Archive for the ‘ Fitness ’ Category
I’m proud to say that the 5am starts have completely corrected my body-clock. Yesterday was the first day all week that I didn’t have to get up at that ridiculous time to work. Instead I slept in until 7am! and I woke up feeling completely rested and amazing.
Then work for 10 hours (overtime was too tempting), doing manual labour and stuff.
Then I get home and decide to go for a run and half way through it starts to rain.
Yep, best day ever.
I think that if you want to be fit you need to enjoy exercising. If you hate exercising a really short gym session seems like forever but if you enjoy it time flies and you train for ages.
Like yesterday I went for a 10 lap (4km-ish) run of the oval near my house and found some woman training there also. She had a heap of witches hats, weird tubes to throw around and all sorts of gear. I rocked up barefoot with my phone for music.
I got straight into it, I pumped my music and it psyched me up enough so I could run hard around the track. I then stopped after the lap, had some water and waited for the next breakdown in the song. Taking that rest after every lap was important because it meant that I wasn’t in “pain” the whole time, so I enjoyed the run, rather than spending it dreading how much more I had to go. The 10 laps seemed like nothing because I enjoyed it. But the other lady sat in her car for half an hour before starting her training and then didn’t even look like she wanted to be there.
A reoccurring thing I have found in life is that quantity is almost always more important than quality. Her training was of high quality, with more aerobic and agility training, while mine had a rest every couple of minutes. But I did more, and I will probably go back and do it more often because I enjoyed it. That compounds the benefits of my training against hers, meaning I get more out of it in the long-run.
With exercise (and any skill development) it doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you do lots of it. And the only way to do lots of something is to enjoy it.
After having an ordinary week, or experiencing mental exhaustion, there is one thing that helps extremely well. Going outside.
Our bodies were made to be outside most of the day. Being stuck inside an office isn’t natural and has a really damaging effect on ones mental capabilities.
If you go outside and lay around for the whole day you will come out of it feeling 100% better and feel like you have had a productive day (even if all you did was sit around).
A day is a day and a week is a week. In your memory however, a length of time changes depending on how much occurred in that time period.
If you spend a week flat out doing experiencing memorable moments then thinking back the week will seem like it lasted much longer than a week.
Alternatively, an uneventful year will speed past, mostly because there aren’t enough memorable events to reference.
Compare one person who lives outside their comfort zone their whole life. They experience so much and have so many memories that retrospectively their life seemed like it lasted an eternity. Another person works their whole life, living safely and cautiously. The years begin to blur together because they are all very similar.
The difference? when death approaches one of them will look back and feel their life came and went too quick. The other will say “That sucks but it doesn’t matter, life was getting exhausting anyway”.
So it turns out that my opinion on Doping within the sport of cycling is similar to that of many journalists. It actually kinda annoyed me when I read another article that agreed with my viewpoint. This is because the “media’ is usually wrong.
I understand that disagreeing with something simply for the point of disagreeing doesn’t contribute much at all. But I do like trying to find perspectives that don’t align with the hive mind, regardless of whether I believe these viewpoints or not.
That is why I originally took the stance of pro-steroids. Now I’m taking the opposite stance by arguing that a big part of taking performance enhancing drugs is individual genetic traits. Some people will benefit way more than others and you don’t really want two cyclists competing and the guy who trains harder to lose simply because he is less receptive to the drugs.
Athletes should be rewarded for training harder, not rewarded for being genetically compatible with steroid use.
However on the same note there are many people who trained their absolute hardest but were genetically incompatible for their sport (Flat footed for example), Michael Phelps being shaped like a dolphin with huge flipper feet likely contributes to his “skill” and that definitely did not result from a dedication to training.
Ideally the correlation between the winning athletes and the athletes most dedicated to training should be 100% and steroid use definitely distorts this relationship. However there are many other influences in sport that similarly swing the balance in the wrong direction which need to be considered (on equal grounds) if steroid use is to be banned for this reason.
Ever since the topic of Lance Armstrong and doping came up my opinion has been “of course he was on the gear”. I have been under the impression that the Tour de France was something in which athletes needed steroids to effectively compete.
People need to stop viewing these charges from the perspective of a spectator who dabbles in the art of cycling occasionally. A world class cyclist (or any sportsman) has a huge incentive to take performance enhancing drugs. During Armstrong’s peak he enjoyed several years of being a cycling god, he was paid incredible amounts of money, had world fame and won the game that is life.
If the other option was to die a nobody then I know what option I would be choosing.
Remember that guy that gave up? Neither does anybody else.
Please keep in mind that every cyclist at that level is on some form of gear. Those who are not finish last.
So even though he was doping, it wasn’t a case of unfair advantage. It wasn’t first place on steroids and everyone else competing fairly because everyone was on them yet he was the most effective at incorporating them into his training.
