The Fitness Ninja

I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth.  It’s just that the motivation to blog (as so many bloggers know) falls off when life gets busy.  I was on vacation last week and so I didn’t write anything down then.  I have kept up with Chalene Extreme and am now in the second phase of the program; her ‘PUSH’ section.  Overall, I’m enjoying it if only for the eye candy the instructors provide (but damn that Skippy guy is annoying as shit, constantly yelling stuff in the background) and the fact that it’s a bit easier than P90x or Insanity.  I also like the fact that Chalene pushes you to pick weights where the failure should kick in at 6-8 reps; it’s nice to get the sets done fairly quickly (although not too quick as she’s always reminding you lift and lower everything SUPER SLOW).  So, in terms of weights, I try to do the bulk of the work in this phase with 30-40 pound dumbbells (more so the latter than the former).  I’ve also kicked up my grease-the-groove system again and have upped the dip belt from 20 to 35 pounds.  Man, that is killer.  I find myself totally struggling for the fifth rep on any pull up set I do then I pair these 5 reps with 20-30 push ups of different varieties.  Over the course of the day the numbers built up.  Also, still running home from work and enjoying it.

Hmmmm… what else.  Much to my shame I also haven’t been keeping up with my SparkPeople calorie tracking.  When the blogging stopped so did the tracking.  I got lazy I admit it.  Interestingly though, I did follow through on my weigh in on the morning of the 20^th before the family reunion and I clocked in at 137.  Not bad.  I lost a pound since the last weigh in.  I’m happy with this weight range and will fight to maintain it.

In other news, we’ve taken my son Eli to some more specialists.  Since he’s been deaf in his left ear all this time he’s kinda favoured tilting his head to the left so that his right ear is the one exposed to the world.  Well, this had developed a small imbalance in his neck muscle development and so we’ve taken him to a physical therapist whose shown us how to do special exercises to help him strengthen the other side (I believe the medical term she gave it was torticollis).  Small steps.  We’ll get this fixed and straightened out.  At least this is something in our power to fix.  But man does he hate it when we force him to twist his neck in different directions.  It hurts because he’s not used to it.  It breaks my heart to do it but it must be done.

Here’s your first hard lesson, kid.  Life is sometimes about pain, how much you can take and still keep on going.

He’s also getting an MRI to get something else checked out.  The pediatrician we have is very good so we’re thankful to God for that.  The last doctor we had for him was an idiot (she prescribed 2 medications that weren’t meant for babies!).

As for me, I have my own appointments with the doctor / hospital.  I’m not going into the details right now but suffice it to say it’s a preventative measure.  It’s strange… I’ve busted my butt over the past year and a half to get my body in the best shape it’s ever been.  I’m actually quite proud of the journey I’ve made in terms of weight loss / fitness and damned if I’m going to let a medical / genetic condition get in the way.  Gotta fight for the gains I’ve made…. And, more importantly, protect them as best I can.

Alright folks! Sorry for being so out of the loop lately.  Keep fighting the good fight and I hope everyone’s making the progress they want to make in their fitness / good living goals.

Alright so here I am at the start of a new excercise 3-month cycle.  I have to re-commit to getting fitter.  I hate going through all these months of work without showing any significant changes in my body’s constitution for it.  So here goes… I will do my best to track all my food via SparkPeople over the next three months and post the daily calorie count on my blog.  Not that anyone will care but at least it makes me accountable to tracking my food / calorie intake.  And isn’t that the whole reason I started this blog in the first place? To make me accountable to my fit self?

I hope I can stick with this promise.  I’ve tried unsuccessfully before in the past to do this, but I think this time being aided by SparkPeople I may actually be able to meet my nutrition goals.

What else? I hope to get more sleep and not stay up so late reading / playing Catan or other games.  This I think will be a hard one to follow as I’m naturally a night owl.

Eat more protein / protein supplements.

I’ll add more as I think of them.

But this leads me then my next post…

Well, today was kind of strange as the wife and I took Eli to Mt. Sinai hospital.  We got up super early (like 4:50) to get ready and feed Eli.  He wasn’t allowed to 2 hours prior to the test and we knew that if we didn’t feed him that he would go absolutely nuts.  Everything went well except the tonne of traffic we had to face due to the downpour on the way there.  Thankfully, there were no incidents with protestors or police in Toronto (there were a lot of them in Queen’s Park which we could see from the hospital).

