matthearn.com

In order that this site feels less like a juicehead blog and more like something that the average person would actually enjoy reading, I’m taking a quick break from the recounting of my “fitness journey” to hit on a few things that have been bothering me lately.

• Can someone explain to me how the “offsides” rule in soccer came to be? I thought of this during last year’s World Cup (USA! USA! USA!), was reminded of it during this year’s Women’s World Cup, and then again now that the English Premier League season kicked off over the weekend. It’s almost as if some FIFA official sat down one day and said to himself, “There is altogether too much scoring in football, we have to cut down on all these goals.” It’d be like moving the outfield fences 40 feet out to cut down on all those pesky home runs…something I would actively support. My point is…I have no point.


• I would just like to remind everyone that the Phillies are 9 games up on the division and on pace to win 106 games. Daddy like.


• The downside of dieting: sometimes my farts are just unbelievable. I laid a sulfurous bomb at work earlier that subtly altered the DNA of everyone in nearby cubicles. On the plus side, if any of ’em reproduce, the kids should be able to fly, or detect cesium with their toes, or something.


• I was pretty excited to see Michelle Bachmann win…whatever the hell it was that Iowa just did. It wasn’t a primary, right? Just some kind of “proof of concept” vote? Whatever it was, I was pretty stoked. I mean, the GOP’s batting a thousand with its presidential front-runners since 2008: every damn one of them has been bat-shit crazy. I think they’re 3 for 3 now, right? Hopefully Rick Perry will talk more about Texan secessionism or attempts to pray away droughts and they can lock in 4 for 4.


• “Texan Secessionism” would be a pretty pimp name for an alt.country band.


• The other downside of dieting: HOLY CRAP I’M SO HUNGRY ALL THE TIME.


• That reminds me, I need to do a post about Creatine and why it’s very effective and really annoying. So, uh, look for that.


• I cannot recommend highly enough a band I have discovered named “Passion Pit.” The fact that I have now purchased their album means that 1) they’re completely mainstream and everybody already knows about them, and 2) they’ll probably break up within the next two months, but I am a HUGE fan. I’m somewhat indifferent to electropop, but something about PP makes me happy in my bones. Go grab their album “Manners” and give a million listens. Apparently they’re working on a new album to be released next year, which would be hella rad.


• HW and I are having a boy and are having a hell of a time thinking of a name. Any suggestions? I open the floor to you.

Peace, playaz.

So after spending 3 months dropping fat like it was hot, and building strength, I found myself wanting to switch programs. I was tired of doing rinky dinky stuff like “scapula raises” and “seated rows to neck,” and wanted to do a complete barbell routine with bench presses and squats and deadlifts, oh my. I also wanted to start building muscle more quickly.

When beginners take up weight-lifting, they experience an effect known affectionately as “noob gains,” in which one gets a bunch stronger in a hurry, even while cutting fat. Some folks feel you’re adding muscle mass at this time, although personally I think you’re just learning how to use more of your central nervous system to transfer signals to the muscles, and aren’t really getting any “bigger.” After a few months, though, if you aren’t eating enough, your muscles can’t grow, and you can’t get any stronger or bigger. My noob gains period, I guessed, had run its course.

I was also tired of not being able to eat mashed potatoes and pie. You can see how this is a serious concern, particularly as it was around the holidays.

So I googled around a bit looking for a “hypertrophy” workout that I could fit into my schedule, and found the “Anti-Bodybuilding Hypertrophy Plan” by Chad Waterbury. It had everything I wanted: barbell exercises, and 4 relatively short workouts a week, divided into what’s known as an “upper/lower” split: upper body one day, and lower the next. I was well on my way to super-jacked gunz, son!

Except: I wasn’t. I kept running into problems, like the fact that I was having trouble getting all the reps at the prescribed weights (which were determined by a certain percentage of “1RM,” or one-rep-max, the maximum amount you can lift one time in an exercise). I was trying to do 3 sets of 10 deadlifts at 60% of 1RM, and was hitting something like 8 reps, then 5, then 4. My bench press wasn’t anywhere it was supposed to be, either, and I was having a lot of difficulty knocking out anything CLOSE to the chinup and dip numbers I was supposed to (even using an “assistance” machine, which helps by supporting some of your weight as you move).

Also, since I was supposed to be “bulking,” I was eating like a pig. No real veggies, lots of fat and protein and schleck. As a result I gained back a fair percentage of the weight I’d lost from careful dieting, and if my arms and chest were getting bigger, I didn’t much notice it, seeing as they were covered up in delicious, succulent fat.

