I am using one that I got from GI Joes. It doesn't require any hardware for the door frame. I got it for 30 bucks. I have seen them all over the place in that price range though. Are you sure there are no pull up bars? Look over the squat rack. There is always one above that. The problem with pull up bars in gyms is they are so freaking high. My trainer almost always has to lift me to get to one. (how embarassing) The one in my doorway I can just reach up an grab which makes it somehow easier.
I averaged 1483 kcals a day last week which is up quite a bit from before. I need to average 1614 in order to reach my goal. That is only a 131kcal delta per day. I will take me time with it and allow it to happen without freaking my body out too much. When you increased your kcals did you gain weight?
I just started this week with uping the calorie intake. Hopefully not, I am fine with the big # but I want bodyfat to drop..but for me something had to give cause I just felt crappy all the time
__________________
Expect more than others think is possible;
Dream more than others think is practical and Risk more than others think is safe!
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. Herm Albright (1876 - 1944)
So today was another trainer session (AM) I still intend to go to Ab class and also spin class later tonight.
Anyway the session was pretty kick ass. I was feeling so much more energetic since getting my cals and nutrition taken care of. We concluded today that I probably actually did crash last week due to lack of food. This happened partially because I did not fully disclose to him my activity levels. I always forget that most people do not run non-stop from the time they get up until they fall in bed at night or have farms or go to the gym for 3 hours a day sometimes.... etc... I think it aslo happened because most people lie to him about what they eat so he squeezes them down to a bare minimum. In any case I think I am good now and he is starting to get that I am a real serious client with a whole hell of a lot of heart and brain.
Today we started with deadlifts and he work a lot on my form. This exercise is very hard to get correctly so again I took my time and worked with very light weight (45lb) through 3 sets. He works me in exercise groups of 2 for some reason. (I need to ask him about that) In my last set we did the swedish pike ups or the Jake knife for those of you doing NROLW except this time he made me do a push up before each one. Talk about ass kick. I could only do 10 of them x2 sets. You can bet I will work on improving that. Anyway here is my workout today
circut 1 (hamstring/hip)
Deadlifts 3x15 (45lb)
Swedish ball kick outs (push into ball and go in prone position and kick each leg up) 3x15 each leg
circut 2
ab roller 3x15
Ham glute brige and lift with Swiss ball 3x15 (he didn't let me use my hands for balance. this was really tough)
circut 3
swedish pike ups with push up first 2x10
BTW: Here is a video of the prone jack knife or swedish pike up exercise (it is the last one) from my trainer's website. (go to the VIDEO tab - it is the 3rd exercise demonstrated)
Thanks Mel. He is being ultra careful with me on the Deads due to my hamstring injury. This is the ultimate hamstring exercise after all.
You look incredible in your last pics by the way. You're sort of screwed for the "most improved" competition I would say. I sort of think I might be screwed too. So my new goal isn't to win the comp just to look better than you. Bwaaaa Haaaa Haaaaa...
No hamstring damage due to the deads but I could definately feel both of them during yoga last night. Yeah, I did another yoga class.
Today was yet another workout with trainer. Today's lesson was in balance. He stressed today that balance must go hand in hand with strength. In fact it comes before in his book. "If you cannot do a decent bw squat with balance then you cannot do it with weight" I want to just lift but he is not allowing it at this time. He did promise me that next week we will do some squats with weight though. (yeah)
Exercise 1
Started with calf exercise whereby I stood on a balance beam (on the edge) and raised and lowered myself by standing on toes and then pushing through heel. This was deadly hard for me. He taught me to focus on one object and to quiet the rest of my mind and focus on making my body work to do the job. It was a lot like the yoga. I don't like this stuff very much which means it is very good for me. I did 3x15 of these each leg.
Circut 1
Next we used the cables low to the ground and a swiss ball. I laid my head on the swiss ball and grabbed the cable handle with my R hand. I then crossed my left leg over my right knee and pressed up through the hips so that my body was parallel to the floor. Again 3x15 (2 lbs)
For my second exercise I sat on the swiss ball and held the handle/cable with my palms down and with straight arms lifted straight up. 3x15 (1lb)
The weight doesn't seem like much but it was for some reason a lot to me. During this exercise he made a comment that my "delts" were starting to look very nice.
Exercise 2
V-ups 3x15
Exercise 3 (another one for balance and again very yoga like)
Again using swiss ball. Place shin of one leg on ball and push back until there is maximum stretch. Sort of like the warrier pose in yoga but with the back leg on the swiss ball so the stability is poor. This one actually really was challenging and I could feel it in my inner thigh and hips.
