Work It Paleo

Avert ye eyes!!!!

(DAMN THINGS ARE TOO BIG!!! Gonna have to resize them at home….)

(thats what she said…)

6′2″
282 lbs

Ok so I have been skipping the gym a lot lately. However, I have been working out at home. And guess what? Its awesome! Either before I go to bed or right when I get up, I do a workout. I have been doing this everyday since my last post. Through this, I have come to a conclusion. People have no business lifting weights if they cannot do some simple bodyweight exercises. Push-ups, planks, squats, lunges, and pull ups should all be reasonably easy before anyone starts moving around extra weight. Here is my reasoning.

Push-ups can be easily modified to accomodate various levels of fitness. This is about as basic of a move as you can do, and its easily comparable to a bench press. You should be able to do at least 20 push-ups without straining too much before you start messing with bench press.

Planks are hard. Well, at least they are hard for me since I have no abdominal strength. I can only hold a plank for about 45 seconds right now.  However, I can easily do 35 crunches or more. The plank makes much more sense to me than endless crunches. Its also easy to modify to make it harder. Although, I am a fan of the ab-roller too, but I am in no condition for that at the moment. In any case, I feel that planks are a much better use of your energy than crunches and such.

Squats are great. I love me a squat. However, I don’t feel it was a great idea for me to start doing squats when I rejoined the gym. To be effective, you need to have a good range of motion and maintain good form. If you cannot do that with just your body weight over say 30 reps, you probably shouldn’t be hoisting iron quite yet. I was in that boat. I can do about 45 now before getting fatigued. Once I hit 100, I am going to add in some lunges and may jumprope. I have noticed my form is better (verified by the bro) and I am getting a lot more flexible. Bending at the knees does not seem as terrible of a propostion anymore. In anycase, one should be comfortable with a decently high rep count of bodyweight squats before moving onto the weighted squats.

Lunges are not something I am doing yet. I am working up to it. My knees suck and I think I will have to ease into lunges so they are not sore all the time. Maybe soon. I do people at the gym all the time though doing lunges with weight. Same rules for the squat apply here. Make sure you are comfortable with the movement before adding weight.

Finally, there are pull-ups/chin-ups. This is the most difficult thing for me to do right now. I cannot perform even one pull-up unless its on an assisted pull up machine. They are tough. I am doing negatives right now to work my way up to it. I may pop in the gym friday and use the assisted machine as well. I do like it though. Even just doing negatives, I can feel my back working really hard. I know that eventually I will be able to do it if I am persistant enough. Its just a matter of time. To me, this is one of the best and safest back and shoulder exercises you can do. I was doing shoulder flies with my trainer last week, followed by shoulder presses. I was in pain once were we done for the day. Pull-ups, on the other hand, give me no such issues. I think its because the movement is more natural. Well more natural than flies. The shoulder press was actually ok, I just think combining the two was asking for trouble. In anycase, for upper back and shoulder, this gets my vote before moving on to doing weight exercises. I think 10 reps would be a good number to strive for.

I have to say though, I am really digging the bodyweight exercises. I get completely done with my workout for the day in about 12 minutes or so. Of course that time will increase as I add more reps and more exercises. For now though, this short routine agrees with my body very well. I don’t feel dead when I am done, and I am seeing good progress.

Yesterday’s workout:

Squats: 45 reps
Push-ups: 8
Easy Push-ups: 8
Negative Pull-ups: 10
Plank: 45secs x 1

I am going to start doing a weekly weigh in post as well. I will post pics too if I have them.

Woo hoo! Finished my last exam today! Now I am free. FREE I TELL YOU! Well until June 29. And I still have to pay tuition and buy books. And get a parking pass. *sigh* Its a hollow victory….

Hottie Doing a Push Up

Ok, so now I am a little pissed at myself for getting a gym membership on a whim. The only thing that is proving useful is Assisted Dip/Pull-up machine. As it is, I can’t move my own weight around well enough to do either of those exercises without assistance.