After posting a few queries at the Men’s Health forums, and doing some more research, I concluded that doing a hypertrophy plan was a stupid idea for anyone as new to lifting as I was. Strength was what I needed, and a lot of it. On the advice of knowledgeable folks, I started eating properly and doing a program called “Starting Strength,” which is both a book and a very informative online wiki. It, once again, had everything I wanted: barbell exercises, a plan for progression (gradual adding of weight as strength improves), and just three workouts a week.

There are a few different programming techniques you can use, but the one I selected features back squats at every workout, bench press and overhead press on alternating workouts, deadlifts once a week, and pullups twice a week. (I like pullups, although at the time I could not do any, so I had to do “negatives,” wherein you use a stool to raise yourself up to the bar and slowly lower yourself down.) Dropping one workout was key, and also I was exercising just about every muscle in my body at every workout, instead of just twice a week. To recap: 25% fewer workouts, 50% more muscles worked.

I made great progress quickly…too quickly. I was adding lots of weight every workout (10-15 pounds to my squat every workout, 20 to the deadlift, 5-10 to the bench and overhead press) and after a couple weeks had quickly stalled out the upper body lifts. I reset (basically went back to the beginning) those, but kept adding to the squat and deadlift, eventually getting the latter up to 335 pounds, and the squat to 265, before a nagging pain in my right hip (I suspected the sartorius muscle) basically shut down all my leg exercises for a couple weeks.

I rested a bit (and was a lot less careful about my diet, unfortunately) and got back to it with more careful progression (no more than 5 pounds per workout to any exercise), but the hip injury kept lingering, and eventually I had to stop for a month. This, of course, was when I outwitted myself yet again, and convinced myself it was time to try another hypertrophy routine…more next week, and be sure to stay tuned for when I blew out my knee because I was stupid!

When last we left the narrative, I was eating enough rare red meat that I was becoming ruminant, while doing an odd variety of exercises designed to keep me interested and build muscklez. I did some poking around on the Men’s Health TNT Diet, and discovered the Men’s Health Forums, which led to significant changes in my diet and exercise routines. Here are the things you need to know about the forums:

1. there are separate forums for weight lifting, running, miscellaneous cardio, diet, injuries, general health, as well for specific Men’s Health diet plans (TNT, Ab Diet, Huge In A Hurry) and also a few “off-topic” forums where folks espouse remarkably narrow-minded conservative political philosophies;


2. there is a lot of good information on the forums, particularly in the “stickies” (post threads that have been deemed especially useful and always appear at the top of every forum);


3. there are a lot of well-meaning folks on there with anecdotal experience but not a lot of actual fitness or diet expertise;


4. there are five or six smart, knowledgeable people who want to help you, particularly if you demonstrate some intelligence and ability to comprehend science; and


5. there are five or six utter douchebags who, while they may be knowledgeable, simply crap on everything with which they disagree.

I tend to put the douche-bags on “ignore” and just don’t respond, because I’m tired of arguing with trolls.

Having gotten that off my chest, I will say that the forums are a great place to find a whole wealth of information (even if it’s just links to other sites) about how to lose fat, gain muscle, proper exercise form, a whole host of stuff. It also alerted me to the fact that the rinky-dink routines I was doing as part of the TNT diet may have been effective, but they weren’t ever going to be as effective as barbell training with big ol’ compound movements (even though much of the TNT stuff was still basically compound movements, many of them involved dumbbells or just bodyweight, which is less effective).

A “compound” movement is an exercise that involves more than one muscle group (such as deadlifts, back squats, and bench presses); exercises that target a specific muscle (like bicep curls, or calf raises) are called “isolation” movements. Compound movements are the foundation of any serious muscle-building routine, for the simple reason that you exercise a whole lot more muscles at one time. For example, a leg press machine works primarily the quads; doing a barbell squat exercises the quads, the hamstrings, the lower back, the upper back, and the abdominals.

(Squatting is rad. I’m a fan.)

Now, my focus is to try and get big ol’ muscles. Getting strong is handy, but to be honest if I could get big ol’ freaky muscles and not really gain any strength, I’d take it, because I’m no professional athlete and a 500-pound deadlift doesn’t really have any use in my daily life. So, I started googling up hypertrophy plans, which is where I made my misstep, about which I’ll talk later this week.

Haha! You thought I wouldn’t post again for like 3 years, didn’t you? You were wrong! Although to be honest I think the odds on two posts in one week on this blog were 75:1 when I checked with my bookie yesterday afternoon (his name is Hmayek, he is from Armenia, he loves taking NBA bets, and you really really REALLY do not want to get to know him or his friends if there is any way you can possibly avoid it).

