago was. I think next time I will start at 3 and go to 7 instead of 1 going to 5. That would give me a total of 75 reps of each, a decent work total. All I need now is to get over my fear of injury and get up to lifting my bodyweight.

HIIT can be as low as 6 minutes a week… Caveat please, thank you.

Chronic cardio (an hour on the treadmill)? Let’s kick that dead donkey again…

My wife is so smart, she already uses macadamia nut oil.

R5D12 – Modified WOD and TGU Plus Why Do HIIT (and not cardio)

gymnastsWhat burns calories best? Should I run 3 hours a day to burn fat? Why are you making us work so hard? All valid questions from my little proteges at gymnastics. Being as it is that I am their Strength and Conditioning coach, they often come to me looking for (simple) answers. Running 3 hours a day vs working out 30 minutes a day? Sounds like the stuff I tell my wife about wasting her time on the treadmill. Once again, the interwebs come to the rescue.alicias

HIIT kicks cardio’s butt.

The study to show HIIT (painful, hard workouts) beats lower intensity longer cardio sessions (A bit, well, dry)

Yet more information about why not to eat grains including rice!

In honour of the benefits of HIIT, I literally drove myself into the ground yesterday.

Using a 90lb barbell and a 18″ box (due to height restrictions in my basement):

10 Box Jumps
1 Sumo Deadlift High Pull
9 Box Jumps
2 Sumo Deadlift High Pulls
8 Box Jumps
3 Sumo Deadlift High Pulls
7 Box Jumps
4 Sumo Deadlift High Pulls
..and so on until…
1  Box Jump
10 Sumo Deadlift High Pulls

I collapsed and I think I set a new HR record of 166 bpm which for me is pretty good. I usually peak at 160 and I really felt those extra 6! I don’t really know why I was so tired after, however, I also did my RKC 5 TGU per side so that may explain it.

I shouldn’t complain, my competitive girls work harder than I do… I make sure of that!

R5D11 – Swingcreasing The Volume

kbloveIt’s the end of week 2 of the Russian Kettlebell Challenge and although I am fighting against the dismissive and mocking tone of the “Minimum” label assigned to the first couple of weeks, I am enjoying the workout. Today I added an extra 10 swings which means that instead of doing 20 swings then active rest, we are now challenged to do 30 swings plus the active rest. This is a short phase, I think I saw that we are up to 40 swings in week 3! Also it should be noted that the next phase of the workout, following “minimum” is not “regular” or “intermediate” but rather “Rite Of Passage”. Sounds ominous! Also to be noted, some have referred to the current phase as “Man Maker” which I completely agree with especially since now we are directed to start warming up, for practice, with cleans and snatches. Yeah, pre-warmup I am going to do snatches with a 45lb kettlebell. You Russians are crazy!

So the program is pretty standard for a total of 4 weeks and then moves into the Rite Of Passage phase. I am end of week 2 now and it seems to be dragging somewhat but given the fact that I am doing other programs in conjunction, I am not going to get down on myself.

I managed 5 rounds of the 30 swings with active rest when compared to 6 rounds of 20 swings gives me a total volume increase of 30 reps. I have been working hard on my form and so was pleasantly surprised to find that my back, while worked, was not sore.

By the way, I don’t want to harp on this but rest shouldn’t be called rest unless you are resting. Active rest isn’t rest, it’s action.

Next is Turkish Get Ups, 5 per side after a warmup and 5 a side of cleans and snatches. I have to admit, I am smitten with the kettlebell.

R5D9-10 – Cardiopocalypse

new hatBeing at home with the baby is a unique set of challenges in a lot of ways, not least of all when it comes to working out. I had to do my bench sets with the baby looking on with an even stranger look than when I did the RKC the other day. It is a little disturbing however I managed to get through the following:
15-15-15-15 @135
10-10-10-10 @ 185
7-7-7-7 @225
5-5-5-5 @ 275

The following day I had come to the realization that the baby will sleep 45 minutes. So I put her to bed, jumped on the treadmill and did 45 mins of cardio. I was insufferably bored. I though I hated cardio before, I should have done a Shaun T workout instead. I don’t know how far I went, in fact I don’t even care I hated it so much. I can’t wait for the spring to come so I can do some short sprints outside. As far as I can tell, cardio on a treadmill is nothing short of Chinese Water Torture. Never again, I have come to the end of my treadmill world, it’s over.

