Did I Do It All Wrong?

I'm changing things up again.  By now you must be thinking that I'm the most scatterbrained guy around. That's probably partially true, but I promise I have my reasons for switching things up.  I've come to realize that I made some mistakes with my 12 Week Challenge, and it's time to set things right.

For the past few months I've been working hard to lose fat, in the healthiest way possible. Being healthy has always been a big part of this for me. Lately I've begun to question my approach though. I have focused on restricting calories and exercising as much as my recovery would allow. Is this really the best way?

Something I read the other day made me rethink this whole concept.  If you are thrown off by all the talk of caveman diets, and paleo nutrition, I apologize, but bear with me while I explain my thought process. If one of our caveman ancestors (I like to picture Bam-Bam) was suffering from a lack of food (during the winter, or other times when food was hard to come by) would he be more active or would he be trying to preserve the energy he did have?  By exercising hard on a calorie deficit, this is exactly what we are doing.  There is no way little Bam-Bam would be out running hill sprints unless absolutely necessary.  This is the modern approach to fat loss though.  Reduce calories and exercise more.  How does our body respond to this situation?  Well, first it takes energy away from what it considers to be non-essential, like the reproductive system, and gives that energy to the brain.  No need to be making babies if you don't have enough brain power to maintain sensible thoughts...memories of Saturday night? The second thing the body does is hang on for dear life to the fat stores you do have left. There is a hormone called leptin that takes messages from our fat cells and controls fat storage accordingly.  When body fat gets low, and there isn't much food coming in, leptin freaks out and goes into fat storage mode.  By pushing yourself too hard while not eating enough, your body is going to start making all kinds of hormonal changes that you will not like.

The other problem I've noticed about restricting calories and focusing on macro nutrient targets is that I am becoming food-focused.  Eating should not involve math.  That's the bottom line.  We are supposed to eat healthy, natural foods until we feel satisfied, and then we stop eating.  I haven't gotten to the point of dreaming about cakes and cookies, but I think that I'm wasting a lot of mental energy on diet.  Also, a big part of hormonal health is stress control, and constantly thinking about food can result in a lot of underlying stress that I don't want or need.

You know that I'm always down to try something new and experiment on myself, so that is exactly what is going to happen.  The best part is that I already did a lot of the leg work during the 12 Week Challenge.  I have a pretty good idea about what kinds of food make me feel the best.  When I was doing the high fat/ low carb diet, I was killing it.  I had great energy levels, wasn't a moody jackass, and had the libido of a thirteen year old at the Playboy mansion. So, I'm switching back to that style of eating. No more tracking macros and weighing chicken breasts. I will still pay attention to the carbs that I eat, because they seem to have the biggest impact on fat loss (for me at least), but I am going to eat protein and healthy fats until I feel good and happy.  This may take some fine tuning, but that's part of the process.

Learning about nutrition is silly sometimes, because there are four thousand experts with ten thousand different philosophies.  It gets extra confusing because you can certainly get a great body without being healthy.  There are all kinds of nutritional experts who talk about treating body builders and other physique competitors after their shows.  In a lot of cases these people completely wreck their metabolisms, hormone balances, and develop eating disorders in an attempt to get down to super low bodyfat levels.  I'm not interested in becoming a train wreck with abs.

My thinking, and I may be completely wrong about all this, is that fat loss and muscle gain will happen naturally as a result of the work I do in the gym. I just need to change my focus to being healthy and start really listening to my body.  I will be sure to share everything I find out with you.  If it doesn't work, and I wind up a big fatty, you may not want to copy me on this one.

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Wasting Your Time is Awesome!

I'm at the gym the other day waiting patiently for the one and only squat rack.  Don't judge, you North Americans, I was lucky enough to find a gym with one good squat rack.  The squat rack at my previous gym was more like something that got ripped out of an elementary school playground sometime in the eighties.  Anyways, I finished up my deadlifts, and was hoping to do some front squats before going home.  This big guy (not good big) had been busting out set after set of squats, and I realized that he was not giving up that squat rack anytime soon.  I conceded, and hopped on the leg press.  I finished my workout, did a little finisher, and was packing up to go when I asked super squats if he was getting tired yet.  He'd done squats non-stop for the forty five minutes that I'd been there, and who knows how long he'd been at it before I got there.  He was starting to look like grossly bloated marathon runner staggering over the finish line.  He replied that he was tired, but still had three hours to go.  

