Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. ~Yoda


photo credit: carolyntiry

A lot of people don't like to make New Year's resolutions for a variety of reasons. I'd like to think that I've heard every excuse there is at this point but people continually find new ways to surprise me. The two most common (to date) that I've heard are:

1. "Oh, I don't need a reason to make goals, I have them year-round."
2. "People never stick to resolutions anyway so why bother."

There's a whole slew of ways to argue these points, but for me it just isn't worth it. While I agree with the first statement in principle, New Years and its associated traditions provide a logical, easily remembered point in time to set goals for yourself for the coming year. If you're committed enough to not need such a landmark date that's great, but I'll stick with what works for me.

In years past I never bothered setting goals for myself. Sometimes (infrequently) New Years was a good time to look over what happened to me in the last year and try to figure out what went wrong. The past two years were the first times I tried setting concrete goals for myself and it worked out pretty well. I think that where this practice fails for a lot of folks is that they don't set concrete enough goals. If you don't know your goal, how can you judge your progress or success / failure?

Now without further pontificating- my goals for 2010.

Fitness

• I want to maintain a 30-31 inch waist.
• Make it to the gym 4 days a week at least every other week, if not every week.
• Reduce my bodyfat. My scale currently says I'm at ~8-9%, but I wonder how accurate that is. That might be true overall, but most of my bodyfat is concentrated around the 'ole waistline. Needs to even out!
• Be able to squat 160lbs, bench press 180lbs, and do 100 pushups. Not necessarily all of these back to back

Hobbies

• Read at least 3 books a month (or 36 books for the year) with at least half being non-fiction. I'm great at tearing through fiction but I'm slow on the nonfic.
• Draw more. I haven't actively sketched anything in years, and the LA Ink marathon I watched while fighting off the deadly ninja sinus virus ..thing rekindled the creative urge in me. I haven't decided what I'm going to draw yet but I want to have at least four finished pieces by the end of the year.
• Photography. I definitely want to take more pictures, and I've started on that by joining the 365 Project. It's not a competition- you just take a picture every day and post it. I also want to enter at least two photo contests this year.
• San Diego Exploration. At least once a month, try something new around town. This includes hiking.

Self Improvement

• Learn a foreign language. This is one of my failed goals from last year, sadly. Logically enough I'm starting with Latin American Spanish since it's the second most popular language here. I'd also like to be able to talk to the nice smiling people who run the 24 hour burrito drive thru near my house.
• Add a new technical skill / certification. I'm leaning strongly toward PHP here due to my increasing WordPress involvement. Currently I'm more of a talented amateur hacker at it than anything else.

So thems my goals for the year. The fitness ones should be a breeze, the hobby ones a bit harder, and I think that the self improvement ones will be the hardest of all.

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
~Benjamin Franklin

photo credit: nDevilTV

Traditionally this is the time of year that I do the typical year in review type post. I broke tradition the past several years by either not posting at all or posting my todo list / resolutions for the year. Since the todo thing worked out well last year, I'm going to be wild and do both this year, though not in the same post. I'm writing this amid dirty looks and calls of "see you next year!" at a crowded Starbucks. The dirty looks are probably because I'm taking up an entire couch thingy with my feet propped up. Too bad! It's near a power outlet. Finders keepers and all that.

2009 in Rewind
I don't think there's any way I can describe 2009 other than frelling awesome. (Yes, I used frelling in a sentence. I'm aware it's a made up word. So is grok and I plan to use that at some point too so shove off.) Overall I think 2009 has gone well for me

Where I succeeded:

