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Not All Habits are Bad

“Get up, Trinity. Get up! Get up, get up.”

Remember that scene in The Matrix when Agents were following Trinity at the beginning in the film? She said that to herself to overcome her fear, so she’d get moving again.

I said something similar yesterday morning at 6am when my alarm went off. I don’t have a problem getting up early, dear reader; I may even call myself a morning person if asked. My trouble wasn’t fear, it was motivation against lethargy or laziness. You see, I can’t get up early to go workout before work. Try as I might, I can’t make it through a week of workouts if I do that. (I did get up yesterday. I had a course all day and working out during my normal time wasn’t feasible.)

But, tomorrow? Probably couldn’t do it.

Let me run something by you, dear reader, let me know if this seems familiar to you.

You’re alarm goes off; you get up, take a leak, go make some coffee; you read the paper, make some breakfast, have a shower, then brush your teeth. You leave for work, smack your forehead, think to yourself, “Clothes!” You go back, get dressed, then go to work.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. I’m guessing you follow a similar sequence at work. You may not do all those things or you may not do them in that order, but my point is that you have some kind of routine.

I have to ask you: if you forget to brush you teeth, do you feel funny? How about if you miss your coffee?

When I get up early for the sole purpose of working out, I can’t do it; I have to motivate myself. If I go at 11 or 12 in the morning, I go without a problem. I feel bad if I don’t. So to keep working out, make it part of your routine. You’ll never think about working out again. Admittedly, changing your routine is a challenge. If you want to change your routine, you’ll only have to conscious of the change for two weeks. After that, it’ll seem weird not doing it.

If you’re motivated to workout at all, you shouldn’t have to muster the motivation for each workout. Let your routine take care of that.

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Frequency, Volume & Intensity

The more you learn about diet and exercise, the more variables you find that you must keep track of. But if you don’t know the big, basic ones, tweaking your rep speed or your beta-carotene intake won’t help. In this tip, I’ll define three big things that you must know about for planning your routines: frequency, volume & intensity.

Frequency

This is the least controversial of the three. All frequency means is how often you train in a given period of time, typically a week. For example, I go to the gym four days out of seven. That’s my frequency.

Volume

Volume is the amount of training you perform per workout. This would equate to how many sets you do in a workout. For example, today, I trained arms and shoulders for a total of 27 sets (9 per muscle group). More is not necessarily better when training. A marathoner is probably the ultimate high-volume trainer. Sprinters, by contrast, train with a low volume.

Intensity

Intensity is how hard your workout is. I don’t mean how hard you were breathing or how hard you felt it was: intensity is more objective than that. Intensity is a measure related to your maximum effort. You only have 100% intensity. For lifting weights, this is typically measured by your 1 Rep Maximum (1 RM) of an exercise: the maximum weight you can lift for one rep; any more, and you can’t perform the exercise. Ideally, you wouldn’t begin your training without first testing your 1 RM in the lifts you want to do. Sprinters are the ultimate high-intensity athlete. Marathoners train with a low intensity.

So: you can train hard; you can train long; but you can’t train long and hard. I’ll talk more about this in future posts.

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Introducing Diet & Fitness Tips

I find myself paralyzed: there are so many aspects of getting back in shape that I want to write about, I can’t decide where to start. Everytime I think of a good place to start, I think of at least two other things to tell you. That would require WAY more organization here at jasonkemp.ca than I can muster.

So I’ve decided on this little mini-category of Diet & Fitness Tips. This will be a grab bag of definitions, tips I’ve read & tried & liked throughout the years and anything else I feel I should pass on, but don’t want to write at length about. (I actually always intend for my posts to be short, but I can’t bring myself to not be thorough. … But this time I mean it.)

So here’s the first tip, I mean, definition: diet.

Diet

When I think — and you do too, dear reader — of the word diet, I immediately think of the phrase on a diet; as in “I have to go on a diet because I’m causing planes to arrive 10 minutes late.” This implies that after you go on a diet for a while, that you get to go off a diet. Not so, dear reader. That’s not the meaning you should think of when you hear the word diet.