"Wait, what?!  Three more hours?"  I asked. 
"Yeah, I've gotta do four hours everyday.  I'm too fat, and need to lose weight." he said. I started to cry on the inside, but managed to blurt out,
"Don't you have a job?"

Where do these insane ideas come from?  The more I try to learn about fitness and nutrition, the more I'm blown away by the absolutely insane information that is so readily available. 

Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule?  It states that in any endeavour, 80% of the effects will come from 20% of the causes. Your job is to find out what causes you can focus your attention on to maximize the effects.  For fat loss, what are the different causes you can focus your effort on?  Weight training, cardio, diet, eating so called super foods, praying to the ab gods, etc.  Which one of these will give you 80% of the results?  The answer is diet.  If your diet is spot on, you can lose fat without doing anything else.  To maximize your rate of fat loss from 80% to 90% add some cardio.  To build some muscle, or at the very least prevent muscle loss, train with heavy weights.  

Diet is the cause that will yield 80% of the results.  Once you let this sink in, you can start to take all that misplaced effort and focus it on meeting your dietary targets.  This is why fat loss is so excruciatingly painful sometimes.  We are hard-wired to want to do more, to make things happen faster.  I'm sorry, but it doesn't work like that.  The only thing that you can do more of is eating less, and being more patient.  Four hours of squatting is not going the answer.

Straighten your diet out.  Figure out where your energy is best used, and use it there. I hate spending time on something and getting very little in return, and I know you feel the same way. So, back to super squats.  I told him about my quest to learn as much as possible about fat loss and nutrition, and that I personally have lost around 20 kg in the past three years.  I asked what his diet looked like.  No fried foods he said. If I had asked about his squat program I'm sure I would have gotten a run down of a fancy template designed to increase volume exponentially week by week in order to blah blah blah.....but, for diet the answer was no fried foods.

Please don't misplace your efforts.  Focus on the causes that will give you the most results. 

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Goals, Goals, Goals

The jaw on that guy is something else eh? Do you think he could get a Big Mac in with one bite?  

One of the most important things I learned during the 12 Week Challenge is the power of goal setting, and in particular, the power of publicly announcing goals. It's amazing how much more focused you can be when you have clear goals, and deadlines.  I can't recommend this enough.  Imagine yourself in one year.  Where are you?  What are you doing?  What would make you happier than anything else?  Write down every answer you can think of.  After you've written them all down, order them from the most important thing that will have to greatest impact on your life, to the things that would be nice to do, but are not as essential.  Take the top five goals and write down every possible action you can take to make these things happen.  Then take these actions and make schedules and deadlines to complete them in.  If you take fifteen minutes to sit and write this down, I promise you that it will make a big difference in your jaw...er, I mean, life.  

This will be a new tradition on this blog.  I would love to have other people post their goals on here as well.  Putting your goals out for everyone to see is a great way to guarantee success. Here are my goals to be accomplished by October 31st.

1. I have visible abs at a bodyweight of 75kg.
2. I can squat 115 kg for five with perfect form.
3. I can deadlift 140 kg for three with perfect form
4. I can bench 90 kg for three with perfect form.
5. I can overhead press 70 kg for one with perfect form.
6. My work capacity is good enough that I can lift weights four times a week and also sprint three times.
7. My arms are 14 inches around.
8. My legs are 22.5 inches around.
9. I have started to introduce more carbs back into my diet, and am focusing on gaining muscle while remaining lean.
10.  My ankle and hip mobility are much better, and I can sit in a deep squat for ten minutes comfortably.

To clarify, the weight lifting goals all refer to weights and reps within the Wendler 531 program that I'm doing, not just walking into the gym and hammering out three reps. That's it.  These are the three month goals that I set for myself at the end of July.  I reread them everyday, and make sure that each and every day I am taking steps to achieve them.  The interesting/frustrating thing about fitness goals is that they really can't be rushed.  The biggest factor in achieving these goals is having a well designed plan, and sticking to it without question.  Patience and persistence are a must when you are getting into shape.

