My BodyBlog

Interesting workout today!  The gym has a new power rack, first time it had one, and I used it for the first time on squats.  I was planning to go heavy today and the rack gave my confidence an extra boost since I knew I could bail out if it didn’t go well.  I worked my way up to 315, feeling good, and did one squat to parallel at that weight with little trouble.  That equalled my personal best from a couple of years ago.  I had given up going really heavy on squats, choosing to go as deep as possible for high reps.  My legs have come along great this last year and I was curious to see how much weight I could lift.  After comfortably doing 315 I put on another 10 and successfully did 325!  Felt great and I know I can do more if I keep working at it.

Another first today - tried some barbell sumo deadlifts.  Did 3 sets of 10 at low weight to get the hang of them.  Also did some seated calf raises on the smith machine, a new calf exercise for me.  I’d never did them before, it just seemed like a lot of setup time.  I did 3 supersets, starting with standing barbell calf raise followed by the seated calf raise.  I had a great burn going after those sets!

Between squat sets I did some dumbell exercises to strengthen my rototor cuffs.  I found them on bodybuilding.com.  They are simple to do and low weights are used.  I had problems with my rotator cuffs off and on for a long time, but since I started doing some of these exercises the problems have gone away and I am feeling stronger than ever.  A stronger rotator cuff will not only help prevent injury, it will help your bench press and other chest and shoulder exercises.  It’s worked for me, give it a try! 

My workout last night was awesome - started with deadlifts, followed by power cleans (a new lift for me) and finishing up with some quad work and some sprints on the treadmill.  I felt stronger than I ever have, and also felt more confident thanks to some comments I received at the gym.  Here’s what happened.

Half way through my deadlifts, a younger guy came over to me and started talking about deadlifts.  His best lift was one for 405, last year.  He saw the kind of weight I was lifting, in the low 300’s and asked how long I had been lifting.  I said for 8 months, and he complimented me on my progress.  He said that watching me had given him the itch to start deadlifting again.  He had been working on squats so we talked a little about that, then he said (more or less) ‘I can see why you do well on squats and deadlifts - you’ve got the body of a powerlifter.’

I didn’t know what to say - I had never thought of myself that way.  I said ‘Yeah, I’m not very tall’.  He said ‘You’re broad and have a low centre of gravity.  That makes it easier for you to lift a lot of weight than me since I’m taller and not as thick.’  We were finished talking, soon I set up for a 355 deadlift, which would be a new personal best.  I did the lift, and he was again nearby and he asked me how much weight I just lifted.  When I told him, he said that I would have no trouble getting up to 400 by the end of the summer (my goal was the end of the year!).  What a confidence booster!  For a fit guy a lot younger than me to view me in that light means a lot to me.

I went on with my workout, doing power cleans next.  This is a new exercise for me, this was only my third time doing them.  I just used low weight, making sure I do them right, but I did get up to the point where I did 135 with good form.  Feeling confident, I put on 20 more pounds, but I couldn’t get it to my chest.  It was then I realized why that exercise is called ‘power’ clean.  To be successful in getting the heavier weight to your shoulder you’ve got to have a tremendous amount of effort behind your liftoff to ‘power’ that weight up to where you want it to go.  I set up, focused, and did it the second time.  Not perfect form, but I did it.  I’m looking forward to getting better at this in the months to come.

I finished off my lifting by doing some quad work.  I did supersets on two machines, thigh adductor and extensions.  I did a warmup set, and felt so good I decided to go heavy on these to see how much I could do.  I did 3 working sets and my max was 180×12 on adductor and 170×10 on extension, all with good form.  I was amazed by my strength on these machines.  These numbers are way above what I thought I was capable of and are great improvements from only a couple of months ago.

