Enough with the excuses already

I like to pride myself on being pretty dedicated to my workout routine. And most of the time I am very good about it. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an internal battle going on every day to just get myself to the gym. It starts from the moment I wake up, one after another as I begin my day I rattle off excuses. “I’m sore, I’m tired, I have a lot to do today, I will go tomorrow, its just one day not a big deal.” This goes on and on throughout the day sometimes continuing while I am getting dressed for the gym and on the really bad days this thought process will stay with me on the drive there.

Once I get there though, its gone, and the focus is there. I flip gears and my thought process becomes, “Write down your exercises, pick a good song, rack your weights, lift, rest, repeat, next exercise.” And before I know it my workout is over, I wasn’t too sore or too tired and I still have plenty of time to do everything else I need to do. And this got to me to thinking about how often in life its really that simple.

For a lot of people we have this constant stream of doubt and excuses running through our heads telling us no. And it is hard not to listen to them, but once you start ignoring it and start down the path you will no longer be hearing those excuses. Even better once you have accomplished something not only will you know the excuses were silly but you will know that you were capable of doing what you wanted to all along. So, I consider these excuses as a fun little mental warm up now as long as I can keep overcoming them I think they will only make me better and hopefully beating my excuses to skip a workout will lead to me beating excuses when I have doubts in other areas of my life.

My fitness plan

I see it all over the place, people are very concerned about health and fitness. So, the amount of info is immense and overwhelming and even more what works for one person might not work for another. In what follows I want to describe how I keep up the fitness habit, stay motivated, bounce back, ride the highs and lows and manage to still enjoy some of the less healthy pleasures in life.

I am no expert but in my quest to leading a healthier life I have made it a point to read as much as I can on the subject from experts and regular practitioners. With that said here is my philosophy on fitness. I begin by focusing separately on the two major factors and applying similar techniques to each: Nutrition and Exercise.

 

Nutrition:

 

Have a stated goal and time frame. At the beginning of this year I returned from the National Championship game in Arizona weighing a lot more than I liked. 211 pounds actually and it wasn’t the good kind. So, I made a short term goal to lose 20 lbs. in 3 months. This is a little less than 2 lbs a week. A range that is perfectly healthy.  

 

So with that goal as my starting point I knew I had to make changes and study myself to find out what was working. I became very neurotic about what I was eating. At first I had cut out all but minimal carbs and was actually under eating. After a week I had lost 4 pounds, more than I liked. So, I reworked my eating habits and did a little research into a more balanced diet.

 

Track your progress. I tracked both my weight and dietary intake every day. Weighing myself first thing every morning and using www.fitday.com to track everything I ate. I still do both today though my goals are different.

 

Stay on schedule. For me eating well is not a problem as long as I stick to the plan. The plan being 6 meals a day. As long as I do this I have very limited cravings and those that I do have are easily overcome with little tricks. However, when I get off schedule and go more than three hours without eating something during the day I begin to lose focus and tend to get caught up giving in to unhealthy options. Once I take that path the rest of the day usually ends up being shot. But on a day where I plan ahead and have 6 meals scheduled it is not hard to go the 2 or 3 hours between without snacking or eating something I shouldn’t.

 

Remove temptations. Simply put if I want to eat something that is not good for me I have to go out to buy it. I do not buy junk at the grocery to keep in my house so anytime I go off course it is a one time purchase such as a restaurant or something I purchase to have just that once.

 

Allow free days. Or free meals if that is all you need. I try to eat healthy all week but come Saturdays when college football is on I allow myself to enjoy bar food and some drinks. Or if I am going to the movies I get the buttery popcorn. In the end its not going to kill your progress. I like to take 90-10 approach to eating; if you eat well 90% of the time the 10% when you don’t is not going to stop you.

 

 

Exercise

 

 

Have a stated goal and timeframe. Just like with nutrition you need to have goals with exercise, they usually go hand in hand. When I was in college I took on a position in my fraternity that required me to be a little bit stronger than I was at the time so I spent the summer getting stronger and putting on weight. Over about 8 weeks I gained 15 pounds of muscle and got a lot stronger. Back then it was a lot easier to do. This year with the goal of losing weight I worked out knowing that my goal was to burn more calories than I was taking in.

