Over the last couple of weeks I have been making some unusually big gains in strength since I got back into weight training. It’s felt so amazing that I can almost liken it to a drug addiction – not that I know what that feels like exactly. I started in November of 2009 by joining a small gym near my house. It had been nearly 15 years since I touched a weight with any degree of seriousness. I started strength training when I was 20 years old right before joining the Navy in 1986. In 1989 I was certified as a personal trainer and went to work training clients privately as well as fitness clubs. In 1998 I changed careers and stopped weight training altogether. From 1998 to 2008 I went from 200 lbs to 290 lbs. I spent a year from November 2008 to November 2009 losing most of the fat I had accumulated by walking, running, and eating healthy food in very small portion sizes. As a reward for going a full year without faltering on my commitment, I joined a gym knowing the money spent would not go to waste. Here are my approximate starting strength levels for the basic movements:

Dead Hang Pullups: 0
Pulldowns: 90 lbs. (8 reps)
Cable Rows: 70 lbs. (8 reps)
BB Bench Press: 115 lbs (8 reps)
DB Incline Bench Press: 35 lb DBs (8 reps)
DB Shoulder Press: 25 lbs DBs (8 reps)
Leg Press: 400 lbs. (8 reps)

These are the weights I am currently lifting:

Dead Hang Pullups: 7
Pulldowns: 170 lbs. (8 reps)
Cable Rows: 150 lbs. (8 reps)
BB Bench Press: 205 lbs (4 reps)
DB Incline Bench Press: 70 lb DBs (6 reps)
DB Shoulder Press: 65 lbs DBs (6 reps)
Leg Press: 800 lbs. (5 reps)

So on average I have about doubled my strength in most movements. It’s amazing how good it feels to be able to lift these kinds of weights. A great deal of this adaptation is neuromuscular rather than actual new muscle tissue development but I estimate I have gained about 10-15 lbs. of new muscle since I started. These kinds of numbers make the act of going to the gym kind of like going to an amusement park. I can’t wait to see how far I can take my strength potential. It’s going to be a great new year.

It’s so easy to talk ourselves out of exercising. Making excuses just seems like a mental process we can’t escape. There is something I have found that really works at integrating a fitness routine into your lifestyle so that it becomes difficult to talk yourself out of. This one thing is the MOST important thing to keep in mind in the earliest stages of an exercise plan…

Consistency.

At the beginning, consistency training is EVERYTHING.

When we think of getting into shape we immediately think of getting our body into shape, but we rarely put very much thought into changing our mindsets.  Since our minds are making all the decisions its important that we wire ourselves to first ensure we stick to any fitness routine we plan to undertake. After all, whats the point of starting on a fitness program if you just end up quitting a few weeks or months into it? Training ourselves to be consistent is all about training the mind. If you don’t do this first, then you are MUCH more likely to quit your fitness program.

When we wake up in the morning and look at that difficult and grueling workout ahead of us, it’s very easy for our mind to talk us out of it. The secret to making this automatic is:

Don’t make initial workouts hard or difficult.

Make them easy. So easy that your mind can’t really come up with valid excuses not to do it.

In fact don’t even make them work – make them fun. Go for a walk. How hard is walking around the block? OK, it may be difficult for some. If walking around the block is difficult then walk 100 feet and back. It doesn’t matter very much WHAT you do as much as it does that you DO SOMETHING, AND DO IT CONSISTENTLY!

Start with 3 times per week, every other day. By making the exercise simple, it becomes much easier to stick to and build that consistency you need. Over time your mind will re-wire and begin to think of this as a very necessary activity in your life. Once that consistent foundation is built, you can start increasing the intensity of your workouts and you will have a MUCH easier time sticking to your routines and feeling great.

If you are anything like me you will actually start to have the opposite problem – staying OUT of the gym on days when you need to rest.

Something unusual happened to me today after my morning workout at the gym. I noticed a new guy working out. He was wearing jeans and not really sweating much but he was lifting respectable weight and appeared to know what he was doing, but he seemed slightly out of place. He said good morning to me and I reciprocated. No big deal. He later introduced himself and we started talking in between our sets. He was a friendly guy but something just didn’t seem quite right about him. Was he gay? He sure didn’t seem gay by any known characteristic I would associate with someone being gay. After I finished my workout and was about to leave he came over to me and said “So you take care of your physical self here at the gym but what do you do to take care of your spiritual self?”

Oh no.

I just knew what the next few words were going to be out of his mouth. Yes, he was trying to sell me his religion. And here I thought he was just a nice guy with no hidden agenda. Now if there ever was a sure fire way to erode the faith I have in people to just be nice without the need to change them or sell them something, this was it. So we went a few rounds of him trying to convince me with his dogma and bible quotations and I tried to get him to show me who he was and not just keep regurgitating what he had read or what someone had told him. Maybe I got through to him, but I doubt it. Eventually I just had to end the conversation and leave.

I’ve been watching the Tour de France lately and becoming very interested in the athletes and just what kinds of power they generate on the various sections of a stage. As it turns out they are generating, on average about 250-300 watts. Roughly estimated this comes out to about 150-200 watts on flat sections, 200-300 watts on low grade climbs, 400-600 watts on steep climbs and 600-1000+ watts for sprints.

Now I am by no means a serious cyclist. I don’t even ride an upright bike. I ride a recumbent bike recreationally and rarely ever do organized rides. I have done a few centuries and plan to do more, but for me cycling is only 1 component of my fitness landscape. I do the vast majority of my cycling on a stationery recumbent bike at home. Luckily this bike gives me a digital watts reading so I was eager to see what it felt like to generate 200+ watts over a period of time. I normally don’t even look at watts when I ride so I had no real idea what I was typically generating on a daily basis. As it turns out watts is the only real universal method of measuring the power someone is generating for a given body weight and heart rate. This bike has 16 levels and I usually ride at lvl 10-14 at a speed that generates about 80-100 watts with my heart rate in the low range at 110-120bpm. It’s a pretty easy ride and serves as the initial 40 minute phase of my early morning exercise.

After coming to understand what the Tour De France rides are generating I decided to see what I could do on my own bike. I started out and used to first 10 minutes to warm up and work my way up to level 16 and get to 200 watts. At 200 watts I was sweating hard, but my heart rate was only about 140-150bpm. Still a long ways from my maximum of 185bpm. I kept up 200 watts for 30 minutes and it felt great. Certainly not easy, but very doable and I think I could have gone another 40 minutes at 200 watts without too much more effort. Distance covered was about 15 miles and calories burned was about 500-600. So this was it. The limits of this bike have been reached. The only way I can make it any harder is to spin faster.

I also tried out the bikes at the gym (upright and recumbents) to get a comparison of the wattage accuracy. Those bikes are Cybex Cyclone models and are very smooth. It turns out the gym bikes gave me readings about 50 watts higher than my home bike for about the same levels of exertion. So if they are more accurate then I was actually generating closer to 250 watts instead of 200 for those 30 minutes. According to the Pros, I should be able to sustain generating at least 4 watts per kilogram of body weight to compete at low level amateur cyclist levels – since I weigh 97 kilograms this means I need to be generating nearly 400 watts sustained. OUCH! OK, so I have some work to do. Will report more in a few months.

I still need to do some more tests with my heart rate to see if the exertion is the same on both, but doing this experiment has given me a little better understanding of what kinds of power the Tour De France cyclists are generating for long periods of time and over those grueling 21 days.