Peg-Leg Update

Okay, no longer peg-legging my way around town, so even though there is still soreness in my left thigh, it is well within manageable post-workout soreness levels, the third day after the overuse injury now. Will still probably bump back leg presses for a day or two to make certain that the muscle is fully recovered, but that's totally fine. Pleased with my speed of healing, based on how painful that was even just yesterday, to be sure!

Going to do Workout A (upper body only) for the second time in a few hours, and I'm really psyched, actually. It will be fun to see if I netted any strength gains since last week. By the monster growth I've seen in my arms, I'm guessing yes! This is the acid test...does this heavy lift to failure minimum rep thing really really work? Can't wait to find out!

Eating protein like a crazy carnivore. My hunger levels have been through the roof. I wonder if my healing overuse injury is begging for more protein than usual. Think I'll go drink another protein powder shake to see if I can quiet the beast for a minute. My weight is slightly up, but Tim Ferriss predicts a 2.5 pound muscle gain per week, minimum, no matter who you are, girl, boy, hard-gainer or not, by following Occam's Protocol, and this gain is just less than that. I am not gonna let the scale freak me out right now. It's not about that. My clothes seem to be fitting the same, except I can see massive muscular gains in my arms, which is crazytown! So time to keep chilling...will re-measure in a week, halfway through the protocol, to see what's happening all over, body composition wise. If the scale is edging up and it's all muscle, that's great. If not, we'll have to revisit diet - see below.

My mood is back up again. It's been mostly crazy up (as has been my libido!) since a few weeks after going back to eating normal amounts of food, taking the AGG/PAG/CQ stack (see previous posts for more info), taking vitamin D again and getting exercise. It's very hard to tease out exactly what is helping, but I'm glad something is.

I know this morning's rant about angry people seems...angry. I think I overloaded on the toxicity of so much of it at once. It made me kind of nauseous. And again, don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with being angry, even if someone is angry with me! Especially with me. I get angry, everyone does, it's important. It's all in how you deal with it. Do you stew in it, rage with it, take it out on other people? Or do you use it to see something is wrong, state your case, stand your ground calmly and try to negotiate a better life? At least my mood bobbed back up pretty quickly. I just needed to vent and move on. One more thing to remember about how your problems do not magically disappear when you reach a normal weight. In case you didn't know.

Tried on clothes for a second whilst running errands. Simultaneously awesome and depressing. Skinny-fat sucks. I am now so amazingly small, overall, but so...bulgy. I ended up buying nothing. Sometimes clothes look so freaking hot on me, but they really have to be the right ones. I know that now is the time to be patient, gain the muscle that is going to give me more definition and shift my metabolism more to fat-burning. Patience now is key. I may have to stay out of dressing rooms a little longer...

Lastly...I feel a little at sea about my diet right now. I know I need to be taking in 1.25 grams of protein/pound of lean body mass during this massive muscle gain phase. Do I need to be limiting my fats to keep from gaining? So much conflicting information. I'm supposed to be limiting my carbs to near nil except one day a week, and I am, though I am reluctant to completely give up fruit 6 days out the week as Ferriss recommends. I like an apple and almonds as a snack, but it's against my religion, apparently, right now. I am NOT limiting myself to lean protein at all. Eating roast chicken with skin, ribeye steaks, shrimp, salmon, butter, cream, occasional goat cheese. Some people seem to think that will work better for me, some think it's a recipe for disaster. This is kind of hard. Also, tired of severe restriction after many years on and off of that. Guess I just have to experiment and see what happens. Again, starting in April, cutting/functional fitness/more cardio-oriented phase may help tremendously.

Edit - one last thought for the day: I am not a religious-type person, so I was puzzled when I first saw this middle-aged lady crossing the street with what looked like some kind of junk smeared across her forehead. It was the second one that I saw in Target that produced my startling realization that it was in fact, Ash Wednesday, and these ladies were taking it quite seriously, which is cool by me, just not accustomed to it. Right after my revelation, I overheard this kid one aisle over: "She has ice cream on her head!" I totally busted up.

Happy Ice-Cream-Head Wednesday!

Heavy Lifting Heaven

Warning - I intend to spend this post effusively babbling about my first time discoveries of the joys and challenges of lifting heavy things to failure. If you find this boring because you couldn't be less interested in anything that banal OR stupidly cute but ultimately boring because you've been LIFTING HEAVY THINGS FOR YEARS, feel free to close this blog and move along to somebody much more amusing/informative/productive, like doing your taxes or playing Angry Birds or checking your Facebook. I will understand.

Okay, today was part deux (or rather, workout B) of our first week of Occam's Protocol, a workout routine from Tim Ferriss' "4 Hour Body" designed to produce massive lean muscle gain. I needz to cure my skinnyfat! (See last post for WTF that means.) Let me tell you, this workout KICKED MY ASS. If you had any doubt in the slightest that only two different lifts and a little ab work with NO cardio, not even any circuit work could leave you shaky and unable to make it down a set of stairs without clinging to a railing, you would be WRONG. So very wrong.