• I got in better shape. It hasn't been as quick as I wanted but I think I had some pretty unrealistic expectations going in. I've still got a long way to go but now I'm educated. I know more about muscle groups, exercises, and nutrition which will make this year even easier. It's like running downhill I think; the further you go the easier it gets. Daily Burn and my trainer Dennis were vital parts of this process as was the support of my friends and family.
• I was better at managing my money. I've setup automatic transfers into savings each pay check and a small spending stipend for things like books and movies. Mint.com has been a huge bonus to getting this done. Mint is like an automated version of Quicken allowing for automatic transaction categorization and alerts for a variety of situations (pending credit card payments, over budget, etc).
• Get more into my hobbies. Another one for the "win" column. I've been delving more and more into amateur digital photography/art, even to the point of opening my own store to sell prints. I've read more too, thanks to the Kindle app for the PC and iPhone, and I'm keeping up with it all via GoodReads. I rebuilt my website into something I like and I'm willing to maintain. As a side benefit I've learned a ton more about WordPress and I've actually done some custom site work and hosting. Hiking and camping excursions continue to grow, though not quite to the level I'd like. Moving out to San Diego will probably help that quite a bit.
• I moved to San Diego. Oh yes, this was a goal and it was most definitely met.

Where I failed:

• Self improvement. I didn't add a new technical skill or certification to my repertoire, and I didn't learn a new language. Gonna have to bump this one into this coming year.

Everything else:

• I bought a new car.
• I got invaded by ants.
• I had a few issues with the neighbors.
• I (unsuccessfully) tried Rogaine. More on this later.
• Attended MetaCon '09. Words cannot describe this event, ever. Probably because of the gag order from the judge. This year's MetaCon 2010 promises to be better!
• I got a job with Sony and moved to San Diego.
• Got told the truth a lot. Example: : patience (you don't have) is a virtue (again which you don't have)
• Did a fair amount of blogging. God, I hate that word. How about we say writing instead?
• Gained (and lost) a roommate.
• Went camping twice. Must do more!
• Got closer to my family. (Yeah, a win/loss there right? )
• Did I mention I took a lot of pictures?
• Got inspired by a pretty awe-inspiring blog post related to Harry Potter. I kid you not. Thankfully it's mostly due to the writer not the Harry Potter aspect.

Stay tuned for the 2010 todo list! Here's to another awesome year.

"Looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays!"

Yeaaah, she scares me too.

Yes indeedly, and it's every day that's gym day. It's been hard for me lately to motivate myself to go to the gym every week; once I'm there everything is fine and dandy but actually getting myself there becomes a battle every night. While I think it's way too early for me to be hitting any sort of burn out I'm definitely far enough past the "newbie" phase that the quick improvements are going by the way side, so now I have to buckle down and really work at it. I'm pretty impatient in general, so it's hard for me to be motivated without continual visual improvement. While I'm glad I recognize it for what it is, it doesn't make it any easier for things like Dragon Age to not eat up all my time.

Tomorrow is weigh in / measurement day and I'm more than a little happy. Looks like my weight will be ~165, which means I only have 5 more lbs to my goal of 170. Granted that translates into another 4 or 5 weeks, but I'm trying really hard not to think about that too much. After that it's a week to relax the diet a bit, then I start cutting down again. I've had tons of support and advice from my friends (Dorian and my old trainer Dennis at 1 on 1 Personal Training) in regards to diet and exercise and I couldn't have done it without them. I mentioned that it was hard for me to stay motivated, but the easiest way I've found so far is to be open about what I'm working on and my goals are- I find I'm less likely to let myself slide if I know other people "watching" what I'm doing. Ironically that's also today's topic on the My Daily Wellness Tip blog. Another good motivation tool is that I have friends coming to ME now for fitness advice. It's a good confidence booster and it helps me to keep myself on track. I also follow a few different twitter feeds and forums for fitness motivation; For websites, there's the forums at Bodybuilding.com of course, the forums over at Daily Burn (as well as a small fitness group I'm a member of there), and My Daily Wellness Tip, which is run by a few different folks. I follow many of those sites by Twitter, including jlboissonneault from the Daily Wellness Tip blog, Bodybuildingcom which is pretty self explanatory, and Bodybdercoupons which is a Twitter feed of new forum topics + discount codes. Dennis my old trainer has a Twitter feed as well as 1on1trainer.

Here's to hoping there's only 4 more weeks to go!

“Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” -Mark Twain

Om nom nom

I'm currently in what's known as a "bulking phase" and I hate every minute of it. That picture is my lunch today: A sandwhich with 3 servings of turkey, fat free cheese, tomato, and lettuce, rice cake chips, carrots, trail mix, a light Muscle Milk, sugar free Jello, and water. ( o . o ) I feel like a blimp most of the day. The scary thing is all that food is only 560 calories. Eating this much food is soooorta expensive.

It's widely accepted that you can't add muscle without adding fat, so most serious gym rats do what's called a bulk/cut cycle. You "bulk" for 2-3 months which involves in eating excessive calories, then flip and "cut" for about the same amount of time eating fewer calories. Everyone has what's called a "maintenance" level of calories- it's the point where your daily calorie intake is exactly equal to what you use in a day. Granted it's hard to do that on a day to day basis, so most people use a weekly total and average it up. Since adding 1lb of muscle of fat requires 3500 calories, that easily breaks down to 500 extra calories a day for a week. If you're trying to cut, you shave an extra 500 a day. Sounds easy right?

The problem comes in determining your maintenance level of calories. Lots of people use a body mass index formula (BMI) like the one described here. The problem is that everyone is different; the formula varies by weight, height, and gender. It can take a bit of experimentation and time to figure out what your maintenance level is. For reference mine is ~2400-2800 calories a day. I started bulking two weeks ago and weighed 155. As of this Friday's weigh in I'm up to 163. I've been slowly increasing my calories until I hit ~3200 on gym days and 2900 on non gym days. I finally seem to be adding mass pretty well and increasing strength-wise, so I don't see a need to mess with the formula much more. The only downside is I'm starting to reacquire a bit of a spare tire again. I was originally going to try and hit 170, but I'm not 100% sure that that 15lb increase has a good ratio of muscle to fat. On average for most people it's 2lbs of fat for every 1lb of muscle, so starting at 170 I'd have to cut back down to ~160. It's an eternal juggling act as you lose a bit of muscle when cutting too, so I may just go for 175 before starting the cut. I'm adding in a light bit of cardio 2-3 times a week for a few weeks to see if I can't get back to a better ratio without impacting calories much.

It's a good feeling when small shirts are too small through the shoulders and chest though

Hey! It's been a while hasn't it?

I'm sorry I haven't posted more. Life in California is pretty busy, so I don't have a lot of free time to hang out on the internet. It's somewhat ironic to me that I feel busier here than I did in Alabama when by and large the culture here is far more laid back and relaxed. Work hours start later and are far more relaxed, holidays are longer and there are more of them, and no one really ever appears to be in a hurry. I don't know if this is true for most jobs here, just tech jobs, or just "game industry" jobs of which I'm on the very periphery of.

So what's keeping me so busy you ask? The biggest push for me personally has been re-furnishing my pad. When I left Alabama I threw out just about everything that I didn't personally pick out, or furniture that I didn't like. I took pictures of my old apartment right before I left of everything packed up. It's pretty drastic that when moving from a 989 sq foot, 2 bed/bath apartment to a 830 sq foot, 1 bed/bath apartment almost everything I moved fit in half my living room. I had 86 "items" for the movers to move. That's it. I threw away a lot both physically and mentally to make this move, and one of my first orders of business has been to get my sense of "home" re-established. It's still a work in progress, but I'm done enough to actually show it to people and not feel like I'm living in a dorm room. You can see the full album on my photos page. Here's a few samples:

Some of my free time has been devoted to working on my official blog of course (www.thefirestarter.org), working on my dad's photography site (www.thruthelenz.com), and I just finished a website for Dennis my old personal trainer (www.1on1personaltrainingnow.com). Website work is sort of hit or miss for me, I don't generally enjoy it and have to be "in the mood" to get anything done. I need to finish Thru the Lenz and one more site for a friend's computer consulting gig before I can quit for another year or two. Hopefully. What's left of my free time has been split between gym, various social events, reading, and a renewed interest in gaming. I'm still trying to find a good multiplayer (co-op) RPG, so if anyone has recommendations I'm all ears. Gym is indirectly taking up more time than I'm used to; eating 3000 (or more!) calories a day while trying to bulk is not as easy as I would hoped. There's food prep time, sleep time, longer gym sessions.. but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was worth it and didn't enjoy every minute of it.

