Ebbs and flows

Feb10
by Duf on February 10, 2012 at 1:49 pm
Posted In: General Fitness Talk, Nutrition

Despite my outer, workout obsessed appearance I too can suffer from the normal ebbs and flows of motivation.  My last two GUTS efforts were sub-par, I mentally just was not that into it.  I also have found it tough to get excited about doing the half marathon in early March.

It may be some degree of burn out. After all, my 5 day a week lunch work outs paired with my after work sessions with various endurance activities and contest challenges wedged in there makes for a pretty full exercise plate.

My head hasn’t felt positively focused for a few days and when that happens everything suffers.

On a side note, I still have been doing juicing primarily for dinner 4 or 5 days a week.  We also found a decent alternative for those looking for some of the benefits of juicing without buying a juicer and investing the time required to make juice.

The brand is called Naked.  They have a variety of juice combinations and they are basically just pure juice with no bullshit added although the product is pasteurized for shelf life.  I’ve tried 4 or 5 varieties and all of them were fine.

We have been using these instead of our crack of dawn juicing sessions that were becoming a large pain in the ass.

The bottles aren’t cheap, Ali reports they are roughly $2.50 a pop. However if you compare that to the time/effort and cost of the raw materials used in juicing it will be pretty much a wash.

If you see them at the grocery store grab a bottle or two and try it out.

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GUTS equal opportunity energy drain

Feb08
by Duf on February 8, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Posted In: Endurance activities, GUTS

So I did a GUTS routine before running today.  At first I was considering not even trying it because my triceps were very sore from doing Metin’s tough tricep stair routine Tuesday.  I decided to try anyway and surprised myself with 37 dips and followed up with my 20 pull up plateau.  In push ups I felt weaker than normal and decided to stop at 36 reps since I wanted to run 3 miles on the treadmill yet.

Well one thing I have noticed that doing the GUTS routine before any conventional weight work out will significantly reduce the amount of weight I can push/pull/lift.  The 5 or 6 minutes of GUTS seems to adversely affect my performance for the next 30 minutes or more.

Well I believe today was the first time I tried to run after doing GUTS.  I found it had the same side effect to endurance work as well.  I STRUGGLED to do the first mile at the same 8:34 pace I did for three miles the week before.  In fact I was very close to just stopping altogether., I felt that lousy.

I compromised by bumping the treadmill back to a slow 6mph pace before bumping it back up to 6.5 for the last mile.  I just felt very low energy.  It only makes sense to attribute it to just another post GUTS side effect.

My hope is if I continue to combine the two exercise types that my body will slowly be able to recover better from the intense aerobic GUTS work out more efficiently instead of having it carry over for the majority of my gym session.

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Unofficial

Feb07
by Duf on February 7, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Posted In: Physical challenges

I made an unofficial attempt at the 5150 today.  I thought mixing 5150 practice attempts on my GUTS off days might be productive although it sort of negates the whole rest concept.  Trying to do 50 pull ups and 100 push ups in 5 minutes isn’t exactly resting.

I had some improvement over my initial attempt where I netted 35 pull ups and 75 push ups in 5 minutes.  This time I managed 40 pull ups and 75 push ups.  My pull up sets went like this 10-10-8-7-5 , my push ups were 20-20-20-15.  I liked these set reps, they didn’t totally gas me early but were big enough chunks to add up to decent toals.

I’m only 10 pull ups and 25 push ups from the magic 150 number.

My one arm static chin hold is really improving, at least on my right side.  Yesterday I held what felt like a solid 10 seconds on the right.  With my left arm I still am only able to pause briefly above the bar before my strength fails.  The disparity in strength between my left and right side may explain why my muscle ups always fade on my left side when they start to turning into “one overs”.  I am hoping my continuing to work the OAC hold on the left I can even out the strength level between the two halves.

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Light weekend, BBR hater

Feb06
by Duf on February 6, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Posted In: Endurance activities, General Fitness Talk, GUTS, Physical challenges, Soapbox

I had an abnormally light weekend as far as exercise goes, running 7 miles Saturday morning but nothing else otherwise.  To be fair I was busy almost all day Saturday doing things at the house but my Sunday was pretty damn lazy.

With as active as I normally am, even one day of abnormally low activity, paired with less than healthy eating (Super Bowl),  can send me into a tizzy.  I feel lethargic, grumpy, lazy and just annoyed with the world.

