Posts Tagged ‘gym’

• Lacking the intensity

  Date: 2010.02.24 | Category: desert | Response: 1

  I’ve been unable to find the intensity in all of my workouts. I’ve changed some things around with my schedule and my routine has been vastly altered to break up the monotony. On cardio days, for some reason, I’ve had a hard time pushing myself. I’ve been plagued with minor joint injuries over the past two weeks. My feet find every odd shaped rock and every uneven space in the ground to land. I’ve had three or four partial ankle sprains and I’ve got a few quasi-stubbed toes. I keep on telling myself to take it easy and loosen up those joints… the intensity never comes when I get stretched out.

  I might need to take a cue from my dog and start taking something similar to glucosamine. I had to Google the word because the dictionary couldn’t find it – Wikipedia says that the effects are no more than those of a placebo in multiple studies. Apparently glucosamine is widely used in veterinary medicine and it works (for the most part) but humans aren’t so lucky. Maybe there is another way to help loosen up the ankles and knees. For now, I’ll continue with the stretching and try to prevent further injuries. I just wish I could do all of that and bring the intensity up.

• The requisite gym update post

  Date: 2010.02.05 | Category: desert | Response: 0

  What would you do without the requisite gym update post? Probably continue through your life without skipping a beat – but, I feel the overwhelming need to write something new and the only thing on top of my head is my progress at the gym.

  First off, I should have done a better job taking care of myself when I was younger. I’m not old, but, some of the self inflicted injuries still come back and haunt me whenever I workout. Shoulders, knees, feet, and ankles seem to be the problem areas (notice the trend, all joints).

  Last time my only goal was to shred weight and I did that to the tune of 25lbs. This time, at the request my significant other, I don’t plan on dropping a ton of weight as I looked “like I hadn’t eaten.” The intensity level isn’t where I would like it but I’ve been pushing myself harder this week and I’m starting to feel the strain. I mix weight days (a variation of the P90x workout) with stationary bike days – I’m not up to full speed on the bike yet (averaging about 13mph). I want to push it to over 18mph by the time that I leave. I’ve got a long way to go but I think I can do it.

• Remain calm and don’t make any sudden movements

  Date: 2010.01.23 | Category: desert, rants, work | Response: 0

  The new crew has arrived and I could be in for a massive share of the workload. The new guy has been in less time than I have but has more inspection experience so he will be the senior inspector. I, on the other hand, outrank him and have much more experience in running all of the programs required to keep us out of trouble. The new management seems to be in high ping mode so I’m going to do what I can to keep them out of our hair. If I run through a few self inspection checklists before they even ask – they should be duly impressed and stay out of our way.

  Did I mention new guy (singular) – there is only one person to replace the three that are leaving. I’ve been told they plan on shifting things around but things aren’t looking good.

  Things could turn around in a week or two after everyone calms down – I can only hope that they calm down. If not, I’ll keep my blinders on and grit my teeth. It sounds like a trip to the desert is a vacation for most of the new guys. They’ve been working 12′s for the past 6-8 months. There is no reason to work 12′s unless there is so much work that you have to cancel all leave and have people sleep at the shop so they can get back to the task at hand as soon as they wake. In my opinion, they are horribly managed. I can only hope they left all of their “back home we do this” crap behind them.

  I haven’t been able to get a decent workout in for the past few days. I’ve got to go to the clinic and get some meds to kill some inflammation in the bottom of my foot/heel. I know what it is and I’ve been doing everything I can do prevent/heal the problem. I’m going to need a little pharmaceutical help. If it doesn’t clear up my mood is going to head quickly south – I need the gym. I need the endorphins.

• The desert resolution

  Date: 2010.01.15 | Category: desert | Response: 0

  Most people have New Years resolutions that are unobtainable. I don’t believe in changing something at the start of the new year; I believe on starting that change on a Monday or whatever day may fall next. I do believe in desert resolutions – when you’re in the desert you have plenty of time to devote to whatever cause one might choose. My cause – the gym.

  I did a terrible job of making it to the gym last fall and I knew that my trip to the desert was going to be the time to turn that all around. Aside from being horrendously out of shape (and I’m not talking about being round) things have been going relatively well. I’m not incredibly limber but that does come with time. I took the first 5 day relatively light to warm myself up to the notion of self induced physical abuse and now I’m going as hard as I can. Age and experience have forced me to listen to my body so that I prevent injuries and prevent previous injuries from coming back to haunt me (at one point in time I thought I was invincible…. stupid stupid me)

  I haven’t been slinging around that much weight this time but I’ve been focusing on using my body weight for most of the exercises in the hope that it will prevent injury.

