90 Day Transformations

Merry Christmas!

The end of another year.  New Year's Eve is next week and I am sure that everybody is thinking about what new transformations they want to make in 2011. 

I, for one, finished both the Beginner and Intermediate progams from the Men's Health Book of Muscle and started Starting Strength to get my lifts up.  I stopped at Thanksgiving and am just going to pick it up again after the first of the year.  I lifted for about 14 months non-stop and that's a huge accomplisment for me.  I'm not resting on my laurels, though, because it's pointless to do that much work and then just stop.  So this is simply a short break to just relax, enjoy my friends and family and good food, and not worry about getting sets in.

When I stopped, I got my bench up to 165, my deadlifts held steady at 305 (I backed off for Starting Strength), and my squats are 175.  Decent, but in no way impressive.  I feel that I have so much more strength I can gain.  Interestingly enough, my strength protocols weren't producing much in the way of hypertrophy that I can see, and I really don't care.  Feeling - and being - strong is it's own reward.  I've always been a skinny dude (even under my fat suit I wore periodically) so having the beginnings of some real strength is kind of intoxicating.

Anyway, I also picked up The Four Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss, and have been continuing my exploration of Paleo.  Once I get my lifts up to 1.5 plus times my bodyweight, I'm going to move away from the strict strength stuff and get more into the metabolic conditioning stuff.  Perhaps another round of P90X?  Crossfit?  Some kind of martial arts?  Lots to think about and plan for 2011.

So everybody enjoy your holidays and get excited about 2011! 

The Transformations continue..

Happy New Decade, P90X'ers and Wannabees!! Also, I'm Nude.

2009 was an interesting year, to say the least.  I welcome all my usual new New Year's traffic.  I direct those of you who are new to the site here and then here first to get an idea of what I'm all about.  Oh, also here.

Let this be the year you make good on your promises to yourselves to get in shape and start living a healthier lifestyle.  It's really worth every second of the pain and sacrifice (I make it sound so nice, don't I?).  So don't be afraid to take a measly 3 months out of your entire lives and eat clean and workout.  Just 90 tiny little days.  Worried about your friends giving you grief when you pass on the beer and wings?  Just nonchalantly inform them you are "on a program" (keep a good attitude about it and you just might get some allies).  90 days.  12 weeks.  3 months.  It goes by so fast and at the end of it you are a different person.  Isn't it worth trying that just once in your life?  You might be surprised at what other things improve in your life when you improve your health.  I'm just saying. 

Give it a shot.

In other news, I was looking at myself in my living room mirrors naked this morning, and I have to say I'm rather pleased.

Looking back over my training log from December, I weighed 177 on 12/17/09.  Today, 01/06/10, I weighed in at 184.  I know I gained some weight from xmas indulgence, but 7 pounds?  I guess it's possible.  And I took a week off from lifting Christmas to New Year's Eve so my muscles were able to fully recover and grow.

Anyway, I decided to really take a look and see if I can notice any gains.  Nudity required.

Sure enough, I was looking at my quads, glutes, and hams in the mirror and dudes, there's some size and definition there that definitely wasn't there in October, especially in my already fine ass.  Also, my arms are getting bigger.  Nothing huge, but I can definitely tell I'm filling out.  Yeah, there's some extra fat in the spare tire area, but not much.  How much of that 7 pounds is fat and how much is lean muscle?  I really have no idea, but it's definitely not all fat (or all muscle for that matter).

My long-term question is, of course, what will happen next time I do P90X?

I started P90 at 190 pounds.  I ended P90X 6 months later at 164 and a nice 6 pack.  I'm almost back up to where I was before weight-wise, but I'm definitely not chubby like I was.  I can still see 4 of my 6 abs and my face isn't all doughy and round like it was.  My arms and legs are hard, too, not flabby like they used to be back then when I started P90.  My guess is, and this is purely guessing, that if I got P90X lean today, I would weigh somewhere in the 169 to 172 range.  Again, just guessing.  But I don't think it's too far off the mark.  The key will be to lose the little bit of fat without hurting my overall mass gains once I'm ready to cut up.

I still have a little less than 3 months left to go in this first 6 month program.  See, if you had just started P90X when you read my first post about this program...

You would be done.

Welcome to 2009, Fitness Fans!

I see that with the new year comes new interest in fitness.  I haven't posted anything since the beginning of November and yet I get this almost double jump in hits week one of 2009 (W01 above).  Everybody is telling themselves that "this is the year."  This is the big year that we finally decide to get in shape in time for spring break or summer.  This is the big year we start taking control of our lives by starting at the bottom and working our way up.  This is the big year we get a six pack.  

