Anyway, a year ago today, I wrote and published the first post, which later became the About page.  It was a welcome to anyone and everyone who decides that the garage is their best hope for a workout, whether that’s for training for a sport, losing weight or getting stronger.

So how have you managed to rattle on for a whole year?

Well, I’ve talked about lots of different things.  Hopefully, some of them have been interesting.  Here are some of the main categories:

 Workout routines and training

My own goals have shifted only slightly in the last 12 months.  I’ve solidified my one-arm chin, hit a double-bodyweight chin and dip, pushed my deadlift up to 2.5x bodyweight and benched 100kg for a double.

I’ve tried a number of different training programmes, including total body three times a week, upper/lower split four times a week and legs/push/pull six times a week, high volume: both high reps and low sets and low reps and high sets, maximum effort training, using 5 reps, 3 reps, doubles and singles and Doggcrapp (DC).

I’ve not made all the progress that I wanted but I’ve jumped (most) of the hurdles that have appeared in my way and I’ve got a lot stronger and more muscular into the bargain.  And I’ve learned a lot about how I want to train from now on.

 Mobility and stability

Mobility and stability have been big for me in the last 12 months.  I had a horrid time with my excessive lumbar lordosis, which was partly caused by sitting too much and partly because of lots of competitive swimming.  I also have a chronic recurring issue with my left shoulder, again caused by too much swimming.  It’s not helped by my desk job either. 

I’ve tried activation drills (of limited use), stretching (marginally helpful), soft tissue work (awesome) and strategic strengthening exercises (critical) to get myself into straighter shape.  I’m much less “S”-shaped now and my overhead pressing movements thank me for it, both in terms of my groove and my abdominal stability.  These days, I do 15 minutes of soft tissue work every single day and I feel so much better for it.

 Exercises

Blogging has been brilliant for making me try lots of new exercises.  It’s made me get creative about devising new ways of doing things, including how to do glute-ham raises, which proved popular on the RossTraining forums, lumberjack squats, zercher squats, floor presses and viking presses.

 Cardio

I don’t blog much about cardio because it’s fairly easy to get right.  Don’t do too much and don’t go too hard being the general rule… Anyway, during the last 12 months I’ve experimented with various types of cardio to help with the odd fat-stripping session, which allows me to spend most of the rest of the year eating…

 Diet

I performed my first successful mass-gaining phase this year and gained just over 20lbs of scale-weight.  Unfortunately, I hurt my left shoulder just after finishing and lost a bit of upper body mass as I cut down again.  Ultimately, I think I managed to keep 10lbs of lean mass, which I wasn’t disappointed with.  I don’t think I’ll go all out for it again.  I’m going for a slower and steadier approach now.

 Homemade gym equipment

I spent a fair bit of the summer banging around in the garden making bits of gym kit.  Most ambitious was my sled, which I have used for pushes and pulls (which I prefer – I see myself as more like a miniature Jouka Ahola than any of the really big dudes).  However, I’ve also really enjoyed my farmers’ walk bars, my thick bar and my sandbag.

 World’s Strongest Man

I was given the World’s Strongest Man 1980-1989 and 1990- 1999 for Christmas and I reviewed them in detail.  It was an amazing learning experience to see what the human body is capable of and the kind of strength that it is possible to attain.

 Oldtime strongman

At some point in the year, I discovered the oldtime strongman resources that have been made available to us on the internet and I set out on a crusade to detail who they were and what we knew about them. 

 Book reviews

Recently, I decided to start reviewing a book every Monday, which gives me the weekend to read it, if I haven’t already.  I started out with the amazing Biomarkers, which really made me sit up.  Since then, I’ve worked my way along my bookshelf, reviewing anything and everything training related that I can lay my hands on.

Personal Training resources

And finally, just in the last few weeks, I decided to take things further and get qualified as a personal trainer.  Please join me this coming year as I learn what I need to know to get myself qualified and set out on the next phase of my understanding of this strange thing we do… training.

What is total fitness?

