Tag Archives: fitness

Project 42 – 2 week absence?

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My brother is going to slap me and then remind me to walk for 15 min every day…  I am obviously having consistency problems but I like working out and I want to be healthy so I will not quit.  If I start out a week missing Monday than it is twice as hard to go on Tuesday and even harder on Wednesday, etc…  I did work out a couple times over the last two weeks but missed most days for lots of different “reasons”, mostly work related…  I do have a beautiful new Redwood Planter Box with a Tomato Garden all protected from gophers and other pests and varmints… 🙂

I worked the Elliptical for 45 minutes and did upper body weights (except core)…  I want to run tomorrow either on street or treadmill…  I did weigh in at 250 lbs last week also…

Project 42 – “Ronnie Lott” – Week 9…

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OK…  This is becoming a habit!  I am actually exercising every day (almost) without thinking too much about it.  🙂  I must write more so I can remember the workouts better.  Today, I took a video “spinning” class…  It was great!  I started off with a warm up to soft music with a very “fit” guy on his bike guiding me through a meditation type warm up and ended up riding through the clouds to new age music with his soft, encouraging voice saying “keep going” and “your doing great”…  I think I am in love with this guy!  😉  I felt kind of silly and looked over my shoulder a few times to see if anyone was watching me enjoy his soothing voice.  However, the groove I was in was soon eclipsed by the pain in my butt…  I did not have any riding (padded) shorts on so the mounting agony forced me to say goodbye to “Mr Wonderful” and move to the recumbent after 25 minutes.  Maybe I’ll get some serious padding and try a real spinning class soon at the other gym.

So, I finished with another 25 minutes on the recumbent and kept the Watts between 233 and 245 with the heart rate varying between 137 and 145.  Also, I did 3 sets of 10 reps on all the upper body machines which are set up quite nicely to get through quickly.  I had a little shoulder pain from the chest/shoulder reps but I can reduce the pain significantly by lifting more slowly and doing a few less reps.  Let’s see if I can recall the previous week:

Yesterday (4-26), Hard skating for 45 minutes at the ice rink with a few rests.  (Training for a return to ice hockey soon)

Tuesday (4-25), Elliptical machine for 45 minutes.

Monday (4-24), Elliptical machine for 45 minutes.

Friday (4-21), Went surfing for 2 hours.  Lots of paddling but not sustained heart rate training.

Thurs (4-20), Elliptical machine for 45 minutes.  3 sets of 10 reps on most of the upper body machines.

NEVER QUIT!!!

STOP Targeting!

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I am absolutely sick and tired of seeing exercise tips on TV and magazines that are recommended on the basis of “problem areas”. You women are constantly given these bogus tips for the backs of the arms, hips and mid section. Tried em yet? Didn’t work, did they? That’s because the real true information all these companies and products fail to tell you is that you can’t spot reduce fat on your body. The reason your arms are flabby and you have big thighs and butt is not because the muscles in those areas are soft or drooping – it’s because there is a large amount of FAT there. Actively recruited muscles burn fat. They do not burn fat from specific areas of your body. Let me say that again…

MUSCLES DO NOT BURN FAT FROM SPECIFIC AREAS OF YOUR BODY.

Let me also state that no muscle group in the body should be focused on at the expense of all the others. ALL the muscles in your body need to be trained. ALL the muscles in your body need to be strong. By focusing on certain areas of the body you put your muscles out of strength balance. You also rob yourself of the greatest possible elevation of your metabolism which is what you need to burn the fat.

However, this fat burning process will only happen if you have a calorie deficit in your body by way of diet (intake) vs activity (output). The more muscles you use in your workouts, the more fat and energy you will use. Strength training will break down the muscles and cause them to adapt to lifting heavier weights. This adaptive recovery process uses energy and burns calories. This process takes place primarily at night while you sleep. So if you want to burn maximum number of calories while you sleep at night then you better be working out with heavy weights (this means a weight you can lift at least 8 times but no more than 12) and using all the major muscle groups in your body. The reason these companies and products keep leading you to believe these lies is because they know it will fail and keep bringing you back to purchase the next product they plan to roll out. So stop listening to all the plastic looking models posing as trainers on TV, and start listening to the facts.

Think Yourself Skinny?

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OK so here is the latest technique to losing weight. Are you ready? It’s called habituation. The idea is that by visualizing yourself eating a food you really enjoy eating, you stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain enough so that when the time comes to actually eat the food you will eat less of it and be satisfied. Simple, right?

*beating head against keyboard*

The problem I have with habituation isn’t whether it works or not, but rather that weight loss seems to be the goal of this technique rather than building a strong, lean, healthy body by eating healthy, nutrient dense foods. Instead we are trying to play tricks on our heads by visualizing eating junk food so that when we actually eat junk food we don’t eat as much of it and lose weight. How many people do you know who’ve gotten fat from overeating healthy food? I certainly have never heard of such a person. The really great thing about eating healthy, nutrient rich, un-processed foods is that they usually taste just good enough to keep us interested and satisfied but not so much that we binge on them. Perfect.  Why mess with this successful formula?