This will be the first post in the extremely long and unpredictable series tentatively entitled “How Matt Hearn Became Marginally Less Fat And A Little Bit More Muscular (But Let’s Be Real, It’s An Ongoing Process And Hearn Is Still Pushing Two-Fitty)”. It starts thusly:

In late September of last year, after a summer of trying to keep the fat at bay by running incessantly in my Vibram Five Fingers but still eating whatever I wanted, I was somewhere around 260 pounds, and my feet and shins were essentially destroyed by running in un-cushioned shoes. I had to completely stop running and wait for my feet to heal up, occasionally getting out on my bike a little but mostly sitting on my butt eating 4000 calories a day and wondering why I had so much trouble getting back to my fighting weight.

Then my good buddy Brian Smith sent me a link to the TNT Diet book, produced by Men’s Health. I flipped through the sample sections and said “Wow, this makes sense.” The book, among its other qualities, alerted me to fact that losing weight was a grand idea, but dudes like Daniel Craig aren’t just skinny, but muscular.

Duh.

I immediately grabbed a copy of the book off Amazon (for about $5, which I guess isn’t a very good sign). The TNT “Diet” is essentially a low-carb one, although it adds in a bunch of stuff about carb timing and insulin and stuff that was largely meaningless to me because unless you’re within about 15 pounds of your ideal weight you should be doing “Plan A,” which is: eat from this approved list of foods that don’t contain carbs. I’ve had great success on low-carb diets in the past (I dropped about 40 pounds in 2004 doing one), so I said let’s knock this out for a few months and see whatup.

The more important thing I learned in the TNT book was some basic muscle-building, however. Weightlifting, using a variety of techniques, to build muscle. The book says don’t even bother with cardio (although it mentions some High-Intensity stuff to do if you are insistent upon it). None of this was particularly revolutionary, I’d lifted weights a little before, but what I’d never done was focus on diet and exercise AT THE SAME TIME. Either I was running and lifting and going nuts but eating like a pig, and therefore seeing no fat loss, or I was eating well but doing no exercise so I would lose some fat (and muscle) and then watch it come roaring back as soon as I stopped “dieting.”

I specifically remember the date that I started the diet and exercise plan: October 4th. I remember this because my boy Josh got married on the 2nd, and the food we ate that weekend was unbelievable and rich. I probably gained 3 pounds just from red wine. That Monday morning, I weighed myself and the scale reported 265 (and cried out for a moment when I first stepped on it). Yeah, it was time to fix this.

The diet was a breeze, I’d low-carbed before. I loaded up on meat and cheese, avoided bread and potatoes, and dropped 5-6 pounds in a week, the usual water loss. The workouts were fun and interesting, with the exception of the “Dynamic Warmup,” which I did religiously, and which consists of jumping jacks, arm circles, lunges, various other calisthenics, finishing up with something called “groiners” which are about as enjoyable as they sound. The first workout contained “static lunges,” “incline dumbbell bench presses,” “hip extensions,” “seated rows to neck,” and finished up with the “prone cobra,” in which you lie on your belly and left your head and feet off the floor for 60 seconds, tightening the back muscles. The workouts switch up fairly frequently to keep you from getting bored, with “goblet squats” and “planks” and things, and the rep and set counts change as well as you get stronger. I was losing a little weight every week, mostly enjoying the routines, and hoping I’d be looking like Dwyane Wade by spring.

Then, while looking for more info on the diet and exercises, I stumbled across the Men’s Health Forums, and discovered a whole new world of exercise and diet advice, as well as some of the most outrageous douchebags ever to operate a computer, which is where the story will continue next time.

This is yet another in the seemingly unending series of posts in which I say “Sorry I haven’t been posting!” and “I’m going to start posting more!” followed by disappearing into the ether for another 4-7 months because I’m a schmuck.

My bad.

It’s not deliberate. I still feel that explanations are owed, however, so here it is: I got two kids, playa, and a third on the way. It is amazing how much time is taken up by entertaining two children while trying to keep up with housework and keeping one’s overly-pregnant wife from going Hormone Crazy and throwing daggers at you. Not metaphorical daggers: literal daggers that she keeps in a belt, looking like Danny Trejo in Desperado but without all the tenderness.

Another reason is that my life’s been sort of devoid of things to share with all-a-y’all. Over the last 9 months, my primary activity other than job and family has been attempting to turn my body from a blancmange into something approximating Captain America, or at least The Tick. I considered writing a bunch of stuff about it, but there are already fitness blogs on the internet written by people with more success and more knowledge than I’d ever be able to come up with. I didn’t want my site to become a fitness blog, where I just throw up a weekly post saying “Got my squat up to 245!” or “Diet was crappy this week, so I’ve decided to give up eating until Labor Day!” Those are lame and useless, and don’t exactly promote great readership.