Total fitness is defined as everything that affects the overall health of a person.  This includes the mental, emotional, social and spiritual aspects of our (human) beings.  Some may scoff at the broadness of this definition but I was actually quite pleased to see all of these aspects considered.

Why is that?  Well, I’m not about to go all Paul Chek on you but I have a healthy respect for the interplay between the mind and the body.  At university, I read a little psychology and I was always impressed by the revelation that only a few decades before I started my course, it was widely mocked in scientific circles that a psychological stress could have a physiological impact.

However, it is now well-documented that stress can cause a reduction in the capability of the immune system.  Science did a complete u-turn in a matter of a few years.  And we keep learning more about this interplay between mind and body.  Conditioning Research posted a link only recently to a study that has demonstrated how stress makes you sore.  I can barely get my head around that.  Let me try and understand, someone can be rude to me at work and that could make me recover slower from my workout?  Amazing. 

We could be only on the edge of our understanding of how the mind and the body interrelate.

So what makes up total fitness?

Well, I made up this pictogram to show you:

As you can see, physical fitness is just a small part of total fitness.  Physical fitness can be broken down into smaller subdivisions (see below).  The other components of total fitness are as follows: 

• Medical fitness is defined as simply the absence of illness, injury or medication.  I guess some powerlifters would put it as “there is no such thing as strong but injured, strong but fatigued or strong but sick.  There are only strong and weak.”
• Nutritional fitness refers to the level of nourishment enjoyed and assesses whether the nutritional needs of an individual are being met.  I would add that there is definitely a difference between nutrition and calories.  Most people seem to get too little of the former and too much of the latter.  You can be obese and malnourished.
• Emotional fitness is the ability to manage the mental pressures of life.  I like this one because I have seen people make great gains when they are mentally in the right place but make little or no gains (with a lot of effort) when they are not.
• Social fitness is the ability of the organism to fit in within its community.  We are social animals and I think we underestimate just how big a role society and community play in making us healthy.
• Spiritual fitness is the extent to which the organism lives according to its values.  If you’re a people person and you’re doing an analyst’s job then you’re probably not achieving this goal.

Criticisms: I had the following criticisms of this analysis:

• Medical fitness is only as precise as medical science at the present time.  Given our track record on observing the effects of stress on mammals, you have to think that we’re not as clever as we think we are…
• Nutritional fitness is largely in the eye of the beholder.  Nutritional fitness will mean completely different things to Loren Cordain, Weston A Price, Brian St Pierre and the UK government

What’s physical fitness?

Hey, here’s another pictogram:

Physical fitness is analysed through a number of different qualities as shown above.  I’m guessing you don’t need me to explain them, though…

Criticisms: I had the following criticisms of this framework:

• Muscular strength and endurance are at opposing ends of a spectrum that encompasses a wide range of types of strength, power, strength-endurance, endurance-strength and endurance.  So within this framework, hypothetically, maximal strength and long-term endurance could be sound but power could be poor.  I know that’s unlikely but it’s possible.
• Cardiovascular fitness blurs the edge of muscular endurance and is strongly connected to muscle fibre type.  It’s also often developed to the detriment of speed and strength.  I’m also not convinced that cardiovascular fitness exists in isolation of the muscular system to which it is attached (but, hey, I get to learn all about that!).

Ultimately, these categories are just a framework for exploring the concept of fitness and fall a long way short of defining what it really is.

Why would you do that?

Well, I work at the sharp end of corporate finance at the moment.  I help people raise debt and equity funding and I help them buy and sell businesses.   For some it would be a dream job and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy doing it.  I just don’t see myself doing it ten years from now.

Late night completions are not uncommon and it’s routine for stressful problems come crawling out of the woodwork like lice during due diligence.  It’s never boring (which is why I got into it in the first place) but it can be pretty hard going.

OK, what are you expecting to get out of the qualification?

I am hoping to get:

1. a qualification that will enable me to work formally with people doing what I already enjoy helping people do;
2. a framework of understanding that will help me consolidate what I know about training and broaden my knowledge base; and
3. an idea of where my knowledge gaps are.

