Starting next week I will be transitioning into an upper/lower body split routine.

Upper

Two presses, two rows and a few extra sets for the arms and the shoulders.

Lower

The focus is on the quads, glutes, hamstrings and the lower back with a few sets for the calfs and abs thrown in.

This is essentially “Lyle’s Generic Bulk”. It is an intermediate routine that hits every body part twice per week (similar to a 2x/week full body routine but with a considerably higher volume). When it comes to exercise selection, I am not including anything new this time. These are the exercises I feel the most comfortable with and the once I feel that I can progress with safely and with good form.

The chins are supposed to be my “high rep row” (ideally every body part is hit with both high and low reps in this routine) but I need to gain more strength in my lats before that is possible. Until I can comfortably do 10 chins I will simply do as many as I can. My PR so far is 6 chins in one set but depending on my weight fluctuations my daily performance in this exercise varies quite a bit.

I’m not sure how this will work out with “real life” getting in the way of things but I’ll start out with the schedule outlined below. Alternatively I might try the less optimal Mon/Tue+Thu/Fri setup.

Since I’ll be doubling the number of strength training sessions I obviously need to reduce the amount of time devoted to cardio and endurance. I’ve already reduced the amount of cardio from five to three sessions per week in the past year and I will now drop another hour of cardio.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to try out a new group training class at Sats Jakobsberg. Sats Shape is a yellow colored class which in Sats terms means that it falls in the “simple and fun training” category. And yeah, it was simple and I had fun. Nuff said?

Well, no, there is more to it than that. When I say that it was simple, I don’t mean that it was easy, it was simple in the sense that it didn’t take much coordination to participate in the class. It’s entry level in that sense, kind of like the 30 minute “Sats Core” class, but quite surprisingly it can be a challenging class even for people that are used to Sats “blue” classes (Body Pump, Core Pulse, etc.). So don’t be fooled by the “color coding” in this case.

Much of the challenge lies in the way the exercises are performed. Squats for instance are performed “ass to the grass” rather than just to “parallel”. In a typical Body Pump class most people do not even reach parallel, let alone “3/4″, but here I observed several people going much deeper than they normally do. This is really cool and I believe that many of those who will stick with this class will be able to improve their squatting performance in Body Pump class as well.

A parallel squat.

As backwards as it may sound, I would say Sats Shape is actually in many ways like Sats Cross Training. Except that it takes the parts I didn’t like about Cross Training, reverses everything and makes it awesome instead. Instead of running around in pairs doing exercises on different stations, you do everything together, in the same tempo, facing the mirrors. This means that there is no hype to perform as many reps as possible as everyone is just supposed to perform as many as is dictated by the choreography and the tempo. The tempo is also slow enough to allow you to perform the exercises with good form and when you are facing the mirrors you are less likely to cheat. Obviously there are differences, so it’s not really a one-to-one comparison, Cross Training is more based on intervals/cardio, while Shape is more strength-based. In a sense it is maybe closer to compare it to the strength based parts of Power Step. In fact, my initial reaction was that several of the exercises were identical to some exercises I have encountered in Power Step class in the past year.

One thing I found interesting about the whole concept is how it also has a sports specific seasonal component. The instructor explained that for instance, when the skiing season approaches, the class will shift it’s focus towards functional exercises specific for skiing.

So I have to say, I’m quite surprised at how much I actually liked this class. When the instructors at Sats described the class to me they used the term “functional training” which is a heavily loaded term and a big source of confusion, so naturally I had a very hard time figuring out what they actually meant by this.

Functional training involves the idea of strengthening the core with the use of “unstable exercises” but that is a can of worms I’m not going dive too deeply into. Needless to say, I don’t care much for the kind of thinking where you take an already unstable and core strength building exercise (like the split squat) and add an unstable surface component to it to make the exercise less safe to perform and thus reducing the amount of weights you can use for loading the exercise.

Progressive loading is an important component of functional training, something which I believe may be overlooked in a group training setting where you are limited to certain weights and resistances. If you are strong enough to start out the class at or close to the heaviest possible resistances, chances are you will struggle to make progress with this class in terms of “functional strength”.

However, in the context of functional training, what I found most interesting is that we did a lot of exercises which seemed like they were for improving common shoulder mobility issues. For me personally, this is the biggest selling point for this class. I suspect that I suffer from some combination of a winged scapula and a protracted shoulder girdle and the exercises we did yesterday seemed like text-book examples of how to treat these very common types of deficiencies.

Lately I’ve been running in the Hagaparken with a friend and yesterday evening we ran the complete round-trip around lake Brunnsviken. The round trip is about 12 km and we ran it in a leisurely 77 minutes. Running surely is a lot more fun when you have a friend with you. Those 12 kilometers felt much quicker than when I run alone.

I’ve only run 4 times this summer so running this kind of distance at “talking pace” is enough to literally destroy my legs. Haven’t felt this stiff and inflexible in my knee joints for quite some time.

Pow! The long arduous wait is finally over. Power Step returns to Sats Jakobsberg next week. I don’t care which release they choose to run as long as I get my fix.