In between quad supersets I was approached by a teen that I’d never spoken to before.  He asked me to tell him some good shoulder exercises.  As we chatted I found out he’d just turned 16 and had only been working out for a month.  I asked him if he liked it, he said he loved it.  I encouraged him to stick with it, learn proper form on all the exercises, and told him that his diet would make a huge difference to his results and progress.  He asked other questions, wondering what I did to get where I am today.  For me, this means a lot to my confidence.  The results of my bodybuilding was evidence to him of what could be achieved in the gym.  Helping to inspire and motivate someone else on their own bodybuilding journey is immensely satisfying.  It’s something I’ve been hoping I could do and now to be in that position is wonderful.  It motivates me to keep working hard and improving.

What a great workout for my body and spirit! 

Couldn’t lift 230 two weeks ago, successfully did one unassisted rep today!  My plan to gain strength gradually is working…I am now injury free and plan to keep it that way by lifting with good form and slowly inceasing weights on many exercises….I am more in tune with my body than I have ever been and will use the Instinctive Training Principle to help me get the most out of my workouts while staying injury free.  Time to go to bed and let those muscles grow!

I just entered my 100th workout in the Workout Tracker.  I’ve decided its going to be my last.  I started using it as soon as it was introduced, at a time when I was thirsty for knowledge about bodybuilding and my dedication and interest was steadily increasing.  I was able to overlook the frustrations sometimes encountered, such as losing an entire workout during the saving process, or making a mistake and not being allowed to go back and fix it the way I wanted to, or just the times when it was very slow or non-responsive all together!  Now, 7 months later, I find it more of a chore than something I look forward to doing.  Like anything in life, you should evaluate if the time it takes is worth the benefit it provides.  For me, the answer is ‘no’ in this case.  I didn’t do anything with the info and stats it gave me.  I can usually remember how much weight I lifted last time on a particular exercise, so I didn’t even use it for that.  I don’t workout according to a strict program, so creating workout templates was of no use to me.  A couple of ways it did benefit me though were helping me learn the correct names for many exercises, and encouraging me to try many of the different exercises I saw listed that I’d never tried before.  So, thank you Workout Tracker, but good-bye.  With any luck I’ll use the time saved for some extra cardio! 

For those unfamiliar with the Instinctive Training Principle (ITP), there are lots of good articles on this site with all the details.  Some promote ITP, some are against it.  I found the debate interesting and thought I’d put in my two cents worth based on my experience.  From my understanding on what I’ve read, I’ll broadly define ITP as ‘training hard and training smart to meet your individual needs’.  Some writers have said its training how you feel like training on any given day, which is true to a point, but its not as simple as that.   

When I started training over 4 years ago, I had no clue what I should be doing.  By starting from a position of total ignorance I guess I was the ultimate ‘Instinctive Trainer’ because I did what I felt like doing each workout.  At the very start, I did follow a full-body training circuit suggested by a gym employee, and I decided the number of reps and amount of weight based on how I felt each day.  I soon tired of doing the same circuit every workout, and I knew I had to do different things to maintain my motivation.  By watching others at the gym and asking a few questions, over time I learned how to do different exercises for different parts of the body.  As I gained knowledge and experience, my choices and results got better.  At different times some things worked for me, some things didn’t.  I didn’t worry about following any routine, as long as I got the gym time in, the workouts were making me feel good, and I enjoyed what I was doing, I was satisfied.  Each trip to the gym was an unplanned adventure, since I had no idea what muscles I would work out until I got there.  I let many things determine my choices, including who was at the gym, how crowded it was, what equipment was in use or not in use, how much time I had that session, and how tired or energetic I felt.  This haphazard approach sometimes meant, for example, I did some biceps exercises three workouts in a row, and didn’t do chest for a couple of weeks.  As they say, ignorance is bliss.  Just getting to the gym regularly and seeing some changes to my body was enough to satisfy me, I didn’t want to make things any more complicated than they were.  

