Fitness Goals I Have Known and Loved

Goal!! Some of us love goals. Most of us benefit from them. A few are obsessed by a goal. I have been all of these people, but here are a few fitness goals I have known and loved.

50 x 100

I once had the goal of doing 50 onearm (alternating) dumbell snatches in 10 minutes with a 100lb dumbell. I went at this a few different ways. One way was starting with a 75lb dumbell and working my way up. The other way (once I could do 1 snatch with a 100lb dumbell) was to do this exercise EVERY DAY for 5 minutes and once a week for ten. Constantly doing the exercise seemed to be the thing that got me there. I think I weighed about 190 at the time and the 100lber was the heaviest dumbell in the weight-room I was using. Since hardly anybody does this exercise, I got a lot of "looks." One guy asked me, "What does that work?" Translation: What part of your body are you trying to get all "swoll" by doing THAT? I laughed. What part of your body do you NOT work when you are trying to get a dumbell (that is over half your body weight) from the floor to a fully extended position over your head?

MEx2

My next favorite was going for a 2x BW deadlift. Translation: I wanted to be able to lift a bar weighted with twice my bodyweight (bw) from the floor to hip-height. Once again, I used 2 different approaches. I didn't have a ton of time to work out (like - not even 20 minutes), so gaining muscle mass wasn't an option anyway, but it would have been counter-productive too! If I weighed more, I would have to lift more. SO, I dropped carbs significantly and dropped down to about 175 (I'm 6 3, but "slender"). Then I started doing 2 sets of relatively heavy deadlifts everyday before bed in addition to some super-quick morning workouts. One morning, I got up and I just "felt it." I wasn't even planning on it. I wasn't in my basement workout gear. I had jeans on. BUT, since I felt it, I just went for it and managed a fairly smooth 363lbs. About 8lbs over bw for good measure.

PISTOLS

The "pistol" is a one legged bodyweight squat where you keep your unloaded leg extended in front of you. I tried to get a picture of someone doing one in here but blogger was hating on me.

I spent a lot of time doing front-squats (with the bar loaded across one's sternum and delts instead of trapezius/back) to get to the point where I could do one pistol without collapsing onto the floor, but it felt great and I eventually got up to 10 per leg before some knee stability issues convinced me to back off.

What's next?

Future goals include a 400lb deadlift, one arm chin-ups and one arm pushups (I have long arms, so these are lofty goals). I'd also like to get to a respectable squat, but my hips and lower back don't like them.

Your Home Fitness Solutions

I am offering flexible, affordable, holistic and empowering training. My goal is to get you up to speed quickly to work within your resources to meet your goals with a training regimen that will allow you to enjoy your workouts and make progress. I don't want to foster dependence.

I want to work with men, couples and families.

Here are two testimonials:

“Training with Matt Hunter was a fantastic experience. I needed to get in shape without a lot of equipment. I found I could do Matt’s workouts almost anywhere. Following Matt's simple regimen for several months, I began to see major improvements in my overall strength, stamina and physique. Furthermore, I was motivated to work out on my own, using the tools he gave me. Matt has a kind and easy-going personality that make training sessions fun and encouraging. For anyone wanting to get in shape and not knowing where to begin, he's your guy!” Joe Alpar

"Matt knows more than 90% of personal trainers working in the field."
Bob Gorinski, DPT, CSCS, Cert-MDT, Head PT at First Choice Rehab in Mechanicsburg

Evolving Fitness - Part 2

So, in the last post I was returning to weights from a season of bodyweight training.

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 future posts, I'll share the basics of the "new rules" without giving you the actual "new rules" since there are at least 19. Here are two:
1. Focus on large muscle groups - (ie. chest/shoulders, back, quads, glute/hamstrings) these programs have VERY few curls or tricep exercises. 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.

I love these principles and I enjoyed these workouts and made progress, but the recommended 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.

My workouts became a hybrids of the principles from New Rules and EDT. I'll explain how I did this in future posts too.

Using this fusion, if I did a 3-5 minute warm-up and rested 3-5 minutes between 2 series of intense supersets, I'd be in and out of the weight-room, or basement, in around 40 minutes or less. If you need shorter workouts, do slightly shorter series of more intense supersets. I think people could make progress with as little as 10 minute series.