But why am I feeling a ting of regret for purchasing the gym membership? Well, after doing some research on bodyweight workouts, I have found that there is A LOT of variety. More than I ever really thought of.

Also, I feel more comfortable doing those exercises than working with traditional weights. Although I don’t think traditional weights are wrong or useless , I would much prefer doing a bodyweight workout. Hell, I have an ample supply of weight!

I think I realized this on Sunday afternoon. I was going to head over to the gym when I decided that I would rather just workout at home. I did weightless squats (concentrating on form), push-ups, sit ups, negative pull-ups (using an Iron Gym), and some static lunges. I felt great afterwards! I also realized that the squats I am doing at the gym are not right at all. I am not going down anywhere close to parallel at the gym. At best, I am doing a little more than a 3/4 squat. This tells me I need to improve my range of motion before I work on how much weight I can move around.

On the money side of things, I spent around $600 getting started with the gym. This includes signup fees, monthly fee, personal trainer, gym clothes, and workout towels (they don’t provide any). Of that, I could have just spent $100 on clothes and towels and been good. I get great training advice by reading various blogs, forums, and websites (yes, I plan on linking this stuff on a separate post). I have found that a home gym setup for doing a bodyweight exercise routine would be cheap (haven’t added it up yet, but it seems to be an inexpensive thing to setup, may also do a separate post on this). So, now here I am kicking myself for jumping into a gym (again!) so quickly. I will probably hang on to the membership through the fall. Hopefully by then I can have something good going on at home. And even at that, I will probably leave my brothers membership alone and just have him pay for his thing once I am out of there.

Now on to the Diablo II part. I found myself bored this evening after taking my second to last exam for the quarter. I have been wanting to play a video game for so long, but I just haven’t really found the time. So last night, after I made dinner I installed Diablo II and the expansion pack and played that for about 2 hours.

I had never had a chance to use the Druid before, so that is what I went with. Let me tell you, tearing through people as a werewolf is freakin’ awesome! I can’t wait until I can get the Werebear form!

For an old game, its really really fun! The graphics are nothing great by today’s standards, but the gameplay is solid and it just brings back a lot of good memories. And it helped me fight the urge to fire up WoW again. Although, I have no desire to do any group play at this point, it is easy to get wrapped up in that game for a few hours at a time, even if you are just running around by yourself. Not to mention the fact that installation and initial setup would take hours if you include getting my old addons installed. Then there is matter of getting my gamepad out and installing and programming it, which is a bit time consuming.

Had I fired up WoW, I would have had no fun last evening and been out $15 dollars. With tuition due in a few weeks and the need to purchase books and food, I really don’t feel its good use of my money.

So Diablo II it was! And let me tell you, classic games are soo much fun!

Not me....

Ok, so there are two parts to almost any fitness plan; diet and exercise. As you may have guessed, the dietary focus for me will be on a Paleo Diet. Essentially, I will be mimicking the diet that was eaten by our caveman ancestors. I will delve more into this later.

The second part of any good fitness program is exercise. To me, when people think of a fitness plan, this is what comes to mind. It also tends to get the lions share of attention when it comes to making your perform well and look good.

For me, performance is more important than looks. Logically, if you can do well at the goals you have set out to achieve performance wise, the form of your body will follow accordingly. Of course, I am no fitness expert. I only know what I have read, but I have been doing an extensive amount of reading on various exercise philosophies for the past 11 years (since I was 14).

Now, goals is a good place to start when trying to define a fitness program. Some people simply want to look good. Others want to perform well for a sport, or enter the local strongman competition. Some people have specific goals like “I want to bench press 250lbs.”

Personally, I have two goals. The first is to make everyday things effortless. This might not sound like much, but I get winded going up two flights or more of stairs , I struggle a bit with moving heavy objects, and I get tired really really fast when exerting myself. I feel that I shouldn’t even have to think about doing these things. If someone asks me to come out and move furniture, I want to be able to work all day without feeling like I am at maximum effort. Not like these things come up often, but that is what I am working toward.

