Drop 12 Inches from my abdomen

She says I need more food; More carbs, more fruit, less protein. She also says to stay a way from caffeine. Easy for her to say, lol. So I’m tracking my stuff for her, so I can see her at the second session, she’ll break it down to see what she can do for me. Overall, a great experience… highly recommended.

Decided to change my approach to make better results.

1) Make everything automatic.
- Stopped going out to lunch with people on a regular basis
- Signed up for 2 P.E. classes at the college. Now my GPA is tied to whether or not I show up to workout, and my new social groups are designed around workouts. It works.
2) Focus on maximizing intensity.
- Everything I do I gas out on. Some comes earlier than others, lol. Pushing boundaries makes gains exponentially.
3) Avoid injury
- I was Success Paradoxing last year. Injuries took me out of training for 25% of the year because I was being pigheaded and working to the point of injury. No wonder I didn’t hit my goals.
4) Get professional help.
- There’s only so much I can do by myself. I have the best training partners, fight trainers, physical therapists, and S&C coaches I’ve ever had. I’m the best prepared I’ve ever been. I’ve put myself in an environment where each area of my fight life is overseen by an expert. The only parts I think I’m missing is Sports psych and Nutrition, and I just made an appointment with a Dietitian for Monday. I dunno where I’m gonna find sports psych in my budget.

Well, my diet’s pretty darn optimized.
I don’t think a nutritionist is going to help any. It’s all about consistency at this point (and it works!), which has netted me a 7” loss and 31 pounds in 8 months. At that rate, Itt’l be next March before I get to where I want to be… if there was only a way to speed up that process.

I’m pretty sure the only thing I could do better is to Up the intensity in all of my Martial Arts classes. The BJJ class could definitely use some more, the TKD class is pretty up there, but there’s probably room for more. The boxing class maxes me out, I don’t know if I can really push much harder. In Crossfit, I could up intensity, but not much. Anyway…

New Goals
BJJ – In randori, go till I gas out
TKD – Keep HR over 120bpm
Boxing – Focus on speed and repetition, rather than variety.

This is rediculous. I dropped 5” thus far, and will probably make another 1” by the time my target timeline is over (at the rate this is going). While that’s some great success in its own right, I’m still quite a bit impatient and would love to speed the process up dramatically.
AAAAAAH!!!!

WeightWatchers has more chicks than GreenPeace. The ratio in there was like… 10:1. Anyway, after my first week on the points system, going to their meetings, I dropped 5 lbs. They gave me a little gold star, like in grade school… and I was all happy. ALL happy. I was talking to Jason, and he was like “Dude, eat your Activity points, or your body’s going to be lame and get fatter.” And I was like; “Whoah… that totally explains that.”
I guess there’s some sort of balancing act I have to be doing… not too much… not too little. Whatever. I’ll pay closer attention to it, and eat more myoplex.

OK, I’ve got roughly a month left. I started at 48” around the abdomen, I’m down to 43.5” as of this morning. I’ve REALLY got to watch the nutrition stuff like a hawk this coming few weeks. Moe and I are hitting up a Weightwatchers meeting tomorrow, to see what they have to say. More updates later.

I’ll tell you what. Working out doesn’t cut it, period. I’m weeks into this workout program, and my intensity is rediculous. That only leaves one thing: nutrition, and I don’t have the time to trial-and-error this thing, so I’ma attend my first WeightWatchers meeting on Saturday. WooHoo!

I get my bodybugg Tonight. It showed up this afternoon. I’ve been consistent with interval goals from MaxO2. There is no feasible way that I can’t be dropping fat like a madman by my calculations. Next aerobic goal: 33 minutes ontime in 30sec on\ 45sec off intervals.

After reading most of Jerry Robinson’s “MaxO2” in its entirety, I started a new plan on top of the BFL AND the fight training. Jerry’s theories make so much sense it’s rediculous. So I setup a milestone plan that starts at Maintaining a 60 min LSD and ending at a 150 min 5\5 min interval at >145bpm on the “ON-Time”. I’m going to test the interval program in the BFL plan against the bodybugg data, and then the MAXO2 interval plan.

The only thing I really have to watch out for is the overtraining symptoms. I’m trying to do some seriously low impact stuff for the long, drawn out aerobic sessions, so I don’t kill myself for fight training. But good news: The last four weeks of training, I haven’t even drilled fighting stuff, and I went back last night… lo and behold….
I DIDN’T GAS OUT. I had 13 matches (lost 12, won 1 of them by submission, but hey…) and I didn’t get tired. I attribute this DIRECTLY to the BFL interval training. It amps me up to do more interval type stuff.

My weight and measurements haven’t shifted, and that’s wayyyyyyy frustrating. It’s week 4, for goodness’ sake. Interestingly enough, I can SEE the difference at my extremities. My calves are looking a whole lot more defined, as well as my biceps\triceps. Heather says my face looks thinner, but the scale keeps above 240, and the tape stays above 46”. If it gets to week 7 and I’m still the same, there’s going to have to be some sort of HARDCORE research into why I can eat 1800-1900 cals per day, burn 600-1000 intentionally, and still be retaining this kind of fat mass. But that’s why I ordered the bodybugg. For scientific readouts of what’s ACTUALLY happening to my body.

I hope the bugg data comes out in some sort of xml type format that I can write a desktop app against. While there’s nothing wrong with myApex’s webApp, I sort of want to see the data before they crunch it. I dunno, we’ll figure it out.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
So I went through 1066 kCals yesterday on the machines, in 6 sessions. I just empirically figured out why everyone wants to take EAS’s word for it that 20 minutes of interval cardio is enough. I hurt in places I didn’t know existed. So all that stuff I was saying yesterday: still applies. But maybe not with that kind of intensity. I do have some notes, though…

1) Tested out the “African-Running” theory proposed by Ian, my PT. While it did some wierd things to my calves, I generally felt like I was being more efficient with my stride and felt better about clomping my 240 lb body down over and over again.

2) All that “Body awareness” stuff really works. Here’s what I did: For the first stretch of the run, I would focus on digging my heels in as they land… getting as far as I could and still have a decent rhythm to my stride. When my ankles started hurting, I focused on the push-off of my toes instead, which put the strain on a different part of the ankle. When those got tired, I focused on “gliding” trying to hit and pushoff as lightly as possible, kind of in an elliptical motion. This allowed me to run for about twice as long before everything in my ankles got angry at me.

3) The Elliptical machine is by far the most efficeint machine I’ve tried for spiking the heartrate AND kCal burnage.

4) My lactate threshold is at about 145bmp, via the “conversation test”. When I get over that, I just begin to sweat.

5) I got dropped by an enormous headache. Turns out I STILL don’t drink enough water. I think it might have changed over when I changed Creatine brands, but I’m not sure. I finished off the big tub of Cell-Tech… and that stuff seriously pisses me off. I feel like there’s way to much sugar, and wierd acid sensation. I switched over to EAS’s normal creatine stuff, and mix it with my myoplex. We’ll see how that works out.

I also did 1 pullup from a dead hang today. Now that’s cool. Watched Body of Work . Now that’s inspirational.