So, what do you think?  Will I accomplish these goals?  I bet that simply by clicking publish on this post, I will be further along on my way.  Join in.  The comment section below is open for you to post your goals, and make things happen.  The more the merrier. I'm also really curious to see what sorts of goals people have.  If your goals are completely unrelated to fitness that's great too.  Post them anyway, and watch when in three months you've accomplished all of them!

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What do you do in the gym anyway?

Walk into any gym anywhere in the world and there are people doing all kinds of weird things.  A lot of people must think some of the things I do in the gym are weird.  But there is a difference between weird and effective, and weird and pointless.  You need a good plan every time you enter the gym.  You should be out of there in less than an hour, feeling like you left nothing on the table. Your time in the gym should be based on intensity.  You should be working hard if you want to see results.  If you are working out for two hours, are you really pushing yourself?  

A typical workout should consist of four parts, the warm up, the heavy part, the "pump it up"part, and the finisher. Here is a brief outline of what each of these means.

Warm Up

You need to be warming up properly.  This does not mean touching your toes three times, swinging your arms from side to side and then loading three million pounds onto the bench press.  Run through a couple rounds of some bodyweight movements to get your muscles warm, and to practice some essential movement patterns.Two or three rounds of the following will do the trick.

1. Bodyweight Squats
2. Back Extensions
3. Pullups
4. Pushups or Dips
5. Hanging Leg Raises
6. Hip flexor stretches

Do as many reps as you feel is suitable for you to be thoroughly warmed up, without wearing yourself out.  This little circuit covers all the main muscle groups and should get your heart and lungs into the game too.

After getting warmed up, you need to get some mobility work in.  Hopefully you have access to foam rollers, and if you don't you can make do with a lacrosse ball (or something similar).  On lower body days roll the knots out of your glutes, lower back, IT band (the outer edge of your thigh), and the inside of your thigh.  After rolling these out, do some stretches like these to get your hips greased up.

Those stretches will mobilize your hips better than anything else. After spending some time grimacing in those positions, you should run through some of these movements to tie everything together and get your body working as a stable unit.Some good movements to do this can be seen here.

On upper body days you need to focus on your shoulders in the same way that you focused on hips for the lower body days.  Think about the postural problems you have, such as shoulders rounding forward.  What causes that?  A tight upper chest and biceps. Use this time to try to undo some of those issues, and also develop awareness of which areas need some extra attention.  This is a great general outline, but be sure to add in other stretches to address your individual problems.

Heavy Part

You're all warmed up and moving like a well oiled machine. Now you're good to start working safely.  Don't just throw your working weight on the bar and go though.  Give your nervous system a chance to get warmed up too. Start with an empty bar and incrementally add weight until you reach your working weight. The first part of your workout should be focused on strength.  Work up to an eight, five, three, or even a one rep max in one of the four main lifts.  By slowly adding weight until you reach your maximum weight, you get lots of volume done with heavy weight.  Louis Simmons of Westside Barbell has found, through years of training world champion powerlifters, that it is not necessary to do absolutely maximal weight to get stronger.  His athletes very rarely train with more than eighty percent of their one rep max, and the strongest people in the world almost always come from his gym.  An example of working up to a five rep max with 100kg would look like this,

20kg (empty bar) x 10

40 kg x 5

50kg x 5

60 kg x 5

70 kg x 5

80 kg x 5

90 kg x 5

95 kg x 5

100 kg x 5
105 kg x 5

Your goal was to get 100 kg, but you still felt strong after the 100 kg set, so you added a little bit more and went for it.  That's the beauty of this approach.  On days where you are feeling strong, push yourself.  If you are sick, or slept terribly and feel like a zombie, you may not be physically capable of giving it your all.  Listening to your body prevents injuries.

