UD2.0 Journal

Bas Rutten MP3 “Thai Fighting – Track 1″ 10 x 2min rounds

Notes:
I used a regular bag instead of a banana bag this time.  End result = I could (and actually did) do the knees (every combo ends with a knee).  Long story short, I’m pretty whooped.  It’s wasn’t a stellar performance but very acceptable.

Dietary adventures are going strong.  There was a big shift on the scale from Monday to Today that was kind of weird, otherwise all is well.  I’m getting used to the portions, lack of carbs, and have really just slept like a rock the past couple of days.  It’s crazy I tell ya.

News – For the Kids

A study finds a link between daily salt intake and childhood obesity.  The study concludes that if kids eat less salt then they drink less fluids and thus drink less soda resulting in a skinnier kid.  I think that one is a little odd considering that the argument is to limit fluid intake.  It would obviously seem that it’s the type of fluid that’s causing the problem, not them pesky kids drinking too much water (fat little bastards).  The second question, Do these kids have salt blocks in their living rooms?  They’re coming home from school and grabbing a handful of the salt…putting a pinch between their cheek and gum?  Mmmmmm.  Is it a reasonable assumption that the kiddo’s are eating pre-packaged garbage?  I wonder if it was sodium free pre-packaged crap if the kids will still be fat?

Study #2 shows a genetic link as having more influence than environment in childhood obesity.  This is one that’s going to be misrepresented and used as excuses across the world.  There’s a genetic tenancy towards body type.  Tall kids, short kids, big boned, and birds.  What there isn’t is an excuse to let your kid be a little turd and toss up the “it’s genetics” card.  If your kid has a salt block in the living room and doesn’t move unless forced…it’s nurture.  Everyone has tendencies, that means that it’s “harder” for some people to achieve X than other people.  Those tendencies mean that the environment has to accept MORE responsibility to fight the good fight.  Your kid may not be a ripped superstar, but they can be healthy.  Make an effort folks.

Study #3 finds that teens losing weight has no negative effect on bone loss.  Previous studies found that adults losing weight have lost bone density so it was a concern in growing (shrinking) little bodies.  The key point in this article that I seen was that the kids were put on a plan.  While the details weren’t laid out I’d almost bet money that some form of exercise was going on.  Bones are living little creatures that respond to the environment.  If they’re stressed then they strengthen and if they’re not stressed than they become weaker.  An adult lugging around 100 extra pounds of flab is naturally stressing their bones, if they lose that resistance and don’t replace that stimulus with something else then blamo…drop in bone density.  Bump up the activity then blamo…increased bone density.  It’s like magic.

Greek Style Sandwhich

This is one of my recipes that I like a lot. It’s not terribly authentic but more of a “reminds me of” dish.  For something that takes about 15min to go from fridge to belly it’s a nice departure from your normal ham and cheese.   If you have access and a desire you could sub shaved lamb or ground turkey for the pork and it’ll turn out just fine.

Meat

1lbs of Groundshaved Pork loin

1/4 cup of Lemon Juice

SaltPepper to taste

1 TBS of Rosemary

Stick it all in a skillet and fry it up.

Sauce
1 cup of plain yogurt.
2 tsp crushed garlic
1/4 cup shredded cucumber
1tsp dill (or mint)

Mix it.

Serve in a pita w fresh tomato, lettuce, maybe some thinly sliced onions.

UD2.0 Journal

For time (21:44)

100 Pushups
100 Pull Ups
100 Sit Ups
100 BW Squat

Notes:
Annoyed. This was way harder than it should have been. The diet probably came into play but my hesitance towards the whole X-fit experiance is…yeah. After a month of trying it out I think I’ll mosey back to what I was doing before. I learned that I need a little more heavy lifting and a lot more frequent conditioning work.

Diet is going well.  A couple minor willpower issues here and there but I built a little cushion in my daily calories to accommodate for that sort of thing so compliance is still rocking.  Energy was great yesterday, probably from a lack of actually doing much in the gym.  I noticed a distinct sag in the love handlesbelly roll this morning, so things are progressing right along.  A couple of weeks of looking like crap and then it’ll come full circle to lean and mean!

Mahi Mahi w Red Pepper Sauce

Blatantly Stolen from Roland’s Blog:

Mahi Mahi

4 Mahi Mahi fillets
¼ cup sesame seeds
1 tbsp light olive oil
½ tsp salt

Roasted Pepper Sauce

3 large red or yellow bell peppers
1 tsp olive oil
¼ cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 fresh large basil leaves or ½ tsp dried basil
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
¼ tsp black pepper
1 cup chicken broth
½ cup cream
salt to taste
sesame seeds for garnishing

Mahi Mahi

Spread sesame seeds and half of the salt onto a plate. Lay filets in the seeds, coating one side only

Heat a nonstick skillet using high heat. Add olive oil and swirl. When oil begins to smoke, add the coated filets, sesame seeds down. Cook for 4 to 5 minutes on each side.

Pour ½ cup of sauce into rimmed plates or shallow flat bowls. Carefully, lay a filet onto the center of each plate, sesame seeds up. Sprinkle sauce and filets with additional sesame seeds.

Roasted Pepper Sauce

Roast peppers over open flame, on the grill, or in the broiler. Keep turning them until the surface is charred and mostly black. Immediately seal in tupperware or ziplock bag for ten to twenty minutes. Submerge them in cold water and rub the skins off with your hands. A lot of blackened spots will remain. Cut open peppers and remove seeds. Coarsely chop the peppers.

In medium saucepan over high heat, combine oil, roasted peppers, onion, garlic, basil, salt, cayenne pepper and black pepper; cook 3 minutes.

Add broth to the pepper mixture and heat to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes.