• Stress, workouts, and the little things

  Date: 2009.06.04 | Category: Life as we know it | Response: 0

  Switching to night shift is always difficult and the events of this week haven’t made it any easier. I’ve found that it takes a good 4-5 days for me to get my internal clock adjusted to working an off shift. I need copious amounts of caffeine to make this work because I can’t stay busy enough to keep myself awake. I’ve tried to keep myself busy but there have been times when I caught myself dozing while standing up. Summer has arrived in the state of Washington and in the land of no air conditioning our house tends to get a little toasty during the day even if all of the windows are open. If it’s dark I can usually sleep but when its warm like this I don’t sleep quite as well.

  Jessica has had a rough week. Jeff, her brother in-law, was in the hospital because of kidney stone and a brand new diagnosis of diabetes (boo!), her uncle passed away earlier this week, and she has been running on empty all week long. She has been stressed (obviously) and taking everything in like this simply wears a person down. Stress feeds stress and I haven’t been my normal self all week.

  My normal stress reliever is a trip to the gym. The heat and the lack of energy due to the time shift has prevented me from getting in a decent workout. I feel like a weakling right now. Its extremely difficult to time to calorie intake so that I have some energy come workout time. When I work on dayshift I normally workout 4-6 hours after my last meal and 1-2 hours after my last snack. When I am working nights I haven’t had anything to eat in at least 9 hours. I feel like I am trying to win a race with nothing in the gas tank. I have tried eating immediately after waking but I hardly have enough time to digest. My only options are to suck it up or wake up in the middle of the night (or day) and eating breakfast. Can you imagine waking up at 2AM to eat a meal? I can’t and I really enjoy my six hours of sleep a night.

  Little things at work have been driving me crazy. Communication from my shift to the other shifts is a one way street. I try to send out as much information as possible and in return I receive nothing. Dayshift may do something and have some solid reasoning behind it but without communication I feel that they have lost their damned minds. Ten to fifteen times I night I ask myself what the hell were they thinking. Oh well – I’ve vowed to get in a good workout tomorrow and the weekend is fast approaching. Hopefully I can ignore the little things and relax – this isn’t the end of the world and I need to stop acting like it is. I really want to be able to work myself to exhaustion but finding enough work to stay busy is a difficult task. I’m writing this post instead of doing something because I want to be able to stretch out my one hour of scheduled work for this evening. Motivation is difficult when you are working by yourself. When you have no communication with other people it’s hard to gauge how much work you need to finish to be a contributing member. I’d much rather work with someone I despise than work alone – at least I’d have some competition.

• What has happened?

  Date: 2009.05.17 | Category: Life as we know it | Response: 0

  There was a point in time where I would spend hours looking for something that interested me. I would spend days on the internet trying to stay entertained and I would share much of what I found here, at this blog. Lately, however, I’ve found that life outside the internet is far more fulfilling and entertaining.

  Work has kept me relatively busy but I still don’t find much job satisfaction. My job has seldom been mentally demanding and I spend much of my time putting out small fires (not literal fires as fires around explosives usually leads to blown up people). I know that I could be doing more but unfortunately there isn’t much more for me at my current job. Its a rinse, wash, and repeat job and its gotten tedious. I have been stationed here for two years and as of next January this will be my longest single assignment. I really like the area around the base and the base itself – I just don’t like my particular job function. It does keep me busy – so busy that I can’t get a chance to write on this blog – then again, the wonderful BlueCoat filters have been cranked up a notch so I can no longer access my blog from work. Huuzah!

  I’m on a bit of a health kick right now so I’ve been planning my meals in advance and have been cooking two meals at a time. The planning and preparation takes quite a bit of time. Its a structured diet so I can’t eat exactly what I want – most of what I eat is rather bland. If only I could find a repository of quick and healthy meals that fit in with my current diet plan. The plan restructures in another two weeks so by the time I get it all figured out it will be time to change gears again.

  I also have a new workout routine that I takes 6-7 hours out of my week. I workout at the end of my day and it drains me of all of my remaining energy. It’s quite demanding but I really like the change. There is some yoga in it and this brand of yoga is not for the faint of heart. This stuff is intense.

