Posts

Posted on

Insanity: The Asylum — DAY 1 – “Speed & Agility”

Today I started The Asylum. I didn’t mean to start it today. I needed to do a cardio workout, and I planned to do one of the Insanity month two DVDs.

Then I got to thinking. I have to take a break in about a month to do some traveling and partying. Hmmmm…. Now would be a good time to start The Asylum, which is a 30-day program.

So I did.

The Asylum Volume 1 (currently there is only one volume of The Asylum, but I guess they’re leaving room for sequels) is marketed as a sports training workout. I’m not an athlete and I’m not involved in sports of any sort, but, what the hell, right? I’ll give it a go.agility ladder for Shaun T's Asylum workout

The first DVD is “Speed & Agility”. It incorporates extensive use of the agility ladder that was included with the program. The ladder is thin plastic rungs that are connected with nylon bands. You can see a picture to the right, but the ladder is in its collapsed state. Expanded there is about a foot between the rungs.

The ladder is designed to lie flat on the floor, and you use it to know where to put your feet and hands during the moves.

For this workout, anyway, the ladder was really less help than hassle for me. I have limited area to workout in, about 6 feet by 6 feet, so I had to keep rearranging the ladder, depending on which exercise we were doing. In addition, the ladder is pretty flimsy, so it was hard to keep it straight.

However, I did find that the ladder, while it’s nice if you have room and probably does provide incremental benefit, was mostly unnecessary, so I did most of the moves without it.

As for the workout itself, well, it’s a Shaun T workout, and if you’ve done Insanity, you know what that means. It’s tough. I had to stop and rewind the DVD a couple times to try to figure out what the heck he was doing. Hey, I am not the most coordinated person in the world. Sometimes it takes me a minute to figure moves out.

The title of the workout is “Speed & Agility”, so there is a lot of jumping, some balancing, a good amount of moving pushups and bear walks. All in all, a very good total body cardio workout that lasts about 45 minutes, including warmup and cooldown.

I had to take extra breaks along the way — that’s the way Shaun T designs his workouts: impossible — but I got all the way through “Speed & Agility” without ever thinking about quitting early. The workout is varied enough to hold my interest.

Oh, btw, in case you’ve looked at The Asylum and seen the jumprope, you may be concerned, as I was, about space restrictions. For this routine, the jumprope was only used during the warmup, and I was able to simulate the movements without the rope.

Tomorrow is “Strength”. I’m looking forward to that and will report back on it.

Posted on

Setting your own rules (and then following them)

I’ve never had a problem with rules.

That’s not to say that I like rules when other people impose arbitrary ones on me — I don’t — but I understand why that happens. After growing up in a semi-strict household, attending a Baptist university for 2 years, and spending 20 years in the military, I suppose I’m just accustomed to living by rules.

When it comes down to it, I believe the main reason I don’t mind rules is because I like a streamlined life without a lot of surprises, i.e. I don’t want to deal with the consequences of breaking the rules.

For example:

  • I don’t smoke pot, because it’s illegal and I don’t like the variables involved
  • I overpay on my taxes, because I don’t want to end up on the short end of an audit
  • I drive an acceptable speed on the highway, because I don’t want to deal with being pulled over

And so on…. Some would call me overly cautious. Whatever.

Anyway, when I find myself in need of some added discipline in my nutrition consumption, I set new rules for myself.

Recently I have found myself staying up later, and so doing a lot of late-night snacking — sometimes 1000 calories worth. That’s not good! I don’t need those extra calories, and there is no real reason to be doing the snacking.

That called for a new rule: No eating after 8:00pm.

At various times in my life, I

  • quit caffeine for 18 months, because I wanted to see if life was better without it — it wasn’t
  • quit drinking for 18 months, because I was having liver issues — my liver is fine, but now I drink a whole lot less, because I found I enjoyed not drinking
  • quit grains for 6 months, because I wanted to see what that was like — it was okay, but I’ve added grains back into my diet in quite a bit more moderation than before
  • quit eating meat for 36 months, because I wanted to break my fast-food habit — it worked!

For whatever reasons, I set those rules for those times in my life when I felt I needed them, and I somehow stuck with them until they were no longer necessary.

How about you? Can you create some rules to help yourself reach a goal? If you think that might work for you, create those rules and stick to them!

Posted on

Excuses, excuses

One of my favorite mantras is “there’s always a good reason not to do something.” There is. I can always come up with some really good reasons why I should not do something that I need to do.

In the fitness arena, the good reason could be a sore or pulled muscle, a really busy schedule, sickness — you name it.

I pride myself, however, on being able to work through or around those excuses. That’s really what they are, after all, excuses.

How can a legitimate injury or sickness be an excuse? Those sound like valid reasons to skip a workout, don’t they?

Sure, but that’s why the mantra: There is ALWAYS a good reason not to do something. If I let the good reasons keep me sidelined, I’d be sidelined more often than not.

Pulled muscle? Don’t work that muscle, or, better, just work it less. Unless it’s a really severe pull, working the muscle lightly will help it heal faster.

