State of My Arts

I’m not usually much for reading biographies, but a really interesting series of blog posts came across my Google Reader recently.  The blog site is called Body Recomposition, written by Lyle McDonald.  He’s a fitness professional, who writes a bunch of things that are usually way more serious into the science of exercise and peak fitness than I can normally grok.  But there are sometimes interesting tidbits that I can hopefully apply.

It turns out that he has been a near-Olympic class speed skater.  This series is a fairly fascinating foray into the seamy underbelly of speed skating.  I just wanted to type “seamy underbelly”, though it turns out that not everything is quite copacetic there.  But the really interesting part to me is the psychology of someone pursuing a goal through significant obstacles.  He spent five and a half years pursuing the goal, and never made the Olympic team.  But he considers his pursuit a success.  He figured from the start that he could live with failure, but he couldn’t live with never giving it a try.

The first installment in the series can be found at: No Regrets Part 1.

Fitness, Training

I had a goal of 194 by Christmas.  Well, I bottomed out at 195.2 last Friday.  But then after pizza at work yesterday and some cookies too ugly for guests… 198.4 this morning.

The remainder of the year will be a lost cause for weight loss, so I’ll pick up the struggle in the new year.  I think I’ll have to start counting calories again to get to my weight goals, and that’s never fun.  Here’s hoping that I figure out how to eat without gaining weight one of these years.

Fitness

Now that I’ve hit 3rd dan in TKD, I’m reflecting a bit on where I’m headed.

In TKD…

I’m continuing to teach, that’s a given.  My training will continue as it has been.  I’ve been emphasizing low, centered movement, but I’m still working on improving that.  I also had the chance to watch part of a video from my black belt exam where I was sparring.  To my own eye, I looked slow and fairly immobile.  Some techniques were good, but my movement was only middling.  I need to work on quickness and slipping techniques.  My body type isn’t really built for that (6′ 195, large thighs), but I think I need to improve in quickness and balance.  Added core strength would be a plus.

In Hapkido…

Okay, this one is really easy.  2nd dan test in 2 weeks.  Many of the same principles I mentioned in the TKD section also apply here.  I need to transition from entries into techniques more fluidly.  We’ve been doing a lot of countering drills, feeling the balance and shifting to a different technique when the opponent’s energy changes.  It is great stuff, but I still find it difficult to quickly recognize the balance and positioning, and then figure out my best more from there.

In BJJ…

Finally going to start it back up!  It has been 10 months.  I’ve missed grappling, so I am looking forward to going back.  Here, quite simply, I need need to work on not injuring myself.  I’m going to try to work on technique and fluid movement without relying on muscling my opponent around.  Easier said then done… once the blood starts flowing in a grappling match, my competitive instincts take over.

In Kali…

Well, something has to slip.  I stopped it leading up to my promotion exam, and I didn’t miss it.  I think that means I’m not ready to be a student.

In Fitness…

P90x has been great.  However, for 2/3 times per week, I’m not sure it is the best use of my time.  The number of reps in the workouts is high, but maybe I’d get better results by splitting those reps across more days.  I think I’ll do the Plyo workout periodically.  Maybe I’ll try out kettleballs sooner or later.  If the weather cooperates, I might going jogging more often.  I went for around 2.5 miles on Sunday, and it was almost fun.

BJJ, Fitness, Hapkido, TKD, Training

So, I’ll be testing for 3rd dan in TKD on September 25, which is five weeks from today.

Our black belt promotion exams are usually three hours or so.  I feel like I’m in good enough shape right now to have a good performance, but I figure I’ll try to peak at that time.  My current exericise regimen is TKD on Mon, Weds, and Sat; Hapkido on Weds and Fri; teaching on Tues and Thurs; and lifting weights on Sun, Tues, and Fri.  I’ve dropped Kali for the time being, as it is too rough on my shoulder.

I can’t really add anything to that load without overtaxing myself.  So I suppose the only real change I can make is replacing my weight lifting routines with something else.  Cardio/core on test night will be more useful than added strength.  The options that come to mind are running, yoga, plyometrics, or cardio. 

So, faithful readers, any comments on what has worked well for you when you are trying to peak for a particular event?

Fitness, TKD

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was looking into several internet products on the subject of nutrition.  I decided to go ahead and purchase the Fat Loss Troubleshoot/Metabolic Repair Manual.  If you are interested in more full reviews of the product, check out the reviews at Skwigg Blog and Alwyn Cosgrove’s blog.  From my perspective, there was a lot in there I already knew, but plenty more that I didn’t.  It isn’t for everyone (especially priced at $77), but I’m hoping it’ll be a bit of a spur for me to improve my nutrition.

