Week #5 report

Ok five weeks into the program and the results are good. My functional strength is really increasing, and fitness is coming along nicely too. Which it needs to, because my City to Surf training officially starts this week. 6k run I think? Should be interesting.

I'm also going to move into my parents' place in Balmain for a couple of weeks while we enter the serious phase of our bathroom renovations. This means no gym - so I'll have to do some research and come up with a bunch of good body weights exercises.

Week #3 report

Well I'm still sticking to the program. I've had a few problems with my damn stiff neck, which has made me rearrange some of my activities onto different days, but I've still stuck to six days of exercise per week.

I've noticed big improvements in not just the weights I'm lifting in the gym but also my running fitness. The only cardio training I'm doing at the moment is running. That's not because running is the only good cardio or the only one I'm interested in (far from it); I just need to work hard on my running so my legs and feet are in good shape to go all out at the City to Surf in August (I'm aiming to beat last year's time by 4 minutes).

Resistance training, continued

So we know what sort of exercises are the right ones to do. But how do

we structure workouts around them? The idea is to focus on what

actually makes you get bigger and grow stronger, and do just that and

not much of antyhing else. And that thing is performing a Failure Set,

i.e. a sequence of reps of an exercise leading to a point where you

fail. How many reps you should be doing depends on what you are

looking for; if it's more general fitness and muscle endurance (i.e.

you want to move around lighter stuff for a longer time), then you

want somewhere between 10 and 20 reps for a set. If you're more

looking for outright strength and size (which I am), then you want

something under 10 reps for your point of failure. I believe you also

need to perform a lighter set first; not so much for "warming up"

(which can be a misleading term), but for preparing your muscles,

getting some blood moving there, firing up your nervous system; I call

this an activation set.

My activation sets are with weights about 50% of my failure set, and I

do 10 reps. I then rest for a minute, double the weights, and do a set

with the intention of failing somewhere under 10 reps. If I can reach

10 reps then I've finished that level of weights and the next session

will add more weight. When I can do 10 of that higher level of

weights, I'll increase the weights again, and so on.

For each weights session, I'll do a "split", i.e. pick a few muscle

groups, rather than trying to do all of them in one go (since I'm

trying to get out of the gym in 30 or 40 minutes). Each split is three

muscle groups, and I do three exercises for each muscle group, but

rotate them around to give the muscles a few minutes break between

failure sets. I currently have two splits: A (legs, abs and

shoulders), and B (chest, back and arms). So on a Split A day I will

do a chest exercise, then an abs exercise, then shoulders, then loop

through the three again with different exercises, and then once more,

for three exercises for each of three muscle groups, where each

exercise consists of two sets (Activation and Failure). That's 18 sets

total, which I can usually do in about 35 minutes.

This structure is not the absolute most effective for short-term

strength and size gains, but it keeps you moving, focuses on continual

improvement, has very low injury risk (no "1 rep max" madness), and

burns huge amounts of calories. It works.

The first wheel: resistance training

The first wheel of my program is resistance training. At a fundamental level, this involves moving heavy things with your body until your body can’t do it any further (reaching a point of failure). The next day, your body repairs your muscles, and builds them up bigger and stronger than they were before.
After years of reading and research, and trying different types of resistance exercises and programs, I’ve come up with what I think is a very effective system. These are the principles I’ve used to devise the system.

1. Don’t overtrain. Rest and recuperation is vital; body parts need at least one day if not more to repair after training to failure. Overtraining slows your growth and increases the risk of injuries. Weights injuries are BAD.
2. Keep it short and sweet. Cortisol is your enemy; cortisol is a stress hormone that increases blood sugar and inhibits bone growth. Intense exercise for more than 30 or 40 minutes will trigger increased cortisol levels. Resistance training should therefore never go for more than 40 minutes, preferably less.
3. Always go to failure, and never past it. You need to perform the exercise until the muscles have simply stopped working, but do NOT try to keep going by “cheating”, dropping form, and pulling in other muscle groups to squeeze out “the last few reps”. This can lead to injury, and doesn’t help build strength. Drop sets are an exception (kind of).
4. Mix it up. Your body will adjust to routines and find ways to do more work with less effort. This is actually a bad thing. You want to be pushing yourself. Rotating which exercises you do will keep pushing your body and keep you on a good improvement curve.
5. Go for quality, not quantity. Rather than lots of bad exercises, do a few really good ones. What are good exercises? Ones that fit the “Crit-3 test”.