Steroids are really taboo and the lame man’s consensus is that the second any ordinary person touches anabolics they become a world class athlete. In reality Lance Armstrong followed an incredibly strict diet, trained 6 hours a day every day, had unwavering willpower, never let the pain overcome him and pushed his body further than any other cyclist (then on top he took performance enhancing drugs).
Steroids: Synthetic forms of testosterone, anabolic/androgenic in nature, which, when researched, scrutinized, and applied correctly via the oral, injectable, or transdermal routes in combination with a well-planned and executed diet, consistently intense and strictly methodical gym work, and regular sleep patterns, will, to varying degrees and depending largely upon genetics, produce a physique possessing a state of musculature seldom witnessed outside the realm of hormonal enhancement. – Urban Dictionary
People need to stop viewing this as the “biggest scandal in the history of the Tour” because the rules of the game are completely different to the amateur cyclist’s opinion.
When one wakes early he is given a full day of sunlight, which is amazing because it feels like the day is longer and the you have the ability to do more. But it is also important to remember that sleep is very important.
So a balance needs to be struck, where you get enough sleep to function correctly whilst not oversleeping. It starts to become difficult when you incorporate weightlifting and training into the equation because sleep is so important to recovery.
It really is a tough balance to find and everybody will have a different tolerance to how effective their sleep is to their recovery.
I was watching a bit of the tour de France the other day and this young Frenchman was way out in the lead, like really far in front. But there was a group behind him and they were gaining. Being in front, the guy would have been able to think to himself “I am going my hardest” while the riders in the group would have been thinking “I need to push way harder to keep up with the group” this difference in attitude was causing the gap to shorten.
I have noticed this a lot, when training alone you can push yourself but it’s nothing compared to how much a second person can push you.
Like a few years ago I ran a half marathon. It was very packed and you couldn’t move 5 meters without catching up to someone else (It was like that the whole way). But because there was always someone that could be overtaken the urge to overtake was always around, and I ended up running the whole thing really easily.
Sometimes to make yourself achieve more you need an external influence, and other people are a good source of encouragement.
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If you watch some of Usain Bolts runs the guys that come second and third often break their personal bests because they are trying to keep up with him
With the solution I found yesterday to my motivation issue I am now moving onto the next problem I have, my diet.
Firstly not being able to cook for myself has been a huge obstacle to putting on muscle. For the first couple months of the session I pushed really hard, forcing down my 1200 calorie smoothies everyday, and I kept this up and was doing all right, the pace of my growth was slow for my standards but then I got sick. All the progress that took months of hard work was lost in a short week of zero appetite.
That sucks.
since then I saved my money and precious protein powder. If I couldn’t get my diet in order, the extra stress I was putting on my body by with heavy exercise wasn’t worth the effort.
Neither are the nutella sandwiches I have been eating (With white bread, note: sugar).
I am really keen to correct this awful diet I have been on, and I should be able to once I move off.
Now I reckon I have an okay knowledge of nutrition, I have read a couple of books on the topic but I believe I need a deeper understanding of it. So my plan is to catch up on chemistry and biology, and go into the difficult books that base their information on these scientific basics. Then apply them to my diet and exercise. With a little luck I should get my health back in order.
There was a blog I read once (I can’t remember where) related to travelling on a shoe string budget, in this article the author contrasted a proper meal vs dessert and suggested that dessert is better value when you consider cost per calorie. Naturally this annoyed me because dessert is all saturated fat, but then I started thinking about this. This idea on eating more dessert is actually just a form of Dirty Bulking applied to travelling, that is you don’t care what you eat as long as you eat enough calories (McDonald’s all the time). ‘Bad’ calories are easier to consume and cheaper than ‘good’ calories.
Firstly note that I am a hardgainer, in weightlifting terms it means that I can eat crazy amounts of food but never gain any weight, and the huge negative of this means building muscle is incredibly difficult. Your body works through the different energy sources (Sugar then other Carbs then Fats then Protein) to meet its energy requirements, protein is important for muscle development but for some people (Mostly young males) eating enough food to leave surplus protein is difficult.
The useful thing about fat is that it that it is easy to get into your system, Dirty Bulking utilises this. Specifically there is this concept (GOMAD) of drinking a gallon of milk a day; Milk is used in nature to bring a baby animal the large energy requirements needed for infant growth and it represents a cheap and easy way to get enough calories (2500-3000 cal plus 160g protein in a gallon). However it does a lot of damage in regards to its ‘healthyness’.
Dirty bulking has its role in dieting but is never preferential to ‘Clean” eating because of the damage it can do to your body. But sometimes cost and convenience leave no other option.
Note: One of my friends realised that both milk and water hydrate you but from a corner shop 600ml of water can cost $3-$4 while a litre of milk is closer to $2.
Strikee 