This is the fourth part of my Time Lapse series which show how I created the painting “Uphill Battle”.

In part 1 I show the “brainstorming” or sketching phase which slowly turns into detail rendering in part 2. In part 3 I go back to the brainstorming or experimentation phase as I wasn’t happy with how the knight/paladin character turned out.

In this episode I finish the detail rendering on the other character which in the end turned out to be a rogue instead of a paladin as I had intended.

Continued in part 5.

I already talked about Sats Cross Training but now that I’ve seen more of the class I feel that I have a few more things to say about it.

It seems the instructor sort of fine-tuned the exercise selection over time so that some of the exercises which I initially felt were sort of redundant were replaced by better and more challenging once during the second week. At first I was worried that the exercises would keep changing every single week (similarly to how the “Workout of the Day” (WOD) over at crossfit.com works). But it turned out that most of the exercises stayed the same over the past four weeks which I think is a good thing.

Thanks to these changes, I think the exercise selection during the past three weeks has been better than what I previously described. There is still in my opinion a bit of an overemphasis on triceps and the combination of pushups, burpees and “planks” tend to wear down my shoulder joints to the point of ruining any pressing I might want to do in the weight room on the following day, but this is quite typical of group training in general. Planks and pushups are very easy to add to a routine from the the instructors point of view as everyone is familiar with them, and for some reason people seem to like these exercises. Personally I think if you can hold a plank for more than 30 seconds, it might be better to just add resistance to the exercise than to increase the time spent in the plank position as it is very tough on the lower back and especially the shoulders when you stay in that position for an extended period of time.

One of the main issues I have with the class is that since everything is done on time, form breakdown is inevitable. You could obviously try to slow down the pace so that your form doesn’t fail, but it is difficult to do so in that psyched up environment. Obviously bad form and cheating isn’t uncommon in the aerobics classroom. However, when you have the kind of class where everyone is facing the mirrors, at least you might feel slightly more motivated to try harder as it means that a lot more people, including the instructor, will notice if you cheat. This is one of the reasons why I like standing in the front row in these classes. It’s a form of “accountability”. You put yourself in the “spotlight” and by doing so you challenge yourself to perform at a higher level than you might normally do, and you make yourself “accountable” to everyone who might see you cheat. Put in simpler words, men perform better when there are attractive women around to whom they want to make a good impression. And I’m obviously no exception. :-P

Part of what makes a group training class fun is that the exercises are done to a known choreography, where each repetition is done to a certain tempo. Learning the choreography is usually pretty easy and once you get to the point where you hardly even think about the choreography, it also becomes easier to perform the exercises with good form. The flow of the music also helps you power thru the movements so you can push yourself harder. And while it may feel somewhat awkward as a man to do some of the more dance/aerobics style moves in some classes, it is actually a lot more fun than the grind of mindless repetitions upon repetitions you find in Cross Training class. Even spinning and body pump is more fun than cross tranining in this aspect, simply because the grind in these classes is, at least to some degree, in tune with the music and you do things togheter as a group rather than individually. Sure you do have a partner and the instructor checks up on you from time to time, but it just doesn’t add up to the same level in my opinion.

So it’s safe to say I’m not a big fan of the class. There are other classes which are more “fun” in my opinion and that is essentially what it all boils down to in the end.

This is the third part of my Time Lapse series which show how I created the painting “Uphill Battle”.

In part 1 I show the “brainstorming” or sketching phase which slowly turns into detail rendering in part 2. In part 3 I go back to the brainstorming or experimentation phase as I wasn’t happy with how the knight/paladin character turned out.

Continued in Part 4.

This is the second part of my Time Lapse series which show how I created the painting “Uphill Battle”.

In part 1 I show the “brainstorming” or sketching phase which slowly turns into detail rendering in part 2.

Continued in Part 3.

This is the first part of a series which show how I created the painting “Uphill Battle”. Most of the time lapse runs at roughly 60x speed, however I had to speed it up to 90x and eventually to 120x in some later parts of the series in order to fit all of the video into five youtube clips. Seeing how the entire drawing and painting process took me 56 hours (real time) I still ended up with 56 minutes of video even though I speed it up to 60x (1 minute of video is equivalent of 1 hour in real time). Ideally I would have fitted it all into one video for convenience but it gets very difficult to see what I’m actually doing once you go above 60x.

The different parts are in chronological order, however they are also split up thematically (sort of). The first part shows the “brainstorming” or sketching phase which slowly turns into detail rendering.

Continued in part 2.

Another six week period of Strength Training comes to a close. In total I have been Strength Training regularly for six months now.

