My new Tivo addiction is Ninja Warrior on G4 TV. Ninja Warrior is a popular Japanese reality game show where contestants compete to complete a 4 stage obstacle course. Athletes from around the world have traveled to Japan to try to complete the massive obstacle course that requires speed, balance, agility, endurance and strength to conquer.
I would love to travel to Japan to compete in Ninja Warrior, but man would it be a huge disappointment if I couldn’t make it past the first stage. In the meantime I’ll have to find local obstacle course challenges to participate in - such as the annual Boot Camp Challenge run by the Marines at the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot.
I’ve barely begun my next challenge to become stronger in 30-days and I’m injured. My workout started with several sets of ab crunches on the nautilus machine, then 3 sets of slow straight-leg leg-lifts. After that I decided to warm up my chest and shoulders with a couple yoga moves which included down-dog to pushup to one-arm side plank pose. After that I moved to the weight room and started with 3 sets of decline bench presses at various grip widths using moderate weight (135lbs) to warm up. Then I moved to the bench press hammer machine and did 3 sets of 175lbs. The weight felt pretty light so I hopped over to the incline hammer machine which already had 225lbs on it and tried to press it up. I got the weight halfway up and couldn’t go any further. This frustrated me since I’ve pressed 275lbs on this machine before. So I tried again. No luck. It wasn’t going to happen. So I dropped the weight to 135lbs and performed 3 sets of 10 reps. At this point I decided to go back to the “ab room” and do a couple more sets of the yoga moves I started out with. After I finished I felt pretty good, but I know I didn’t push myself hard enough since I didn’t even really break a sweat.
Later in the evening I noticed that my front-right deltoid was a little sore. Then when I tried to pickup my dog I felt pain in my shoulder. Not unbearable pain, but I definitely strained a muscle in my shoulder.
So at this point I’m going to need to rest my shoulder and let it heal before I can try lifting (or even doing yoga) again. Since my shoulder is injured I decided to jog up and down 12 flights of stairs in my building just so I can get some exercise in and get my heart rate going. It feels good when your heart is pumping and you can feel the blood rushing through your veins. It reminds you that you are alive and should be moving through life instead of sitting at some desk all day half comatose pumping yourself full of sugar and caffeine - only to go home exhausted and then wake up and do the same thing all over again. But I digress…
Is it possible to gain 10lbs of muscle in 30 days and go from 14% bodyfat down to 10%? I’m about to find out.
A couple of years ago I trained with a 6 foot tall half Korean, half African-American trainer who had the physique of a bodybuilder. Over two months I gained 10lbs of muscle and went from benching 185lbs to 225lbs. That was a couple of years ago and since then I’ve lost a lot of that strength especially after dropping 20lbs. I really enjoyed my training sessions with him even though it was hard to understand him half the time through his thick Korean accent. I’d love to train with him again but unfortunately his location is inconvenient for me. So now I’m on the hunt for a new trainer.
A few days ago I met with a few people at Velocity Fitness which happens to be a small gym located in the office building where I work. The focus of Velocity Fitness is functional training/sports performance. Every trainer that works there comes from either a coaching background or competitive sports background. Supposedly this small gym trains pro-athletes and celebrities as well as the common folk. The gym is small, but very nice - and expensive. $600 for 4 training sessions plus $50/mo membership fee. These are the kind of trainers that could definitely help me reach my goals, but I’m not quite ready to invest pro-athlete kind of money.
A few days later while I was working out at 24-Hour Fitness I noticed the “Shape Up for $99” promo flyers around the gym. The promo is for 4/20min training sessions which is a decent deal. The only negative is that most trainers at 24-Hour Fitness don’t seem to have the experience or knowledge I’m looking for. Plus, it seems kinda hypocritical for some young guy/girl who is only in mediocre shape to try to tell me how to get in shape . I want to be trained by someone who has been successful in transforming their own physique. That being said, I think I might still sign-up for the $99 deal as long as I can find a trainer who knows what they’re doing and is not going to try to sell me crappy Apex supplements or treat me like a fitness newbie.