I worked out in this haphazard way for about two years.  During that time I became very comfortable at the gym using all the equipment and doing many different barbell and dumbbell exercises.  I didn’t try to lift really heavy, just enough to challenge myself.  I wanted to do the exercises correctly since I’d heard the comment ‘form is more important than heavy weight’.  This seemed to make a lot of sense to me, and learning proper form has served me very well.  After about two years I started to gravitate towards split training without making a conscious decision that I should train this way.  I know I was influenced by others at the gym when I heard them talking about it being ‘chest day’, ‘leg day’, ‘arm day’, etc;  Over the next year I started to focus on doing two or more exercises for the same part of the body on the same day.  I’d do a couple of body parts.  Then the next workout I’d try to do a couple of different body parts.  I wasn’t totally consistent with this, and still had no real planned split, but I enjoyed working out this way because of the burn it gave me and the ‘good’ sore feelings.  I also started to see some better results.  So, I ‘instictively’ continued to train this way because of how it made me feel.  This brought me through another year or so, until I got to the point where my interest in what I was doing really increased and I started to do a little reading, mostly from magazines lying around the gym.

Now, I’m ashamed to admit this but I never took anatomy and although I’d been working out for three years I had poor knowledge about the human body.  I didn’t know my quads from my triceps, my lats from my delts, or many other basic things about muscle groups.  Thanks to some reading I soon learned what all the major muscle groups were, and found out exactly what muscles were being worked by all the different exercises I was doing.  I had learned a lot on my own, but a little reading made a big difference to my knowledge and I was able to work each muscle group better, and soon I was working on a split that saw me doing every muscle group about once a week, and incorporatng bench press and squats into my workouts.  A couple of times I made the mistake, for me anyway, of training a muscle group without enough rest, and I had a poor workout.  I knew from how my body reacted I had to give myself enough recovery time.

After about 3 and a half years of working out, I checked out this website after seeing it in a magazine add.  I read for hours, and thought I should be starting to do a more structured workout routine, since it seemed like so many others were on one.  I thought that was the key to success, and it probably is for those who bodybuild for competition.  But I soon realized there is no agreement in the bodybuilding world about how one should train to achieve optimal results.  I saw some common trends in many of the techniques, but couldn’t see any program that I thought would be practical or beneficial for me to follow for an extended period of time.  When I look at my life and the time I have for training, I have to be realistic about it.  I have to balance family and work responsibilities which often change from week to week.  When a program calls for 5 workouts a week, but when I know that some weeks I only have 3 opportunities to work out, then its useless for me to start that program.

I learned from my reading that dedicated and successful amateurs and professionals, although at times follow a strict program, also are smart in that when preparing for a competition they adjust their programs from week to week or even day to day if something is not working for them as well as they think it should.  Also, one piece of advice often given by successful bodybuilders is to regularly make changes in how you are lifting, changes in weight, reps, sets, type of exercises.  They believe great results are achieved by not allowing your body and muscles to become accustomed to what you are doing.  Keeping your body ’shocked’ and ‘guessing’ are two terms I always read.  You can’t do this if you follow a repetitive program for a long period of time.  Allowing for the flexibility to change what you’re doing do is part of the Instinctive Training Principle.  I believe everyone can benefit from changing up workouts; experience allows you to do it better.

Instinctive training is not showing up at the gym and doing whatever you feel like doing that day.  For success, you must have an overall strategy or workplan that you dedicate yourself to following.  My strategy now is to give an intense workout to every muscle group once every 7-10 days (I call this my ‘Cycle’).  This gives me some flexibility in scheduling my workouts without letting any body part lag.  I also incorporate compound exercises and isolation exercises to best suit my needs.  For example, an intense session with barbell squats sometimes serves as my leg exercise during a Cycle, while the next Cycle I might have one more workout so I can do Hams, Quads, and Calves in isolation.  I am never tied down to any training regime so much that if I can’t do something I planned to do it makes me feel like I’m missing out on something.  If I planned on doing Bench Press but the gym is crowded and I can’t use the equipment I need, I’ll do some dumbbell presses instead. 