 

 

So with my goal of losing weight I molded a program at the gym that would help with my progress. In truth it was not much different than it would be had I been trying to gain. I still lifted weights, but my focus was less on increasing the amount of weight each week. And I added more cardio to my routine.

 

Track your progress. Again the same principles apply. When I go to the gym I bring a notebook with me and record what I have done. It helps me see what is working and what isn’t, what I like and what I don’t. And it helps me shape my next workout.

 

 

Stay on schedule. I have experimented with many different splits in the 12 years I have been working out but the one that continuously works for me is a 2 on, 1 off split. Anymore than 2 days in a row and I feel like I am overdoing it, any less than 2 and I am likely to not stay motivated. So, I work out 2 days, then rest 1 and repeat. Within this structure I change the actual workout once every four weeks or so just to keep it interesting.

 

Lift weights and use Intervals. I am not someone who likes cardio, never have. But I do understand that it has value. Though, if I only had time to do one I would lift since lifting weights is the only real weight to change body composition. Still, after pushing myself through a difficult medium paced lifting routine I usually get in some cardio. I have done the slow steady state and the high intensity. Doing long bouts of moderate paced cardio may work for some but I get so bored I am likely to not get a whole lot of benefit from it. However, with high intensity intervals I can do a warm up, do a bunch of sets and a cool down before I have time to lose focus. I also usually feel like I could die afterwards which for me is the sign of a good workout.  

 

 

A few other things to note:

 

Fake it till you make it. I am not sure where I read this motto but it is a good one to use. A lot of days the gym is the last place I want to go. It could be rainy outside and you don’t want to leave the house or you have just had a long day at the office and you have no energy. Go anyway. Just getting there is half the battle. A lot of times you will find that as you get into it you will end up putting in a good workout. Or even if your workout is half ass, its still better than no workout at all and chances are you will eat better afterwards.

 

Take breaks. This is similar to Free days in a way but its more than that. When I go on vacation or go visit my family for a holiday I leave my goals behind. That does not mean I am not mindful of the big picture, it just means that whether I am in New Orleans or at my moms for dinner I am going to enjoy myself no matter what is put in front of me. And I will not be worried about missing workouts. For a few days in a row its ok to get off track as long as you are planning to get right back into it once you return to your normal routine.

 

Do not constantly stay in one mode. A lot of people have problems with this. Amateur weightlifters stay in constant bulking mode and end up getting out of shape. People trying to lose weight will push themselves for too long and end up binging until they regain what they had lost and all progress is shot. Instead of such extremes ease from losing to maintaining back to losing or from gaining to maintaining back to gaining. This year, once I hit my goal of reaching 190, it was not in my original timeframe but I got there, I decided to try to maintain for a while. I eat a little less restrictively and I am not as hardcore at the gym. My plan is to stay within a few pounds of 190 for a little while before setting a new goal and timeframe to do more.

 

Constantly readjust. Life does not happen in a vacuum and we are not science projects. Real life sometimes does get in the way of progress. When this happens adjust to it, do not let it stop you in your tracks. When March came and I was close to my 12 week goal but had to stop exercising and was away from home for two weeks I knew I would be set back. So, I changed my end date and kept at my goal. And eventually I did make it and now that I reached my goal I am trying to decide what my next one is while I maintain the progress I have already made.

 

 

 

There you have it, not sure if I wrote this to help anyone or just give myself something to look at and remind myself what I need to be doing. Either way, I think this will help motivate me and maybe it will help someone else. There are a ton of other little things that I do and other people do to keep up the habit of living a healthy lifestyle, so I know I can not put it all into one post. So to all those who are gym rats good luck and don’t hurt yourselves.

Why I do it

5 days a week I workout, I spend hours a day preparing meals, I eat like clockwork. And I just don’t think people really understand why people like I do it. Why do we lift weights and run? Why don’t we eat crap like everyone else? I can’t speak for everyone but I can say that for me it comes down to three things in no particular order: 1. Health, 2. Challenge and 3. The inability to be content.