The meaning of diet that you should think of is “the sum of the food consumed by [the] body.” (source) So if you had a penchant for hot dogs and a can of Coke for lunch, your diet would consist of snouts and assholes…and Coke. It’s what you eat day in and day out. If your diet isn’t healthy or balanced, then you have an unhealthy diet. The only way to maintain a healthy weight is to work out and eat a healthy diet that you can maintain for long periods of time.

So what’s a healthy diet? It’s one that has the right balance of macronutrients (carbohydrate, water, protein and fat) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) for your daily needs. If you work out with weights a lot, your protein demands are higher than if you were a couch potato. If you are a lumberjack the sheer quantity of food compared to a receptionist is huge.

Stay away from diets with names. They do all the thinking for you, so you can’t judge whether a certain food is “in” the diet or not.

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How much weight should I lift?

Many people have asked me that question over the years; some have even asked when I was working out (that’s a no-no). The only appropriate answer to that question is another question: That depends, what are your goals?

Without setting goals, how do you know when your done? People often decide on a New Year’s Resolution of “lose weight,” or “get back in shape.” These goals aren’t good enough. Those people don’t last long. Working out for the majority of the last nine years, I’ve seen nine Januaries with tons of new faces at the gym; then, I’ve seen nine Februaries with all the same faces as those in nine Decembers.

Be specific with your goals; that’s the only way you’ll succeed. My last post said my resolution was to get back in shape. I lied to you, dear reader, I’m sorry. I’m tipping the scales at 270 right now and I haven’t squatted since I hurt my back last year. My goals are to lose 45 lbs without losing any muscle and squat my (smaller) bodyweight for three sets of 10 reps. That’s specific  as you need. For reasons I’ll get into, I won’t be hitting my goal for nine months. When setting your goal, don’t worry about timelines. If you want a 50-inch chest, you won’t get it within a year (well, unless you have a 49-inch chest). But once you achieve that goal, you’ll be so inspired; you’ll want to conquer the world next.

Setting a goal is good. But that goal is not going to do anything on its own. You also have to have a plan to achieve those goals. Making a plan is a topic for a later post. One more thing you’ll need to do is track your progress. If you’re trying to lose weight, weighing yourself every week won’t be good enough. You’ll have to track your calories and your progress in the gym.

The great thing about setting goals and tracking progress is that you can break it up, and set mini-goals on your way to the real goal. Doing this will re-enforce the need to track progress and will inspire you to keep going. So my first mini-goals are to go to the gym four times a week and to stop drinking sugary drinks.

So what are your goals?

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Mens sana in corpore sano

A sound mind in a sound body.

When I was four, I wanted to be Superman when I grew up. My mother, being crafty (as in arts & crafty) and indulgent supportive, whipped up several S-on-the-chest-attached-to-a-cape-in-the-back things for the other kids, and a full Superman outfit for me, for my Superman birthday party. I remember nothing of this party, but the outfit still hangs in my office behind me.

Flash forward about 13 years, I was lonely, skinny; in my hormone-filled mind, I thought muscles would get me the chics. So I started going to the gym. My first real workout, if I recall, was disappointing: I couldn’t lift much. The next morning, I couldn’t lift my arms above my head because my back muscles hurt so much.

So I kept going.

I also started reading as much as I could about it. Every muscle magazine I could get my hands on was read cover to cover. I was stoked to get Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding for Christmas. Everything I read as gospel; I followed all the exercises to the letter; I weighed my food and timed my meals precisely; I made sure to never work out much longer than an hour; I ensured I was properly rested so I wouldn’t over train. All for the pursuit of a sound mind in a sound body. I was first introduced to that expression in a bodybuilding magazine editorial. The instant I read it, I wanted that.

Getting a sound body is simple – which I hope to explain to you in coming posts – but it isn’t easy. It requires patience, faith in yourself, and some discipline (although less than you think).

I had a sound body once. I’m going to get it back.

That’s my New Year’s Resolution.