Making Progress

Missed posting yesterday, but I did manage to get up at 5:00 am on Monday for my next interval workout. Still couldn't bring myself to warm up by running; did 10 minutes on the bike before and after the workout instead. But the workout went well, maybe too easy. I'm just not burning as many calories as I would have expected by doing calisthentics. Also introduced jumping rope as my low-intensity interval exercise. Tougher than it seems, especially for a guy with two left feet. The DB snatches, however, seemed a bit easy. Might have to upgrade from the 30-lb. dumbbells. Maybe it's time for a 16 kg kettlebell.

Today I managed to get up again, this time for an easy four miles. Although my times are slower than they feel, about 30 seconds a mile slower. Chalk it up to running first thing upon waking, and the fact that I'm now paranoid on tripping over the disjointed sidewalk flags throughout my neighborhood.

My first week of the First Stage did show some progress, though. Sunday night I weighed 207.3 pounds with 11.3 % body fat. Now the previous week I'd measured on a Saturday night, so the comparison may well be skewed; if I'd measured myself after gorging on Saturday's Notre Dame game watch I might've seen no progress at all. But I'll try to measure on Sunday night from now on and get a better idea of how I'm doing.

Grow Your Wings, Then Learn to Fly

Got out for six miles on another amazingly warm November day. Nothing burns the calories like running. Managed to stay about 600 calories down for the day; even with Thanksgiving and its aftermath, I'm not too far over my budget for the week.

Saw a forum thread on sasukemaniac.com the other day, and I wanted to get down my thoughts. The poster was arguing that it's pointless to train for ANW with exercises like weighted rope climbs that aren't specific to the skills tested in Ninja Warrior courses. I disagree, and don't know these people well enough to mix it up in their debate, but here's why.

First, of course you need to train at some point for the actual challenges you'l face in competition. But every football player spends hours in the weight room and on the practice field in drills, even though no football game has ever required players to bench press or run through tires. Players do that sort of training in the off-season, for a few reasons.

First, the off-season's a time for recovering from the stresses particular to the competition. That doesn't really apply to a guy like me, who's training for something he's never done before. But for any regular athlete in the seasonal cycle of competition, recovery's an important consideration.

Second, the off-season's the time to build the base level of strength and endurance necessary to perform the skills specific to competition. You need to grow your wings before you can learn to fly. Not much point in scrimmaging if you don't have the strength to be competitive. And you can't build the strength to compete simply by going out and competing; you won't live long enough to get strong enough.

Third, adaptation's an important consideration for any seasonal athlete. I know I can only go four, six weeks at the most in a workout before I plateau, physically and mentally. That's why I've broken up my training not just into four stages, but also changing it up within each stage. Keeps me fresh mentally, and I buy into the notion that it stimulates more muscle growth and fat loss by challenging my body with different exercises every time.

With that, it's time to get ready for bed. Another week of 5AM workouts starts tomorrow, with another grueling interval workout. Turns out I misread the last one, and did eight sets of the same exercise. Even though I wrote these workouts, "DB Thrusters" can look a lot like "DB Snatches" without careful reading.

Diet Hard

So yesterday was the rescheduled rest day. And I know I need rest days. Everyone needs at least a day to recover. It helps you come back stronger.

The downside to rest days, however, is that you're not burning as many calories as you do the rest of the werek. Because you're resting. Yet you're used to eating a certain amount of calories each day, and it's not so easy to scale back on your rest days. Calories can creep up on you, and before you know it you're down to a thousand calories with dinner and dessert to go.

No problem, you say, just have a light dinner. This is where real life gets in the way.

Thursday was Thanksgiving, so that's just out the window. Didn't even try to count calories for that mess. Even with the five-mile Turkey Trot, I knew I blew my budget.

But Friday was date night with the missus, and we simply had to try the new steakhouse that was opened by the sister of an old high school friend. And when they said they had New York Cheesecake for dessert, we just had to try it.

This is how diets fail.

The only thing you can do with a defeat is learn from it. I learned that I still need to exercise, even on rest days. And I did, burning about 500 calories in an easy bike ride with the 20-lb. vest on. But on rest days you have to watch your calories even more closely, because you'll have fewer in your budget.

And I'm learning that certain foods are just anathema to a diet. Like biscuits. 180-odd calories in each, and you can eat three without even knowing it. Hell, they come in packs of eight, and it's not like you can bake just one!

Another diet killer is American cheese. 100 calories in a slice, if LoseIt is to be believed. That grilled cheese sammich you had for lunch put you in a deep hole for the rest of the day.