Busy schedule? Get up earlier. Stay up later. Be creative with exercise by walking and working when you would normally be sitting and working — for example, walk around while on the phone. Traveling? Walk briskly through the airport. Use your luggage for some resistance training. Stuck in the office? Put your pullup bar in your office doorway and sneak a few in whenever you get a chance.

Sick? Got a cold, or, more likely it seems, allergies? Work through it. If it is indeed a cold, you may want to avoid heavy breathing, but you can still do some resistance training.

There is always a good reason not to do something, no doubt about it. But to have success in our fitness programs — or in any part of our lives — we need to push those excuses aside, and do what we know we need to do.

Posted on

The importance of chewing

I am a fast eater. Always have been, at least since my college days, perhaps prior to that as well. Not sure why I am that way, but I do know that when dining with friends, I am among the first to finish a meal.

I am attempting to put an end to that.

A friend of mine some time ago — so long ago I can’t remember his name (oh, wait, I think it was Wallace Berry) — used to make a big deal about chewing. He insisted that each bite should be chewed thoroughly. He had a precise number of times, I forget the number (seems like it was in the 20s), that he chewed each bite of food to ensure its proper mastication and digestion.

Okay, maybe that guy was a little OCD, but he had a point, and I’ve always remembered it.

Why chew? Here’s what I’ve found from reading and experimenting.

“Chewing gears up the rest of the digestive system, gets it ready to process incoming nutrition.” This sounds tenuous to me, but maybe. Maybe that’s why chewing gum gives you gas (supposedly — I’ve read about this phenomenon, but I don’t chew gum, so I don’t know if it’s true for me or not).

“Chewing gives your system more time to process the food, to understand how much food you’ve consumed, and to more readily let you know when you are full.” Again, this sounds a bit nonsensical to me. How much time does my stomach really need to let my brain know it’s full? It’s not like I swallow a whole stomachful of food at once.

“Chewing adds saliva to the food, which helps break it down.” Digestion is a mechanical AND chemical process, so this makes sense, exposing more of the food’s surface area to the chemicals in saliva would be beneficial.

“Having been chewed helps when the food hits the gastric juices in the stomach.” This is to me the most obvious benefit of chewing. I mean, if you were to drop an intact hunk of steak into a jar of acid, and a chewed up hunk into a different jar of acid, it’s easy to imagine which would dissolve first. (For those of you who have problems with imagination, the chewed up hunk will.)

But why did I call that “the most obvious benefit of chewing”? I have a very practical reason: The longer your food takes to digest, the more gas you produce, and we all know how uncomfortable that can be.

I’ve experimented with chewing more over the past couple of weeks, and I have definitely noticed some improvement in my gastric comfort. I’ll continue to work on my chewing — after all, a lifetime of bad chewing is not going to fix itself that easily — and see what happens.

Posted on

Muscle soreness and the power of muscle confusion

I am sore today. My inner thighs are feeling the effects of yesterday’s workout.

Why am I sore?

Let’s put aside the fact that no one really knows for sure why muscles get sore from being worked out, and just know that they are sore from being worked out.

“But,” you may ask, “why are your legs sore? Don’t you work your legs out? Insanity is a lot of leg work, isn’t it?”

True enough, but this is why mixing up my routines is so important. Mixing it up confuses my muscles, working them in ways they are not accustomed to, and making them stronger in the process.

I touched on this subject in the post “Cardio: How much do we need?“.

The gist of the concept is that when you want to be really good at one particular activity, you do that activity over and over. If you want to be a good runner, you run. If you want to be a good cycler, you cycle. That trains your muscles to optimize themselves for that particular activity.

But don’t think that a world-class cyclist — a guy you would certainly say is in shape — can jump off his bike and run a marathon. Sure, he’ll be further along the training path than someone who sits on the couch every night, but he will need to train to be able to run that marathon, because his body is maximized for cycling.

And that is the basis of muscle confusion. If you want to be generally fit — and that is my goal — you need to do a variety of exercises to keep your muscles guessing, keep them from establishing a routine.

Tony Horton’s P90X, among many other strength-training programs, are built on that approach.

Anyway, back to my personal muscle soreness.

Yesterday I did for the first time since mid-February Tony Horton’s “Base & Back” from his One-On-One series. (FYI, that particular workout is in Volume 3.) The last time I did that routine was about six months ago, so, even having done a round of Insanity and many other leg workouts in between, I am sore today, because, apparently, “Base & Back” made me use some muscles I haven’t used quite so much recently.

In an effort to keep my muscles confused, I try to only do a particular series of routines for 3 or 4 weeks. I will then take a recovery week and start a new series. That’s how Tony Horton’s P90X works, so I kept that strategy in place after I completed that program.

For what it’s worth, I think the confusion could probably be achieved by just reversing the order of the exercises in each routine, if you want to keep it really simple. But I get a kick out of creating new routines and weekly programs.

So, yeah, my muscles are a bit sore, and I like it. That soreness tells me that my general fitness strategy is working.