matthearn.com

Whoops. I typed this all up last night and then forgot to actually hit submit. Derp.

Unsurprisingly, I’m injured. Surprisingly, I’m not sure why.

My lower back is kind of a mess, and it seems like I strain it every month or so, in levels that range from “back to normal in a couple days” to “unable to deadlift or squat for 6 months,” as happened to me after I hit my 455lb deadlift in September 2013. Usually I can pinpoint exactly when it happens, because I’ll be in the middle of a squat or deadlift and will feel a distinct pop, usually on the right side of my lower spine. Yesterday’s injury, though, I can’t explain; I finished my deadlift workout with no pain other than the usual exhaustion from having lifted several hundred pounds a dozen times. Then at some point later on I noticed my back was a bit achy, and this morning it flat-out hurt. As the day’s worn on it’s loosened up a bit, and I was able to get in a decent half-hour on the stationary bike during lunch.

One thing that I’ve learned when it comes to injuries is that if they’re not debilitating and I can work around them, I should do so. If I started skipping workouts every time my lower back was acting up I would never progress. I anticipate this mild strain being back to mostly normal by Friday, and I’m still planning to squat heavy (though if it starts hurting a bunch as I warm up, I’ll bail out). Chinups and pushups don’t seem to bother it much (I did 7 of each this morning) and even planks are mostly painless; after my bike ride and a brief stretch, I did a full two-minute plank (apparently I can do those if I don’t tire myself out doing chins and pushups first).

Stupid back.

I forgot to weigh myself this morning, which is probably for the best because of all the carbs I ate yesterday; the mirror tells me I’m pretty bloated up, though even in just a week of “non-holiday” diet I believe I’m seeing some slight abdominal definition. That might be a hallucination, of course.

Food today: I had leftover turkey and leek chili for lunch, which was delicious but left me wanting more. Dinner was chicken casserole, with brussels sprouts and eggplant.

I was hoping to get all my chins and pushups in after the Flyers game last night, but I ended up watching the College Football Championship, staying up too late, and only finishing with 16 of each and only 40 seconds of planks. It’s probably a bad idea, joint-health-wise, to try and make up for what I didn’t do, but I’m an idiot so I’m doing it anyway.

So far today I’ve gotten in 44 chins and pushups (some of which came during my weight training), and I’ve knocked out about 2:40 of planks, hoping to get another 1:40 to reach what I should’ve done yesterday and today. I also did my heavy bench presses and deadlifts, along with as many overhead presses (supersetted with chins) as I could get in under the hour. I also got in a nice gentle run, about 2.7 miles in 30 minutes.

Food-wise I probably haven’t been sufficiently careful; I made an omelette after my run, and Sarah had pre-made a fantastic turkey and leek chili for dinner, but I haven’t shied away from cookies and breakfast cereal either. Theoretically I need the carbs after working out, but I probably don’t need to get them in the form of 2/3 of a bag of Mint Milanos. Oh, Pepperidge Farm…you know how to love me.

I was up a pound this morning, and will probably be up a few tomorrow ’cause of the carb load, but I should be back down to the high 220s by Friday.

Today’s weight: 230 (+1 this week, -1 since 1/5)

It drives me a little crazy when I see folks, many of them friends and relatives, posting things like “down 5LBs since last week!” Losing five pounds of fat is a significant achievement, but guess what: in a week, you almost certainly didn’t lose five pounds of fat. You lost, ideally, one pound of fat, and probably four pounds of water, which will come back as soon as your various hormones will settle. And then you’ll post something next week about how it was a tough week, you gained a few pounds back. You didn’t! You just soaked up a little water.

Note: if you’re significantly obese, like pushing four hundo, it is possible to lose many pounds very quickly, but if you’re just trying to lose a few Christmas cookie pounds before heading to Punta Cana in March, you can’t do it that quickly, unless you simply stop eating altogether, and then you’re going to pay a heavy price in muscle loss, so don’t do that. #runonsentence4lyfe

Short term weight changes fluctuations are the bane of the fitness-minded. You have to ignore them. The only thing that matters is the long-term trend, which you’ll find follows a nice gentle slope of 1-2 pounds a week, depending on how much a deficit you’re in. This is obviously frustrating to folks who have a *lot* of weight to lose, but keep in mind: it took you decades to put it on. It ain’t coming off in a few weeks.