But today I'm back on the schedule, and if I can watch my intake during the Notre Dame-Stanford game tonight, I should be okay today.

Thankful

Started Thanksgiving off with a 5-mile Turkey Trot. Kept pace with my 15-year-old cousin, who was running her first race that distance. So not a particularly intense run, but five miles is five miles.

Of course, then I proceeded to eat so much that evening that I couldn't log it all if I tried. Oh well, one day off the wagon isn't so bad. Fortunately we didn't bring home many leftovers, so I can get back on track today.

Getting the Thrust

Wednesday is supposed to be my rest day. Active rest, but rest. Sunday through Tuesday I Run, Lift, Run; Thursday through Saturday it's Lift, Run, Lift. Three days each of lifting and running, and one day of recovery. A prudent schedule, if a bit heavy.

And Wednesday's a good day to rest. On the weekends I have plenty of time to workout and nap as needed. But during the week time is tight, and by Wednesday I need a morning to sleep in or catch up after an inevitable late night. So I definitely should stick to the schedule and rest on Wednesdays.

But the success of any schedule rests in knowing when to depart from it. This week I have the traditional Turkey Trot 5-miler on Thursday, i.e., Thanksgiving. Then I've got three days off from work. So it made sense to skip the Wednesday rest and lift, then run on Thursday, and then take Friday off to get in an important recovery day as soon as possible.

But when you vary the schedule, it's harder to adhere to the variance. And that little bit of hesitation is the difference between getting up at 5:00 to workout or getting up at 5:45 and vowing to workout sometime later in the day. Guess which I did?

The punch line is that not until 8:00 tonight did I get to do my first interval workout. And it kicked my can, just in time for a 5-mile morning run.

The workout was eight two-minute sets, one minute intense and the next minute easy, though not totally resting. The intense minute was DB thrusters; hold a 30-pound dumbbell in each hand at the shoulder, then squat and come up fast enough to push the DBs straight overhead like a military press.

It's a surprisingly difficult exercise. You're not really pressing the DBs overhead; the explosive movement from the legs should do that. But you have to really work your arms, shoulders and core just to stabilize the DBs. And maybe 30 pounds was too heavy to do eight one-minute sets, but those are the weights I have. Got a great deal on them off of Craigslist, like $35 for the pair.

So I started, and the first set I cranked out 25 reps. Then did a minute of jumping jacks, then back to the thrusters. And proceeded to struggle to get fifteen each consecutive set. Some sets I don't think I got more than 12 reps. When I couldn't go on I at least tried to keep the DBs at my shoulders, and I never dropped them before time ran out. But it's fair to say I was worn out really early, and sixteen minutes never seemed so long. I was most worried I'd drop the weights on my foot or my wife's car; working out alone in your garage is not without its dangers.

But I did the workout, burned the calories, and for the rest of the year that's what counts. Once I'm in shape there'll be plenty of time to practice rope climbing and cliffhanging. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to rest up for the Turkey Trot.

Slow Going

Running day today. Did my four miles, though the time was unusually slow. Chalk it up to stopping at too many intersections; it was pitch dark out and I was about as reflective as a ninja on the roads, so I was a little more cautious than usual.

But the important thing here isn't so much the time as the effort. These runs are about fat loss foremost. I'm not racing anytime soon. The Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving will be just for the exercise; I'm in no shape to run fast anyway. As long as I keep at the workouts and eat right, things should go well.

Speaking of which, LoseIt! is becoming addictive. My favorite calorie-counting app has the ability to scan a barcode and instantly enter that particular item. It doesn't recognize every bar code, which makes me wonder what directory it's getting its information from in the first place. But it has made it easier to log some foods, and more interesting to log all of them.

Tomorrow's supposed to be a rest day. But with a 5-miler coming on Thanksgiving I think I'll power through my first interval workout tomorrow and put off rest until Friday.

O-Dark-Thirty

First day of "workouts" is in the books. And it went as well as could be expected.

Started with getting to bed before 10:00 pm, so I could actually get up at 5:00. I was working out by 5:45, thanks to two things: forcing myself to throw on the workout gear, so I was actually warm enough to even contemplate a warm-up jog; and downing my pre-workout beverage of eight ounces of iced coffee and two scoops of whey powder.

Here's the first day's workout:
1 mile warmup
Circuit (one set after the other, no rest in-between):

     20 Squat Jumps
     20 One-Arm Rope Rows
     20 Rowers
     20 Spiderman Pushups
     20 Bodyweight Squats
     20 Pullups
     20 Bicycle Crunches
     20 Pushups
1-mile run
Then repeat the circuit one more time

I was supposed to do a mile cooldown, but ran out of time before my duties as husband and daddy took over. Downed another serving of coffee-and-whey, though, and now I feel great.