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...

Evolving Fitness

My friend Bob Gorinski ("Mental Reps"- 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. See Bob's "Gospel of Not Running" post too. 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 repetitions 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 got 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 (see Rosstraining link).

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.

Where it began and why I keep doing it.

I remember 5th or 6th grade gym class. I guess everybody does. Unless you’ve managed to block it out. What I remember is standing at the front of a line of other kids in my class as they witnessed my inability to perform a pull-up for the Presidential fitness test. The gym teacher was relatively cool. I think I remember him saying, “Don’t worry about it Matt.” Sure.
I vowed that was not going to happen again. Somehow or other I talked to my dad about it and he took me out to the barn, showed me a bar that I could use to work on my pull-ups. It was not a pull-up bar, it was some sort of support bar in the barn. Very ROCKY.
A few times a week I went out there. How do you work on an exercise you can’t even do ONE of? You just pull as hard as you can. I decided to pull as hard as I could ten times, rest, and do this again.
The next year I think I did 7 or 8 pull-ups (a few months ago I did 20 to impress my nephew). It felt great.
Around the same time (6th grade I think, not a few months ago), my dad initiated me into the ritual of weightlifting and I am so glad he did. We used to workout in the basement before dinner and talk. I don’t know what we talked about, but it was a good thing.
My dad used to say that he worked out 11 months a year for the one month we had to put hay in the barn. This annual event involved a few weekends of transporting several thousand 75-80lb. hay bales from a field a couple miles away and stacking them 50 feet high in our second floor + hay loft. We don’t live on the farm anymore but now in his mid-late 60s, he still works out. He can probably still benchpress more than me. So here are a few things that I have picked up from lifting.

1. I like feeling physically capable even if all my life requires of me is sitting, walking and minute finger movements on a keyboard. I think that’s what my dad meant. “Putting hay in the barn” means being capable to do whatever life might require, even if it doesn’t require it very often. Actually, raising 2 boys requires a lot more. My dad knows this as well. My brother and I used to ask him to launch us through the air, in the pool, onto the bed, etc. A friend of mine watching me do a particular exercise asked, “Why do you DO that? Are your kids always saying, ‘Throw me higher dad!’?” Actually yes, just this weekend Zephan asked me to throw him “up in the gy (sky)” and “ADIN! (again)” and “ADIN!” and “ADIN!” 
2. Vanity. This is probably a bigger reason to lift than I would normally admit. Pretty self-explanatory, but my wife appreciates the way I look too. It’s probably also the best short answer to "why do you workout?" but when I needed a short answer recently I just said, “I started lifting weights with my dad in the basement when I was 12 or 13 and I just haven’t stopped.” 
3. Lifting teaches some life lessons. A. We have limitations. When you have a weight, you find your limitations quickly, even on my best day. Much more quickly than running unless you’re a sprinter. It’s a good reminder. B. Progress is possible. It might even be inevitable. If you lift heavy weights, eat decently and sleep decently, you will get stronger. As with the rest of life, making certain decisions DOES yield certain results. I may not ever be the strongest, or the best at anything else but it is always possible to improve. Which brings me to C. You have to commit. Sometimes, when I miss a lift, I know it’s not because I couldn’t do it. It’s because I didn’t put everything into it. Likewise, if lifting (or anything else) is not a priority of any kind I will NOT make progress or improve. The problem is applying this truth to other areas where improvement is less measurable. Which brings me to…
4. It’s satisfying. I’m not much into math or measurements or goal setting but when it comes to working out, I love it.   Lifting a weight a couple more times than you did last time you worked out, or lifting a few more pounds than last time feels great. It’s like crossing things off your to-do list. Even when many other things are NOT going right, it’s nice to be able to write down some little improvement in my workout chart.

As Paul would say, “Physical training is of some value, but godliness has value in all things.” 

A word from the basement

Since I'm getting more requests for workout advice, I've created this blog to help build my side-business - Your Fitness Solutions. I want to offer short-term consultations and personal training for men, couples and families. You can take this stuff to the gym, but you don't NEED the gym.

My story, other links and tips will be forthcoming.