That being said, I weighed in at 229 this morning, two pounds down from last week, so I’m going to celebrate with cheese cake. #justkidding.com I did go to a Flyers game tonight and had a couple hot dogs, but avoided having any beer, which is good from both weight loss and wallet health perspectives. I did come home and have Scotch, but that’s because I took my 8yo son and 9yo nephew to the game, and little boys are exhausting.

Food today: pork tenderloin and mixed veggies for lunch; hot dogs for dinner.
Workout: The sleet this morning delayed school, making me late to work and cancelling my intended swim workout. I’m still trying to get all my chins/pushups/planks, but it’s getting late; I may have to make things up tomorrow.

Weight: 229 (-2 since January 5th)

I didn’t manage to get a post up yesterday, as you may or may not have noticed, if you had been waiting with baited breath until the wee hours and finally went to bed, disappointed, wiping cold tears from your cheeks and cursing the day you ever trusted Matt “Le Douteux” Hearn.

It wasn’t the greatest day for nutrition; I managed to stick to the fasting schedule for the most part, not eating anything until a hot dog at lunch, but backslid a bit when we went to a bonfire party in the evening and I ate pizza and drank hot cider. At least I got in my usual chins+pushups+planks.

On Sundays I usually eat breakfast because while I’m a big proponent of fasting, I’ve had bad experiences with being undernourished at church; not sure why, but I’ve gotten dizzy a few times up in the choir stall, so I make sure to get some eggs and meat in my system before I go. Lunch was a hot dog with cheese, though I did spend a lot of the afternoon picking at things (like the pork tenderloin we premade for the week), and then we went to the mall and bought new phones and ended up picking up McDonalds on the way home to appease our unruly children. It’s amazing how even a good choice at McDonalds (in my case, a grilled chicken sandwich) is still *incredibly* unhealthy compared to almost anything you could make at home.

Fries be delicious as hell, doe.

Weight’s still holding steady at 230. Perhaps if I stop eating fricking fast food I’ll actually start dropping pounds…nah.

Facebook is infuriating. You’d think it wouldn’t be that big a challenge to set things up so that when I publish a new post, it posts to my feed, but nay nay, it requires creating an “app”, going through a ton of privacy policy BS, and applying for some sort of approval to post to my own damn feed. I spent about two hours on it, which is about how long it would cumulatively take me to cut and paste about 400 post links to my feed manually over the next year.

Facebook: suck it.

Today I managed to get in most of the workouts I wanted to do, since zero precipitation meant I could go for a nice run, even if I did have to tread lightly so I didn’t slip on ice and turn some important joint into ligament pudding. First I did my Overhead Press and Squat workout, and was hoping to do some light bench press work but bumped up against my hour limit so I only got a few sets in. Then I ran for a half hour, nice and slow, keeping my heart rate low. (One of these days I’ll talk a bit about heart rate training.) Then throughout the day (I work from home on Fridays) I was able to get in my 30 chins, 30 pushups, and 2.5 minutes of planks. After taking off a couple weeks from all activity and watching my max chinup set drop down to 6, I was pleased that yesterday and today I maxed out at 8 and 9 rep sets, respectively.

Food-wise, I’m probably not as careful as I should be on Fridays, but figure that having lifted weights, a few extra carbs won’t kill me. After my run I ate a banana, and then got a bunch of leftover pork from last night and inhaled it, and later made some eggs with turkey bacon and toast. Dinner was chicken tacos, not my favorite, but the kids really enjoy them. I imagine before bedtime I’ll probably indulge in some cereal or other carby snacks ’cause gainz brah.

Today’s weight: 230 (-1) again. Not having significant fluctuations in carb intake like a true Leangains-style diet means not having significant fluctuations in weight, either. I haven’t been super-careful about calories this week, and plan to continue trying to eat clean without religiously counting for a few weeks, along with maintaining my 1-9pm fasting window. Hopefully that and 4-5 cardio sessions a week will help me drop fat, but if I fail to see my weight drop I’ll start counting everything I eat, which will suuuuuck.