Holy crap. Where do I even start? The first session of both workouts A and B involve calibration, where you move up incrementally through what you think you could lift to what you can lift to failure, using a certain cadence/reps/rest time. And THEN you figure out a percentage of your last complete set, wait 3 minutes, and do your regular set to failure, as you will from now on. So I do think these first workouts kick your ass twice over. But WOW.

A and I got help from the gym manager dude that I love so much. He's young, super muscular, definitely a jock, yet he's got a kind face, a truly good heart and is so freaking sweet. I can't tell you how much I appreciate him. We were chatting with him tonight, and he said both of us shouldn't lose ANY MORE weight. He said now we can just take our time, enjoy the process of making slow and steady progress toning and eating and drinking and enjoying life. I wanted to smooch him, right then and there. Good guy.

The incline bench press is not one of the automatic machines that we are accustomed to. You have to set your own free weights on the posts, instead of positioning a pin. It actually had a ton of adjustments you could make.  I can't tell you why, but these things intimidated the hell out of both of us. Perhaps it's the nerdy fear of what I like to term "jockspace" that possesses us both (A is a big somewhat muscle-y dude naturally from his Viking heritage, but he's actually a big softy nerd like me.) Anyways, supersweet gym manager dude showed us all about how to use it, and was so encouraging.

I am ridiculously weak on these machines, despite my mildly impressive girly-biceps. It seems like all that time spent at the gym working out inefficiently plus dieting drastically (though under medical supervision and with urgent medical purpose) without being able to work out left me weak as a kitten. But I don't care. Everybody has to start somewhere. So, on the incline chest press, my post-calibration weight was only 20 pounds. Lord. But...you do it SLOWLY. Extremely slowly. By 5 reps, my arms were shaking. The set is supposed to be 7, but I failed at 8.5 reps. This is great! Perfect. If you calibrated correctly, you need to be only surpassing your minimum set by a couple reps at most.

Failure. It means true failure. Shaking, grunting, trying to force that weight up millimeter by millimeter, feeling sick with effort. Not giving up until you've held it there as long as you can, until you feel it giving way and dropping, then striving to slow the descent so that it takes at least a full five seconds until the weight stack clacks down. I love it. And that is the only rep that really counts, according to Ferriss and probably many many others. That is the rep that causes massive overload, and triggers muscle building. I never knew. Let me tell you one thing: damned hard work, but so much less hard work than fast rep after nearly useless rep of low-medium weights for years and year. That may have built me up some, given me some aerobic capacity. But this. This is doing years' worth of hard work, all at once. The efficiency is glorious!

We also did the incline leg press. We figured this one out on our own (Sweety-jock was on the elliptical, didn't want to bother him.)  It took a LONG time for figure out our calibration weights, and mine ended up being 100 pounds. But wow, 10 rep minimum, and I made it to 11.5. Perfect, awesome, and neither A nor I were able to walk after. He actually staggered when he got up, in a faux-drunken semi-circle. It was astounding how weak we were after that.

We did some ab work and discovered that the super efficient (read HARD) ab work Ferriss prescribed probably should only be done ONCE A WEEK like the other lifts on this protocol. Ferris did say to only do that with workout A, and that workout B had optional kettlebell work, but since neither of us feel ready to swing a kettlebell without professional help, we decided to try an ab repeat. I discovered I didn't have full muscle recovery from last time. I probably shouldn't have, but I pushed though anyway. I'll have to figure out something to do in the meantime.

Oh! But there ARE kettlebells at my gym, after all! Last time, I thought there weren't but we were shown where they are hidden. So I don't have to leave my happy gym after all! Hurrah!

We did eventually leave the gym for the night, and tried to walk down the outdoors stairs to the car. Our legs FAILED us. Literally failed us. We both had to cling to the railings to make it down safely. It was actually scary. And we were ravenous by the time we got in and out of Whole Foods with our roast chicken and assorted necessities. Note to self: ALWAYS have a Larabar in the car.

Lastly, I know this is going to sound insane, but...within a day or two of "Workout A", last Thursday, we could SEE a difference in our arms. Unbelievable. This smack really does work. Can't wait to see how quickly we gain some muscle. In April, we will hopefully be able to pay for some training and switch to a more functional fitness workout involving swinging balls and something called a Turkish Get Up (yes, I'm that adolescent that these things amuse me.) Which, apparently, besides whittling my waist and give me Michelle Obama arms is supposed to build up my now sadly flattened butt. Just in time for swimsuit season.

Now I must slather Arnica gel pre-emptively over the entirety of my body. This is based on the fact that I failed to after Workout A and was almost immobilized by happy-good-awesome-post workout soreness for two days after. Knowing is half the battle. But I couldn't be happier to be sore in my life. These workouts are working, and I feel focused and ready to keep pushing into a new phase of fitness and normal life.

Thanks for tuning in.

Edit: fixed typos!