The test took 2 hours and at the end of it we had a better understanding of my son and his deafness.

He has nerve damage in his left ear which has resulted in moderate to severe deafness.  He’s actually not totally deaf in that ear but it takes a pretty loud sound in order to get through to him via that channel.  Interestingly, the nurse who was helping us said our son had better hearing than her as she had *complete* deafness in one of her ears.  She said the condition did not slow her down in any way.  The doctor also tending to us was also partially deaf and you would have never known it unless they told you.  Their speech was impeccable and they functioned like anyone else.

This gives me a great deal of comfort as I thought Eli would be totally deaf on that side.  The doctor said to help alleviate matters we could opt for a hearing aid but she noted that most people with one good ear often don’t get hearing aids as they can function perfectly fine without them.

God has blessed us.

After the appointment, the family and I went back to Yorkdale mall to eat and window shop.  My nutrition today was absolute garbage as I waited out the appointment at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop.  As a result, I had half a box of Timbits, a large oatmeal cookie, a small chocolate milk, a glass of juice and a muffin.  UGH! I haven’t snacked that much in a coffee shop in ages.  To make matters worse, once we got to the mall, to celebrate the “good” news we ate out at Pickle Barrel.  I had a veggie burger along with a green salad and balsamic vinagrette.  Good choices huh?

Well I caved in for dessert and split with the wife a large Skor sundae! It was made with frozen vanilla yogurt and whip cream along with chocolate sauce. OMG…soooo good.  But sooooo bad for you.

I promise I’ll get back to eating well tomorrow.

Dinner was light: yogurt with half cup of granola and strawberries.  Dessert was 3 small boxes of raisins.

The kicker is… I didn’t work out today either.  I just did yard work for 2 hours or so.  It was strenuous… but not as balls out exhausting as any of the workouts with Tony or Shaun.

Tomorrow… tomorrow.  I promise I’ll take better care of myself tomorrow!

PS I’ve become addicted to Catan! This is the greatest game since Street Fighter or World of Warcraft.

Alright… almost didn’t do a workout today.  It’s terrible being aimless with no schedule.  At least when I was following the hybrid I always knew what to do on any given day.  Now, I second guess myself.  I think “Hmmm… maybe I’ve been doing too much cardio lately… should do some weight work… oh but that Stretch X looks appealing cause it’s DEAD EASY”.  Such are the thoughts that run through my head.

In the end, since I wasn’t up for any bar work, I opted for Shoulders & Arms.  Along with Chest, Tricep and Shoulders this is a nice workout in that it just requires the dumbells.  Very straight forward and basic.  To add a bit of a change, though, I decided to up the weights for most of my sets by 5 pounds.  This change, as to be expected, caused me to decrease most of the reps down to 5-6, sometimes 8 if I was lucky.  Also, during the tricep dips, rather than just doing them on a chair with my feet on the floor, I put two chairs together and did them while suspended between the chairs’ backs.

All in all, a pretty good workout.  My arms were pretty burned down by the end of it.  To celebrate, I ate THREE CUPS OF ICE CREAM!

HAHA! Just kidding.  I had my protein drink instead.

Got to go to bed early tonight as tomorrow the wife and I take Eli down to Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto to get his hearing assessed.  Man, I am a bit worried not just because of the nature of the test and we find out the degree of his deafness but the damn G20 is setting up right now.  What that means is there is a ton of protesters and police down there.  UGH.  Thankfully, we go super early in the morning and we should be out of there hopefully by 1PM.

Alrighty, peace out! Keep eating right and working on those fitness goals!

Whew! Finally, my cough and cold have broken.  I’m mending well and I’m just phlegmy now as opposed to being totally stuffed up and hacking up a lung.  WOOT!  However, Southern Ontario is in the grip of some really hot days (approached 34 Celsius in some parts near where I live) and the humidity is just killing me.  Still, I did finish Back & Biceps along with Cardio Abs today around 9:30 PM.  Took much longer than usual as after about 4 exercises I had to take a half hour break because the baby was fussing and needed more attention than just sitting in his car seat with some toys while I work out in front of him (the wife was busting her butt on the treadmill).  I took the baby into our cooler finished basement and he stopped fussing.  Once the wife was done, she took him off my hands and I sweated my way through the rest of the routine.

