Connecting with God - Part I

Ari Goldman writes about the Jewish practice of saying a b'racha (blessing).
"Blessed are you God, King of the Universe, who... (brings forth bread from the ground, creates the fruit of the vine (wine) ...etc.)" There is a b'racha to be recited before virtually everything.

A.J. Jacobs is/was a secular journalist who wrote the Year of Living Biblically, in which he decides to try to follow every command in the Bible as literally as possible for a year. One small piece of this is gratitude. In a fascinating video/talk, Jacobs describes the way the consistent practice of giving thanks has transformed his life and turned him into a "reverent agnostic" as well as a more grateful person. The question has been posed: when an atheist feels just generally grateful, to whom does the atheist give thanks?

I believe that connecting to God on a daily basis is part of the whole health of a human being.
We are selfish creatures in my experience... Okay, fine. I'm a selfish creature. I need to connect to something outside myself to awaken me to the fact that I am not the center of the universe.
Notice how limp Adam's hand is in comparison to God's in Michelangelo's famous painting of the creation of Adam? In the Christian scriptures there is a sense that God is the constant animator of life. Paul, quoting a Greek philosopher, states that in God "we live and move and have our being." But in this, we are relatively passive.

My desire is to try to be a more equal partner with God in God's animation of my life.
By partner, I mean that I would not be working against (passively OR actively) God's purposes, but for them. By "more equal" I mean that maybe instead of a 1,000,000/1 ratio of God's work to my partnership, maybe we could reach a 1,000,000/2 ratio (which would double my personal investment). But achieving this takes "mindfulness;" a conscious attention to God's presence and a discerning of what role I might play in God's will for a situation.

One way of being mindful is the ongoing practice of looking for things for which I can be grateful.

Today I had each member of my class say a b'racha in introduction: "Blessed are you God, King of the Universe, who... (gives me great friends, has given me a great family, gives us coffee...)
As I look out my window right now it is my favorite time of day. The sun is low and shining which gives all the green things a glowing emerald appearance. I will go outside to say this b'racha.

What are you grateful for? Wouldn't the world be a better place if we were only a tiny bit more grateful?

Evolution of a lifter - III

So, in the last "Lifter" post I was transitioning from bodyweight exercises to using weights.

My new inspiration was The New Rules of Lifting by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove:

 The authors don't claim any of this is really new, but that a lot of popular training articles and programs have deluded people.  In a nutshell, here are the "new rules" without giving you the actual "new rules" since there are at least 19.

1. Focus on large muscle groups - (ie. chest/shoulders, back, quads, glute/hamstrings) these programs have VERY few curls or tricep exercises.  The theory is that when you do any sort of upper-body press, your triceps HAVE TO work hard.  When you do any pull/chin up or row, your biceps HAVE TO work hard.

2. Focus on exercises that imitate (relatively) "natural" movements: push - pull - squat - bend - lunge etc. 

3. Weights are tools to help achieve fitness goals and machines are relatively ineffective tools.

Use dumbells and barbells and occasionally a cable station or exercise ball.

4. Strength is the foundation of all movement.

5.  You should set a personal record every workout.

6. A workout is as good as the adaptation it forces upon your body.  Incidentally, this is why resistance training is better than "cardio" for fat-loss.  You body adapts to it more slowly and it increases your metabolism WAY more than "cardio." 

7.  Warm-up, but don't stretch, before your workout.

I love these principles and I enjoyed these workouts and made progress, but the workouts were still just a bit too long for a grad student with a wife and a baby whose demands seemed so disproportionate to his size.

The missing piece I needed at the time was a workout system called Escalating Density Training (EDT).  The program is described in basic form in several places online and was published in the book Muscle Logic by this guy, Charles Staley, and boasted, "Cut your workout time in half, with better results." This may be an exaggeration, but it did cut my workout time down. I did get better results and I loved the way this system makes you compete with yourself successfully and have continual progress.

Here's EDT in short.  When I do EDT, I also have the "new rules" in mind.  This seems complex at first because it is counter-intuitive, but when you get into it, it is amazingly simple.