For me, a large part of the ITP is knowing how to be flexible in your choices of when and how to exercise, and not losing out on any of the benefits of training regularly and intensely.  Instinctive training is being in tune with your muscles and knowing what is working best for you at any point in time.  I have been a devoted follower of instictive training right from Day 1 since that is all I knew to do.  It has worked to get me through injuries caused by training and by other things.  For example, when I sprained my wrist it severely limited what I could do for several weeks.  Instead of staying away from the gym to let it heal, I just changed what I was doing at the gym.  I focused on legs, abs and cardio much more, and used bars/cables for selectedupper body exercises with low weights and higher reps.  As the wrist healed I increased cable weights and started to slowly incorporate dumbbells back into my workouts.  Eventually I started using barbells for chest again, although it took a long time for my wrist to heal to the point where I could get back to lifting the weight I was before the injury.  But I got there eventually, without stopping my workouts or slowing the pace of my recovery.  If an exercise caused me pain, I stopped doing it or lowered the weight.  The saying ‘no pain, no gain’, is counter-productive for someone trying to recover from an injury.  I think how I continued training while allowing my wrist to heal is a prime example of instinctive training, and I would also call it ‘training smart’.

Instinctive Training also helped me mentally, giving me the tenacity and dedication to stick with my training when the demands of everyday life could have discouraged me to the point of giving up.  For example, I remember one time when my wife and I were facing a ‘perfect storm’ of family responsibilities and work pressure that consumed most of my time for several weeks.  Time for me to do my own thing was severely restricted  My gym visits were few and far between, and I was lucky if I could arrange to be there for 45 minutes.  The split training cycle I had been following was totally thrown off by these circumstances.  I knew I had to make the most of the limited time I had, so I focused on doing compound exercises and supersets to get the most out of my time and to get the most intense workout I could.  I did fewer sets with higher weights and lower reps to really hit the muscles hard.  An intense 45 minute session once or twice a week for a month served me very well.  It relieved stress, gave me a good workout, and made me feel like I was still moving towards my fitness goals while at the same time meeting the responsibilities in my life.  When I got through that difficult time and life returned to normal so I could get back to my usual cycle, I appreciated and enjoyed my gym time all the more.

When it comes right down to it, ITP is more of a mental attitude, or a state of awareness about your body, than it is a training technique.  A beginner can use ITP but it’s likely results will be slower because of lower knowledge (I’m proof of that).  A more seasoned bodybuilder will use ITP to their advantage because they are in tune with their body and know how to lift to get the most out of each workout.  Most people are somewhere in between, and using ITP will vary in its effectiveness.

I guess my final comment is that ITP means listening to your body and understanding what it is saying to you.  I’ve read the assertion that training a muscle while it is still sore from a previous workout doesn’t hinder long-term muscle growth.  I’m no scientist, but instictively this just doesn’t sound right to me.  I’ve done it and based on how I felt during and after the workout, I don’t think it did me any good.  Overtraining is a well-documented problem that slows down the progress of many people, and I believe that by listening to your body you can train regularly and smart without falling victim to over-training.

I’m just an average middle-aged guy who has fallen in love with bodybuilding.  I love how it makes me feel and look, and I’m going to stick with it for the health benefits.  Bodybuilding is similar to most things in life; the more you know about something and the more experience you have doing it, the better you will be at it.  I wouldn’t tell a beginner to start out the way I did.  I know I could have gotten better results faster if I had followed some kind of program at first.  But I think what I went through has given me valuable knowledge and tools that I can use to get the most out of my future training sessions, knowledge that I wouldn’t have had if I had been just blindly following a program or doing what someone else told me to do.  I’m going to see where the ITP takes me over the next couple of years, keeping in mind the basic principle of changing my workouts regularly.

I’ve put forward lots of thoughts in this post, to anyone who’s read it, many thanks!

My actual birthday was yesterday, but I was so busy I didn’t have time to write!  Another year gone by, time for a little reflection…I’m 43 and I’m the fittest and healthiest I’ve ever been….who woulda thunk it? LOL!  In my late 30’s I used to dread turning 40…I considered it to be the start of a long decline into old age.  I saw myself with permanent middle-aged spread, with nagging health problems, and God knows what other age-related problems…..how stupid I was!  When I finally got off my ass and started improving my lifestyle at the age of 38, I realized that I was my own worst enemy!