The point of the workouts in this six-week First Stage isn't so much to train for specific ANW challenges, but to get myself in shape to train for those challenges. The exercises have some relation to ANW -- I'll do rope work and plyometrics of some kind in every workout. But my aim is to keep moving for forty minutes and to change things up every time, playing on the P90X idea that "muscle confusion" stimulates muscle growth and fat loss.

Getting Down

Brihgt and early this unseasonably warm Sunday morning, I started (or restarted) training for ANW. The fact that I learned yesterday that there probably won't be another Sasuke tournament to qualify for is not, for the moment, derailing me. In fact, it's good to have such a sobering thought before starting on this quest. Hear news like that three weeks in, and you're tempted to take a break from training. And as anyone who's ever been in a relationship knows, taking a break means breaking up.

So I started nice and easy, with a six-mile run. The hard part today, though -- and this will only get harder -- is the dieting part.

See, my goal for First Stage is primarily to slim down to what I've decided is an appropriate weight for cliffhanging and spider jumping. So I've had to take a long, hard look at myself (boy, that came out wrong) and determine what needs to change.

So last night I took my weight and body fat using the Tanita scale. I waited two hours after last eating and made sure I was plenty hydrated. The results? 209.4 lbs., 12.5% body fat. Not too shabby for your typical fortysomething dad. But such men never reach the buzzer on the First Stage. I know this, because Sasuke's full of jokers like that, guys who are in it to wipe out. I ain't goin' out like that.

I'd like to get to 8% body fat. If my calculations are correct, that would mean losing ten pounds of body fat. My experience with calorie-counting, though, tells me that I can't reliably lose more than a pound a week for any sustained period. If that holds, then I'll lose six pounds by the end of the First Stage, which will put me at about 9.5% body fat. 

I count calories using LoseIt!, a website with a companion iPhone app. There's plenty of these on the market, but this one's good enough -- and free, if I recall. You set up your stats and goal, and it tells you how much you can eat each day net, after factoring in your workouts. And that's my one saving grace. It might prove that, by working out six days a week, I can burn more than 3500 calories (1 pound) a week. Whether that's the case, I certainly couldn't do it without the app.

So how do you lose a pound a week of just body fat? Near as I can tell, you reduce your carbs and increase your protein intake. But you still need to eat enough carbs to fuel your body, especially if you're working out. I don't trust any diet that wants you to eliminate or radically reduce your carbs, or any other element of a balanced diet, for that matter.

So how will I do it? Protein First is the mantra. Internet consensus appears to be that you need as many grams of protein in a day as you weigh in pounds to maintain or gain muscle while losing fat. So I'll shoot for at least 150 grams of protein a day. If I hit that, then everything else can be the usual mix of grains, fruits, and veggies.

This is far from scientific, I know. But I'm far from a scientist. This is a crude but usable approach, so I'm going to use it.

And after lunch on Sunday, I've got to say it's so far, so good.

Heading to Alderaan

So I was all set to start tomorrow on the first stage of my training for the fonldy-anticipated ANW tryouts this spring, when I read that the producers of Sasuke are bankrupt.

Now, nobody ever promised us another season of ANW, or Sasuke. In fact, G4's said nothing to indicate what, if anything, will happen with ANW in 2012. I chose to believe that it would happen, but this sure makes the whole thing look doubtful. Apparently there's another big deadline or decision day December 16, so it doesn't look like there'll be any news until then at the earliest. But right now it doesn't at all look good for ANW as we knew it.

So what should I do? Start training, of course. I always knew that this could be for naught. But if nine weeks from now my body fat's down below ten percent and I'm fit enough to complete all these workouts I've planned, then it'll all have been worth it.

And if I find that there definitively is no ANW to train for? Fortunately, there's other challenges. I did Metro Dash last spring, and it was a blast. There's also a seemingly infinite variety of mud runs and obstacle course races, from Tough Mudder to Spartan Race to the zombie-themed Race For Your Life. If you're fit enough for ANW and regularly run, then you're fit enough for any of these races.

So tomorrow we start our journey, and hope that Alderaan will still be there when we come out of hyperspace.

Type A

Took days of brainstorming and a couple of hours tonight, but I now have every workout planned for the next six weeks, right through New Year's Day.

I'll figure out a good place to post the workouts. But I've got eighteen pages of unique circuit or interval workouts and a separate page with another eighteen days of running. Add six days of rest, and that's every day planned for the rest of the year.