I’ve listened to the playlist for the September 2010 release of Sats Power Step (Spotify playlist) but as always it is difficult to know how the music will work with the choreography and they usually use a different version or remix of the track for the actual class than what you find on Spotify.

I also listened to the new Sats Core Pulse playlist (Spotify playlist) and it seems a bit more promising even though I’m getting kinda sick of all the rehashing of tracks that goes on with all of these releases.

In any case, anything is better than the track list for the totally forgettable summer release for Body Pump.

Speaking of Body Pump, one of my main issues with that class is the heavy focus on the arms. Regardless of which release you attend, Body Pump always devotes one track for a crazy triceps superset and follows that up with another track just for curls. The problem for me is that if I put on a challenging enough weight on the “back” track (bent over rows + RDLs usually) my biceps are already dead by the time it’s time to do 3 minutes worth of curls. And the same applies to the triceps, if I put on enough weight for the bench track to actually feel something in my chest I fatigue my triceps pretty hard. And what do you get after the direct arm work? Oh yeah, more rowing and more pushing. I mean I can understand that the audience demands direct arm work, but why can’t the biceps and triceps be supersetted into one track like in Power Step? Power Step has one heavy press (chest), one heavy row (back), one heavy leg track and one heavy arm track. About half the volume and about twice the intensity of a Body Pump class.

Another thing that perplexes me is how at the end of every Body Pump class you have the obligatory “ab track” where you are likely to encounter some variation of leg-raises and the instructor will inevitably say something about how good the exercise is for the “lower abs”. I just cringe every time I hear that. I bet they say it simply because it is what 90% of the women in the class, and probably most of the men as well, want to hear.

Next week also marks the start of my next bulking cycle. I took a few days off from training this week and next week I will get started with my new strength training routine with a slight deload. My glutes and hamstrings got very stiff and sore towards the end of the last cycle, restricting my squats quite a bit. The “rebound” effect didn’t really happen this time around, but this is probably due to the fact I’ve been on a calorie deficit for some time now. Hopefully my strength levels will rebound once I ramp up the calories back to “normal” levels.

So what do you get if you take me from four years ago and cut off 30kg (66 lb)? You would get me in the present, a new smaller version of myself. Or just “Mini-Me” if you will.

It was four years ago that I decided that I should “get into shape”. I had obviously been thinking about it for a long time and even tried dieting a few times, only to bounce right back, but the thing that triggered it for me, the event that changed everything, was seeing the bathroom scale bounce up to three digits.

“One - zero - zero kilograms” I silently read from the display. And I thought to myself: “I am 25. And I am obese.”

And I just stood there on the scale and I stared at those three digits. And as cliche as it sounds, I pictured in my head that metaphorical fork on that path leading to my future. On one side, was that familiar and easy path I had always traveled, with a future similar to my present. On the other side was a path leading into darkness, a path with unknown obstacles and an unknown future. And I looked behind me at the road I had traveled to get here and I looked at those precious first 25 years of my life which I had wasted and I had no one else to blame but myself. But unlike Austin Power’s Dr. Evil, I had no time machine with which I could travel back in time, undo all those excess calories and re-live my life on a different path. My only options were these two paths leading forward.

I didn’t really stand on that scale longer than a minute that day, but I remember that it felt much longer simply because so many thoughts went thru my head all at once at that time. I am hesitant to call it a “spiritual” moment or even a “religious” one, but I can’t describe it in any other way. I have a few times felt this sort of “adrenaline rush” which makes me think so quickly that it is as if time itself slows down for a brief moment. And that was one of those rare moments. I knew right then that this was an important turning point in my life, that what I was to decide in the following moments would have a huge impact on how my future would pan out.

So when I finally stepped down from the bathroom scale it felt like I was making a decision right there at that very moment. As I stepped down from the scale I was metaphorically stepping down on one of these two alternative paths.

And I think you know which one I picked. :) And that was probably the most important decision I had done in my life. Because today I am a completely different person. Proud of what I have achieved. Stronger and fitter than I have ever been. Looking at these pictures I found of myself from before I started my weight loss program, I realize that the new smaller me, I shall call him: Mini-Me, looks roughly ten years younger than the old me from five years ago. Ironically, it is almost as if I have in fact managed to reverse time by embracing the present and the future.

Just to clarify, I am almost 24 years old in the first picture, I included it as there are very few good full body pictures of me from that time (which I suppose is understandable). In the second one I’m 25 years old and actually a bit bigger, but it’s hard to tell from that image. I started my diet three months after that picture was taken at exactly 100kg. As of this morning, Mini-Me weighs a bit less than 70kg (154lb) with roughly 10-11% body-fat. The right-most picture was when I weighed about 71kg (11-12% bf) but the difference one kg makes is not enough to add any kind of visible difference anyway. That is pretty much what Mini-Me looks like right now.