The only thing I'd like to do more of that I haven't is hiking. I got to do a quick 2 hour trip to Torrey Pines a few weekends back (photos here), but I haven't done any real stuff yet. I'm trying to get a group together to do a hike at Volcan Mountain this weekend but those pesky social obligations I mentioned keep cropping up =). Along with the hiking comes photography of course, but that's still very much a shelved project until all my website work finishes up.

Next post will be sometime this week and will probably be a Rogaine update. Stay tuned!

Editor's Note: this is a long 'un folks! Brace yourselves for lots of fitness-related rambling.

Wikipedia defines a non sequitur as an argument in formal logic in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises. Its original Latin meaning is "it does not follow" and that's exactly the sentiment I get when reading this article from Time: Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin. I only came across it while reading the Daily Burn blog (I highly recommend their service- you can see my sad little profile here. Friend me!). I could tear the Time article apart easily, but Susan on the Daily Burn blog did a pretty good job already. I highly recommend reading the Time piece, then her response. Instead I'm going to talk a little about what I had to do to get back in shape and let you draw your own conclusions about the Time piece.

I wouldn't describe myself as a fitness guru by any definition. At best I'm a "fitness enthusiast". I work out 3-4 times a week and I track what I eat pretty closely, but I'll readily admit that it's for completely shallow reasons and that the overall health benefits are a secondary goal as far as I'm concerned. My major form of entertainment is gaming and I don't think anyone would argue that it's a very "fit" hobby. I was tired of being a lump on the couch, and while I don't think I was fat, the extra weight I carried definitely had an affect on my state of mind. Luckily for me I've had the added benefit of working with a great trainer and getting advice from friends who are far more experienced than me, so any sort of success I've had has been 70% encouragement and advice from them and only 30% effort from me. Of that 30% effort, probably the three most important factors for me to get back in shape was education, organization, and willpower: not what I ate or what I did.

When I first tried to exercise for a few months by myself I quickly found I had problems sticking to a schedule or I ate badly (willpower). When I did manage to exercise, I was often doing the wrong exercises or doing the right ones incorrectly (education). Even if I managed all of that, I would lose track of what I did the preceding week (organization). I was floundering and not making much progress all of which contributed to demotivating me from continuing. To combat these three issues I decided to hire a personal trainer. Working with a trainer allowed him to handle the organization and education portions, and willpower was up to me. Willpower quickly became a function of my bank account; if I deviated from the diet the longer it would take and the more it would cost me. That was all the motivation I needed to stick to the diet and work my ass off. While I had a shaky foundation gleaned from friends/books/magazines, working with the trainer improved on the foundation I had and gave me a fair amount of confidence that I knew what I was doing. By the time I was done (8 months later), the base education was there and the willpower was more habit than anything. That left organization and better education left to conquer.

Once I wasn't working with a trainer full time anymore, I needed to set and track my own goals since there wasn't a 3rd party giving me the necessary organization and structure. I had tried spreadsheets when working out on my own before the trainer, but I didn't have easy access at the gym to follow a workout or update my progress. Enter Gyminee. It had a great website for tracking my workouts/exercise/food but it still wasn't "in the gym". In time they became Daily Burn and now have two great iPhone apps. One, Daily Burn, lets you update your nutrition and exercise info (including tracking your workout process) while the other, Food Scanner, is a barcode scanner to let you look up nutritional information. I've added all the food I eat including some custom recipes to my favorites so it's easy to track / update what I've eaten each day on the fly from my phone. My diet stays pretty constant as long as I don't eat out, and I only tend to buy the groceries I need to make my food for the week. Without extra food in the house willpower and binge eating suddenly isn't an issue. Thanks to the Daily Burn website/app I can pre-plan my workouts at home online then just follow the workout instead of standing there in the gym like an idiot trying to figure out what to do. Due to the habits I formed while working with the trainer, I've now managed to knock out the necessary organization and willpower to exercise on my own.