Either this is a brilliant way of marching me down to new levels of fitness or it's insane. Part of me suspects that I enjoy the laborious tabulation and formatting in Excel of each workout as much as I enjoy the workouts themselves. No matter, we're going to give this a shot.

Looking at this schedule and knowing my life, there's no way I can do this if I don't work out from 6-7am. This will be tough, because I hate working out in the cold and dark, and where I live that's all we have at that time of day. On the bright side, if I can get this done I'll undoubtedly be in great shape.

Now I have no excuse not to plot out the social media schedule. I expect that I'll have to start putting this project out there Sunday, when I start the workouts. So Friday's devoted to the media aspect, getting this whole thing truly live in 48 hours. Details to follow.

Not-So-Short Circuit

The First Stage workouts are taking shape.

For six long weeks -- right up to Christmas -- I'll work out six days a week. Three days a week will be in the gym, alternating between circuit and interval workouts. Three days will be running varying distances, with maybe an interval day here and there.

I have a nasty habit of overthinking things, but I do believe that planning out workouts to the day will help keep me honest. So now I have to compose, in all, nine circuit workouts, nine intervals, and eighteen days of running.

Why not just do the same circuit and interval workouts each time? Because workouts get stale fast, and six weeks is a long time for me to do any one workout. Plus, I've got enough exercises to do that I can afford to change it up every time.

Circuits

Consensus seems to support doing a circuit of 3-12 exercises, take 10 minutes for active rest, then come back for another. Not that you can't do it other ways; this just looks like it will burn the fat and give me enough opportunity to work the ANW-related skills and strengths. So for each circuit day I'll choose a few from each of the following four groups, arrange them to alternate muscle groups, and do that a couple of times each day. I've arranged the exercises within each group from most to least intense, so I don't kill myself in any given day.

Pushing Exercises

Handstand Pushups

One-Arm Pushups

Wall Pushups

Plyometric Pushups

Hindu Pushups

Pushups

Pulling Exercises

Rope Climb

Plyometric Pullups

Prone Rope Climb

Fingertip Pullups

Rope Pullups

One-Arm Rope Rows

Pullups Core Exercises Dragon Flags Wall Plank Leg Raises Situps Crunches Leg Exercises Pistols King Deadlifts Depth Jumps Box Jumps Sideways Squat Jumps Squat Jumps Bodyweight Squats

Sure, exercises will repeat, but no two circuits will ever be alike.

Intervals


The difference between circuits and intervals is that the latter involve fewer exercises that use more of the whole body, with intervals of intense exercise and rest. Tabata's a version of interval training I might try during this stage, particularly since a Japanese guy popularized it. Speaking of which, when was the last time you read about an exercise idea that wasn't pioneered by the Soviets?

Anyway, on interval days I'll alternate between a few of the following exercises.

Rope Burpees
Pullup Burpees
Burpees
Rim Jumps
DB Thrusters
DB Snatches


Everybody knows what a burpee is, right? Rope burpees merely end in a jump up onto the rope for a quick pullup. And after that explanation, I'm pretty sure you get the idea behind pullup burpees.

Tomorrow night I'll try to pick a little from Column A, a little from Column B, and put together all the workouts for the next six weeks. Then it's on to the media stuff.

Firsto Stagee

Okay, This Sunday everything starts for real. Over the past few months I've tried out some ideas on how to train for ANW. Some looked promising, some didn't pan out. This week I'm taking all that I've learned and putting it into a new approach for the final few months before, I hope, G4 sends out another casting call.

I figure that we'll need to have a video done sometime in April, if only because that's when it was due last year. That gives me 19 weeks between the week of November 20 and the end of March. Nineteen weeks to complete the transformation to Japanese game-show contestant.

Of course, we'll break the training into four stages. First Stage will run six weeks, through the end of the year, and focus on fat loss and endurance. Right now I'm around 12% body fat, though I've never been confident in my measurements. But I have a Tanita body fat scale, so I'm just going to have to find a regular time to use it and take weekly measurements. The training in this period will involve running three days a week, circuits three days a week, and one day of "active rest." It'll be a challenge to devise circuits that will burn fat, train ANW-specific skills and strengths, and stay fresh for six weeks.

Second Stage will be strength building. I won't be much lower than 200 pounds come spring, so I need to turn that to an advantage by being as strong as possible. That'll be hard to do in the home gym with few weights. But hey, I have a 40-pound vest, so if I do enough rope climbs and box jumps with it I should get pretty strong.

Third Stage will be ANW-specific skills. To the extent that I'll ever build obstacles, I'll do it here. Part of me thinks that if I just climb the darn rope I've got in the garage gym I'll be ready for anything. But I've toyed with ways of replicating the cliffhanger, so I may play around with a few ideas.

