Goals

Morning Weight: 178.2lbs

Morning Waist: 32.5 in

Yesterday morning I went for my first run in a long, long time.  It felt pretty good.  I've heard from author and trainer Mark Sisson that when you perform cardio, stay at a pace in which you could carry on a conversation.  That is the place in which your body is metabolizing mostly fat for fuel.  If you have to breath out of your mouth, your body is tapping into more carbohydrate than fat to power muscles.  I did an experiment and run just as fast as I could while only breathing through my nose.  It was uncomfortable at first but I got the hang of it.  I changed my pace when I needed to.  I would have run farther but rain started coming in heavy.

I'm about 5 pounds down from my starting weight.  I actually am not sure what my goal weight is nor does it matter that much.  I imagine I will be most comfortable around 172 at 5'9.5.  My true goal is to not have the waistband on my underwear flip over anymore if you know what I'm talking about guys(TMI?).  I've set a goal waist measurement of 31 inches and will reevaluate when I get there.

The way I measure waist is that I put my tailor's tape around the navel and draw in as much as I can then take the number.  This might not be how everyone does it but I'm really just looking for a consistency.

My physical training is still pretty spotty.  My left shoulder was giving me a lot of trouble for the past 4 months and just a week or two ago it started feeling fine again.  I got a shoulder workout in and had no problems.  There's a lot going on in our lives right now and movement hasn't been my top priority, nor has the space been available.  I believe in having a dedicated place to train and not a lot of set up for that.  I don't really have that yet and I hate commercial gyms.  I own a lot of equipment, just not a great place to use it.  Most of the time I train at my church where the majority of my equipment is stored, but getting it out and putting it back is such a hassle that it often breaks my will to lift.

My focus has been on hitting things on the go.  I have a barbell in my garage and I'll grab that when I walk by and do some military presses and squats.  I do push ups in the bedroom and chin ups in the doorway.  How I eat has been the paramount of my journey.  When I was in my 20's I ate whatever I wanted and as long as I trained in the gym 3-4 times a week, I stayed lean and made progress.  About the time I hit 28 that wasn't the case anymore.  How I eat is the most important thing to my physical well-being and in light of what I know now, it always has been; I just feel it more now.  I'm not talking about counting calories; that is a waste of time.  I mean getting feedback from my body.  Not eating until stuffed, going to bed a little hungry.  Cutting out all the junk food and enjoying real food.  Increasing fiber intake and watching out for chemicals.  I still eat a cookie or cupcake here and there.  What's life if I have to give everything up?

I'm going to be an "old" dad already, but I want to be able to do things still.  I believe that a decline in quality of life is a choice not a side effect of getting older.  Few are helpless victims.

At Least the Ending is Good!

I listen to a podcast called "Fat-Burning Man".  It's pretty great.  I love Abel James and what he does.  I even got his book "The Wild Diet" and while I'm not a very fast reader, I am enjoying it and am excited to implement the principles that Abel has written about.  His podcast features interviews with the world's leading experts, gurus, scientists, doctors, researchers, etc that pertain to health and the way the body perceives nutrition.  Some of the things I've heard have really knocked my socks off and challenge the way that I see food and the world around me.

Something that I notice about many of the guests though is that they assume a Darwinian-evolution(DE) thought process.  While I don't concede that all of the guests have this worldview nor do I believe the lie that all intelligent scientist types only adhere to DE, there seems to be a large number of experts who believe this way.  These aren't bad people mind you but I find one things strange about their logic.  This is not the first time this has happened but this morning I was listening to an episode of FBM and the guest on there spoke about the evolution of human-kind and so on but just a minute later he said that there was a wisdom above us that knows so much more than us that causes the changes.  Isn't that an intelligent design?  Mother Nature being the god of the the naturalist, isn't that intelligent design?  Guests who claim molecules to man theology also say that we are "designed" to eat a certain thing or move a certain amount.  Who is the designer?