So far I’m just making minor changes.  What I should do is create some daily meal plans and get myself on a good schedule of measured portions.  I haven’t gotten to that yet, though.  My normal weekday schedule consists of:

Breakfast: massive bowl of oatmeal and peanut butter (nearly 550 calories)
Second Breakfast: Sliced apple dipped in 3/4 cup of 1% cottage cheese
Lunch: 700-1000 calories of over-processed, high sodium foods
Dinner: 500-600 calories of over-processed, high sodium foods (such as Lean Pockets)
Snacks (if needed): Almonds, carrots, 100-calorie popcorn
Treat: Ghirardelli 60% cacao dark chocolate square

So my lunch and dinners have been leaving much to be desired.  Lunch is often a hoagie (aka sub, grinder, or a hero depending on where you live), which is middling okay.  But sometimes I get Chinese, or Taco Bell.  Other times I get salad-by-the-pound plus a slice of pizza.  I could really improve matters by making my own food and bringing it in.  But that’s where the laziness comes in.

After I get back from the dojang (7:30-8:30, usually), I don’t often feel like making my own food.  Sometimes I’ll have another bowl of oatmeal, but over the last few months I have often been in a Lean Pockets rut.  This past week I made some healthier food (beef & couscous, chicken & pasta), and I hope to continue that trend.

My breakfasts and snacks aren’t too bad.  My morning oatmeal (around 7:45 AM) is something that I’m not willing to give up.  I make it nice and thick with 1 1/3 cups of oatmeal and 1 1/2 tablespoons of peanut butter.  The apples and cottage cheese is new — I had been doing a meal replacement shake until last week.  Either way is slightly over 200 calories, but the apples and cottage cheese keeps me satisfied longer.  Snacks are only when I need them.

Next on my nutrition docket is improving my pre- and post-workout nutrition.  I should have something both before and after I workout (as I laid out in my last post), especially on those days I’m working out for several hours.  It is a journey.

Fitness

I really didn’t mean to go nearly two weeks between posts.  I actually thought I posted a few days ago, but it turns out I merely left it as a draft.

Here’s my current workout plan that I started last Tuesday:

Sunday: P90x upper body/abs
Monday: Advanced TKD; Kali
Tuesday: P90x upper body/abs; Teaching beginner TKD
Wednesday: Hapkido; Teaching intermediate TKD; Advanced TKD
Thursday: Rest!
Friday: P90x upper body/abs; Hapkido
Saturday: TKD (90 minutes)

There are several P90x upper body routines: Chest & Back; Shoulders & Arms; Chest, Shoulders & Triceps; and Back & Biceps.  I’ve only tried the first two so far, and they are definitely good, challenging workouts.  The Chest & Back workout involves lots of chin ups, so for me that involves cheating (only lifting some of my body weight).  My shoulders just aren’t that strong yet.  My left arm is far weaker than my right — my left arm will fail on the final move while my right could have done more weight/reps.  Hopefully that left arm will catch up.  I haven’t had issues with my surgically repaired shoulder doing the lifting programs.  When I first started doing push ups (a couple of months back), the scar tissue would crackle and pop, but that is no longer happening.  So full speed ahead with strengthening.

Another quirk to my workout schedule is that I like to play tennis.  I almost invariably play with the same guy, and we keep it very light and active when we play.  We don’t bother serving or playing games, we’ll just rally back and forth workout ground strokes, approaches, and point construction.  So it is a good cardio workout.  We often play on Sunday (when my partner isn’t injured), so that will make for a tough double workout on those days.  We’ll see how that goes.

Fitness, Training

Yesterday I talked about my weight and my fitness goals.  My position at the time was that I’m doing a whole lot of exercise, so maybe I should just let the nutrition thing slide and continue to do the things that are maintaining my weight, but not allowing it to drop.

But the more I think about it, the less defensible that position is.  As I stated, I’m training or teaching martial arts around nine hours per week.  And I think I’m going to make an honest attempt to continue with the P90x program.  Today was the Plyometrics workout, which is a 58-minute DVD of jumping around in different ways.  (Side note: one of the four doing the workout on the DVD has a prosthetic lower right leg, which astounds me.)  I’m sore from yesterday’s chest/back/ab workout, but I’m not dead from it.  Tonight I did the hour-long plyometrics, then went to the dojang for a black belt TKD class (thankfully mostly hand techniques), then I stayed for the Kali class (which, unfortunately for my tired legs, had plenty of footwork drills).

Back at the ranch (as one of my college professors loved to say), the fact is that if I’m going to add an daily hour-long workout to my martial arts routine and I’m also going to play tennis hopefully once or twice per week, I’m starting to push 20 hours per week of exercise.  And I can’t be bothered to spend maybe an hour or two per week researching nutrition and meal planning?  That doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Part of my mental hangup with changing my diet is not feeling sure that I know what direction to go.  There has been so much misinformation over the years regarding nutrition, that it is tough to feel confident in anything I read.  Among the martial arts blogs I read, there have been two nutrition programs that have stood out with positive reviews: Precision Nutrition and Fat Loss Troubleshoot/Metabolic Repair Manual.  Sometimes all those testimonials seem over the top, but I think I’d have a much higher level of confidence following one of those programs than trying to do my own thing (which is working soooo well for me).  Both of those programs are much more expensive than a simple diet book, but they both come with plenty of extras that should make it worth my while.