The "Pump It Up" Part

 A lot of very successful powerlifters will work up to a heavy five, three, or one rep max, do some high volume accessory work, and call it a day.  They believe that getting maximal heavy work done is the most important thing, and accessory work is done only to work on weak body parts.  For people more interested in building muscle, do your strength work first, and then work the muscles related to the main lift with lots of volume.  There are limitless ways of doing this, but the key is to do the strength work, and then move on to the bodybuilding stuff.  An example would be working up to a five rep max on the bench press, doing five sets of ten on incline dumbell bench, and then doing some tricep work.  The heavy part of your training is done to train your nervous system and muscles to work together to move heavy weight. This part of your training is done to get the muscles working and to get some blood flowing into them.  This is where you follow the bodybuilding philosophy of going for that mind-muscle connection and really feeling the muscles work with some lighter weights.  For this part choose rep ranges any where between 6-20.  For the heavy part of your workout, you are trying to break records and constantly increase the weight.  For this part your weights should be increasing over time, but you are more focused on feeling the muscles work.  Have fun here, and do drop sets, pyramids, all those things that bodybuilders love.

Finisher

After you have finished your strength and volume work, it can be fun to do a finisher to get some conditioning while you are still warmed up and ready to work. Pick a conditioning method that will take less than ten minutes, and work as hard as you can.  I wrote some ideas for conditioning in a previous post.  My personal favorites are barbell or bodyweight complexes, or a combo of the two.  This should take absolutely no more than ten minutes.  Five minutes would be an even better goal.  You've done a lot of work already, this is just thrown in to boost your metabolism a little more.

Hopefully this is a good outline to get you spending your time in the gym more efficiently.  Remember that keeping intensity up, and rest periods short is a great way to get more done in less time.  Leave the cellphone at the door.  Your Candy Crush record will never do as much for you as your squat or deadlift record.

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My Top Five Fat Loss Workouts

I recently moved, and so switched to a new gym.  But, before I left my old gym I had a really funny encounter.  I noticed a guy whom I'd chatted with from time to time, giving me an awkward up and down, so I gave him a nod.  He walked over to me, and told me that I'd gotten noticeably taller.  I told him in my haphazard Chinese that at 28 years old, it seemed unlikely that I'd had a noticeable growth spurt. I mentioned that I'd been losing fat, and he agreed that I looked thinner, but urged me to go and check my height, guaranteeing that I'd gained a few centimeters.  We agreed to disagree and the conversation turned to what I was doing to lose fat.  He was shocked to hear that I never once stepped foot on a treadmill or went jogging.  Those are the only real tried and tested ways to lose fat right?  

It seems that many people are at a loss when it comes to challenging and fun ways to burn fat. I want to share my favorite fat loss workouts with you.  These all take less than half an hour including a comprehensive warm up and cool down, and most take more like ten minutes. The principle for all of these workouts is that by exercising really intensely for a short time, you will increase your metabolic rate, and burn calories through something known as EPOC (Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption) or the so called "after burn" effect. So here are five challenging and intense, but also fun workouts.

Sprints

I've mentioned sprints before, and truly believe that they are the best cardio possible.  The only problem is that they suck.  If you truly push yourself when doing sprints, you will probably finish within ten minutes, and will need to lay on the ground begging for oxygen for another ten minutes. To have a good sprint work out you have to warm up properly.  If you don't, you WILL pull a muscle, I promise.  Jog for five minutes, do some high knee raises, butt kicks, squat jumps, side shuffles, and then some stretches for your hip flexors, hamstrings, and calves.  Pick a 40 or 50 meter path, and do two or three easy sprints, slowly increasing your speed.  Once you feel ready to push yourself safely, do your first sprint.  Keep the distance limited to 40 or 50 meters.  Sprint, immediately walk back to the start, and go again.  Do ten to fifteen sprints, gasp for air, walk for a few minutes and then go home. If you are feeling ambitious do ten burpees after each sprint, this is a great test of mental toughness.

Barbell Complexes

You are going to pick up a medium weight barbell and do three to ten different exercises without putting the bar down.  The number of reps will be the same for each movement, and should be between five and ten.  You will do all the reps on the first movement, then move on to the second movement.  After completing all the movements rest thirty to sixty seconds and then go again.  Repeat four or five times. The first time you try this only do three different movements, and add more as you see fit. The first time you will also want to be very conservative with the amount of weight you use.  The first round might be easy, but by the time you've done five rounds it won't be.  If you choose a weight that is too heavy, and the last round takes five minutes to complete because you keep dropping the bar, you have missed the point of this style of workout. Here are a couple of examples.