Why? Because running on a treadmill will not prepare you for ToughMudder!!

RKC Week 3 next!

Insanity 2 Codename Asylum

asylumApparently there is a new Insanity workout coming from Shaun T. It is supposedly coming out early 2011 and according to Shaun T himself:

I just finished a program called ‘Asylum’ because I had to take it a step forward. With ‘Insanity,’ it is based off max integral training and your best. I took all of that and made ‘Asylum’ really sports-specific. There’s a workout called Game Day, where you are doing all these different sports. You’re using your agility and speed. It’s really for the person who wants the athletic body and mentality.

Sounds like a step away from the aerobics dropouts and more towards the conditioned athlete. Personally, I can’t wait!

The Low Carb Prejudice – Start By Knowing What Is Wrong

YOU NEED TO READ THIS!

Yesterday, in my excited confusion I forgot that I hadn’t built my 24″ box yet for my box jumps. And that I don’t have a rope for double unders. So instead I struggled through RKC warmup and TGU while the baby looked at me with a stare of utter bewilderment from her jolly jumper. I also had to coach and joined in with some of the events to get me moving. Day 8, not really a success, but day 9 is looking better already. Why? Mostly because I love bench and can’t wait to do more, but also since I am not coaching, going to look at daycares or otherwise involved in leaving my house. Apart from changing the wheel on the wife’s truck, I have nothing to do but hang out with the baby and do my workout.

The Fallacy.

Whenever I talk to people about Paleo diet the most often reaction I get is “low carb”. This pisses me off. It’s kind of like someone telling me that due to the fact that I only eat 1 breakfast I am on a restrictive low breakfast diet. Here’s a newsflash… You are only supposed to eat one breakfast! But the general population seems to be caught up in some bizarre world where everything they eat is measured, judged and assigned a specific limit APART FROM THE MOST DANGEROUS THING!

It’s easy to find protein calculators on the web, most will say you need to eat between 1 and 2.5g of protein per lb of body weight if you want to maintain your muscle mass or gain lean tissue. It is equally easy to find fat calculators that will tell you how much fat you need, what kind, when to eat it and how to avoid it. You can also drown yourself with Caloric Intake calculators based on crappy BMI calculations, crappy Body Type calculations and even crappy blood type calculations. So all this being said, why is there such a stigma attached to limiting the amount of carbohydrate you take in? It seems that the food industry that is basically controlled by the commodity companies (wheat, corn and soy) is fine with ignoring the limits that need to be placed on carb intake. Of course, if you all knew that the human body should be having a maximum of 150g of carbohydrate a day the demand for these commodities would plummet along with metabolic disease rates, diabetes rates and obesity levels. However, since it seems to be that we can’t vilify carbs at the risk of being labelled as extreme, what are we to do?

It seems as though there are several solutions to the problem of humans eating too much carbohydrate and at the same time increasing our assistance to our ailing planet and our ailing animals. For example, ask yourself why we are feeding animals with human food? Shouldn’t animals be eating things that we can’t so that we can use the human feed to feed the hungry? Let the cows eat grass, it is what they were meant for. Convert some of the wheat and corn and soy hectares to pasture and let the animals eat food that will increase both the quality and the saleability of the meat. it’s not just that they are not designed to eat wheat and corn, it is actually killing them in the process. The whole notion of feeding cattle to death with human food doesn’t seem to bother too many people, mostly because they have been duped by the meat industry (yes, I am not just picking on the commodity farmers here) into turning a blind eye.

While you are at it, let’s stop eating the corn all together and use it to make biofuel that will prevent the burning of fossil fuels and remove our dependency on oil from the middle east. Although this process is shunned by those who believe it is too costly to be feasible I say it is just a case of volume. The more you produce, the better you get at it, the lower the cost of production. That is why the target date for when we will run out of oil keeps getting further away, as technology increases, efficiency increases.