I think that the conclusions that these gurus come to are very fascinating and applicable but the route they take to get there is flawed.  The more I learn about how complex we are, the more I am confident in a Creator.  Vitamins, minerals, phyto-nutrients; this stuff isn't just random expressions of chaos no more than my television is.  When you can put the microscope on these things and it just can't look deep enough to see it all, or when the telescope can't look out far enough: this world is just too complex to be senseless.  And all of this is mere observation; we haven't even asked the question "why?" yet!

I believe that there is so much about our world we don't know yet and a lot of it is in the realm of nutrition.  Mostly because large companies make money off of the lack of nutrition in their products but that is a topic for another day!

Relaunch

I used to be active.  I used to care about what I eat.  I used to train 4-6 days a week and I used to be in my 20’s too when everything physical came easy.  I could squat 3 times a week and press overhead every day.  15 pull ups was a warm up and recovery for a heavy deadlift was just 48 hours.

Now my lower back is tight, my shoulders take turns telling me which one hurts more and my body just hurts too much to move sometimes.  I don’t eat nutritious things and my clothes don’t fit like they used to.  Sleeping is a struggle because I’m always uncomfortable and my job has me sitting a lot which is also uncomfortable.  Everything I do is the contrast of what I used to be and what I used to teach.

A year ago I was a trainer helping people as best I could reach their fitness goals while trying hard to maintain my own.  I was spinning my wheels in a new environment and in a job that I was growing more and more dissatisfied with.  Movement was money and money isn’t fun when you are trying to make it.  Exercise was just what I sold, not what I was striving for.  My heart was somewhere else.

In 2010, I became co-owner of a personal training gym.  I was 27 years old, loved moving heavy things, jumping around, and even running.  I had everything. I could want as far as equipment went and training was easy to do and always on my mind.  I broke my own records every month and I was in the best all-around shape of my life.

The business of fitness is a hard mistress though and pay-to-play was getting far too expensive to keep up with. I had gotten married in 2011 and I had a wife to think about.  It was a hard, foot-dragging decision to leave my business partners and engage the fitness world on my own at a little gym in our apartment complex. Gone were the familiar nuances I had become accustom to.  No barbells, not medicine balls, no battle ropes.  Dumbells only went up to 50lbs and I had to share the gym with people who had no idea what they were doing.  My fitness suffered and coming back from injuries just didn’t happen.  My back was so tight from muscle imbalances that I would shy away from most activities that pushed me.

I left the fitness industry on a large-scale when I applied for and was accepted as the youth pastor at my church.  In 2014 I had dropped what was left of my plan to complete my degree in exercise science from Columbus State and I enrolled at Liberty University.  God had bigger things for me that I had felt for a long time.

I took comfort in the fact that someday fitness would no longer be a part of my identity and I could eat all the pizza and cookies without a double take from my friends and family.  I thought I would finally have the time to enjoy food and fitness on my own terms.  While I let my training business putter out, my attention to the amount and kind of foods I was eating did too and before I knew it my medium shirts didn’t fit anymore.

Now I don’t think there is anything wrong with me wearing a large shirt.  They are more modest on me especially when I raise my arms up, but the reason I wear large shirts has nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with my out of control eating.  During the winter I hid myself with sweatshirts saying to myself that I’d have it under control by spring time.  That’s something I’ve said for 2 years now.

The time has come to drop the excuses, drop the “soon I will”‘s, and protect myself and my family from the dangers of overeating, poor nutrition, and general couch-potato-ness.  I know that my pains can be fixed by the right kind of movement and better eating and the only thing stopping me is me.  One of my students has been a big inspiration to me as she just decided one day to get off her butt and get to work and her results have been amazing.

For myself who wants to be in great shape for my health and my family, for my wife who wants the same thing for herself, for God who has given me a body to do work for Him with, I dedicate this blog of accountability.

The Best of Us

I'm a big fan of the sport of strongman.  It's all about men and even women exerting physical persuasion on seemingly impossible sized objects and situations.  It's a sport dominated by men like this:

This is my favorite strongman, Brian Shaw.  He's 32 years old, 6'8" and weights over 400lbs in competition.  This is the ideal body of a professional strongman.