Then I said, well, it’s not like I have any readership now. (Oddly, my site still gets page-views, mostly from people looking for information about 1998 Mazda Proteges. A fine automobile, for sure, but not exactly trending on The Twitter.) And while other fitness sites have lots of information, they 1) aren’t MY experience, which might be useful for someone in a similar position, and 2) they aren’t funny. I can usually be relied upon to do something funny, usually at my wife‘s expense.

So, here’s the deal. This is still not a fitness blog. I’m hoping that just getting back into the swing of writing every few days will get my brain operating in a manner conducive to writing about all kinds of things just like the heyday of 2002-2005. I’d like to talk a bit, for example, about how Hunter Pence makes my heart go pitter-pat. But, a lot of the posts you’re going to see here for a while are going to be about my process from flab to fly (current status: flower). I’ll endeavour to add plenty of hilarity, so please tolerate me while I get it out of my system and return to discussions of why someone should start a Hobo Eating Competition (in which the hobos are doing the eating, not being eaten themselves, as I believe the latter would be illegal in most jurisdictions).

Gracias!

Holy crap! I don’t sound like complete ass! Here is mp3 evidence:
The People That Walked In Darkness
Right?

Oh yes. This happened.

You’re right, I have had professional vocal training!

Josephine receives a kitty card from her lovely Auntie Rach. In lieu of subtitles, here’s how it went down: “Kitty! Meow!” ::hug::

Newsflash: I am a HUGE nerd. Like, staggering. Wait, let’s back up.

A few weeks ago, Brian revealed to me that he had ordered a new diet book, the TNT Diet, off of eBay for like $4. I found it on Amazon for like $6 (the price appears to have gone up), and since I have free Prime 2-day shipping, I had it in, well, two days; Brian’s took longer, eBay being what it is.

The book is basically a low-carb diet (specifically high fat, and we all love fat, right?), along with a detailed program of weight-lifting to build muscle. I’ve had good luck with low-carb diets in the past, so I figured this would be a fantastic way to get back under 18 stone and maybe develop those wicked arms and shoulders that drive the ladies crazy.

This is where the nerdiness comes in. While reading up on TNT, I discovered that Men’s Health (the publisher of the diet book) maintains a kickass forum for asking questions and chatting with other dieters, sharing your knowledge and goals and successes. From this, I learned all kinds of completely awesome things, like how ideally when trying to build muscle you should take in 1 gram of protein for each pound of “lean muscle mass” (which technically includes bone and water, anything in your body that’s not fat), and on the diet you want to try and stick to a 60/30/10 ratio of fat to protein to carbohydrates.

So during the roughly 30 minutes a day when I’m not at work or being bossed around by my family, I’ve been making nifty little spreadsheets to show me how many calories I need to take in, how much protein powder I should eat every day, fantastic stuff. I’ve even ordered a set of calipers and tape measure to reasonably-accurately calculate my actual fat percentage, which led me to some interesting data.

I currently weigh 254 pounds, and am roughly 6’3″, depending on time of day. My best guess, based on a number of online fat percentage calculators, is that I’m probably about 30% fat, and no more than 32%. (I’ll know more Friday night after my kit arrives.) If I’m 32% fat, that means I’m 68% muscle/bone/water, or about 172 pounds. Now, according to Wikipedia, if I get myself down to 14% fat, I would be very, very fit, almost “professional athlete” fit. Assuming that I gain no muscle (and I intend to, if possible), 14% fat on top of 172 pounds of muscle is 200 pounds. Someone who is 6’3″ and 200 pounds has a Body Mass Index of exactly 25, which is still technically in the “overweight” category. How crazy is that? Even if I was as fit as I had ever been in my entire life, a doctor might look at my BMI and tell me to lose a few pounds.

Sorry, are you asleep? My bad. I enjoy this stuff. See also: Nerd, Matt Hearn is a.

I started the diet at 257, so in about 10 days I’ve lost 3 pounds. Here’s hoping I can keep it up. I haven’t seen my wang in months.

I find this hilarious. This is the current picture that’s up on the website for Concord Mall:

As someone who works roughly 1/4 mile from the Concord Mall, I’d like to ask: where in the hell was that picture taken? It certainly wasn’t at the mall. It wasn’t anywhere NEAR the mall. Believe me when I say this: this is the nicest bench in the mall. (Click to embiggen.)