To anyone who uses aging as an excuse not to be fit and healthy…wake up!  It’s amazing how the body responds to the right kind of physical activity and nutrition.  Anyone, no matter what fitness level they are starting from, and no matter what physical limitations they may have, can benefit tremendously from exercise and clean eating!  At 43 I’m stronger, more muscular, and leaner than at any point in my life.  I’m full of energy, have a more confident and positive attitude, and I’m looking forward to the years to come with anticipation about what I will accomplish as I continue my bodybuilding and healthy lifestyle journey!

I celebrated my birthday with a day of healthy eating, a long walk, and a good deadlift and chest workout in the evening.  Life is good!

I just had a good look in the mirror.  Relative to where I started from, I’ve come a long way.  Relative to where I want to get to, I still have a long way to go….it seem like the more you achieve with this bodybuilding lifestyle, the bigger your goals become, along with your desire to achieve them.  When I started out, I was happy just to be working out and feeling better.  I was doing it for the health benefits.  As I started to grow muscle, I wanted to get better at it by learning about different exercises and workout plans.  As I started to lose some body fat, I wanted to accelerate the process by improving my diet and doing more cardio.  As strength increased I wanted to work at increasing my personal bests on compound exercises.  I’ve been motivated to do all these things by the results I’m getting and how great I feel.  Sometimes I feel like I’ve achieved so much, other times I feel like it’s insignificant compared to what I’ve seen others accomplish….how I feel depends on what mood I’m in at any particular time.  When I feel a little negative I try to remind myself that I’m on a journey that will last for the rest of my life and my quality of life will be determined not by the end result but by what I do on the journey.   

It’s that time of year again in these parts.  The grass is growing fast, driven by two days of warm weather and rain.  With good weather today, I had to seize the opportunity to go out and do some lawn mowing after supper.  If it were to grow much higher, I wouldn’t be able to push the mower through it!  I’m glad to get it done, but the down side is I had to put off my planned gym workout.  The up side is, pushing the mower for an hour is a great workout all by itself!  Summer is one of those times when I have to be very flexible, getting in my workouts when I can, since I am on the go a lot with my wife doing ’summery’ things, plus keeping on top of the yard work.  Another positive is that I am more active during the summer, taking longer walks, riding bike, and doing yard work.  I won’t miss out on too many gym workouts during the course of the summer, and if I have to I can do some body-only things at home to compensate.  Plus a little extra rest from lifting from time to time will make me stronger so I can hit the iron with even more intensity!

A few months ago I decided it would be a good idea to evaluate my progress at the end of each month.  I’d list the things I was happy and not so happy about.   But really…what’s the point of doing this?  As I sat down to think about what I am unhappy about for May, it occured to me that I will always have things I am not happy about because I am constantly striving to better myself, yet I have limitations in terms of time and my physical capabilities…why force myself to document a few less positive things when there is so much incredibly positive happening to me thanks to my dedication to living a bodybuiding lifestyle!  I’m doing this because it makes me feel great physically and mentally, so from now on I’m going to focus on the positive things.  I will continue to recognize my not-so-strong areas and work to improve but I won’t dwell on them.  I’ll blog about my accomplishments and my challenges as the mood strikes me, but no more monthly ’self-evaluation!’  I’ve got better things to focus my mind on!  However, for old times’ sake, here are the things I am HAPPY about for the month of May:

• Great health all month!  No nagging aches or pains from past injuries!
• Benched 225 lbs, personal best!
• Deadlifted 350 lbs, personal best!
• Did not miss a planned workout, I worked around some unexpected family circumtances!
• I did cardio after every workout, did HIIT on treadmill frequently.
• I successfully did sets of pull-ups during a back workout, first time ever!
• Eating clean all month!
• Walked frequently, had a bike ride!
• Bought some new summer clothes, smaller sizes than last year, made me feel great!

All in all, a phenomenal month!  Hope yours was too!