It occurred to me that writing these things first thing in the morning and talking about the previous day is kinda dumb; it’s better for me to post them in the evening and talk about that day, so that’s what I’ma be doin’ from here on out. I also realized that links aren’t getting posted to Facebook and Twitter, so I’m fixing that; if this is the first post you see, you might wanna go back to the first day of this week and, you know, catch up. ‘Cause it’s getting real around here.

We had a last minute lunchtime meeting at the office today so I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d be able to get over to the Y for my usual swim, but that bad boy let out a few minutes after noon and I sprinted for the door. Still a bit pressed for time, I decided to just swim until I either reached 1500 yards (60 lengths of the short course pool) or started to drown.

Something that bit me in the ass a little bit during my International-distance (aka Olympic) triathlon from last August was the fact that I always breathe out of the left side when I swim. What I hadn’t anticipated was that we were going clockwise around the 1500 meter course, which meant that I couldn’t see the buoys I was meant to be passing unless I stopped to pick my head up and glance over to that side. It wasn’t a fatal issue (not nearly as badly as the current that added 10 minutes to my usual 1500m time, or the fact that I’d been eating horribly in the week prior which bit me hard while biking through the hills of northeast Maryland), but a bit concerning. I’d read of folks having issues during a swim because the waves came from one side and they couldn’t breathe to that side without inhaling water, which would be really bad if it happened to me and I wasn’t trained to breathe to the other side at all. Plus, it’s just good swimming form to breathe every 3 or 5 (or even 7) strokes because it helps keep your stroke more ambidextrous.

So I decided that the fall and winter I’d teach myself to breathe to both sides. Actually, the hard part wasn’t learning to breathe to the right; after getting used to rotating properly to that side (I have a tendency to under-rotate anyway, so this was a good thing to get used to), I can swim more or less endlessly breathing to just one side or the other. The part that was killing me was breathing 33% fewer times over a given distance, which reduced the oxygen available, and increased the carbon dioxide I had to get rid of. At first I could barely swim one length of the pool before having to switch back to breathing every two strokes.

When I first began training myself to swim freestyle in 2013 (after completing a couple of triathlons using nothing but breast stroke), I found a program online called “Zero to 1650 in 6 Weeks” (a “swimmer’s mile” is 1650 yards, or roughly 1500 meters). It aims to take someone who can barely swim 100 yards to being able to swim that full mile, swimming just three times a week. I could only allocate 2 swims a week, so I spread it out over 9 weeks, but it worked a treat. I went from being able to barely swim 4 lengths of the pool, to handling a full 66-length mile in under 40 minutes. After struggling to add bilateral breathing to my regular workouts, I figured I’d go back to the 0-to-1650 well.

It worked fantastically, even fast than six weeks. After completing the 1000 yard week, I found I had solved the problem; it was just a matter of setting a reasonable pace, and not stopping. The next trick is going to be improving my speed. While one of my goals is completing an Ironman (which starts with a 2.4 mile swim), my preferred distance will always be sprint races, because you can bang them out in a morning and be home in time for brunch, and the training requirements are much more reasonable. The guys who are competitive at the sprint distance can swim a true half-mile in under 10 minutes; it takes me closer to 18. This is obviously somewhere I can improve a great deal. (The same of course goes for my cycling and running, but swimming is where I’m least comfortable).

Today I managed 1500 yards in a bit over 31 minutes. Next week I’ll probably work on some speed drills to see if I can keep breathing every three strokes will pushing hard with good form.

Yesterday’s activities: 30 chins, 30 pushups, about 3 minutes of planks throughout the day.
Today’s activities: 1500 yards swim, 30 chins, 30 pushups, about 2.5 minutes of planks.

What I eated yesterday: I polished off a leftover pesto pork chop for lunch, with vegetables; dinner was eggs, ham, turkey bacon, and a nice bed of spinach. I was trying to avoid carbs but couldn’t resist a few crescent rolls.
And today: Lunch was the last 1.5 pork chops, with some broccoli. For dinner, Sarah threw a big pork roast in the crock pot with apples and sweet potatoes, and there were green beans as well. (The kids also had mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, I couldn’t resist having a little of that as well.)