Remove from heat and pour mixture into a blender jar. Let stand for 5 minutes. Blend until smooth. Add cream to blender and blend for a few seconds to mix.

Salt to taste.

If made ahead, keep the sauce warm, but do not allow it to boil.

UD2.0 Journal

Push Press 7×3
88/88/110/110/110/110/110

Notes:
My shoulders were sore from the cleans…then they loosened up and I was just a weenie.

The weekend finished wk 1 of this round of dieting with a bunch of hotfresh food.  I’m pretty good about pre-preparing food and leaving it some wiggle room for spices and whatnot on “the big day”, but to actually cook food from beginning to end and eat it when it’s still hot from the oven (vs microwave) is a treat.  My first week has me down right about 3lbs.  Most of it is probably poo to tell the truth, but it’s a warm and fuzzy anyway.

UD2.0 Journal

Reps for time 21-15-9 (12:25)
Clean @ 135
Dip

Notes:
Disappointing time. I was hoping to get something under 10min, but again my skill on the cleans are lacking at best. A high note is that 135 is as high as I’ve ever done and I did a bunch of them! There’s still a long learning curve on that one.

Yesterday was re-feed day.  Being full is awesome.  Being full of energy is awesome.  Over all really good day.

UD2.0 Journal

OH Squat 95lbs 75 reps for time (9:55)

Notes:
I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it at all, so not having any major struggles was a good feeling. The original WOD was “in as few sets as possible”. I hate math so I did sets of 10 + 1 of 15.  A few reps were a little wobbly but over all it was a good morning.

Dietary adventures went awesome yesterday.  No lightheadedness to speak of.  Tomorrow is a carb up day and life is good.

Nordic Walking

I’ve touched on this one before but it’s a fun one, so I want to dwell.

For those of you that don’t know, my main training environment is a multi-national facility in the wonderful world of Germany.  For the most part the population is a little older (40’s-50’s) and a little lazy, blah, blah, blah.  They’ve just introduced a “Nordic Walking” class\group and you see people strolling through the “where ever” and loving life.

For those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about “Nordic Walking” is basically walking with ski poles.  When I grew up we had “walking sticks” and now the hardcore craze is to have TWO walking sticks for twice the calorie burn.   Some of the awesome benifits include:

• increased overall strength and endurance in the core muscles and the entire upper body
• significant increases in heart rate at a given pace
• greater ease in climbing hills
• burning more calories than in plain walking
• improved balance and stability with use of the poles
• significant un-weighting of hip, knee and ankle joints

I think it’s important to note that to receive these benefits you actually have to do the exercise correctly.  Most people that I see are taking a leisurely stroll and dragging the sticks.  To get “exercise” you actually have to put it in gear and push off with your feet and the poles.  It “should” be challenging, that’s where the adaptations occur.  The poles are less than two pound.  That’s like walking with a cup of coffee or LESS than a tall boy (which would also make conversation and the challenge of walking that much more interesting) if you’re not playing correctly then you’re just walking with big sticks and who wants to be THAT person.

A couple of claims to address:

• 17% increase in heart rate AT A GIVEN PACE compared to walking.  I’ve got an alternative solution…walk faster.  Seriously, it works.
• Over all strength and conditioning.  Compared to walking…sure.
• Balance\Stability\Makes walking easier.  If you have trouble walking.  If walking is seriously hard for you (elderly, diseased, missing legs) then using these as aides to get out of the house may be an awesome idea.

The big one that I think is fun is on average people burn 20% more calories from walking with sticks than they do walking alone.  That’s pretty impressive right?  Ponder if you will…in an hour…at a brisk pace you can get about 4 miles in you.  That’s roughly about 400 calories x 20% = 480 if you use the sticks (ironically enough is almost exactly the recommended calorie reduction for losing weight).  Let’s say that you don’t have an hour to put in and you do a half hour…200/220 respectively.  You get home and eat a banana, because what kind of communist devil doesn’t eat a banana after a workout, or over all calorie expenditure goes down to 70-90 calories.  You spent 30minutes of your life (+10-15 for getting ready\showering if needed) to burn less than 100 calories.   DAMN IT!!

Now you say that you DO have an hour a day to put in…OK…you win this round.  More importantly you say “Don’t eat the banana”.  AH HA!!!  Eating less = weighing less.  Holy calories in-calories out Batman!  If you cut out 2 (small and innocent 160 cal cookies) cookies a day then you’re  only 80 calories shy of the hour walkers and you just kicked the crap out of the 1/2 walkers from either category.

If you’re doing it for the musculature adaptations, I would point you to the floor.  Jumping Jacks\Pushups\ect are all faster and easier ways to achieve that.  If you’re doing it for fat loss…you’re not going to win that battle with THAT weapon.  There are too many other ways to burn more calories for the time investment, 20% of “not enough to matter” is still “not enough to matter”.  If you’re doing it for the enjoyment…OK…that’s an excellent reason.  Doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.  If you enjoy it then you’ll actually do it and that’s freaking awesome.

Journal

Reps for time
21-15-9 (5:54)

Deadlift 225
Pushup

Notes:
Did OK. I love having 2hrs set aside in the morning to finish a session in 6min. Truth be told I really got winded. Pure speculation but being on the low cal\carb (1,300cal\>100 carb) thing for the past 3 days probably didn’t leave a whole lot of gas in the tank forcing to use the aerobic ability for things it just wasn’t intended to do . It’s crazy just sucking wind *hard* from doing deadlifts…that aren’t particularly heavy.

I’m starting to get used to the macros\calories a little bit.  I still get a little hypoglycemic now and then, but over all I don’t feel like I’m going to die at any moment.  The drop in water weight is a false sense of security leaving me with a skinnier face\belly making me “look” more athletic.