I also could feel a lot of muscles firing to keep my balance throughout this workout. I know that a lot of folks on this board poo-poo the balance work but that is the type of thing that brought me back from my injury. Allowing these muscles to atrophy is likely what helped pushed me into the injury in fact. Anyway, for what it is worth that is what I did so far. Tonight I have an ab class and will do a bit of intervals.
Yup balance has been an issue for me too, but doing the NROL routines has really helped with that. Hard though it is to accept your trainer is right - you have to learn the basics before moving on to the fun stuff. Still, great workout and way to push those deltoids.
__________________
Tom
No "happy hours" makes for a lot of miserable days. - Mahler
Yeah.... Deep down I know he is right but it still isn't as much fun as the other girls seem to be having with NROL. He assures me that this training will give me great advantages as an athlete. We'll see.
Tonight I went to the gym again and did pull ups with the assist. Tonight I did 50lb assit and 3x10. How are you doing with the assist machine at your gym? Did you start that yet?
Oh yeah and since this is my log I should document that I also did a 30 minute ab class (kick ass) and then went to the weight area and did bicep curls too. I did 3x15 (12.5 lbs) but never got tired so did another set with 20 lbs and that did it. I guess the 12.5 lb weights are not enough anymore. How cool is that?
Tonight I went to the gym again and did pull ups with the assist. Tonight I did 50lb assit and 3x10. How are you doing with the assist machine at your gym? Did you start that yet?
Yup, posted it to my log too. I pretty much have to use the whole stack (-250) in order to be able to do 2 sets of 8, but that's 2 sets of 8 more than I've done previously. Then again I do them at the tail end of my workout - if I did them earlier I'd imagine I could take off some of the weight.
__________________
Tom
No "happy hours" makes for a lot of miserable days. - Mahler
Thanks everyone for the encouragement. It really hasn't been easy but I suspect that if it was easy then everyone would be doing it. The truth is though that I am getting amazing results. I weighed in yesterday and took my bf and I am now at 22% bf with a weight of 130 lbs. I started just over 6 weeks ago at 31% and 134.5. By my calculations that is @13 lbs of fat lost and @9 lbs of muscle gained. I think that is a rate of 2.1 lbs per week. Not too bad but obviously a bit too much as I did end up with a bit of a crash. During this time I was only consuming around 1400 kcals a day with very low fat.
The fantastic news is now with all this data I can do some Math and come to some real accurate numbers of what I am actually burning in cals a day. By my calculations I am burning an astounishing 2480 kcals a day with my current work out schedule. I am sure as more of my body turns to muscle this will change somehwat but I feel pretty confident on these numbers. So that means that if I continue to strive for the 1700 kcals a day that will keep me at a 1.x lbs a week change and will keep me feeling more energized as well.
It ain't exactly what is recommended in NROL but I know it will serve me well this upcoming month until I've had time to adjust. I have about 3 months of this rate of loss before I will have to turn it around and start gaining so I am preparing for this mentally and physiclly in the next 3 months. At some point I am going to have to get into the 2400kcal range if I want to beef back into the strong and beautiful body that I want to ultimately have.
Yup, posted it to my log too. I pretty much have to use the whole stack (-250) in order to be able to do 2 sets of 8, but that's 2 sets of 8 more than I've done previously. Then again I do them at the tail end of my workout - if I did them earlier I'd imagine I could take off some of the weight.
I have tried these before and after my other workouts and nothing seems to make a big difference. Like all good things in life I think this is simply a matter of being more stubborn than the problem is hard. Keep at it and you will see results soon.
Oh yeah and I forgot to mention.... Even though my bf is at 22% I can not only see my obliques but also my high ab muscles (the 6 pack ones) are starting to show definition. If I can get down to 15% or there about I think I will be sporting some pretty cool abs.
Motivated as hell about my recent understandings of nutrition and how this all fits into the big picture so I created a tool that I hope others of you might find useful as I am.
I made a post RE this in the nutrition thread as that is (I think) the most suitable place for it. This tool needs to only know you bf%, weight and avg cals consumed per day for x period of days and it will spit out all kinds of good information to you. It will even tell you how much protein your body needs to continue the rate of muscle build it is currently doing.
The most useful thing for me was seeing what my real daily rate of burn was (an astounding 2674kcal per day) and also plugging in different numbers into the "what if" field to help me determine what is a safe low kcal for me. I learned that over the past 7 weeks I burned at a rate of 2.48 lbs a week. No wonder I had a little crash.
I know that many of you will poo-poo this but today there was a sun break and I decided to go for a little run. I did 16 miles because it felt good. I think that will be all I do for the day. I am icing quads right now as I actually got a bit sore. I did this nice and slow to prevnt myself from injury and did the 1/2 marathon point at just over under 2.5 hours.