Today’s weight: 230 (-1)

Back to the usual grind today; there’s still a ton of snow on the ground, so I won’t be doing any exercising outside, but I’m back in the office today so I can go for a stationary bike ride in the office gym. This is probably a good opportunity to test my heart rate on the stationary bike again, since it’s oddly very different than it is on my road bike.

Yesterday was a pretty decent day; I lost track of calories again, but stayed away from truly horrible foods, and since it was a weight training day I don’t feel too bad about getting some extra carbs in. We had a large pile of basil laying around (long story), so Monday night we had made a big pile of pesto with it, and yesterday I seasoned some pork chops, slathered the pesto on, and broiled them to medium. Delicious; doubly so with some extra pesto on top of roasted spaghetti squash. Other than that, I ate leftover baked chicken for lunch, a banana, probably a few too many pieces of bread and chips dipped into the pesto, and a bowl of cereal not long before bed. All in all a pretty low-fat, high protein, high carb day, which is perfect for after lifting weights. (I’ll explain why at some later date, I’m sure.)

The weight training program I’m following now is a low-volume version of the one I’ve been doing for the last few months (and having great success with): the GZCL method, invented by an amateur but very competitive powerlifter. It’s a good bit more volume than I had been doing in the past, but I think I’ve reached a point where in order for my old-ass muscles to actually grow, I have to hit them super-hard and eat a lot, which is what I did for about the last 3 months. Hopefully I added a bit of muscle along with the fat, and hopefully I can keep the muscle while I lose the fat.

Essentially the GZCL method has you program exercises in a variety of rep and weight ranges, taking advantage of the different responses your body has to different stimuli. For decades, a traditional “bodybuilding” split has involved high reps (8-12 reps in 2 or 3 sets) and medium weights, and a “strength” split has involved low reps (1-5 reps in 5+ sets) of high weights. I believe that a good routine will involve both: you increase your strength with high weight stuff, and then you exhaust the muscle with lower weights to stimulate hypertrophy. That’s what GZCL does: you do 10-15 total reps (broken up into small sets, obviously) at greater than 85% of your max (Tier 1), and then you do 20-30 reps at 65-85% of your max (Tier 2), and then you do 30+ total reps at below 65% of max (Tier 3). Tier 1 is one of the big compound movements (Bench press, squat, overhead press, deadlift); Tier 2 is one or two exercises that support the movement from Tier 1; Tier 3 is 2 or more exercises, also to support the Tier 1 movement. As originally programmed, you do one movements and the accessory tiers per day, training 4 days a week.

Something that I like to do is switch around accessory work from one area to another, as long as lower body stays with lower body and upper stays with upper. So on bench press day, I might do 5 sets of 3 reps at 85% of my max (that’s Tier 1), but then I might do overhead press, 4×8 at 65%, supersetted with chin-ups (the OHP Tier 2; I’ll do the bench Tier 2 on “OHP day”). Then I’ll do incline bench and rows, 4×12 or 3×15, using a weight that allows me to complete each set with 1 or 2 reps left in the tank.

The problem that I had is that, right now, I can only find time to lift twice a week. Luckily, I’m also a big fan of full-body training over any kind of split, so I would double things up: bench press, then deadlift, then OHP accessory, then some squatting, then some Tier 3 upper body stuff, and then a bunch of core work (usually leg raises and romanian deadlifts). The problems with this are 1) it’s super exhausting, and 2) it takes forever. My workouts were routinely over 90 minutes, sometimes even pushing two hours, and I had a lot of issues with nagging injuries because my form on some exercises got bad because I was so tired.

Since I’m cutting fat and not trying to add muscle for the next 5 months, it doesn’t make much sense for me to have all that extra volume. So what I’m doing for the foreseeable future is to keep doing 2 full-body workouts a week, but giving myself a hard time cutoff of one hour. If all I get into that hour is Tier 1 stuff, so be it. If I get through the Tier 1 stuff in 35 minutes and have some time, I’ll move on to Tier 2. I don’t see ever really getting to Tier 3, but I’ll also be doing bodyweight stuff every day of the week so I’m not crazy concerned. I’ll have done the bulk of the necessary stimulus to maintain muscle (as long as I get a ton of protein), and I won’t be overworking and risking injury. Yesterday was Bench and Deadlift, and I did only Tier 1. This didn’t bother me too much because I knew I’d also be getting in my 30 chins and pushups, plus some plank work, but my workout was barely over 50 minutes, including a 5 minute warmup. I’m sore today, but that’s mostly because I’d taken 2 weeks off from lifting because of illness.