1. Pick the exercises you want to do for your large muscle groups.

2. Put them in "antagonistic pairings" or roughly opposite exercises.  Example are bench/row, lower-body push/upper-body pull.  You will do these exercises back-to-back in what is called a "superset" moving back and forth between them.

3. Each pair, or superset also indicates a 15 minute "personal record" or PR zone.

4. Use your 10 rep max for each exercise (this can vary depending on your goals).

5. Structure your workouts based on these pairs but, you will NOT perform any exercise to failure.  You should always feel like you could perform at least one more rep on all but maybe the last set of a PR Zone.  

6. Start each set doing HALF of your rep max, moving the weight as fast as possible for each rep and moving back and forth between exercises with as little rest as possible between sets.  Decrease reps-per-set and/or increase rest periods as you fatigue.  Aim for around 45 reps per exercise, but the program is self-correcting BECAUSE....

7. If you beat your previous record by 20%, you increase the weight by 5% or 5lbs., whichever is less, and keep going!

NOTE: Even though the weights and reps are not maximal, moving them as fast as possible means you exert maximal FORCE for each rep.  (Ex. You may exert 140lbs of pressure to move a 100lb weight as fast as you can).

Here's what your workouts might look like then:

Monday:

PR Zone 1-

Squat/Pullup

PR Zone 2- 

Bench/Row

Wednesday:

PR Zone 1-

Deadlift - doesn't really need a pair

PR Zone 2-

Lunge/Military Press

Friday - repeat Monday and then repeat Wednesday the next Monday etc.

I've never done this exact workout, but its not bad.  If you did a 3-5 minute warm-up and rested 3-5 minutes between PR Zones, you'd be in and out of the weight-room, or your basement, in around 40 minutes or less.  If you need shorter workouts, do slightly shorter PR Zones.  I think people could make progress with as little as 10 minute zones though you might want to start out doing 6-7 instead of 5 reps.

I'm doing some other things now that mix up a bunch of these principles with some other things I've learned, but these are the basic building blocks.  My pastor recently preached on taking care of ourselves, so maybe this will help someone do that...

My advice to everyone is to do the exercise you enjoy.  Play, run, lift, jump, march, whatever.  But if you DON'T like what you are currently doing, try something else!

I haven't even talked about nutrition, but I have gained 25-30 pounds since I got back into lifting and I don't think my body-fat percentage has increase much at all.  People might ask, "what about cardio-vascular health?" and even though I only run about once a year, I went out and ran 5 miles with a running friend a few weeks ago and felt pretty good!

So, if you're into working out, let me know what you've learned or found helpful!  I'm always trying to learn new things.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask...  

Evolution of a Lifter - II

My friend Bob Gorinski ("So Whattya Think Robert?"- see my links) posted a great blog on weight-training not too long ago.  Bob blogs on life, faith, family and sometimes lifting.  He is a SICK athlete,a thoughtful Christian and a great dad.  He's also a great PT and he blogged about the toll that lifting takes even as he hit an incredible personal best in the squat.  Anyone considering PX90 or whatever it is, should see his review of that program.  

Yes, there is a masochist element to most of us who like exercising whether we are runners or lifters or whatever...  But, I think there are ways to at least maximize our pain to payoff ratio, and one major way to do that is to maximize time.

Once upon a time, I would work out for an hour or more and I know lots of runners and others who exercise for long stretches even though they don't enjoy it because they think they have to in order to reach their goals.  Here's how it went for me...

When I worked out with my dad in the basement we did a few sets of a few exercises (mostly upper-body) with repititions like this - 12, 10, 7, 5.  Not a bad way to go.  When these sets got easier, we added weight.

Somewhere along the way I got Bill Pearl's Getting Stronger which is a great book in its own right with workouts for beginners and up, bodybuilders and every imaginable sport.

The problem with the book is mostly that Pearl is a bodybuilder.  He thinks in terms of individual muscles and individual exercises to target those muscles.  In the end then, the training is less functional and you end up doing a LOT of different exercises in a workout.  

I used to follow programs like this and I would do exercises aimed at "isolating" the muscles I wanted to work.  When you think this way, you have to do a LOT of exercises.  That takes a LOT of time.  You also end up treating all muscles equally.  You spend just as much time on your biceps, which are a very small proportion of your body, as you do on your hamstrings, which are much larger.

