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?