  I’m working on a math class – something I should be doing right now instead of writing but I’m putting it off for just a little longer. I’m behind the power curve and I need to knock it out this week. It’s nose to the grind stone time.

  Jessica has been working fewer hours this past month. She hasn’t been cut in hours, she is simply no longer working any overtime. Her work is broken down into a couple of different segments and this particular one is the slower part of the year.

  We’ve been trying to get out of the house more often and we did just that yesterday. My college roommate and his wife-to-be (a former neighbor from down the street) were making a swing through the Pacific NW while on vacation. We acted as tour guides on Saturday and took them around Seattle. We rarely go to Seattle so it was nice to see some of the sights. We went to the Crab Pot for dinner and they literally dumped a bucket of cooked ocean on our table. They invited one of their friends to join us – he was another one of my neighbors while I was growing up. I guess he had been living in the local area the entire time I had been here. Small world huh?

  So – if you come to this blog and are hoping for tidbits of my life I’ll try to get them here. I’ve got more pressing matters to deal with at the time – if you have Facebook you’re bound to see a little more from me there… but not much more. I’m a busy guy.

• 31 days, 744 hours, or 44460 minutes

  Date: 2008.08.27 | Category: Life as we know it | Response: 0

  Irregardless of which way you add up the numbers, I’m going to spend a long time away from work. I have a bunch of leave available and I decided, hey, why not take a bunch of it all in one giant go? I won’t be traveling far from home during the duration of my leave but I’ll have plenty of time away from work to goof around. I only have a few goals while I’m on leave

  1. enjoy my time away from work
  2. avoid thinking of work
  3. goof off whenever possible
  4. read a book or two
  5. study
  6. hang out with Jessica
  7. hang out with my parents (who will be here from the 6th-12th)
  8. wear all of the dogs out
  9. Train for snowboarding season (its right around the corner – hooray!!!!)
  10. Go to the Mariners game on the 9th (my birthday coincidentally)

  None of the goals are monumental and all are achievable. The only ones that will take a little bit of willpower to achieve are numbers five and nine.

  I’m going to study for a few CLEP tests while I’m on leave so that when I return to work I can enroll in school. Due to the manning situation at work (we don’t have enough manning at work) I’ll still be on mid-shift for the next few months. The current schedule looks like I will be working nights until Thanksgiving. It could be drawn out longer but we’ll see what happens when we have people return from this current rotation to the desert. As a military member we sacrifice, this is my current sacrifice; I work a shift that nobody else wants because I’m the only guy that can do it. It messes with my personal life and its going to mess with it further when I enroll in classes in late September. I should have plenty of time to do my homework at night but some of my classes are going to be during the evening. There is no way that I can avoid that – oh well, gotta get my education finished sooner or later.

  Training for snowboarding season means a tweak in my workout regimen. I’ll target all of the flexors and core muscles in my body while doubling my lower body workout. I lift legs once every 5 days and do cardio every other day. I’m planning on doing a two day leg lifting split that will have me doing one day of ridiculously heavy lifting followed by another day of endurance lifting. I’m not worried about the heavy lifting – I’m worried about the endurance lifting. Simply put, its going to hurt – alot.

  I should have a busy, and hopefully relaxing, month ahead of me.There are times when it’s great to be a government employee – thank god for paid leave.

• Bikes

  Date: 2008.08.19 | Category: Life as we know it | Response: 4

  The stationary bicycle has been my preferred form of cardio for quite some time. The first time I got on it I thought I wasn’t going to make it but I figured out how to get my rythm and I figured out how to use the up and down stroke to reduce muscle fatigue (foot straps are an invaluable tool when riding) Yesterday, I had a little too much energy at 5AM and I didn’t have anything that I interested me in the few hours before I was going to sleep. So, I did what any other unstable person might do, I chugged a pre-workout drink and headed to the gym. My current regimine consists of alternating 4 and 5 day lifting cycles. The current day in my program was legs

  My workout consisted of
  Squats – 20x225lbs 10x275lbs
  Leg press – 40x275lbs
  Calf raises – 50x135lbs
  Medicine ball lunges – 60ea
  Medicine ball bridges
  Side bridges
  Three point bridges

  I’m not moving around a bunch of weight because I’m not trying to pack on muscle – I’m just trying to stay a lean mean fighting machine.