The next goal is nowhere near as practical, and will probably not be attainable until I reach my first goal. That goal would be to have the athletic capability of an action hero. I know it sounds silly since many of them do crazy stuff and seem to have superhuman abilities. But, try to think Indiana Jones or Jason Bourne (on the high end with Bourne). They have great endurance, can easily hoist themselves up over a railing or a ledge, can pull up others without to much issue, have good balance, and good range of motion. Less than a superhero, more than Joe Sixpack. That is what I am shooting for.

The thing about these goals is that they are not defined by numbers. They are defined by capability, which is harder to measure, and that makes some people uneasy. I think that even though it is more difficult to measure capability, it is ultimately more satisfying to achieve that kind of goal. If someone can bench press 350 lbs, but they can’t carry a sofa up a flight of stairs, what have they really achieved? Unless of course they are powerlifting, then that bench press becomes a capability goal in itself.

So how do I plan to achieve these things? Well, I intend to keep things as random as I can manage. The idea is that life is not as structured as we would like. Also, our bodies are not machines. With that in mind, a fitness plan based around rigid structure or the idea that working your body as if you were no more than a mass of parts, is silly. Isolation exercises don’t make sense, except at the very start of a workout plan. And that is only to ensure that you have enough base strength to do the more complex exercises. Then again, body weight exercises are also a great way to start, and they work muscle groups together.

Which brings me to the next tenent. Complex movements. The idea with this is that your body should work as one cohesive unit. The more involved the rest of your body is in an exercise the better. A good example is leg press vs squat. In a leg press, you are sitting at an angle on a seat, pushing weight that is on rails moving in a fixed range of motion. A squat will work all the same muscles while forcing you to balance the weight. This is a more realistic situation and it works more muscles since you have to utilize those smaller stabilizers in your legs and back. This limits the exercises that you can do a little bit since you will be avoiding machines and isolation exercises, but it I feel the workout quality will be higher, and there are still plenty of exercises left to play with.

Also, variety will be key here. I want to spend sometime doing alternative exercise. I have read about some really neat things that sound like fun to boot. Examples include water tube exercises, sledging, and the 300. I will locate the links and repost them here, but suffice it to say that variety is what will keep this interesting. Doing the same thing all the time is boring. In fact, I think every other attempt at exercise I have made has failed because of boredom and plataeus. The boredom is from doing the same routines or having a very limited set of exercises to work with. The plataeus are a result of the same thing, but also there is the mindset that goes with that. Essentially, if you are not increasing your weight, you will are not improving. That is a very discouraging thought indeed.

Next up is cardio. I hate it. That being said, I don’t plan on doing any cardio. At least not in the sense that most of your traditional people would think of cardio. I don’t mind running a short distance like a mile. I kind of like doing sprints too. Neither of these would really count as cardio to most people. Sure it involves running, but one mile is too short for most to consider anything more than a warm up, and sprints are more of an anaerobic thing. However, I don’t plan on running a marathon, half-marathon, or competing in the ironman competition. So being able to run any further than a mile is practically pointless. And I can here the question forming in your head right now “But I thought you wanted endurance like an action hero.” Well, yes I do. But most action heroes do not go running or jogging from point A to B. Most of their endurance is more related to raw strength than lung capacity over several miles. Using our Indian Jones example, he outran a boulder, because he was fast, but had enough energy to get to the mouth of the cave. Additionally had to run a little farther afterwards to escape the angry natives. Of course, he had a nice rest in between.

Now, because of my knees and the horrid condition they are in, I will have to be careful with running and sprints. Actually, for now, I plan on using the elipticals at the gym. They don’t hurt my knees at all, but I would like to get back to something like running, swimming, etc.