 

The health reasons are obvious so I won’t waste any time on that but the others are significant. Challenge was my original reason to get started, after growing up playing sports competitively you kind of get addicted to it. I started lifting because of sports and then one day I stopped playing sports because of lifting. I still remember when I told my mom that I didn’t want to play sports anymore because I could challenge myself everyday in the gym. This inevitably led to my mom using hilarious terms like “ripped” and “shredded”. Anyway, the point is that I found a personal challenge that I can enjoy everyday whether it is running faster, lifting more or just looking better. And that leads into my inability to be content.

 

I always feel like I could be better. So I read up on nutrition a lot, I am constantly looking for ways to improve. But, this also means I am rarely happy, which could be a problem. I lose 15 pounds and I want to lose 10 more, I hit one goal and then create a new one. It’s a full blown obsession in something that you can never really be perfect at. Because there is no end date, no time when you can just stop, it’s a constant battle with yourself. And that is hard for a lot of people, a never ending struggle, so I guess I am fortunate that I have the will power to do it. To make my meals for the next day every night before I go to bed, to pack my gym bag, to schedule the time in the gym and to work hard once I get there. Most people don’t have the determination to do that, they want to look good, but they don’t have the mental toughness to make it a reality. Ronnie Coleman said that “everyone wants to be huge, but nobody wants to lift heavy ass weight” and while that probably isn’t true for everyone you can apply it to a lot of other areas. In this society an importance has been placed on appearance, so people generally want to look pleasing to others, yet so few want to do the work. They want magic cures as if we were all students at Hogwarts. There are no magic cures, there is no quick fix, it takes a lot of hard work, and a wealth of knowledge.

 

I was prompted to write this after reading about the US has the highest percentage of people considered obese by BMI. Now, I do not agree with the BMI fully but even if they used other standards this country would still fail health standards atrociously. And what really gets me in this whole thing is that all these overweight and unhealthy people think I am the one missing out. But, I think they are the ones that are crazy, eating 1000 calorie burritos everyday and lying to themselves about how they are eating healthy when they have skim milk with their bacon and sausage breakfast. Don’t feel sorry for me, I like being sore, I like eating healthy, and I like the way I look a lot more than I like the taste of fast food.

Nothing tastes as good as looking good feels

I’ve always been a gym rat. I started working out as a freshman in high school, lied about my age to join my first gym and began reading about and taking supplements over ten years ago. Throughout that entire time my body has changed many times over from being 160 pounds going into my senior year of high school to hitting a massive muscular 205 before my junior year of college. Since hitting 205 back then I have had all sorts of health problems that really messed me up. I dislocated both my shoulders, got tendonitis in my elbows and had a fluid build up in my knees, have pulled my lower abs and currently have a hernia that may be forming. None of that though has kept me out of the gym for too long. I was out 3 months when I was rehabbing my shoulder but that was my longest stint outside the gym. The problem was that I was always able to eat whatever I wanted as long as I was working out and still feel good. That was until I left school.

 

After leaving school I spent a few months living in Jacksonville, all I did back then was eat and workout while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. During that time I was doing lots of cardio and weighed about 190 before moving to Virginia for a job. During the first few months here I had shrunk down to 180 before getting back into form and getting on a good workout schedule. I still wasn’t overly concerned with what I was eating and over the next couple of years it would hurt me. I spent 18 months traveling for work, living out of hotel rooms, eating fast food, not paying attention to what I was putting into my body, not working out consistently, and eventually I got soft. Before I knew it was January 2007 and I was weighing an unimpressive 208 pounds.

 

Clearly unhappy with that situation I began researching ways to get back to a weight and into shape that I was proud of. For about 6 weeks I did a carb cycling diet but it left me hungry most days and I was actually under eating.  After that I finally got smart, bought myself a digital scale and began using healthy practices. I figured out approximately how many calories I was burning in a day and how many calories I could eat while still losing weight. I now know that I can eat about 200 grams of protein and 200 of carbs if I only eat 45 grams of fat and probably lose about two pounds a week. I eat six small meals a day and all of my choices are sensible, good fats, whole wheat carbs and veggies and strong protein sources. And now that I have thoroughly bored you with the details, here are the results, I am down to 195, eating well, putting together solid workouts and I plan on being 185 by the end of May.