Final Stage is producing the video. I should be able to take some skills from Third Stage and do them well enough to video. And of course, by then I should have enough stuff from the media side of this project to make a winning video.

Ah yes, the media stuff. Need to schedule all that, too, or it'll never get done. So what am I doing here on the blog?

The Social Network

So now I've got a Facebook page for The Warped Wall. Would've liked to roll it out with some more new content, but it's probably just as well to have a placeholder out there right now. It's an incentive to get started on the next phase.

Lots of planning to be done here. Figure I've got through March 2012 to prove myself worthy of a spot on ANW, physically and... telegenically, I guess. So I need to sit down and plot out a schedule not just for the next four months or so of training, but of social media stuff as well.

Makes sense, though I've never done it before. With this blog I just figured I'd stop here sometime every day and blog whatever inspired me. Obviously, I need a little more structure and focus to turn out something worthwhile on a regular basis.

But the Facebook page's a start. Or rather, an impetus. Or a pretext? I need to eat.

Re-evaluating

Been a long time since I updated here. I've been working out pretty regularly, and have started incorporating serious plyometrics into my workouts. And every time I've worked out, I've wanted to update the blog about what's been happening, what I've been learning. Heck, I made two plyo boxes; I've got expertise to share!

But updating the blog with a 500-word entry each day hasn't been feasible. And with the new year approaching (and once Halloween hits, the new year is approaching very quickly) I've got to seriously reevaluate my media approach here.

The point of this blog, of all my online activity, was to both inspire my training and make myself a better candidate for ANW through their video submission. And a sporadic blog just isn't going to do it. So I've got to figure out a way to make the online content a better compliment to the training, a better resource for fellow ANW fans, and a better source for my own submission.

So let's back up. The online content has several possible elements:
1. Blog
2. Podcast
3. YouTube videos
4. Twitter feed
5. Facebook page

What I need to reevaluate is what you do with each element and how often.

I still think that the blog is the best place for daily updates. But of what? A recap of the training isn't necessarily valuable to anyone. But there should be some lesson learned in every session, something from which everyone could benefit. It can also be a good place for discussions of whatever's come across my Google news feed. For example, a few days ago there was an article out of Malaysia about their own version of Sasuke. The moment's passed, but that's the kind of stuff you'd post. And the posts needn't be longer than a hundred words, short and punchy. A training tip, a bit of news, that's all folks want or need. And with my schedule, that's all I can reliably produce.

Next element I want is a podcast. I've run one before but never been regular with it. I've always found that it takes too much time to crank out an episode. That's probably because I insist on writing each episode word-for-word and they run about ten minutes long each. Also, I've never been familiar enough with GarageBand to make production smooth each time. So hopefully I learned something from my previous podcast, and can use that to streamline the process.

But what goes into the podcast? Commentary. Observations about ANW and training for it that aren't necessarily tied to whatever I'm doing in training that week, but are basically timeless. And yes, I'm contemplating the podcast coming out weekly; I can't imagine having the time for any greater frequency.

I envision it like the NPR podcast The Score. It's a weekly podcast that can't be more than five minutes, which I know works out to about a thousand words. And if it's going to be "evergreen" content, I could probably outline a few months' worth of topics up-front, and hopefully thus get a jump on scripting each episode.

Then there's YouTube videos. These also wouldn't be necessarily timely, but would be valuable instructionals folks could turn to any time. A video on how to build a plyo box would be a good idea, for example. Another video illustrating exercises on the rope would also help. Of course, there's some videos out there that do this already. But a voice-over tying the training to the Sasuke obstacles would make them more appealing to my target audience.

And the videos might come out no more than once a month. It's exponentially tougher to produce video than it is a podcast. Heck, I'm not even sure I could produce a decent video without at least giving my garage a new coat of paint!

Twitter and Facebook seem like they should be a part of anyone's online strategy. But what would a Twitter feed be good for in this case? What Twitter's good for generally: timely, brief messages. Quick comments about the workout. Instant updates about the audition process -- assuming, of course, that there is a next season of ANW.

A Facebook page would be a good place to aggregate all content. The twitter feed, podcast, blog entries, and YouTube videos could all link there, in one convenient spot for any followers on Facebook. Of course, you could probably do the same things on the blog page, and perhaps I should. But Facebook is a built-in audience, your friends your first network of viewers/readers/listeners. So it makes sense to bring all your content there and point elsewhere.

This is clearly going to require some serious time management. But I think I have a pretty good idea of what I want to get done over the next six months or so.