As I mentioned before, I’ve never been able to perform even a single chinup or pullup and three months back I noted that the assisted pullup machine was not the right tool for bringing up my chinup/pullup strength as I had a very difficult time achieving any kind of progress with it.

So I switched to underhand pulldowns on a single pulley and have been progressing steadily on those for the past twelve weeks. I started with only managing 8×32kg and yesterday I pulled 8×68kg on my final set.

However, since machines and pulleys don’t translate very easily to body weight or free weight exercises, it is not possible to predict the functional strength transfer from one seemingly similar exercise to the next. So in order to put this into a meaningful context I tried doing some body weight chinups yesterday.

And guess what? I did it! I performed a body weight chinup. In fact, I did three of them. :) (with a body weight of 72.5kg)

Plugging the values above into the Brzycki formula (a formula for predicting your one rep maximum) tells me that my 1RM for the pulldown is 84kg. My body weight is roughly 86% of the predicted 1RM, which according to Brzycki means I should be able to pull that weight 3-5 times, which indeed is pretty much what I did with the chinup. So the functional strength transfer from the Underhand Pulldown (on this particular single pulley) to the body weight chinup seems to be close to a one-to-one match. For me, anyway.

With the exception of the Bench Press I have made good progress with all of my primary exercises. Before this six week period my heaviest squat was 40kg (in Power Step class). Yesterday I did 8×85kg. I feel stronger even on the endurance side of the equation. And this simply because the 30-35kg I take on during the squat track for Body Pump class is now a typical warm-up weight for me.

My heaviest Romanian Deadlift was similarly 40kg in Power Step class and in six weeks I’ve managed to build up to 9×85kg in the weight room. If it wasn’t for grip strength becoming a limiting factor for the deadlift, I might have been able to push it up another 10-15kg.

Paradoxically, even though I have decreased the number of exercises, the amount of time it takes to finish the workout has increased. This is partly due to the fact that with barbell exercises you need to run around and hunt for plates and collars and after you are done you need to carry them back to the racks. But mostly it is because I feel that I need more rest in between sets now than I did before.

Since my workouts now take longer to complete I have very seldom had any time nor strength left in me for any auxiliary exercises. I’ve done two sets of curls in the past six weeks. Given the chance to get some extra sets in I have often opted for the Weighted Back Extension and the Weighted Crunch, both excellent exercises, although a bit cumbersome to perform when holding heavier plates.

But it’s not just the recovery time between sets which has increased. I often find myself so fatigued from the first session of the week that I regress on the following workout. I can’t push for a new PR for every exercise every single workout as I did before. This marks my transition from the beginner to the intermediate level, when strength gains are no longer linear. This means I may have to progress into a training program with some kind of weekly periodization.

I just finished reading Practical Programming for Strength Training by Rippetoe & Kilgore (2006) and about half way thru the book it struck me that this book had pretty much summed up every meaningful piece of knowledge I had managed to distill from the abyss known as the Internet in the past six months.

Half of the literature and articles you find on the net are full of re-iterated training myths and macho bullshit boosted to absurd proportions by the authors bloated egos. Much of the other half of the literature is devoted to articles promoting expensive and useless supplements. On top of this, very few of these so called “training gurus” of the Internet have any resemblance of teaching or writing skills and often look at isolated training issues and fail to see the bigger picture which only confuses the readers more than it helps.

So it is very refreshing to find a book which manages to be the complete opposite of this. The structure of Practical Programming for Strength Training is excellent, and the argumentation and conclusions are sound and logical. The book is truly a training “text-book” as it teaches you not only the methods for programming your training but also the underlying principles and physiology which is important for understanding the “why” for the recommendations given in the book. However it is in it’s application where the book truly shines, the book doesn’t give you a specific training template and doesn’t teach you any of the exercises it discusses but instead teaches you how to program your training to fit your own fitness level. Most trainees could use the methods discussed in this book to drive progress in the weight room for several years.

So if you are the least bit interested in strength training this is the book to read.

I tried a new group training class yesterday. SATS Cross Training.

When the class was introduced at SATS Jakobsberg it was first named “PT Circle” (Swedish: “PT Cirkel”) and I was always under the impression that it would be kind of like working out with a personal trainer, and that is also typically how people would describe the class. They later renamed the class as “Cross Training” which I always figured meant that it had some kind of ties to the whimsical Cross Fitness cult. In any case the word “Cross” would imply some kind of workout that would try to include a very wide range of training or fitness goals.

To add to this I heard all these stories about how it was the most “intense” class Sats had to offer and that I was guaranteed to be sore the day after (as if that was a sign of a good workout). So naturally I was quite intrigued.