My only regret is that I didn’t take proper “before” pictures when I started. Because of this it is very difficult for me to visualize what I actually used to look like. It’s a bit surreal to think that almost a third of the old me has disappeared. But if we unrealistically assume that the weight lost is purely fat and that I haven’t gained any lean mass during the past four years then those 30kg would amount to roughly 33 liters (8.7 gallons) in volume (density of fat tissue is about 0.9kg/l). It’s hard to imagine how much that is in real life but imagine 33 milk cartons stacked on top of each other.

Yeah, that’s a lot of milk.

Cutting down to exactly 70 wasn’t really in my plan a month ago, but I have this thing for nice even numbers so I could not resist the urge to cut past my previous levels after bulking up 2kg in my latest six week cycle. :-P So I used the Intermittent Fasting approach to dieting and dropped 4kg in just 4 weeks.

Going forward, my plan is to bulk up about 6kg before the Christmas holidays. If we assume half of that is fat and half is muscle I should be able to hit 73-74kg @11-12% bf after a three week cut by the time I turn 30 in January. And yes, that means I intend to cut during the holidays o_O; but I still believe it is a very realistic goal. I am still primarily focusing on increasing my strength and increases in mass comes as a side-effect of this. However, it is impossible to grow without a calorie surplus, so the most important thing for me in the following months is to eat more, not the exercise itself. For some reason this has become very difficult for me, probably because I have been obsessing so much about “eating leaner” for the past four years, that it has become sort of a subconscious thing.

If my previous cycle was all about barbell exercises, then you could say the theme this time around is a focus on dumbbell exercises. I know from experience that it is a lot harder to make linear progress with dumbbells but I think I need to change things up a bit to make progress in my “problem areas”, namely my chest and shoulders. For this reason I am actually cutting back on the pressing and including some isolation exercises which target the pecs and lateral deltoids directly. Since I am still working with a full body workout twice per week I will alternate the two presses and the two isolation exercises which target these muscles. That way I will be hitting everything twice per week with roughly the same volume I have used previously. But with less focus on the triceps.

Workout A

3x Chinup (BW to Failure)
3x Squat (5-10)
3x DB Bent Over Row (5-10)
3x DB Bench (5-10)
3x DB Lat.Raise (10-15)
2x RDL (3-7)
2x Superset: Triceps Dips (BW to failure) + Barbell Curls (10-15)
2x Superset: Back Extension (10-15) + Bosu Ball Crunch (10-15)

Workout B

3x Chinup/Pullup (BW to Failure)
3x Split Squat (5-10)
3x Barbell Bent Over Row (5-10)
3x Seated DB Press (5-10)
3x DB Fly (10-15)
2x Deadlift (3-7)
2x Superset: Triceps Dips (BW to failure) + Barbell Curls (10-15)
2x Superset: Back Extension (10-15) + Bosu Ball Crunch (10-15)

Even though I have two different workouts, this isn’t a body part split routine. It’s a 2x/week full body routine which I will start out as alternating A/B every week and move towards alternating it A/B one week and B/A next week. I do this because I know that I will need to vary the intensity over the week (weekly periodization) after about 2-3 weeks in order to progress another 2-3 weeks into the cycle before I need to deload. Two workouts per week has worked out pretty well for me so far so I’m sticking to that for now. 3×1h cardio per week and a 300 kcal daily surplus should be a good starting point.

I’m putting chinups first in my program because I find it to be the most rewarding and thus most fun exercise and by placing it first I should be able to put more focus on it. I can currently perform five chinups and my plan is to work myself up to 15 chinups and then alternate it with pullups, which put more emphasis on the lats and less on the biceps. Once I can do 15 pullups it will be time to add weight to the exercise.

My “other row” is the Bent Over Row and I will alternate between the dumbbell and barbell version just to figure out which one I like the most.

For some reason I have not been able to improve my Split Squat and Lunge performance in Body Pump and Cross Training class even though my back squat has improved, so I will be alternating the squat with the split squat in order to address this weakness.

I learned from my last cycle that putting deadlifts directly after squats was not such a good idea, so I’m placing the deadlifts further down in the workout. I’ll be alternating clean style deadlifts with the Romanian deadlifts for some variety.

Another thing I learned was that while arm strength has stayed roughly the same, endurance has decreased as a result of not doing much direct arm work. So I’m including a few sets for that purpose. I may have to increase the number of sets at a later stage, but lets see where this leads me. I could just as simply add an extra arm workout before/after a spinning class if the weekly volume isn’t high enough.

I use the supersets simply to save time, I don’t like spending more than 1.5h at the gym each session.

Bosu Ball

I see many people using Swiss Balls for various different crunches, and it seems like a good way to add a few extra inches to the range of motion for the exercise. What I don’t really care for is the whole “instability” aspect, so I’m thinking that a Bosu Ball should work out better for this purpose. I tried this out a few days ago and while it was a bit difficult to find that “sweet spot” on the ball, once I did get it right, I felt the crunch very nicely in the target muscle. I didn’t try it with a weight, as I think I may have to find a way to lock my feet down if I am to attempt that.

This is the fifth and final 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 part 4 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.

In the final episode I add the colors and lighting and make some final adjustments.

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.