Beginner

Deadlift x 10

Power Clean x 10

Front Squat x10

Advanced

Deadlift x6

Shrug x6

Power Clean x6

Front Squat x6

Push Press x 6

Back Squat x6

You can program these yourself with a bit of common sense.  Arrange the movements such that you are working from the floor to the roof, and if you want to really go for it, work your way back down to the floor again.

Bodyweight Conditioning

This has always been one of my favorites because it's just so easy to do.  I often run out to the park, think of what I can use to workout, and then get at it.  My favorite style of programming for park workouts is to choose four or five different movements, start at a certain number of reps, and then subtract one rep each round.  For example

Round 1

Box Jumps x 12

Chin ups x 12

Lunges x12 per leg

Dips x 12

Round 2 is eleven reps of each, Round 3 is ten reps, etc. until you are down to only one rep.  It seems like it would get easier as you go, but because each round is faster you get less time to rest before doing the same movement again. With this style, try not to rest between rounds if you can. Get out to the park, take a look at what you have to work with, and get at it.

Jump Rope

Muhammad Ali did it, I rest my case.  This has been a main conditioning tool of successful athletes for a long time. If you can't jump rope efficiently now, just be patient.  It really takes no time at all to get proficient enough to burn fat.  My advice is to keep your elbows tucked as close to your body as you can, and really try to feel the tension on the rope.  You should be able to do it with your eyes closed. When jumping rope for fat loss, intervals work really well. Jump rope for one minute, rest for thirty seconds, and go again.  Repeat for ten to fifteen rounds.  My favorite jump rope workout is one minute of rope work, followed by ten burpees, then straight back to the rope.  You can replace the burpees with dumbell swings, jump squats, dumbell cleans, whatever you can think of.  I think the jump rope with burpees may be almost as tough as hill sprints, if you can push yourself and avoid resting after the burpees.  Catching your breath while jumping rope as fast as you can is intense.

Crossfit

Crossfit posts a new workout almost every day.  Go on their website, find a workout that appeals to you, check the times that other people are completing the workouts in, and go beat those times.  It can be humbling to see how fast some people are able to bang out some of the workouts on there.  My only advice here would be to pick workouts that fit into your workout plan.  If strength training, or building muscle is your goal and tomorrow is going to be a heavy squat day don't pick something that is going to fry your legs and prevent you from giving it your all on the squats.  Remember your priorities.  

This post ended up being far longer than I intended, but hopefully some of these ideas appeal to you, and have given you something new to work with.  With this kind of training, intensity is the key.  If these workouts take you longer than fifteen minutes (excluding warm up) then you are not going hard enough. As always, don't overthink this stuff.  Go out and do something.  You never know, something here may even make you taller, just like it did for me!

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What Now?

The Twelve Week Challenge is over, so have I reverted back to my old bad habits?  Actually, I've stepped it up a notch.  During those twelve weeks, I wanted to show with a sensible diet, weight training, and some sprinting you can both lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, and most importantly, without killing yourself.  I believe that my progress shows that it is possible to make a lot of good progress through moderation, in terms of both diet and exercise.

The thing is, I still have not reached all my goals.  I am not as lean as I would like to be, but at the same time I also want to build more muscle.  Quite the conundrum.  Is it possible to get to single digit body-fat (visible abs) while also gaining muscle?  I don't know either, but I'm working on it now. I've changed my approach slightly, and from what I've accomplished over the past two weeks, I now believe that it is possible.  The missing ingredient is, hard work.  If I look honestly at the premise of the Twelve Week Challenge it was basically to get as much as possible with the least amount of work.  This breaks the universal law of reaping and sowing.  If you put in moderate efforts you get moderate results, not extraordinary results.

Like I said, I'm stepping it up a notch.  Everyone these days talks about how if you exercise too much, or have too much volume in your training program you will become "over-trained".  Tell this to an Olympic lifter who is doing two squat training sessions every day of the week. Or to Ironman participants, who spend upwards of twelve hours training everyday in preparation for that event.  The bottom line is that you get out only what you put in.  

As a side note  I spoke with my father the other day about my new training plan.  When he was younger he was a big strong dude.  He got there by doing pullups, pushups, and situps everyday.  No fear of over-training  no scientific programming. He just did those three exercises everyday, and put full effort into it each day.  This is not to say that there aren't more efficient ways to train, but it illustrates the point that the attitude with which you train is more important than the actual program.  People who push themselves will succeed.