Next, make it quick and to the point. No one wants to spend an eternity in the gym, and really don’t you have better things to do? Like working on your project car, making barbecue, or playing with your kids? Hell I still have yet to finish Diablo II, which is fairly important as things go. Also, once you get to a certain point, your going to be too tired to have good form. Also, if you have been doing complex movements, you will have already hit all your muscles within the first 30-45 minutes. Body builders stay in the gym for hours because they 8-12 reps and 3 sets to complete for every tiny muscle in their body on an individual basis. Yeah… try to avoid that.

Last item. Rest. Get some good rest between workouts. Take a week off every now and then. It only makes sense to me. It takes time for your body to heal itself between routines, so give it the time it needs. I only plan on hitting the gym 2-4 times a week. 2 if I am feeling meh. 3 on average. 4 if I am feeling cheeky.

Also, a word on the gym. I would eventually like to get away from ever having to go there. It consumes both time and money. At $80 per month for two people (me and my brother), it is going to cost nearly $1000 a year toward membership fees. Assuming that I will be paying for two people for the rest of my life (I am 25 now, so I am hoping for another 50 at least), we are looking at $48,000 over a lifetime toward gym fees. That is a lot of money and it doesn’t even account for inflation. Especially considering that you can build up a nice home gym for less than that (at least I would hope so!).

Ok, so let’s review the “exercise rules” as I see them:

1) Establish goals
2) Be random
3) Use complex movements
4) Avoid machines
5) Find fun alternative exercises
6) Say no to cardio
7) Make if quick
Rest well

I would say that sums it up nicely. Here is the sample workout I plan on using this morning:

Pull-ups 8 reps 2 sets (complete with negatives if needed)
Squats 8 reps 2 sets @ 110 lbs
Hanging leg raises 15 reps 2 sets
Deadlifts 8 reps 2 sets @ ??? lbs
Dips 8reps 2 sets
Swiss Ball Crunches 20 reps 2 sets

I will be looking more into bodyweight stuff for working out. If I can cancel my gym membership… well that would save a lot of time and money! Although I like doing squats/deadlifts/bench press and having the eliptical available.

Well here we go on the start of a new blog. I had a blog that I used to be semi active on at lightsvengeance.blogspot.com. It was a blog dedicated to paladins in the game of World of Warcraft. You may have noticed that that domain of this blog is iampaladin.com. That’s because I had planned on making a go at a full blown website covering paladin type stuff.

As it is, I made a few pages to satisfy a school project. Its not pretty or great, but it landed me and “A”. Luckily the class was Writing for the Web, not HTML 101

Anyway, I decided to make use of my web host and save a few bucks by reusing my domain, and here we are… my new blog!

So what is this blog going to be about anyway? And what the hell is “paleo”? Well this blog is going to cover my attempt at losing weight and getting fit through the utilization of a paleo diet and a non conventional “logic based” exercise system. Nothing groundbreaking since my thoughts are on both diet and exercise are based on ideas that have already been presented by others. More on that later.

I am also probably going to use this blog to rant and rave about various other things that are totally unrelated to diet or fitness. For example, as an aspiring web developer, I will probably make a few posts concerning projects I am working on, or plug interesting articles that I find. I also plan to have my blogroll cover diet, fitness, web development, and maybe even video games. I do still play video games.

Also, I will probably migrate my old Warcraft blog over here, if for nothing else than sentimental value. Although I would like to log back in sometime just to see what has changed and run some old dungeons just for kicks, maybe throw up a post for old times sake. Of course, that will probably have to wait for a bit at this rate.

That covers the how and the what, so let me tell you about the why. I generally have a hard time losing weight and staying on any kind of a diet. I am hoping that if I write about it and keep something of a journal I will be able to stick to it. Also, it should be motivating to look back and see my progress.

Alright, so that’s just the first entry to get this thing rolling. Next time I plan on going a little more in depth on either the exercise or diet portion to give an idea of whats I am doing.