I am 30 years old, 5'10", and 175lbs.  An Atlas Stone would absolutely smoosh me and I could not even get my hands around the handles of most strongman equipment.  Mine is not a body made for strongman competition.  No matter how much I tried, I could not become a professional strongman.  If I ate more to gain weight(which is a big factor in the sport) I would simply get fat because my frame was not created to carry mountains of muscle.  If I were to train and train to become superhuman strong, I would still not go beyond average strength because I am not genetically gifted with a great strength capacity.  And let's face it, I'm not getting any taller(I might even be getting shorter)

So many of us, myself included, are trying so hard to be someone else.  We want the body an actor or athlete we know; or maybe a friend of family member, or even a rival.  One look at someone we perceive as being better than us and we are suddenly very aware of our "shortcomings".

I forget what I can do and focus on what I can't or how I measure up compared to someone else.  I hear this from women mostly but men feel the same way, we just don't verbalize it like women do.  We all want to be better than we are, but the problem is that we look outside of ourselves to find that.

I am speaking of the physical body in all this.  At first reaction, better for me means that I need to gain 200lbs, 6" taller, and the ability to sling a beer keg 25 feet in the air.  When I sit and think about it, better really means becoming the best version of myself.  This is all anyone can hope for.  I'm not saying it's okay to settle, but we need to be realistic with our goals and means of meeting them.  When you take a look at yourself and calculate what you are capable of realistically, you are freed from the unrealistic expectations that society and our own minds put on you.  How comforting to know that you don't have to kill yourself figuratively and in some cases literally, to look like Jessica Alba, Simpson, or Beil because you can't look like them! Only one person can look like one person unless they are twins.  That is how life works.  People have different bone structures, different muscle fiber types, different fat storage genetics, different everything.  This is what makes a person unique and this should be embraced.  I might not have what Brian Shaw or Derek Poundstone have but I've got things that they don't and that is something unique to me.

What I can do is work to become the best me that I can be.  I hate to say it but in the quest to be a more like someone else, the personality often suffers too and that is not being a better anybody.  Focus on what you have to work with and don't try to duplicate another person; the world is big enough for billions of individuals so be one!  Find your strengths and play to them.  There is a reason why certain people are at the top of their game, whatever it may be.  There is talent and there is skill.  The elite were born that way and worked in the skill I get where they are.  If you don't have any talent, you can at least develop skill but don't expect to outplay Lebron James on skill alone.  Skill takes the average to good and elite to legendary.

This is my body and this is what I can do.  I can get better if I work hard but I will still have my own body, not someone else's and my unique attributes.  I will accept that this has been, is, and will always be true and I will embrace and work with what I have to become the best version of myself I can be.

Painless Lifting

Here is a flare-free instructional video I created to outline the basics of how to properly lift an object off the floor safely!

Furniture Slider Fitness

Hello! It has been awhile since I've added a new workout video; reason being that our camera's life came to an end.  Well I've got my hands on another one with hopes of producing videos with greater consistency now.  Here is a video of what a few furniture sliders can do to challenge your fitness!



The New Desk Jockey Syndrome

I was out shopping the other night and I had a revelation.  I saw a group of teenage girls walking in a parking lot and they all basically look like this:

No, they don't resemble an Olsen twin, but they do have her terrible, terrible posture.  I see this a lot in young people, namely teen girls and young women.  Though I have seen this many times, on this particular night I matched this terrible posture with a recently new activity that has taken over the lives of kids ages 10(maybe younger) and older:

Maybe your mother said that if you make a funny face for too long it will stay that way.  Mom was on to something.  When the business computers came out, we started seeing this terrible posture in the good folks who work the cubicle.  This is caused by the spine and shoulder girdle molding to this hunched position because of the hours it spends in that position.  Kyphotic thoracic and cervical spine, scapular protraction and abduction.  This leads to great muscle imbalances, back pain, inability to active the posterior chain(namely the glutes and hamstrings) properly, and the inability to sit up straight.

Take a look around and you will probably see it in someone you know, or even in the mirror.  The good news is, there is help!  Through consistent corrective exercise and stretching, posture and imbalances can be improved dramatically.  Here are a few exercises to add to your daily life along with being conscious of your posture.  Think of taking 5-10 minutes out of your day to improve years of your life!