Occam's Protocol

One of my dearest friends bought us a copy of The Four Hour Body, by professional madman, Tim Ferriss. The book is huge, funny and chock full of intriguing life-hacking tips about creating a better physical reality for yourself, everything from losing fat and gaining muscle to better quality sleep and sex. Totally worth owning and experimenting with.

Knowing that my dependancy on HCG is permanently over, I've eagerly seized upon many of Ferriss' recommendations as a path to maintenance and further improvement. I know that if I don't start adopting a new regimen, the future will be a long slow slip back into old habits and my old body. Experience has taught me so.

I've been toying with what techniques to try first. In all actuality, I'd probably do best to try what Ferriss calls the Kiwi's butt-building workout, lol. In all seriousness, this workout regimen that centers around the kettlebell and other functional fitness movements involving free weights and plyometrics (such as the Turkish Get Up - awesome name, right?) is probably the best for me. However, just glancing over what this workout entails, I know that I would be uncomfortable and probably most foolish to try it without the benefit of a personal trainer to show me correct form and approach to these movements without say, ripping arms out of sockets or planting a kettleball in someone's face. But we are so very very broke. Thank you, emergency mid-West trip and drunken Valentymes day shenanigans. Also, and this is sad, my gym appears to NOT stock kettleballs. How can that be, in this elite fitness day and age?

Since I've already paid for this month, and I decided to try something different for at least the next six weeks. I settled on what Ferriss terms "Occam's Protocol." The theory behind this training, like much of Ferriss' book, is maximum results for minimal effort. Efficiency in training. This one in particular focuses on massive muscle gain in a very short time through two half hour sessions a week. That's right, my darlings. Better than any comic book back page ad promise you've ever read!

The secret? Two sessions, spaced several days apart and progressively further as you gain, two different lifts for each session, done to extreme failure. Plus an optional short abs/kettlebell session (IF you have one of those snooty fancy gyms that have them. Apparently. Sheesh!) Plus eating 1.25 grams of protein per lean body mass weight per day.

Just did the first session yesterday. It takes a while  to calibrate your failure weights the first two different workout sessions, so it took longer than the half hour. But I did that for both upper body exercises. Felt like nothing, though I had noodle arms for the rest of the night. Today? I feel my entire upper body beginning to lock up like a seized engine. Oh My God Soreness! I plan to slather on the Arnica gel (the real stuff, not the Homeopathic, you have to search like crazy to find it) like I'm putting out a fire in a minute. Note to self: Do It The Night Before! Though to be honest, soreness has never really bugged me or stood in my way. I really do think I'm gonna like this.

Here's the thing. It's meant to put on MASSIVE amounts of muscle. Up to 2.5 pounds a week! It isn't meant for weight loss. Do I have weight to lose? Totally. Do I care? Hmmmm...

I decided, after looking at many pictures of people my height/weight that those people look far, far more in shape than I, after reducing from Morbidly Obese to JUST barely HWP according to the BMI charts. They don't appear to have my spare tires and bra hanger fat and overall Jellyness. I think I do in fact fall into the "Skinnyfat" category.

In case you've never heard of it, it's definitely a thing. It means that your body composition is still fat for your height, though you weigh what is considered normal. In other words, you are lacking in lean muscle mass and making up for it in fat. I must have lost too much lean muscle mass along the way. With clothes on, people go on and on about how trim I appear to be. Even the owner of the gym, who I have not seen since I lost the last 25 pounds or so, had a shitfit about how skinny I look now. If they saw what I see every day when I am getting dressed, I am sure this would not be so. I am now somewhat compact, but lack most tone and have quite a fatty layer on top. Naked, without Spanx-like garments, I look, as one blogger put it, like a melted snowman - the same shape as before, just much much smaller.

The dieting process has become less and less effective for me. Exponentially so. As it does. Diminishing returns, no matter how strict my living, or educated my eating. Plus, if I keep whittling away, I can pretty much just expect to keep losing fat and muscle together. Getting skinny-fat, but eventually just skinny. That is NOT what I want. Plus, so very tired of deprivation. I want to LIVE. Eat. Move. Enjoy.

So, tired of the diet diet diet phase of living, I have decided instead to build muscle like crazy, in hopes of toning up, then thinning out. Ferriss' prescription should help keep it mostly muscle gain, but I will probably put a little fat on. We'll see. However, the more muscle you put on, the better your metabolism functions. I have read many arguments about this, but I keep seeing better and better studies supporting that building muscles really does support more efficient calorie-burning metabolisms. I will need to track those down and support my assertions, but right now, I am lazily ditching work to write this, so it will have to be later. Suffice to say, I've convinced enough to try, for six weeks at least.

After that, we should hopefully be able to afford personal training and possibly switch gyms to responsible kettlebell-owning establishments. Which makes me sad, because I love my gym, and the owner/manager/whatever he is who is so sweet and makes me feel skinny. I can't use them at home, because I won't go out in the constant grey downpour that is my home to use it, and inside the ceilings are so low to as to be troublesome for my 6'6" fella not to constantly whack a hand on it when carelessly gesticulating. Even I do, sometimes.

So, here's to the first great experiment of how to live without HCG 101. Wish me luck!