After two weeks of really working hard.  I'm happy
 with the results so far

I have gone back to a powerlifting based program, called Beyond 531.  It is an awesome program for increasing strength in the four main lifts: squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press.  This is the foundation of what I'm doing now.  Everyday I follow this program for one main lift.  After that I choose an exercise that is related to the main lift, and work up to a heavy set of three to five reps.  Then I immediately work my way back down in a huge drop set to get a lot of volume, and also get the "pump".  This is basically a combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding approaches. This style of training is really fun, but also super challenging.  After lifting really heavy weight, the last thing you want to do is push yourself to absolute fatigue with lighter weights.

For my condition work, after upper body workouts I do a high intensity "finisher" to burn fat and get my metabolism firing. This could be as simple as doing 100 burpees as fast as possible, or it could be a series of barbell exercises done back to back without ever putting the bar down.  Finishers are a great way to work on conditioning, burn fat, and develop some mental toughness.  They are challenging, but are also fun way to end a workout. On squat and deadlift days, I do a sprint workout 8 hours later in the evening.  On rest days, I do another high intensity finisher, and go for a long walk.  I'm really pushing myself hard now.  I'm choosing to work incredibly hard in order to get incredible results.  I'm choosing not to buy into the fear of "over-training".  It's just another experiment, and you will find all the results here and on facebook.

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Five Easy Steps to Awesomeness

I have five things that I try to make a part of my daily life. These things keep me on track nutritionally, keep me healthy, keep me fit, and keep me sane. Try to incorporate these five things into your life for unadulterated awesomeness.

Macros- hit em 

Set macro nutrient goals for yourself (help can be found here) and hit those goals. This allows you to figure out what adjustments to make to your diet if you aren't getting the results you want. You've gotta be honest with yourself though. Record what you actually ate, not what you should have eaten.  If you don't have reliable data, you can't make informed decisions when adjusting your diet. Besides, lying to yourself about what you are is worse than cheating at solitaire.

Move - more if you can

Exercising a few times a week is awesome. Props to you if you are already following a sensible weight training program. But, weight training aside, try to move more. I know that a thousand people have already told you to take stairs, and walk to work, and so on, so I won't repeat it. We are a lazy generation that wants to get everything by doing as little as possible. Get out of this mindset. You know you need to be more active. Don't over-think it, just move more.

Mobility- becausing having hips like your grandmother is not cool

I think that in terms of overall health benefits this might be number one. Get a foam roller, buy this book, and learn how to live in that body of yours. We do a world of damage to ourselves by sitting for hours on end in front of computers. Spending thirty minutes doing self-care is not too much to ask. It feels so good to reclaim proper range of motion in your spine, hips, and shoulders. The actual act of doing mobility work is downright horrid sometimes, but the benefit are immediate and carry over into every part of your life.

Meditate- that's right

I thought this was a little too new age and flaky at first too. I was dead wrong. We spend all this time on our bodies, fixated on the outward stuff when inside is a constant torrent of mayhem. Get that mind of yours under control, and I guarantee the benefits will carry over to every aspect of your life. Take five minutes before you sleep to focus on all the high tension areas in your body, and consciously relax them. This will improve your sleep, help you focus, make you happier, allow your body to heal better after intense workouts...the benefits of meditating are endless, so give it a shot.

Sprint - it's probably as close to feeling like a real athlete as you'll ever get

Sprinting will kick your ass. That's pretty much all there is to it. There are a million ways to include sprinting into your life. Don't over-complicate this! Twice a week go outside, warm up properly, and then move fast. You can run shuttle sprints, suicides, hill sprints, 100m, 200m, 400m sprints, sled sprints, even bike sprints on those rainy days. I can't stress enough the need to not over-think this. Playing ultimate frisbee could be your sprinting. Just move fast, rest until you can breathe semi-normally, and then move fast again.

I think that these five things can make an enormous difference to your life.  They will all teach you to take charge of yourself, and will make you stronger in every way possible. What am I missing here?  Let me know in the comments below or on facebook.

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