Converting planning into reality
20 May 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
There is a certain type of fitness devotee that loves to plan for fitness yet find it hard to pull the execution trigger. Talking the talk is great but it is strictly a preliminary to walking the walk. I heard someone describe it last night on TV, study and preparation are learning from others mistakes and doing it yourself is learning from your own mistakes. Optimally we want a balance between book smarts and street smarts. I had one fellow I worked with who used to provide me full size charts to go with his excel spreadsheets. The only thing missing was a slide show. Well, actually, now that my memory clicks, I remember he had a tripod he would set his video camera on and tape all his workouts. Hed review the tapes looking for technical imperfections. Hed review them at home he tried to get me to look over the tapes once but I flat refused, Maybe would could take a DNA sample and send it to N.I.H. you could apply to be a participant in one of their gene-splicing studies. Perhaps you would be able to leap ahead physically through genetic alteration. Just like Nigel in the movie Spinal Tap, this guy didnt laugh and was crushed when he found out I was making a joke.
At the other end of the spectrum are the doers many are not to big on planning and thought. My buddy Big is a 1st degree Purposefully Primitive. Joey is a big, strapping 30-year old guy who went from a 340-pound national champion powerlifter to 240-pounds state champion bodybuilder, all within eighteen months. Like a sumo wrestler Joe bulked himself up on purpose and captured several national and world titles as a humongous drug-free powerlifter. He squatted 840 in competition. Joe was a landscaper and had a microwave oven jerry-rigged inside his pickup truck so he could heat and eat his many meals while on the job. This is the most Kramer-like guy I know. Once because his father was kicking him out of the house again he took ten hours to cook 140 individual meals. Chicken breast, broccoli, rice, chicken breast, broccoli, rice, chicken breast, broccoli, rice over and over and overHe would cook and weigh each portion and for some Kramer-like reason hed purchased a vacuum pac sealer machine. Hed individually package 140 meals broken into three parts for a total of 420 bagged portions! He took his bounty to his new home, the Animal House, a split level he shared with two motorcycle gang members. He bought a used freezer and refrigerator and placed them both in his room in the basement next to the laundry room. He went into the woodshed and trained and ate with this fanatical precision. At 235 he could deadlift 505 for 20-reps. He took second place at the 2003 Mr. Maryland competition, one of the toughest bodybuilding states in the nation. Once Joey got his bodyweight down, we discovered that he was loaded with muscles! It was incredible what had been hiding under all that excess body fat. His life at 340 had been a lonely solitaire trip. Now ripped and shredded, 260-pounds of Grade A ultra-lean American man, all the bodybuilding and fitness babes who wouldnt give the poor sweet guy (at 340 think Shrek) the time of day now wanted to get in his pants hed suddenly become a Boy Toy Adonis a regular Fitness Fabio! His face went from doughy to ultra-chiseled, (think Kirk Douglas in Spartacus) and suddenly all the ladies wanted to be Joeys best friend.
This led to a number of humorous events better told in Penthouse Forum than in this safe-as-milk website. One amazing looking fitness competitor had been particularly dismissive of Shrek - yet had no problem doing a total flip-flop when Shrek morphed in Kirk. So what the hell, Joe went along with it. He went over the ladys house to pick her up for dinner, While she was dressing I peaked into her sink and what I saw made me realize how unsuitable we were for each other. I just got my coat and walked right out the door. She was sooo pissed. What was so horrific that Joey would flee right before an intimate diner (if he went out with them he made the mean ladies pick up the tab for anything and everything saying, Id love to go out with you, but Im broke. pause) with the virtual certainty of lewd consensual ka-noodling later on. A dead rat? Dirty dishes piled sky high? Rotting food? Shed gone to the trouble of wiping the sink dry my dad was a Nazi-retentive neat freak and he used to make me wipe the water out of this sink or I’d be punished he was a sick bitch! Neatness is no vice, its a virtue. Its also a tip of, amongst the police this is known as a clue.
I believe that walk trumps talk when it comes to physical transformation. A sizeable percentage of heavy thinkers have problems converting theory into physical effort. Some people are compulsive about neatness, order and planning and its always interesting to see if a talker can transition. Seems as if people are a lot smarter nowadays and sometimes thats a help and sometimes thats a hindrance. Over the decades Ive encountered a certain type of individual: smart, witty, incisive, quick-witted and very knowledgeable about fitness and all things related. These folks love to plan and their attention to detail is staggering.
But in fitness there is an unavoidable physical portion to the transformation equation. At some point, you have to roll up your sleeves and go to the gym and train. But even that is not enough! Attendance is no guarantee of success and unless you train hard enough and intense enough to trigger the adaptive response, not much of anything is going to happen. Many folks develop incredible game plans and are diligent gym attendees but if cant generate the requisite level of pure physical effort forget about it! Nothing of any significance is going to happen. I wish there were some sort of get out of jail free or effort by-pass system whereby we could be exempted from having to actually grit and groan while we train. Ditto for eating again, I know people who know lots about nutrition and understand how to eat correctly. They read all the latest diet books yet their results are hardly satisfying. They know what to do and make a nice effort, insofar as showing up they go to the gym and go through the motions and you could set you watch by their regularity yet physically they cant seem to make it happen. You see them at every commercial fitness facility: successful smart people never quite turning the corner on physical transformation.
The reason quite often is a lack of gut-busting physical effort in the gym. Its needed to seal the deal. Thats a hard lesson that many people never accept. To train intense requires we step off into the pain zone, which is really the discomfort zone. It is necessary to extend the envelope and venture into the discomfort zone, repeatedly. Over time pain tolerance improves and simultaneously we begin to realize actual physical change. The body transfigures itself only in response to stress equal or in excess of current limits. More reps, more poundage, faster, longer, these are intensity benchmarks and we need to strive to move our individual benchmarks upward, ever upward. The struggle against what is, the pure effort required to improve on a personal best are what trigger hypertrophy and oxidize stored body fat. Nothing less is going to do. You dont have to be a total fanatic like Pal Joey but one thing he does point out is you dont want to over think the transformation process. Action trumps inaction every day of the week.
Be a doer, not a talker. Use this website to ask questions that will aid you in improving the quality of your actual workouts. Progress is our most important product and by stepping off into the discomfort zone (not the injury zone) real people can procure real results relatively quickly.
Tags:Popularity: 2% [?]
Related Posts:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