  If I’m feeling especially ornery I’ll go for some deadlifts. They are quite hard on my back so I tend to shy away from them. After my workout I hit the stationary bike and did 15 miles in 37 minutes while climbing 2400ft of elevation. (If I did my math right I maintained a near constant speed of 24mph – not too shabby) Needless to say – I nearly killed myself. I was amped up from the workout when I got home but I knew my body had nothing left in the tanks. I’m sure parts of my body think there is a disconnect between muscles and brain. I should have stopped working out when I was done lifting, I should have given in to the pain, and I should have not set the stationary bike on level 14. There are days when I’m amazed by the amount of drive that is hiding deep inside me.

  It was quite an odd feeling when I woke (at 1400)- I wasn’t really sore. I was simply wore out – still. I downed a bunch of cereal and couple of bananas and waited for it to kick in. I was dragging until 0030 this morning when I finally started to get out of the slump (I work nights at the moment).

  Previously that day Jessica and I took our bikes out for the first time this year. She has an old Roadmaster mens bike, its a “wal-mart” special thats 2-3 inches too tall, and I have a Giant Sedona, a trail/city bike, that allows me to do a little of anything. I got it a 6-7 years ago for roughly $400 because I knew someone that worked at the bike shop. It was the cheapest entry level “non-walmart” bike I could afford at the time. I feel bad for her because she doesn’t know how easy I’ve got it compared to her. If you’ve ever ridden on a cheap bike and moved to a higher quality bike you’ll understand exactly how much easier of a ride you’ll get. I’m sure that if I rode her bike, which I couldn’t because its too darn small, that I would have burned 25% more energy just trying to get the darn thing moving. I forgot how much I liked to get out and just feel the wind in my face while hearing the ratchet of the chain as I rode around.

  As a kid my bike was my primary form of transport until I was old enough to drive the Plymouth Voyager (the model with the monstrous, earth rotation altering, 2.2L I4 generating an amazing 96hp complete with fake wood paneling). I only had a heavy ass “roadmaster” type bike at the time and probably did no more than 20 miles on any given day. I rode that darn bike everywhere. I’ve never owned a road bike but I’m thinking next year – next year I might try and get one. I can always pick up a used bike on Craigslist or I can just wait until the end of the season and try to pick up one on clearance. I’ve got to get back on the road more often. I’d like her to come along with me but I know that I’ve got to get her a better bike first – she’s never going to make it if she is trying to keep up on her bike. I’d like to ride from our house to Sunrise point on Rainier (its only 83 miles away with a 5900 foot change in elevation – childs play…. or not) next year. We’ve got a lot of training to do in the off-season if we’re going to make it.

• Getting the time in

  Date: 2008.07.29 | Category: Life as we know it | Response: 1

  I’ve been getting to the gym and doing my time but the quality of my workouts have suffered. The gym at Balad was absolutely packed with equipment, unfortunately, that is not the situation at McChord’s gym. For some reason, the quality of my workout has been slipping but I’m still doing my time. I can definitely tell that I’m not getting an adequate amount of stretching – I feel so old some days. I’ve got to give myself a little credit because all I do is move awkward heavy boxes all night long. The lightest box that I move weighs 71lbs and I’m bound to move at least a dozen of them a night.

  Everyone is taught how to properly lift an object at some point during our working lives. Use your legs, don’t twist your back etc. These damn things are so awkward that its nearly impossible to practice the proper lifting techniques. My lower back bears the brunt of the work.

  I’m still going to the gym – I’m still putting my time in – I’m just not seeing the same gains that I saw while deployed. I haven’t seen any weight gains since I returned so at least I’ve got that going for me. I just need to find a way to spice up my workouts – cayenne pepper maybe?

• You should read this

  Date: 2008.05.01 | Category: ahh the news, links! | Response: 0

  I’m not in the mood to write a full post so I’m going to give you a file and a couple of links. First off is the best appeal to an Article 15 punishment that I’ve ever seen. Its well worth the read – I had a feeling that I wasn’t the only sarcastic ass in the Air Force.

  Next up is an writer that looks at our nation and its productivity if we completely eliminated obesity. Its more editorial than fact but she does bring the work of a few economists into the mix. Its an interesting read thats worth checking out.

  Last is an article about corn and how it is and isn’t impacting the cost of food and gasoline in our country. For some reason, as an Iowa native, I feel compelled to write about corn whenever I get a chance. My home state only stands in the spotlight once in a great while. Most Americans only hear about Iowa once every four years during the Caucus. It’s a shame that most of them are still unable to point it out on a map.