Oh… one more thing.  I started an account with SparkPeople.  My wife started one a few days ago as she is really serious about losing the pregnancy weight.  She even made a friendly bet with one of her closest high school chums (who also just recently gave birth to a baby) as to who can lose the most weight by a given date.  They exercise and plan meals together and do weekly weigh ins so it’s all healthy.  I’m really proud of her for taking the initiative to do all this.

But as I was saying… I started an account and am tracking my calories again.  I have to buckle down and really get some of this fat shredded off.  NO POINT IN BUSTING MY BUTT WITH EXERCISES THEN EATING AWAY THE GAINS!!

So for today… calories consumed: 1660 (my total allotment is 1800 according to my nutrition plan on SparkPeople)

Ah nuts… due to not feeling well I took TWO rest days back to back in order to shake this cough / cold.  It seemed to have worked as I am now on the tail end of it and I can breathe a bit easier.  Bad news is I am now officially 2 days behind the hybrid program.  Hopefully I can double up on one of the days to get back on track AND I hope I am not too tired tonight when I get home after this 5 hour drive so I can do Chest, Triceps and Shoulders.

Overall, this vacation weekend was pretty decent.  Would have been much better had I not been sick but what can ya do?  It happens.  I didn’t do too much shopping as we’re trying to save money.  The wife got a nice dress and some earrings for the Baptism coming up in June so that made her happy.  She has pretty frugal tastes so that’s good (only came to $50 for the combo).

As for my eating… it wasn’t bad.  Because I was sick my appetite was lower than usual (hooray!) but I did splurge yesterday and we went to Cheesecake Factory for lunch. I had their house salad and portablella mushroom sandwich. OMG… so good.  I never thought I would love vegetarian fare but this sandwich beat the pants off any hamburger I’ve ever had.  It was eye opening.  I’m glad I’m trying more vegetarian fare.  For dessert last night, I also caved and split a slice of cheesecake with the wife.

Alrighty… lunch time… hope you have a great day!  Hope to be back later!

I haven’t really added  any new resources in a while but Fitbomb did a small blurb on this site, Fitness Spotlight, that had an awesome article by personal trainer Mike O’Donnell.  Basically, it’s a summary of key bits of wisdom he’s picked up over the years as a trainer.  Go check it out!  Very enlightening.  Here’s part 1 and part 2.

More importantly, though, the site led me to I what I think is the new homemade fitness project I am going to tackle:

A dip / inverted row station.  Nice!

Come to think of it, a bunch of those tools looked pretty promising.  Time to go visit Home Deopt…

Huh… who would have thought food could be as addicting as cocaine.  Check out the additional link from that post about how to beat cravings… very interesting tips indeed.  These were pages referred to me by Fitbomb.  Awesome fitness blog.  Go check it out.

NOW!

I haven’t been talking about it much as I’ve been so focused on the baby and finishing Insanity, but this weekend is a big fight weekend with my hero, Pacquiao fighting Joshua Clottey.  It should prove an entertaining fight but not the one everyone really wanted (Pacquiao vs. Mayweather).  In any case, this is a really interesting interview with Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza.  It’s worth a read if you love boxing and are curious to see what it takes to become a legend.

This guy’s video is friggin’ awesome.  I only have the utmost respect and admiration for people with this kind of physical ability.  Grace and power combined with a healthy amount of … “guts”.  If I were younger, and more flexible, and more daring… I’d love to take up parkour (or free running as it’s sometimes called).  I just don’t think I could do it at my age, at least not to any appreciable level (aka none at all).

It’s strange… I workout religiously and do my best to focus on my nutrition.  And, I am very happy, ultimately, with what I’ve achieved with my body.  However, I don’t really play any sports or have any physical pastimes that I would employ my physicality towards.  In my youth, I used to love playing volleyball, running track and basketball but not anymore.  I sometimes wonder if I would be even more motivated to stay on top of my food intake or be more focused on my workout out if I had an outlet or a higher purpose as to why I am exercising other than simply “being fit”.  Maybe this is the reason why I like running home from work so much.  There’s a definite goal (get home to baby) and the faster I can do it, the better.  But the very act of running, its very simplicity and zen like nature is a wonderful end in and of itself to be in.

Shit, I don’t even know if that makes any sense.  It’s late, I’m tired and I know I have to feed the baby again in an hour.

Hmm… maybe I should take up indoor rock climbing.  That looks hella fun.