Education was probably my biggest hurdle, and still is to this day. There's a glut of information out there, and 99% of it conflicts with itself. Exercise routines, diets, cardio, strength training, yoga, pilates... the list is infinite. There's no easy answer here as basically you just have to learn what works for you by trial and error. There are a few key concepts that are good to know though:

• Body types. There are three major body types, known as ectomorphic, mesomorphic, and endomorphic. Body type is determined in a few different ways, but basically it has to do with how close to the joint your muscles taper and how your body processes/stores fat. It's a sliding scale with ectomorph at one end and endomorph at the other. Figure out which one you are! It will have a pretty significant impact on how you need to reach your goals. A good primer was made by my friend Jaerik here.
• Building muscle vs losing weight. These are two distinctly different and conflicting goals. Building up of muscle will not necessarily cause fat burning. Don't believe me? Check out endomorphs in the link about body types. While it's true that 1lb of muscle will burn more calories than 1lb of fat, in general it's only about a 10-50 calorie difference. Cardio, core exercises, and endurance training are all great for weight loss but not so good for makin' your guns huge. In fact most body builders go through periods of "bulking" and "cutting" where they alternate between packing on the pounds then trimming the fat. Both the exercises and the diet for these two goals are completely different
• How muscles work together. Seems obvious, but not always. There are some exercises that involve many groups of muscles (compound movements) vs exercises that involve single muscles (isolation movements). Your workouts can comprise of both, but it's important to understand that your shoulders workout is doing crappy today because you over trained on triceps during your chest workout yesterday. Triceps are a supporting muscle and involved in the compound movements for both of these groups! Once you've decided on how many days a week you're going to work out you can divide your body into days, and never do the same area in a row. My four day schedule is back/biceps/abs one day, shoulders/chest/triceps another, and legs (quads, hamstrings, calves) another. The fourth day is a core/cardio/calisthenics day mostly, or I might work an area that didn't get enough attention.
• How food is processed by your body. This one is pretty hard, and I'm still digging in here to educate myself more. As I mentioned before, there's a big difference here if you're just exercising to lose weight vs exercising to build muscle. Your body turns calories in your food to energy, and you have three primary sources of calories: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Based off your unique metabolism there's probably a perfect blend that will be optimum, but in general a 1/3 ratio of each is probably a good starting point. When I'm trying to build muscle I'll skewer this and try to make sure more of my calories come from protein, then fat, then carbohydrates last. While cutting the order changes to protein -> carbohydrates -> fat. Everyday usage however, 1/3 of each is a good rule of thumb.
• Know how many calories you need. If you're working out 4-5 days a week, and doing cardio 3-4 times a week, you need calories. You can't exercise without energy. Another handy tip for those wanting to exercise: take your current body weight * 15. With that level of activity, that's the amount of calories you need to maintain that weight. To add a pound of muscle, it will take an additional 3,500 calories. Want to lose a pound? Same deal. You need to add or subtract ~500 calories a day to lose/gain a pound. Your body also handles food better in multiple small doses, so try and change your eating patterns to 3 smaller meals + 2-3 snacks throughout the day. By eating all your calories in large lumps, the body doesn't need that many calories RIGHT THEN and can store the excess as fat.

So there you have it, the three biggest factors that I had to overcome to become effective at exercising. I know that I learn best by mimic and rote, so it made sense for me to get a personal trainer to get started. All the books and advice in the world didn't help until I could watch and be "taught" the first few times. Unlike the Times article author, I realize that nutrition and exercise are both equally as important, and that rewarding yourself with food is broken thinking. Try rewarding yourself with being happy to see your reflection. I've done both, and the latter is far more satisfying.

Useful links in this post:
Daily Burn: http://www.dailyburn.com They have a blog and twitter and I'm sure a Facebook page.
Muscle Chow: http://www.amazon.com/Mens-Health-Muscle-Chow-Workouts/dp/1594865485 A pretty good cookbook for people looking to build muscle by Men's Health. It also has good general nutrition information in it. Google Books has a preview here.

Between staying late a few nights and gym after work, I haven't had time to finish my latest masterpiece.

Check back tomorrow.