Yes, I am way off on a tangent here but let’s start to wrap this up. The SAD (nice acronym by the way) or Standard American Diet is filled with carbohydrate. In fact, the SAD should be labelled as a High Carb Diet. We don’t need to defend our choices of sticking to a 150g carb a day lifestyle, we need to ensure that anyone who eats more than that realizes that they are on a High Carb Regimen that will make them sick. I remember throughout my life my father used to tell me that when he was a kid everyone smoked because they didn’t know it was bad for them. In the same way, years from now I am certain we will look back at the 80s and 90s and 00s as the time when people ate a high carb diet because they didn’t realize how bad it was for them. Just in the same way that pop is as bad as drugs, high carb diets are as bad as cigarettes. It’s about time that people realized that the standard level of carb intake for an active individual should be 150g. Problem is, with muffins running around at 50g, bagels at anywhere from 50-70g and a regular pasta dinner pulling a massive 120-150g it’s not surprising that the Average Canadian or American or Brit is overloaded with carbs every day. If we are going to change the way we eat, live and survive as a species, it’s time we started changing the way we think.

R5D8 – Plan So I Don’t Forget

I am coaching tonight but before I do, this is my plan:

For Time:

  • 50 tuck jumps
  • 1 sumo deadlift high pull
  • 10 plyo box jumps
  • 2 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 9 plyo box jumps
  • 3 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 8 plyo box jumps
  • 4 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 7 plyo box jumps
  • 5 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 6 plyo box jumps
  • 6 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 5 plyo box jumps
  • 7 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 4 plyo box jumps
  • 8 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 3 plyo box jumps
  • 9 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 2 plyo box jumps
  • 10 sumo deadlift high pulls
  • 1 plyo box jump
  • 50 tuck jumps

Then, once coaching is done, I want to do my TGU workout to get me back on track. That will leave me with bench for tomorrow and a day off on Saturday when my wife is out of town and I have the baby to look after.

It’s Obvious – Don’t Be Oblivious

Starving doesn’t work.

dontstarveIt is the reason behind the yo-yo effect and will make you fatter proportionately in the long run. Even short term, starvation diets are a high risk for all kinds of nasty medical issues including heart attack, stroke and aneurism.

Forget the pills, regardless of their appealing pitch, they all do basically the same thing, artifically stimulate your body into burning energy. Unfortunately, since most people who take diet pills are also not eating enough they end up burning their lean tissue. Mostly due to the amount of refined sugar and carbohydrate in their diet.

Try not to get confused here… Calories In Vs Calories Out is a vast oversimplification since all calories are not created equal. However, it remains true that you can’t eat 5000 calories a day and lose weight unless you are in the Tour De France. The biggest problems most people encounter are impatience and hunger. Some people are legitimately hungry and can’t help but eat. They are not eating enough protein. Some people are just frustrated that they can’t lose 41 lbs in a week like they do on the Biggest Loser so they give up. It comes down to education.

Treat your body like a cabin with a wood burning stove. You have a big pile of logs (your fat butt) that you want to get rid of, some smaller kindling and sticks (whole food) and a container of gasoline (sugar) to keep you warm. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out what each of these things do, and which you should use to get the best fire going but I will spell it out for you anyway. If you consistently use the gasoline to power the fire, you will have big flare ups, lots of heat for a few minutes and then nothing. So you add more gas, but there is no consistent source of heat. It is frustrating and the pile of logs that you have been saving for years is still untouched. Even if you try to use the logs with the gas, it doesn’t burn long enough to ignite the large logs. So common sense tells you that burning the big logs will be better, since you have plenty, they burn really well and last a long time. Problem is, how to get them lit. Well, the answer is the kindling. If you use the kindling to keep the fire going when it gets low and use the logs to keep the fire going for the long term then you will have success. The key here is to use the kindling to fuel the logs to warm the cabin. Gas is dangerous to play with and sooner or later you will burn down your cabin if you keep using it. To address the starting point of this post, would it make any sense to let the fire go out completely by starving it of fuel? How about to let it go so long without fuel that it is almost out so you panic and throw gas on it again with logs and kindling and choke it to death?

Losing weight is not rocket science but it takes patience. If you gained 50lbs in 2 weeks then sure, expecting to lose it that way would be reasonable. However, even with hard work, your goal should be to lose 2-3lbs a week at most. Use that to calculate your time to your goal weight and then stick to your guns. Not sure what to eat? Here is a revelation, eat things with ONE INGREDIENT! Meat, fish, fruit, vegetables. Don’t take my word for it, try it for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.

If you are looking for answers, they are right in front of you. Refined foods are garbage and garbage in equals garbage out.

By the way, sugar isn’t the only sugar. Check out the Glycemic loads of some of these foods and you will see, sugar is often the wrongly accused.

Instead of starving yourself, have some chicken and do some reading.