I have been absent for a couple of months due to a family emergency.  There were too many pies, turkey, gravy, and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  It was a serious crisis.  Somebody had to take one for the team, I figured it might as well be me.

So in short, I have not only been absent from 90 Day Transformations, but I have also been absent from the gym.  No dulcet tones of Tony emanating from my tv early in the morning.  Only snoring from my room.

So what effect has two months off my program had, you might ask?  Well, I've gained back about 7 pounds of fat.  I find that to be surprisingly low considering how much pie and beer I've been consuming the last 60 days and how little (okay, none at all) I've been exercising.  I know in the past I've made a lot of big talk about having a clean diet forever more and making exercise just a part of my daily routine.  But nobody's perfect.  When I have a houseful of people and there is wine flowing and pies begging to be eaten, it's hard to be a food nazi.  So I wasn't one.

In a way, I am very thankful that the holidays are over.  With all the overindulging and the fatty, salty, sugary foods and low activity level I found that I was starting to feel not so hot.  After the dust settled from my big New Year's Eve party I restarted my diet and could feel the difference in my energy level and mental and physical state almost immediately.  I enjoyed the holidays, but I can't be that way all year round any more.  I don't know how I did it before.  

All wasn't cookies and nog during my respite.  I did stick to a fairly clean diet overall and continued to eat several small meals starting with my usual breakfast.  It was just around dinner time that the trouble would start.  

I also spent a considerable amount of time researching the methodology for gaining muscle size and strength.  P90X is superb for athletic conditioning, flexibility, and leaning out.  It may be decent for building muscle, but it's far from ideal.  There's just too much cardio and not enough heavy, heavy lifting to build much mass.  So using info from the interweb, the Men'sHealth Power Training book, Arnold's Encyclopedia of Modern Body Building, and stuff from Tony's programs, I'm working on a new fitness paradigm that concentrates primarily on building overall mass and strength with only a secondary focus on athletic conditioning.  In the beginning, there will be just about zero single-muscle exercises.  Everything is compound and done with heavy weights:  ie., squats, deadlifts, chin ups, bench press, cleans, etc.  

One of the cool things about this is that it is a pretty significant shift from P90X, which will make my body have to adapt to a whole bunch of new exercises and should create some obvious gains pretty quickly.  It will also take less time to complete a typical workout.  The downside is that I can't take a squat rack on the road with me.  One of the great things about P90X that made it easy to stick with was that I could take my entire gym with me in a box and do everything in my hotel room.  I proved to myself in 2008 that I could lose 45 pounds and get a six pack.  I achieved this with flying colors.  I'm fairly certain that I mentioned this before, but for 2009 my goal is to gain muscle mass.

For this, I am going to have to start going back to the gym.  

The shorter workouts will help a little bit in this regard.  I can use the extra time to drive back and forth from the gym that I would have otherwise used for the rest of Tony's workouts - "REPEAT-O!"  It will also help to be able to recruit the occasional spotter for some of the tougher workouts.  In the beginning I am going to have to get a live coach to show me the right way to do some of these exercise.  Form is always very important.  

As far as diet goes, I am going to concern myself less with calorie deficits and getting cut and more with getting enough carbs and fat for energy and recovery and protein for rebuilding.  The caloric intake will increase, but not by as much as I thought it might.  I am convinced that I can gain real muscle mass without getting fat and most everything I have read backs this up.  

Once I finalize my plan I will post it up and provide my usual reasonably frequent weekly/bi-weekly updates on my progress.

For those of you who found your way here by doing "does P90X work" google searches the answer is, in short, yes.  But like anything else in this world, the key ingredient to making it work is you.  Programs like Power 90, P90X, Body For Life, Weight Watchers and so on are just tools.  They only work if we, the user, actually use them.  Our results are directly proportional to our efforts.  To get truly great results, we push ourselves past our comfort zones and squeeze out every last rep like that is the rep that is going to add that inch to our biceps or dissolve that pound of fat.  It takes a lot of consistent work over a relatively long period of time - there is no other way around it, that's just the way it is.  Anybody can get in decent shape by getting moderate exercise and not eating like a pig.  If we want to get into the best shape of our lives, we follow the P90X or P90 program like our lives depend on it.  If we want to get big, well, we stay tuned to this here blog.