I'm a Master

Well, maybe not at Crossfit, but I just handed in my last research paper for my last class for my MBA program. Assuming it's a semi-coherent read, I should graduate. I started almost 3 years ago and I remember the first class and thinking I made a big mistake because it was going to take so long to finish. Instead, it seemed to go by rather quickly. I think it relates a bit to working out and getting fit. You basically just need to show up and do what you need to do for that day. You need to break down larger goals. "Getting my MBA" is a big goal and doesn't allow for much focus. But breaking it down into "Read one text book chapter per weekday night" or "complete one review question every other night" or "find 4 usable source articles this week" are short-term goals that help get you through the day, week, month, class, and ultimately the entire program. Same thing goes for fitness. You can't start out 100 pounds overweight, barely able to do one bodyweight squat and start focusing on goals to lose 100 pounds and squat 200 pounds. It's too much, you must to break it into chunks. You should start out with a small, easily achievable goal that requires only a bit of work and effort. There is momentum in setting and accomplishing goals. Success builds on itself. I mentioned here before that last July (see far left photo above) I basically gave up ever being fit again because I just couldn't bring myself to eat right and increase my intensity at the gym. I was zombie walking through your standard 3x10 weightlifting routine and hating it. I was 35 pounds overweight and it just seemed like it would take forever to get fit so why bother? I decided to give it one last try and made a simple goal of tracking everything I ate for 2 weeks. If after two weeks, I didn't like it and didn't make any progress, then I promised myself I could eat 3 pizzas a day and buy a kegerator. Instead I lost about 10 pounds those first two weeks and the success kept rolling. Today I'm more fit than I ever was before, plus I'm smarter because we all know that degrees directly correlate with increased intelligence. ;)

Finally, a light appears

I've never had a cold or flu or whatever that was so on/off. I first thought I was getting sick over two weeks ago and it didn't hit me fully until just this past Tuesday and Wednesday. Today, I actually feel like I'm getting better, rather than the symptoms just disappearing. I'l still a bit stuffed up but the caughing has subsided. I'm proud that I didn't really miss any workouts either. I don't think working out with the cold prolonged anything, my wife and several people I spoke to also mentioned they had oddly long illnesses recently with symptoms that come and go.

Anyway, on to a new challenge. Partly from clicking around on Beast Skills, I want to incorporate more challenging bodyweight positions. To me, nothing says fitness more than being able to handle your bodyweight with ease. What I'd like to do is work on my muscle-ups, handstands, hand stand push-ups and the straddle planche and front levers. Dragon Door has an article on progessing through the planche and front levers that I plan to incorporate into my training. In fact I'm going to start it right when I'm done here. Besides looking at Beast Skills, the other thing that motivated me was that, to my surprise, I can now do one rep of one-armed push-ups. I had bought Pavel's Naked Warrior book several years ago and practiced them for two months without getting anywhere and gave up. I pretty much gave up on them and then a few days ago I tried to see if they were as hard as I remember and I surprised myself by actually doing one. I also really began to see definition in my abs when I started doing L-sits off the pull-ups bar so I know these types of exercises really sculpt the body. There are no fat noodle armed gymnasts. You can see in the photo series at the top of the page right where I started doing L-sits, right between photos 4 and 5 the weight didn't change much but I started doing the exercise 3 times a week.

Right now, I can't balance more than 10 seconds in the frog stand, and the tuck front lever is probably less impressive than that. I cannot free hand stand long enough to impress anyone so I certainly can't do any free hand-stand pushups although I can do 1-2 hand stand push-ups using a wall for support. I cannot do any muscle-ups although I can do pull-ups on the rings and dips on the rings without problem.

So, I guess by the end of summer (I'm not sure how long this takes, I could be giving myself too much or too little time) I'd like to be able to do the following:

Minimum 20-second free hand stand
(then) 1 Free Hand Stand Push-up
1 Muscle-up
(then) 2 Consecutive Muscle-ups
Working for Time on the Advanced Tuck Planche
1 Tuck Planche Push-ups
Working for Time on the Advanced Tuck Front Lever
1 Advanced Tuck Front Lever Pull-up

That all seems impossible right now. But I've always thought the Flag was one of the coolest moves to show off. Sure, a 500 pound deadlift is nice but you can't say, "Hey, watch this!" with any spontaneity with deadlifts. Anyway, I figure I'll practice these 3 times a week and see how far I get.

Day Seventeen - Goal Update

I think I mentioned it yesterday but I've changed my goals for being on the Warrior Diet. Initially I wanted to focus on losing the stubborn fat around my midsection. When the first week went by and I lost almost six pounds and dropped 1.1% body fat, it was pretty obvious that this diet lends itself to accomplishing that goal. But a concern of mine at the beginning was timing. Why would I want to accomplish that by mid-March? That seemed something more suited to mid-May when the nice weather starts in. So right now I've been focusing on eating more calories and protein than I did during that first week and instead I'm going to focus on the muscle building aspect of the program. If the body fat drops, so much more the better but I'm really not looking to lose weight for the purpose of losing weight. I'd rather focus on gaining muscle over the next 2.5 months at which point I can up the cardio and do what I did during week 1 of this experiment. Don't get me wrong, I didn't starve myself during week 1, I ate about the same number of calories I had been eating previously, around 2200, but I've tried to get over 2500 since then. So we'll see how the next two weeks go. It was interesting that I dropped the 6 pounds, increased the calories and gained about 5 back but at a great muscle/fat ratio, for example, dropped 4 pounds of fat and 2 of muscle but gained back 3.5 pounds of muscle and 1.5 pounds of fat. I'll take that every week.