I enjoyed these workouts and made some progress, but they just took too long!

Then I entered grad school and had a 2-3 year hiatus from working out.  When I decided I needed to get back into it, I had no equipment and I had no intention of joining a gym.

SO, I go into bodyweight exercises, push-ups, pull-ups, bodyweight squats and crazy variations of all three.  It was really fun and, coming back from a "keyboard-only" workout regimen, I made a lot of progress.  I still like the simplicity of bodyweight workouts.  A person can get incredibly fit without ever picking up a "weight."  One great resource for this kind of thing is this primitively published manual by Ross Enamait.

My only real criticism of this book is that Enamait uses a LOT of equipment in some of his workouts, even if the equipment isn't weights.  But its still a great book, with a ton of great information as well as exercise ideas to get your creative juices flowing.  You really could be "Never Gymless" although I don't know how anybody could go without a good pull-up bar or branch or fire escape or something.

Still, there is something about lifting heavy stuff.  It is hard to chart your progress on raw strength doing bodyweight exercises.  I mean, its awesome when someone can do 100 pushups, but it takes a lot of determination to decide you're going to do 1 arm push-ups and I never got there.  Maybe someday.  Anyway, I cruised craigslist, found a weight set I wanted and made a low-ball offer.  $90 got me 2 Olympic bars, a bench/squat rack set-up and about 380lbs of plates.  I also reclaimed some weights I bought in high school that my dad wasn't using (he's still using a LOT) and he threw in a couple dumbells.  It was time to hit the iron again...

More on that in a future post.

Motorcycle Diary

This weekend I decided to ride the motorcycle down to Norfolk, where Beth and the kids are visiting with Grandma and Grandpa Crabtree. The "bike" gets 50 miles to the gallon, leaves when I want to leave, and (ideally) gets there in 6 hours, so it beat out the bus and train options by around $40-70 and 3-4 hours each way.
I got rained on a bit on the way down but the first 5 hours were cool. Hour six? My butt was killing me. This bike is a single cylinder 650, which means it vibrates quite a bit, and not a big comfy cruising bike in any case.
On the way back I decided to take a slightly different route. It was more "direct" but off the interstate. And it was raining again but about 15 degrees colder.
An hour and a half into my trip the bike started to "stutter" and backfire. Uh-oh.
"Please just let me get to a gas station."
Nope. It got bad enough that I pulled over and turned it off and tried to look the bike over.
Two small pieces of info:
1. I'm not mechanical. I tried reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" one time and I thought the writer was jerk.
2. Beth and I are sharing a cell-phone right now and it was her turn.

So, I'm broken down on the side of the road, in intermittent rain, in approximately the middle of nowhere, without a phone. So I pray, "Okay God, let's see how you're going to work this one out."

You know what? People don't stop anymore. I'm sure part of it is the whole "biker" thing, but there's something else. Since "everyone" has a cell phone, a person on the side of the road is probably just waiting for their.... whatever they called for.

I decided that the best case scenario was someone in a truck or pulling an empty trailer who would be willing to take me and my bike to the nearest bike shop, where I would sit all day (and hopefully not into the next day) until they got me fixed up and going.
I wanted to maintain my dignity though so my strategy became sitting sideways on my bike facing the road (12 inches from my boots) and waving casually whenever a likely truck drove by.
After about 30-40 minutes of this, a truck turned around and pulled in behind me and a young guy about 21 years old leaned out and asked if he could give me a ride somewhere.

I told him my situation and he offered to drive me up to the nearest gas station, which was better than the side of the road so...
It turned out he had a friend who worked at a cycle shop and he got his friend on the phone. The shop was closed but his friend said he'd drive out and take a look at the bike saying "We can't just leave you stranded."

After running a a quick errand with my new friend we met back at the bike. His friend was there, fiddled around with it, tightened one screw and it was fixed. I offered to buy them lunch but they turned me down casually, smiled at my gratitude and drove away.

Thanks Luke and Paul!

"For I was a stranger" and you cared for me.