The “Crit-3 test” is a set of simple criteria used to evaluate an exercise. They are as follows:

• You support your own bodyweight
• Your body moves through space
• Multiple groups of muscles are performing work at the same time.

Not all the exercises I do fit all the criteria, but most of them do. The idea is generally, go for free weights instead of machines, go for “big” or compound exercises over “small” or isolated ones, and try to include exercises where your limbs and joints move your torso. If you stick to these rules, then your two main benefits are:

• You burn crazy calories, since you’re moving lots of weight, which means doing more work. You should be sweaty and puffed after a weights session. If you’re not, then you’re not doing the right exercises.
• You are continually “injury-proofing” your body, by working not only major muscle groups, but lots of smaller ones, ligaments, stabiliser muscles, etc.

The exercise that best exhibits these qualities is of course the Squat, considered by many to be the “king” of all weights exercises (closely followed by the wide-grip chin-up, in my opinion). It’s not the easiest to perform correctly, but anyone doing resistance training should be doing squats of some kind. If not, you’re doing it wrong.

More on the resistance training program coming soon.

Week #2 report

Well another week down. The program is continuing well. I'm fairly sure I've dropped a percentage or so of body fat, despite having a few beers and some questionable food choices on the weekend (mmmm chilli fries). Part of me isn't really happy about these abberations, and part of me feels inclined to sweep them under the "Cheat Day" rug, much like that proposed by Tim Ferris in the Four Hour Body.

But the cheat day is actually one of the ideas I disagree with in that book, for reasons I'll explain later. Cheat days are not necessary and can lead to dangerous habits and mindsets.

Week #1 report

Well I’ve completed the first week of my training program.
And overall, I’m happy and feeling good about it. I’ve pretty quickly gotten used to the 6:30am daily starts (mainly because I’ve been doing them irregularly for a while as part of my previous semi-half-arsed fitness training), I’ve kept to my routine, and am feeling good. I’m eating quite a lot (five small meals a day) to keep myself from being hungry. For supplements I'm doing creatine and protein shake for morning post-workout, and omega-3, multivitamin and vitamin D with dinner.
I had an odd episode on Sunday afternoon where I felt a bit light-headed and faint. It might have been low blood sugar. I just need to make sure I’m eating enough, especially with the slow carb food program I'm on.

Fundamental principle: the four wheels

A book I read a fair few years ago described a fundamental principle of fitness training in a way that made sense: it said there were four areas you needed to focus on, and that none of them could be ignored. Just like a car can't drive when its missing a wheel, you can't ignore one of these priorities no matter how well you do on the other three. The four wheels are as follows:
1) Resistance Training. Or as it is more commonly known, weightlifting. This builds functional and non-functional strength. It also burns calories, promotes testosterone and increases your base metabolic rate (BMR), which governs how many calories you burn just sitting around.
2) Cardiovascular Training. This can be done in countless different ways, but the main priority is that you spend 30 to 50 minutes at +80% or more of your resting heartrate. This burns calories, and improves your cardiovascular fitness.
3) Nutrition. You need to eat and eat well. And if you're doing quite a bit of wheels 1 and 2, which you should be, then you will need to eat quite a damn lot.
4) Rest and recuperation. This is really, really important, and often disregarded. You need to give your body time to recuperate, especially since resistance training involves pushing your body's muscles to the point where they fail and need repairing. Your body needs enough time to repair the muscles before you push them to failure again. You also need plenty of sleep.

These four wheels are what will be driving the design of my program. I'll talk more about the four wheels, and my particular strategies for each, in the coming weeks.

What I'm really trying to achieve

OK so I have some measurable objectives, but am I actually doing here? Why bother doing any of this strength and fitness business at all?

Here are my reasons.
1: Life and longevity. My life is great and I want to live it for as long as I can. Heart disease is the biggest killer for Australian men and poor diet and insufficient exercise is a major factor. Sure, something is going to take me down someday, but if I can cross heart disease off the list, then whatever's next may be a long time after that.
2: Functional strength. I don't want to be a weakling. I want to be able to look after myself if I need to. And most importantly, I do NOT want to be old and frail. I want to be able to run around with my kids someday. I'm obviously going to decline in strength and vitality when I get old, but if I'm declining from a really high point, that will mean I'll be in better shape for longer as I get older, which is great.
3: Headspace. I find that the better my body is working, the better my brain works. In fact, I don't think the two are really very separate at all.
4: Plain old nerdy curiosity. I like Tim Ferriss' attitude to his body as a vehicle for experimentation. I like testing things, trying different approaches, learning about my body and how it works.
5: I like me. I like having self-respect and self-confidence, and being proud of who I am and what I've achieved. It's a good place to be.