Yesterday’s workout: Bench (5×3 @ 210lbs), Deadlift (5×3 @ 340lbs), 30 chins, 30 pushups, 60s plank
Today’s weight: 233 (+2 pounds, probably because I weighed myself in jeans, and yesterday was a carby workout day, which always leads to water retention)

It wouldn’t be a fitness program without setbacks; today’s snow is going to make it impossible to either run or bike, so it’ll be a good lifting session followed by…well, that’s about it. I had a little difficulty with diet last night; had a solid chicken dinner and then there were leftover Rice Krispy Treats and I found some fritos, and we made pesto for tonight’s dinner that turned out to be really good on leftover cheesy toast from a weekend party. All in all I was probably not far off 2000 calories for the day anyway, though I didn’t measure carefully as I should’ve, and I did get a good 1500 yards in the pool so that probably burned a few hundred calories. Simply not eating until 1pm does wonders for one’s caloric intake, of course.

About that pesto: turns out to be delightfully easy to make in a food processor. A panload of basil, some cheese, olive oil, pine nuts, salt and pepper. Hella yum, and aside from the little bit of oil and nuts, largely calorie-free flava. I’m looking forward to piling it on pork tonight and inhaling it.

Yesterday’s workout: 1500 yards freestyle swim in about 32 minutes, along with 30 chins and 30 pushups with my legs elevated. Didn’t do any plank work ’cause I’m a lazy git. Planned for today: deadlifts and bench presses. I’ll fill you in tomorrow on how that went, and whether I managed to not eat like a punk.

So here’s the good news: I’m back! For the foreseeable future, I intend fairly frequent updates to this jaun so that I can keep you all in stitches and possibly also change your life, brah.

Here’s the bad news: the basic underlying reason that my posts stopped is unchanged, namely, I’m insanely busy with a bunch of crap that’s not particularly interesting or funny. I think I promised some time back that this wouldn’t turn into a fitness blog (because nobody wants to read fitness blogs, even fitness bloggers), but in the interest of self-accountability…I’m turning this thing, at least for a while, into a fitness blog.

The reason for that is that I always seem to get tantalizing close to my goal, but then willpower comes into play and I don’t get there. My goal is not insignificant; I essentially want to look like this fine fellow:

I’ve been saying for a few years that I want to have one summer where I wander around the pool in a ridiculously scant bathing suit with abs a-rippling, looking like Daniel Craig’s taller and infinitely prettier brother. And every year I fall short, usually because I set up conflicting step-goals and screw myself up (usually I try to “recompose” my body instead of just cutting fat, so I don’t lose any fat, and I don’t gain any muscle). So this year, all the goals I use to reach the primary goal will align:

1. Straight fat-cutting all the way to the summer. No more of this cut for a bit, then get bored and decide to bulk for a while. I’m going to continue with intermittent fasting and cut way back on simple starches, and limit myself to 2000 calories a day. There will obviously be days I screw this up (my birthday’s a-comin’!), but if I manage to stick to it at *least* 5 days a week, and try to be a reasonably good boy on the weekends, I should do well.
2. Train for an Ironman triathlon, even though I probably won’t complete one this year. The extra cardio burn will also reduce my bodyfat, obviously.


3. Simple weight training program with reduced volume. Still probably more volume than I’ve used when cutting in the past, but definitely less than the hard hitting I was giving my body during the fall (during which I did appear to add noticeable muscle size).


4. 30 chinups and 30 pushups, every single day (as well as some planks totalling somewhere between 60 and 120 seconds). I had started doing a program where you start with 10 on the first day, then add a rep for every day, but realized by the end of the two month program I’d have to find time to bang out 70 chins a day, and since I still can’t do more than about 10 per set, I don’t see how I could fit it all in. 30 or so reps a day is manageable in 4 or 5 sets, particularly as my weight drops a bit and I can add do more reps per set.