For me this is significant because it is my first distance run since my injury and that ol' hamstring held up fine. My team of pros (my Physical Therapist and Personal Trainer) deserve big kudos for this one.
Oh yeah and on the nutrition front I averaged 1600 kcals a day this week so am at 200 kcals per day over where I was when I started. My goal for next week is to get it to 1700. That will put me in a very good place with some energy to spare. That is if I don't do regular 16 mile runs of course.
Oh yeah and I forgot to mention.... Even though my bf is at 22% I can not only see my obliques but also my high ab muscles (the 6 pack ones) are starting to show definition. If I can get down to 15% or there about I think I will be sporting some pretty cool abs.
I ate like crazy yesterady and managed to get 2200 cals in for the day. I also iced the quads and hamstrings and today I have almost no DOMs at all. I can feel my quads a bit but it doesn't really hurt. How crazy is that? I do a 16 mile run and barely feel it the next day? Sometimes I like this whole "high pain" threshold thing.
Today I am forcing myself to rest. My inclination is to run off and do Yoga but I think I will just kick back and give myself a break and also get food in my body. My friend and I calculated that even if I did push 2200 cals in my body that run was likely worth 2k or near that and with a 2600 cal a day BMR I was in a pretty bid deficit. Now that I sort of get nutritional stuff I am starting to see the light with respect to this sort of cardio and how it is pretty hard on the body. I will make sure to do distance runs only on occasion from now on.
On the COOL side of things I found an OLY bar on Craigslist with some weights that I am going to go and get soon. For 100 dollars I will own an olympic straight and curl bar PLUS 2-45, 4-25, 4-10 and 6-2.5 plates and collars, etc. These are the kind that have the hole in them to make them easy to carry and there is rubber on them to stop all the clinking. I really just wanted the straight bar but that cost over 200 bucks new so I'll take the rest of this stuff too I guess. Hmmmmmm.... Perhaps it is time to start converting that old office into a kick ass home gym......
YEAH!!!! Today we finally started lifting with real weights and all that good stuff. We only got to squats today as we spent a great deal of time talking about what we were about to do.
I sort of got in trouble for my 16 mile run on Sunday. On one hand he was happy for me because it represents the fact that my hamstring is strong (he stressed it still needs work though). But one the other hand he explained how this sort of running conflicts pretty directly with lifting or beefing up. He talked about my day on Sunday and how I could only manage to get 2200 cals in when I had easily burned that much on the run. He also said that sort of distance run can affect me for the rest of the week. He explained how in nutritional terms but that part went over my head.
He said that if I was going to lift that I would have to decide to lift and to gain and then act accordingly. Cardio would need to be less than 30 min a couple of times a week at the most. He told me that I was to spend the next two days finding pictures of what I want to look like so that he can better understand what it is that I want and so that I can visually understand as well. He spent a great deal of time making sure that I understood that I had to eat and how that sort of eating might make me feel sluggish at first and a bit low in energy compared to my normal feeling. He said I will feel strong but very full all the time. Finally he made sure that I knew that "lifting" required heavy weights and that it might not be all that much fun. I smiled then and so did he because we both knew that would indeed be the fun part for me.
Then we talked again about nutrition only he called another trainer over to join in. This other trainer has several clients who are body builders and who compete. This other trainer talked with me about nutrition and also about building muscle first before cutting. It was determined today that I am at a good enough bf% now to start gaining and that it made sense to gain now instead of loose and to cut later. This sort of shocked me because I was hoping to cut into a 15% bf and then gain but both of these guys said that was the wrong approach. So I guess now I have to gain. I will be investigating MyoPlex type things over the next time period I guess.
After this very long discussion he said it was time to get to work. He asked how my quads were doing and I told him I thought they were okay even though I had done that long run. So to put them to the test he had me do 50 bw squats. During this time he was on my case really hard about my form. He put a stool way behind me and had me to reach back and touch it with my butt while staying in my heels. He noted that I protected my right leg still and put all my weight into my left hip. This was a great catch and he earned his salary in that one in my opinion.
Anyway.... Here are the squats that I did...
50 bw
25 (25lb)
15 (30 lb)
15 (45 lb)
15 (55 lb)
So far nothing. No pain and no real effort...
Then he switched to an Oly bar because he saw that I really was that strong already.
20 (65)
15 (85)
And that was that. We ran out of time more than I ran out of spit. I think I could have done more. Holy cow that is like 130 squats. I guess that means we need to start with a bit more weight next time.
I can definately feel my quads today but I'll ice them tonight so all should be well. I am SO excited right now. This is going to be a bunch of fun. All I have to do is figure out the eating thing and stop myself from running so damned much.