So I’ll mull over it a bit longer, and almost certainly come to the conclusion that if I’m willing to spend hundreds of dollars on exercise videos, that $77 or $97 isn’t too much to pay for something that has the potential to fundamentally alter my diet for the better.

Fitness, Training

Well, hrm.

I’ve not been doing well with motivation to eat healthily.  I had done two six-day diets (here and here), and had good short-term results.  But, of course, once I resumed my normal eating routine, the weight came back.  The last week and a half have involved birthday cake, ice cream, pizza, Indian buffet, plus my normal unhealthy lunches.

Today I weighed in at 199 with 17.5% body fat, which is around what it was prior to the second round of that six-day diet.  That’s as high as I’ve seen the fat percentage in the last few weeks, so hopefully that’s a bit of an outlying data point.  Still, this isn’t what I’m looking for.

This morning, I tried out the P90x chest and back workout for the first time.  I muddled my way through it, using some of their suggested “cheats” for some of the pull-ups.  It was definitely a good routine.  My arms are fatigued, and as a bonus my shoulder is still feeling okay.  I also did the 16-minute ab routine, or at least as much of it as I could.  That one is pretty brutal.

I haven’t decided how much my slightly-squishy body is bothering me relative to my inherent laziness.  My current primary fitness goal is definitely improving my upper body strength.  After 20 months of shoulder problems, I really want to strengthen that area.  So this means that weight management falls behind strength training.  Perhaps I should save my mental energy for doing a near-daily P90x routine so that I make sure I am working towards my primary goal.  I know that I need to make substantive permanent changes to my diet in order to see much progress, and I don’t think I’m quite ready to commit to that in addition to the nine hours per week of martial arts classes (plus the time spent getting there, getting home, showering, etc) and the maybe 2 hours per week I’ve been spending on fitness outside of the dojang.

It’d be nice if fighting my weight wasn’t a lifelong struggle.

Fitness

Yesterday was the last day of my diet.  I was finding that all sorts of food was looking good.  I’d see a television commercial and want whatever it was advertising.  There was one brand of dog food that looked mighty tasty.

Here’s the final tally:

Day 0: 200.8 17.3%
Day 1: 199.0 17.3%
Day 2: 196.8 17.9%
Day 3: 194.6 17.6%
Day 4: 194.6 17.5%
Day 5: 194.0 17.1%
Day 6: 193.2 16.9%

Multiplying that out comes to 2 pounds of fat lost.  This is more reasonable than the last time I did this diet, where I had the flu and ran a 103.8 fever.  2 pounds of fat would be around 7000 calories, and I’m sure my caloric deficit was at least that much.

On a related fitness note, I’ve hung up a doorframe chin-up bar and I’m trying to do one or two every time I notice it.  The movement doesn’t seem to destabilize my shoulder (the way pushups do somewhat), so I figure the movement is fine.  My body is built with a larger lower body (big thighs), so body weight exercises like chin-ups and dips have always been tough.  I’m hoping to improve that a bit as I get healthier.

Fitness

Well, I finally got around to adding up the nutritional values for my diet.  I just used today’s diet plan, so maybe other days differ.  Here’s what I got:

58 grams of carbs (27%)
111 grams of protein (52%)
20 grams of fat (21%)
860 calories

Wow, I hadn’t realized it was that little.  I am kind of glad I didn’t add it all up before I went on the diet, otherwise I doubt I would have even attempted it.  Actually, I did cheat a little — I had more lettuce, green beans, and asparagus today than the diet called for.  So push it to closer to 900 calories.

My energy level has been pretty normal.  I’m drinking lots of water, and still exercising.  Today I played an hour and a half of tennis (though I was admittedly feeling a bit dizzy after intense points).  Yesterday was an hour and a half of TKD (primarily high kicks and jumping kicks).  Friday I did a Power 90 (phase 3-4) cardio workout (40 minutes), 6 minutes of a good ab workout, followed immediately by an hour and a half Hapkido class.  On Thursday, I slacked and only did physical therapy (which takes nearly an hour and a half).  Wednesday (the first day of the diet) was an hour Hapkido class, an hour of TKD teaching, followed by an hour of an advanced TKD class (lots of jumping).

I’d better lose weight on this diet with everything I’m doing.  Frankly, I should be able to lose weight even if I double everything I eat.  Today I weighed in at the same weight as yesterday.  Only one more day on the diet, and hopefully my body hasn’t kicked itself into starvation mode.

Fitness