I’m going to keep saying this in hopes that I may actually reach at least 1 or 2 people. There are no shortcuts. Having a healthy, strong, sexy looking and sexy feeling body requires hard work, proper nutrition and adequate sleep. Weight loss is not the goal. HEALTHY BODY RECOMPOSITION is the goal. This means maximizing muscle activity and allowing fat stores to adjust to proper, healthy levels. Stop looking for shortcuts unless you want to keep failing. Educate yourself! The information is out there if you pay attention and know where to look. LEARN about your body. MOVE your body. The panacea is simple and millions of people are already engaged in it – it’s called EXERCISE! DO IT. LIVE IT. LOVE IT.

My Running Story

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In the 90’s I worked as a personal trainer and gym instructor for about 8 years which gave me a lot of knowledge about fitness, nutrition and similar topics. I changed my career which took me away from fitness and into a desk chair until 2008. In that time I gained about 80 pounds.

Now I have been running off and on for about 25 years and I have only owned 2 pairs of running shoes. A lot of that time running was done barefoot on the beach. I would constantly change up my running surface from the soft sand to the hardpack sand to the shallow water. It always felt great, but I never tried doing the barefoot thing on the asphalt. All that time I had the sneaking suspicion that the marketing hype and rhetoric we are fed by the traditional running community that a good running shoe is necessary to avoid or minimize injury, was bullshit.

I finally made the solid decision to get off my ass and get back to where I was 15 years earlier and lose the 80 pounds I had gained. Now I’ve always had a sort of love/hate relationship with running. I’m sure many of you can understand this. Sometimes it just feels right and other days it just feels like a chore. The pain I deal with is in the hips and knees, but they were always manageable and for the most part I accepted them as something I couldn’t change. At some point in 2009 I saw an interview with Christopher McDougall who wrote a book called “Born to Run“. For those unfamiliar with this book, ‘Born to Run’ explores the life and running habits of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, arguably the greatest distance runners in the world. And these indians run ridiculous distances of 50-100+ miles across crazy rough and steep terrains in nothing but strap on sandals.

Digging deeper and really scouring the web for more information on barefoot running, I came across Barefoot Ted and the Vibram Five Finger shoes. I kept reading more and more until I had a strong understanding of what was going on and what I needed to do. If you haven’t seen Barefoot Ted‘s blog I highly recommend it for a wealth of information on the topic.

I first decided I needed to change the way I run, but I did it with my shoes on. I needed to stop heel striking or heel ‘rolling’ as some call it and start landing on my forefoot. Knowing what I did about kinesiology and biomechanics it slowly became clear to me how the foot was really supposed to be operating when running. OF COURSE!! The heel was never meant to be used as a striking implement. The more I looked at it and studied it I realized the heel is basically used for 2 things; balance and stability. When the foot and leg that are in the air, they need to be relaxed. After my first run doing this my calves were very sore. This was as it should be. By design, my calves got very strong, very fast. Look at the way a sprinter runs. They never touch their heels to the ground. Sprinter shoes don’t even have heel tread in most cases and the spikes are all in the forefoot.

So for about 6 months I did all my running very consciously striking on forefoot. It felt amazing!  I could run clearly faster and farther with almost no pain that I had from heel strike running. And it was much more effortless. It just felt natural. I was increasing my distances from 3-4 miles to 8-10 miles.

Much more recently I finally decided it was time to make the full switch over to the VFF shoe and see what it felt like. I kept my distance to a short 2 miles to see what the physical effect would be. My reaction was like a kid on christmas morning. Wow did this feel amazing.  It was like going from driving a loud, old, beat up VW, to driving a fast, sleek, silent european sports car. After that first run in the VFF I knew I would never put on my old running shoes again. My calves found a new level of soreness, but I loved it and knew it was only a matter of time before they were strong enough for me to go much longer distances. And the greatest thing was that my heel had plenty of room to operate when I was landing without hitting the ground. All that extra padding in the heel of my old running shoes was encouraging very poor running form which gave me all sorts of problems. TERRIBLE! The good news is that all those problems are gone. My longest distance currently is 12 miles and my left foot hurt pretty bad at the end, but only because I sprained my foot 6 months earlier. There is no way I could have done 12 miles in shoes.

I have lost those 80 lbs and I love sneering at large footwear companies and I love even more getting in conversations with runners who still wear foot coffins and introducing them to the quiet, peaceful panacea that is barefoot running. Many more companies are coming out with minimalist “barefoot” style shoes as more people get wise to the misinformation we have all accepted for so long about running shoes.