I had some ideas about trying Lee’s February 20 by 12 challenge on Sunday but my knees were a bit sore to tackle 4 sets of jumping deep power squats.  I definitely do want to give it a shot and soon.  I am curious how long it will take me to complete.  I have seen times ranging from 8 minute something to over 20.

I did a GUTS session today. It feels like I am on a plateau, nothing is getting any easier and I am still utilizing a very slow pace at the end of the dip and push up sets.  I don’t know why I bother trying to bench press after doing GUTS.  I have absolutely no pushing power at that point.

My current GUTS numbers stand at 36/20/49.  (dips/pull ups/push ups)

I had my first troll/hater to deal with on the Bar-barian forums.  On this month’s challenge thread this guy unleashes on me, Lou and several of the contestants.  He had several criticisms.

He said that several of the contest participants were using junk form and that Lou and I were not being tough enough as judges.  In reality we disqualified double digit attempts during the month due to form or break timing issues, including two of my own.

The troll went on to question my elevation to forum moderator since I am clearly not an elite bodyweight athlete at this point, evidently he views that as a requirement to run the contests.  He also scoffed at Lou, taking shots at his form as well.

Well I tried to be a professional as I could, asking other forum members to not “feed the troll” (react to the post).  I intended to simply use my power as moderator to delete his posts and move on.  Well it turns out that there were some problems with my moderator rights, I couldn’t moderate.  I contacted Rick about the issue but in the mean time sent a private message to the guy to address his complaints.  Here was my response:

Hey bud I’m not sure who you are or who pissed in your Cheerios. I have been scratching my head trying to figure out exactly what the point of your rant is? Are you an elitist that thinks that only the upper echelon in the body weight community are worthy of posting videos of their efforts?

How does trying to degrade someone on the board accomplish anything positive at all? Do your proclamations make you feel better than others?

I am actually very much a tell it like it is person myself. However when I see a world that is filled with a majority of fat and lazy couch potatoes the last thing I plan to do is discourage someone that actually gets “it” and understands the importance of self improvement and the benefit of challenging yourself physically.

if you had a problem with the way a contest is run you should have contacted me instead of dumping your insults all over the board. I’m a big boy and happy to take it.

I am asking that you discontinue your forum rant.

Do the challenge, do it well and I’ll be happy to give you your props and if you turn out to be an epic poser I’ll be happy to tell you that you suck since that seems to be what you like to hear.

The guy responded mostly positively to my PM however he wasn’t very positive when I finally got my full moderation rights in place and deleted all of his posts and anything related to it. Oh well.  I deleted his complaint about my deletions as well.

For whatever reason my mostly cynical, negative viewpoint of the rest of the world does not seep into my participation on the Bar-barian forums or my dealings with the bodyweight community in general.  I value being involved with a group of like minded individuals that understand the importance of pushing yourself physically, not matter what your current physical limitations may be.

This is a bunch of people that speak via their actions and I respect that more than anything in this world.  There is way too much talking and far too little doing going on elsewhere.  The BBR forums are my little bright light of goodness I keep in my pocket.  I have no intentions of letting anyone take a dump all over it.

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5150 attempt number 1

Feb02
by Duf on February 2, 2012 at 9:52 am
Posted In: Physical challenges

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl2eC1BMiuA

I took my first crack at the 5150, 150 reps in 5 minutes challenge last night.  It was tough, maybe even a little tougher than I expected.

I tried this once before, instead seeing how long it would take me to get all 50 pull ups and 100 push ups.  It took almost exactly 7 minutes.  For this challenge once 5 minutes expires you are done, counting whatever reps you did complete.

When I did the 7 minute attempt I broke the reps into 10 sets of 5 pull ups and 10 push ups, thinking keeping the sets small would help me not gas completely too early.  Well the problem was the 20 transitions between exercises just ate up too much time.

This time my plan was to do each exercise to the point where I would normally pause before cranking out a few more to save time and avoid blowing too much energy too early.  My first set of 15 pull ups and 30 push ups went ok but I was already feeling more spent then I would have liked, especially with the pull ups.

For the rest of the attempt I did whatever pull ups I could manage and did sets of 15 push ups.  I wound up with 35 pull ups and 75 push ups, 40 total reps (15 pull ups, 25 push ups) less than I eventually want to achieve.

I heard from Zef that he is hoping to have special shirts made that are exclusive to the forum challenges.  This will a be a very cool addition and will surely drive up participation.  Having prizes for contests also means that more stringent judging and rule enforcement will need to be in place.

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