What I'm trying to achieve

I'm finally doing what so many people recommend: setting myself some specific, measurable goals, as opposed to "get fitter" (which is a worthy goal, but rather vague).
I am setting myself the following goals and will be reporting my success or failure herein at the appropriate time:
1) I will run the City to Surf footrace (August 12th) in under 75 minutes. This will qualify me for one of the leading groups in the race the next year. In fact, I will run it in 72 minutes or under. I ran in it last year for the first time and got about 77 minutes.
2) By that time (the week of August 12th), I will be able to complete a set of 10 reps of barbell bench press with 40 kilogram plates on each end of the bar, for a total weight of about 90 kilograms (including bar). I currently weigh 73 kilograms.
3) By the end of 2012, I want to be able to do 70 pushups, and 20 wide-grip palm-forward pullups.

Those are my objectives. They include cardio, functional and non-functional strength. I'm confident I can reach these targets.

A quick aside: here is an example of the sort of healthy meal my wife and I make for weekday dinners. This is a prawn, vegetable and buckwheat noodle soup that I made tonight. It took about 30 - 40 minutes and seeing as we get four meals out of it (2 dinners and 2 lunches to take to work tomorrow), probably comes to about $6 a serve. It was super tasty and healthy.
Very rough recipe: shell 600g prawns, keeping shells. Put shells plus a slice knob of ginger and sliced birdseye chilli into 1L of chicken stock. Simmer for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, chop 1 head broccoli and 200g button mushrooms. When broth is done, drain it, discarding solids and keeping liquid. Add vegies and 1 tablespoon of fish sauce to broth. Simmer for 2 minutes. Add prawns, simmer for 2 more minutes. Serve with cooked and refreshed buckwheat noodles. Easy! It's also crazy healthy; we used salt reduced stock, prawns are low calories, no oil used in anything, buckwheat noodles are low GI and high in fibre and protein, and ginger and chilli are so good for you its silly.

What this blog is and is not

As of tomorrow I'm starting on a self-designed and self-inflicted program of fitness, exercise and nutrition. I'm going to write a blog about it and this is it. This first post will just be explaining what the blog is and is not; I'll later explain what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, and why I'm blogging about it.
First, a little about myself. I'm a 36 year old man living in Sydney with a beautiful wife and a fulfilling IT job at a major bank. I was always one of the nerdy kids at school who wasn't strong, fit or good at sports. I did some years of kung fu after I finished high school which gave me a lot more strength and confidence. In my late 20s I pissed it away a bit and put on a bit of weight. Starting in my 30s, I started getting back into exercise and semi-regularly going to the gym for a bit of weights and cardio. That's where I've been for the last few years, though my interest and fitness level has increased a bit more recently.

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to ramp it up. I'm going to start taking it more seriously, applying a fairly strict diet and exercise program, to see how far I can take it. I've been reading a lot and doing some experimentation and research and am confident of what I can achieve. I will use this blog to outline my program, and record my efforts and results. This blog is therefore going to be a combination of a diary and a program outline. I'm not going to record every detail of every exercise, but at the end of each week I'll put up a brief rundown of what I've done, how I'm feeling and what results I'm achieving. Although I'm going to describe the plan I'll be using and why I'm using it, this blog is not a general guide or program on how to exercise or become fit. I've read some books and some internet research but I am not a physical trainer and this is not an exercise program, so don't try it at home etc.

Finally, a quick note on my main influences. I've read a bunch of books on this stuff, some great and some not-so-great, but my two main influences, and books I can unequivocally recommend that anyone with a slight interest in this stuff read, are In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (nerdy looking guy to the left) and The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss (other nerdy looking guy to the right).


In Defense of Food is probably the best book I've read on food and nutrition, and The Four Hour Body is probably the best book I've read on fitness and exercise. I'm certainly not treating them as bibles (in fact there are some chunks of each book that I will disagree with and/or ignore), but both are still excellent books and major inputs into my plan.

Over the next week I'll be explaining more about what I'm trying to achieve and why.