The weird thing about this class is how no one has been able to explain the class in a way that made sense to me. Everyone kept re-iterating that it was like the circuit training we all know and love from school gym class. But now that I’ve seen what it is for myself I can say with certainty that I never had this kind of circuit training in school. Maybe I’m the odd one out on this but the kind of circuits we had in school as I remember it were like obstacle courses and involved a lot of gymnastics. Anyway, that is what I imagined “circuit training” to be like in this context. So it’s no wonder I was confused, it just didn’t make sense.

But now that I have experienced the class first-hand, how would I describe Cross Training?

I would say that on the highest level of abstraction the class is a form of metabolic/aerobic conditioning with the use of intervals similar to other group training classes. A novice trainee might build some small amounts of strength and power as well. But while it may be true that some girls are able to build some strenght endurance by doing Sumo squats while holding a 10 kg plate, it does nothing for the average guy who loads up 50+ kg on the bar for his back squat warm-up sets.

On the more hands-on level the class is built up around a circuit consisting of a dozen “stations”. You simply work your way from station to station in groups or pairs. You spend a set amount of time (typically 45 seconds) on each station before you move on to the next. With 5 seconds “rest” in between sets and twelve stations one lap around the circuit takes about ten minutes. We did three laps, however, for the final lap we only spent 30 seconds on each station so the main part of the workout lasted a bit less than 30 minutes. This is considerably less than a typical pre-choreographed group training class where you might spend 40-45 minutes on the main workout.

As advertised, the class initially feels very tough, and it will burn calories if that is your thing, but don’t be fooled to believe that the amount of calories burned is significantly different from other group training classes like Core Pulse, Power Step and Cycling/Spinning. In fact, I believe all of the above-mentioned alternatives burn more calories overall.

When it comes to “soreness the day after” I can’t really relate as I rarely get sore in the first place and yesterdays Cross Training class was no exception. The class includes a few exercises that almost seem designed for the very purpose of creating soreness, exercises that isolate and hammer down on very small and typically neglected muscles. So if you like pain you will get your moneys worth in this class.

Fortunately, not all of the exercises were like this. In fact there were some nice compound movements in there. My favorite was the jumping box squat, as this seems like a good exercise for developing vertical power output. Another exercise I liked was the Burpee, which the instructor assumed everyone already knew. However, this was the first time I had seen it.

Some exercises didn’t work out too well, most notably the cycling station, I got stuck trying to loosen the strap so I could fit my feet into the cages for about 20 seconds, essentially wasting the entire workout for that station.

Overall I would say this class resembles the kind of metabolic conditioning we did in the army. Sans the mud and the heavy combat gear and the psychotic drill instructor with the evil stare… I sort of miss that here, contrary to what people had me believe it is not at all like working out with a personal trainer or a really sadistic drill instructor. The fact of the matter is that the trainer interaction is watered thinner here than in any of the other group training classes. You do work out in pairs so you can of course shout at each other and so on, but that doesn’t work out too well with most of the exercises and it is also very dependent on who you are paired with. The instructor does have the most wickedly evil laugh though. So bonus points for trying. ;-P

Ultimately, Cross Training is not the substitute to Power Step I had hoped it would be. But it is decent enough cardio, so I’ll include it in my program as such.

I bought a new pair of gym trainers and after a short break-in period I’m quite happy with how they feel. This freed up my running shoes for outdoor running and about a week ago I did a trial run to see if they were still fit for the task. I ran to the marina and back, about 6km. Seeing how I haven’t run for a long time I figured a little pain or discomfort was to be expected and I did get a little sore in my ankles and knees, but this was nothing major. I was able to run the whole distance without resting and to my surprise I felt that I had gained a considerable amount of uphill climbing power.

I haven’t done a lot of running in the past few years but I’ve been thinking that I may benefit from some low intensity steady state cardio every now and then, to serve as active recovery. When you spend a lot of time doing cardio on an Elliptical trainer or do a lot of spinning and then go out running it becomes quite obvious how much more of a full body workout running really is. And I’m not just talking about the core musculature here. Since running activates more muscles, it feels like it also stresses the central nervous system harder in kind of the same way squats and deadlifts do compared to more isolated exercises. Running also puts a lot more stress on the joints and the connective tissues which isn’t a bad thing if you actually want to progressively build up the stability and shock resistance of those joints.

Some of my favorite classes are gone from the summer group training schedule at Sats Jakobsberg. Seeing how I’m not particularly interested in doing Body Pump three days per week for the next five weeks I need to find some alternatives. Besides running I will try out a class known as “Cross Training”. I don’t know much about this particular class, besides the fact that some guys who do a lot of Body Pump seem to enjoy it a lot. I will find out if I like it on Wednesday…