My plan is to keep this damn site updated just to keep my mind right, i.e., focused on my goals. This morning I weighed 231 pounds, which was surprisingly low; I would have thought with holiday bloat I’d be pushing closer to 240 or even more. Apparently a 24 hour vomit flu last week and poor appetite ever since has kept my weight down. I haven’t measured my bodyfat because I don’t honestly think there’s a particularly accurate way to do it, but plan to weigh myself frequently; my guess is that I will look pretty damned good at 210 pounds, which is lower than I’ve been since high school. If I get there and I’m not satisfied, I’ll try to go further, but 210 pounds by Memorial Day is the main goal. Memorial Day is early this year, May 25th, which is precisely 20 weeks from today, so I need to lose about a pound a week; more than manageable, even when I’m already pretty close to my goal.

If you’re interested in following this particularly nerdy fitness journey, that’s awesome, ’cause it’s about to get real.

Today’s weight: 231 pounds

I had an interesting (well, to me) thought the other day while driving through a somewhat poor neighborhood not far from my home. It seems to me that a lot of problems in this country are related to how widely separated the wealth classes are, and not just in monetary terms, but in geographical as well. If you live in a gated community, all your neighbors are wealthy, and your only knowledge of folks in poverty is reading the police reports in the local paper or seeing the shady characters who hang out on street corners on your way home from the opera, you are not going to think highly of the poor. You may come to think they’re all just lazy, that they could easily get themselves out of the ghetto if they really just put their minds to it, that they’re all just criminals who deserve to be mistreated by the police and imprisoned for long terms for petty offenses because they were probably guilty of something.

And if you grew up in a poor neighborhood, watched your mother kill herself with work to feed you and your brother because your dad left years ago, saw friends go to jail (or get murdered) for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and your only interaction with wealthy people is seeing them go on TV and call you a lazy bum or come into the Burger King where you work and treat you like crap, you might think them entitled pricks who deserve to pay outrageous taxes or even get robbed on the streets.

Obviously these are extreme positions. Rich people aren’t all entitled pricks, although a few of them are. Poor people aren’t lazy criminals, even though a few of them are. But they simply don’t interact enough in real life to see past the extremes that they read and see every day. I think we need to get these folks together, living side by side. This isn’t just theory, it really does work in practice, even on a small scale: I’ve known relatively well-off people who have purchased homes in awfully dangerous inner city communities, and they make friends with their poorer neighbors and everybody gets along quite nicely. I think we just need to see more of this.

How to do it? Well, there are a lot of ways. We could simply pass a law that says every McMansion has to have a rent-controlled apartment building next to it, and pass strict laws making sure that those apartments are taken up by truly low-income people instead of just rich folks looking to save a buck, although obviously having rich folks and poor folks living in the same building would be a pretty grand idea as well. Unfortunately we can’t really knock down the existing mansions and apartment buildings and rebuild them to align with our ideals.

The better option, I think, is to tie property taxes to the average value of homes in the community. A guy who buys a million-dollar house out in the country surrounded by other million-dollar houses, well, he pays a property tax rate based on that average million-dollar value. The guy who buys (or builds) a million-dollar house downtown surrounded by $150,000 row-homes, he pays a much lower amount of taxes. It’d have to be an awfully strong tax, of course; plenty of people would be willing to pay an increased tax rate to not live in an area they believe is dangerous. Also, property taxes are currently so low (I think in my area they should be at least doubled, with that extra money going straight to schools, libraries, and community centers) that it wouldn’t put much of a dent in any really wealthy person’s pocketbook. It might also be worth offering extra tax rebates based on a community’s average income, or the number of people in it who use government assistance. We’d also have to make sure that the large amounts of money collected on property taxes in wealthy areas got spent in the areas that had very little tax collected, which might be a challenge. It might also be worth offering special mortgage rates on homes purchased in poorer areas.

I think if we could just get people living near each other and participating in each other’s success, there really would be a rising tide to lift all boats. So tell me: why wouldn’t this work?