Tonight I have an ab class as well at the gym. I love this fitness thing.
I think in NROL it has it that given the choice between endurance training vs strength training, the body will side with endurance training more likely than not. They called it the interference effect.
__________________
Tom
No "happy hours" makes for a lot of miserable days. - Mahler
Stingo and your trainer are right on -- if you have a goal for strength/hypertrophy then stick to it. Long runs won't get you there.
That's a lot of squats today! Here's an article that has a section about squat depth. There are lots of other articles (maybe Lisa~, our resident link queen, can help there) as well. In fact, I believe that studies have shown that knee stress is highest at 90 degrees in the squat. If that's where everybody stops, and if there's a pause at all, then they're spending the most time in the position that's most stressful on the joint.
A lot of it is unique to the indidual too. Femur length, hip and ankle mobility... lots of factors come into play. If you can do it without pain or discomfort, then you'll certainly get the most muscle-building bang for your buck with deeper squats.
And regarding ab visibility, I thought I had one popping out yesterday but it just turned out to be gas. Oh well, maybe next week.
__________________ Megaloi -- My Blog
"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."
- Mignon McLaughlin
I have this "problem" too... a desire to just go out there and row, forever, on a nice day, in my boat, on the lake... it's an amazingly freeing feeling (I used to like running, too, but since I started rowing / racing), you know, just to get up and go... for no other reason than just because you can. Anyway, because I'm racing and rowing with a team, it's something I have to think about all the time. I ENJOY lifting, but my PASSION is rowing. So, for now, my solution is to eat more. I haven't really gotten any further than that
Just wanted you to know that even though you got in trouble, I feel your pain.
Hey Stingo and RedLefty. Thanks for stopping by and the information. I kind of knew it already about the running but like Willie can atest to, it is just a hard habit to break especially when the weather breaks like it did on Sunday. Actually for me this run had a very significant meaning as it was the first distance run I did since I destroyed my ankle more than 10 years ago. It showed me that I am again an athlete. I did wish to run a marathon but after running this 16 and seeing how easy that was I am thinking that a marathon might not be such an amazing goal to reach for. I could easily have pulled out another 10 miles.
Right now I am super pumped up about the concept of lifting and I can tell you that even though I did a massive amount of squats today that it was a total blast and not really all that hard. I can't wait until I am actually testing what my body can really do. I will commit to this new goal for the next six months and then see from there if I can find a balance between this and running.
RedLefty, you are one of the most entertaining posters on this forum. I will definately keep my eye on your posts if for nothing else then for a giggle.
Stingo is that a new Avitar? Nice!
Willie I used to row. I started as a teen at the age of 12 when my folks had a summer place beside a big river and I got my first little row boat. I spent all day in that thing powering up the current and floating down. From sun up to sun down I was out there. Then I went to Germany for 11th grade and got introduced to the real thing. I ate it up and did really well until one day in a single I went into the drink. It was winter. One of the things I hate most in this life is being cold and even more so when I am wet and cold. I never rowed again after that in a single.
Karla, looking good! Nice job on the run even though you got "in trouble" for it!! I certainly think it's fine to go out and run occasionally just because you enjoy it and it felt good.
Keep up the great work!
__________________
Life's a Journey ... Enjoy the Ride!
Willie I used to row. I started as a teen at the age of 12 when my folks had a summer place beside a big river and I got my first little row boat. I spent all day in that thing powering up the current and floating down. From sun up to sun down I was out there. Then I went to Germany for 11th grade and got introduced to the real thing. I ate it up and did really well until one day in a single I went into the drink. It was winter. One of the things I hate most in this life is being cold and even more so when I am wet and cold. I never rowed again after that in a single.
Heh heh. I don't row the single much, for that reason, but I do take out a trainer every once in awhile. I vastly prefer 8's (they're fast! I feel like I'm flying!) and the pair (more technical responsibility-- and when it's good, you know it's because of you... and when it's bad, you know it's because of you ) I don't like being cold or wet, either, but I do live in Seattle, so it seems all too common.
karla! I love sculling. but I row in the warm waters of florida, so nothing bad about swimming here, even in the winter. I will get back to it when I can cut my work hours in a about 5 years or so.
Karla, looking good! Nice job on the run even though you got "in trouble" for it!! I certainly think it's fine to go out and run occasionally just because you enjoy it and it felt good.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks Julie... You are one of the only people on this planet who thinks I am not nutz for doing that. Everyone either yells at me 'cause of my prior injury, or they look at me with screwed up face and ask, "Why did ya go and do that?" They just don't get it. Running is fun I tell ya. I just couldn't bring myself to stop.
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