Response to Ryan aka Mr. Shady…

Ryan is the Husband of my one on one coach at Crossfit Liz.  He’s also the in house videographer at Potomac Crossfit, you can check out his website here.

He’s an avid reader of my blog, and often provides great insight into my training, and regime.  We are having an ongoing dialogue about my program, and this is my response to his most recent comment.

First Ryan is right that as much as I love Crossfit I have not given more than a few weeks of active use, perhaps only about 3 full weeks were I was doing Crossfit at least three times a week, everything before that was more of a build up to Crossfit.  In order to provide a truly empirical answer to my circumstances I would have to do Crossfit 4-5 times a week for a month.   As it is today, it will remain a part of my regime but not all of it.  In fact next week I am thinking about doing one week of just Crossfit and nothing else.

I also think that he may be right that my other workouts could be the reason I am not losing weight, but examining the larger body of work I have significantly reduced the number of workouts per week from 10-12 times to 5-8 times.  This means I have been stressing my body far less in recent weeks. 

My ultimate point about Crossfit was that Crossfit is designed to create athleticism, it’s why the culture behind Crossfit calls trainers Coaches, and the participants’ athletes, in fact the slogan I believe is Forging Elite Fitness.  Building functional strength, power, quickness, and ingraining high output performance are at the heart of the Crossfit methodology.

If I could compare this methodology to cars, Crossfit is like a tuning garage.  It’s great to take a Honda Civic or a BMW 3 series and give it the ability to almost compete with a Porsche 911, but this same garage can’t take an F150 and turn it into a high performance track machine, after it’s tuned the F-150 will still be a big ass truck which is just fast in a straight line.  Think of it as an athletic fat guy, me.

In order to make that F-150 run anything like those smaller vehicles you have to strip it down, and change the composition of the entire body, and chassis.  A different approach is needed to build similar performance; the mass has to be stripped before you can give it the tools to not only have the power to perform but the ability to maneuver like the smaller BMW.

I am aware of my body, and as confused as I am about my lack of weight loss, or why I lose large amounts of weight during other periods, I am conscious of my body and how it feels.  After having made Crossfit an integral part of my workout plan, I feel stronger, more active, I look more athletic, but have not lost weight and my waistline is exactly the same. 

There came a time when I was working with another trainer and I realized that he was preventing me from losing weight, because his methodology was counterintuitive to my needs, I was getting stronger but my ass was still fat. 

While I don’t feel Crossfit is hindering my weight loss, at this given time its role in my progress is one that for me is in flux.  While I desire the types of output that are involved in Crossfit, I’m not sure how it fits into the bigger picture. 

I’m a Bad Person

I was walking my dog this evening, and I saw a man who clearly was a paraplegic in a wheel chair trying to get into the CVS near my home.  He was having a hard time getting over the weather strip at the bottom of the automatic sliding glass doors. 

One part of me wanted to help him, but didn’t want to be that guy who is offering my shallow support to someone I don’t know, and I definitely didn’t want to offend him, so I did what we all do in awkward situation like this, I avoided eye contact, and pretended like I didn’t understand what was going on. 

As I walked away I felt the guilt of my lack of compassion, and guilt from not having the guts to just offer a little help even if the guy would get offended.  I immediately thought about Ktty Genovese, the woman who was repeatedly attacked by Winston Mosley, while a dozen witnesses in the surrounding buildings did nothing.  If you read up this case a little more you will find the details troublesome, as Mosley perpetrated three separate attacks, in the span of almost forty minutes.  Genovese’s death provided a deep look into the bystander effect, or the diffusion of responsibility. 

Was my act a diffusion of something which is a responsibility of all people to help another person?

As I got further away, I started to become thankful about not having a physical handicap.  Again I felt guilty for having this feeling.  It made me thankful that my only physical problem is my weight, and that this battle of the bulge in comparison to this guy’s daily life is about as significant as the stains in my cheap rug.

Stress

I’ve created a schedule for myself for the month of September and in it I have incorporated a five day work week.  This will be the first attempt at a 5 day work week.  It has been a goal of mine for 5 years now.  I’m hoping that this will create more time to pursue other interests, and allow more opportunity for rest and a way for me to find stress relief. 

The last two weeks have been stressful because of family dynamics, and the impeding loan refinance which finally happened last night.  Ryan mentioned this earlier but it really wasn’t clear until we actually closed the loan.  I felt like a cloud had been lifted.

Moving forward I have to get out of my own fucking head.

Fight Gone Bad

September is in a day, which will only leave me about 3 weeks to raise money.  I’m still not sure if I want to do this yet.  I don’t know what’ s holding me back but I think it’s the act of performing in front of a group of people.

I have no problems speaking in front of a group of people as long as it’s a prepared talk, and it’s been years since I have performed any physical act with people watching.  I’ve felt for many years now being the fattest guy in the room that all eyes are on me, so it’s more of a mental block. 

I don’t want any eyes on my fat gut, or fat ass.

I don’t know I’ll have to make up my mind soon.

08/30/2011 Daily Recap

It’s been a couple of weeks, since my last workout with Ian.  Clearly he wanted to show me that he was still here to provide support via his diabolical method of madness.  Today’s workout seemed easy enough; a single 35 lbs kettle bell was his weapon of choice which involved the following exercises:

• Russian Kettle bell Swings
• One Armed Kettle bell Presses
• Kettle bell Squats
• One Arm Kettle bell Swing to High Pull
• Close Grip Push-Up (On Kettle bell)
• One Handed Kettle bell Swing Alternating Hands
• One Handed Kettle bell Squat and Press
• Weighted Sit Up

Easy enough…

I did the above 8 exercises for 1 minute each with 30 second breaks between movements, then a two minute rest at the end of the cycle, and then repeated the 8 exercises all over again, then another two minuet rest, followed by my final round of work, except at the end I added another 1 minute of Kettle bell swings. 

These three rounds of pain were followed by jumping rope 100 times, then 10 squat jumps, and 100 more jumps of the jump rope.  Just another Tuesday morning…

Watch the work below:

In the evening when I got home I committed myself to doing some cardio work today so I did.  I got home late so I needed to stay in my buildings gym which doesn’t offer much for cardio, and with 4 treadmills broken, I had very little option but to use the elliptical machine.  I did a session of mountain which is an increase of intensity every 3 minutes for 12 cycles; I ended up doing 14 cycles which took just over 40 minutes.  I used this period of cardio more as a primer, or a method to make myself tired before my true cardio work.

 I finished my cardio session with some Tabata work, Tabata being the simple pattern of 20 seconds of high intensity followed by 10 seconds of rest for 8 cycles.  I picked three exercises, kettle bell swings with a 25 lbs kettle bell, jump rope, and sit ups. 

I used my Ipad’s clock as my timer, and really pushed myself.  I played a mental game of counting reps during my 20 seconds, and focused on trying to match or beat the reps in each cycle of high intensity.  I would like to try this workout again at some point after doing a two mile run. 

I don’t know what it is but when the work gets started I am trying to find that dark place, that moment where I want to puke or give up and I haven’t been able to get there in quite some time.  These moments are getting harder and harder to come by, perhaps that just means I am still pushing myself like a fat guy, and not like the athletic guy I am becoming.

Tomorrow I have another session with Ian and then some cardio at some point during the day.  I’m looking forward to see what I can do on the Arc Trainer, but if I can’t make it to Washington Sports Club I will run, and do some more jump rope.  I want to search online for some boxing jump rope workouts.