Point #1: A qualification

I am under no illusions that a qualification is a pass into an industry and not an education.  The education comes with extensive reading, conferring with others and experimenting within the parameters that are available.  I’m actually really excited to be thinking about the whole new arena of learning opportunities that the qualification will open up to me.

Hopefully, Jake will let me learn what I need to…

Point #2: A framework

When I was exploring what training provider to use, I emailed my friend Rob Newman for his recommendations and he volunteered that the main benefit of the course was the formalisation of knowledge he mostly already had.

I think that is the main thing that I’m looking for: a framework to hang the knowledge that I already know and to hang knowledge that I want to develop in the future.

I want to understand the broader spectrum of training requirements.  What does that mean? Well, from training myself and Anna (and one or two other willing guinea pigs), I feel that I’ve developed some quite detailed understanding of certain specific areas.  For example, I feel that I have experience of how to:

• ascertain whether someone is very fast-twitch dominant (me) or very slow-twitch dominant (Anna) and programme accordingly in order to develop strength
• take a female trainee from doing no pull ups to being able to do half a dozen
• work up to a one-arm chin without getting tendonosis (or tendonitis, for that matter)
• work on back squat form to get from way, way above parallel down to parallel
• identify common indications of glute weakness and help develop strength there

But there are many things that I do not know how to do.  I have read about many of them but that doesn’t mean I fully understand them because I have never tried them.  For example, I don’t really know how to:

• put together programmes to support specific sports, such as time trial cycling (very popular in my area), rowing, rugby or football
• take the powerlifts above national qualifying levels
• train an obese beginner
• correct for muscular imbalances that I haven’t experienced
• assess someone more generally for weaknesses and immobility

Point #3: Knowledge gaps

Finally, I know that there are things that I don’t know that I don’t know.  I would like to make those things fewer.  I want to increase the things that I do know and the things that I know that I don’t know.  Confused?  Here’s Donald Rumsfeld to clarify it for you…:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

I love that quote.  I think Mr Rumsfeld is one of the great existential philosophers of our age.  Here he is in action:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RpSv3HjpEw

Here’s to making some of my unknown unknowns into known unknowns.

A little background

I wouldn’t describe us as “walkers” compared with the hordes that descend upon the Peak District and the Lake District every weekend between Easter and the end of September.  However, we do seem to rack up a fair weekly mileage.  Thinking about it, in a typical working week, we usually do a mid-week walk of around 5 or 6 miles, a walk on a Sunday morning of between 6 and 8 miles and a couple of walks around the block (1.5 miles) in between.  That’s about 16 miles a week.

On holiday, we usually go trekking and cover 15 or so miles a day in mountainous terrain, such as Scotland or the Alps.  Having said that, we’ve been getting more into the Lake District recently and I feel like we getting to know it well enough now to be able to stay away from the crowds.

When we started going on big trips, we started out using big leather boots but we soon switched to lighter weight fabric ones and then to mid-heel trainers.  Thinking about Vibrams was an extension of this progression in many ways.

So why did you wait?

We waited until we were happy with them for a couple of reasons:

• They are quite expensive in the UK (£99 for the model we wanted)
• We had read some conflicting reviews about them
• We had seen cheaper alternatives (albeit without toes) for minimalist footwear
• I am a late-adopter and I hate being part of a bandwagon

But you got them in the end?

Yes, we got some in the end.  Here you can see me trialling mine on an 8 mile walk that we did no less than 48 hours after I carried the shoebox in the front door. 

 My new Vibrams: any colour as long as it’s black

 And your first impressions are?

My first impressions are just that: first impressions.  I am sure I will feel completely different about them in a few weeks but here goes:

• They are a lot easier to walk in that I had been lead to believe.  I had been expecting to do a little walk in them (say 1.5 miles) and come home feeling like my feet had been run over.  As it was, I did the 1.5 mile walk and barely noticed that I was wearing them.  So I did 8 miles a couple of days later and I did feel them that time.
• Over long distances, they are much more painful on hard surfaces than on softer surfaces.  This is similar to wearing shoes but slightly more marked.  When wearing trainers or walking boots on hard surfaces for extended periods, your feet start to sting and then even once you go back to softer ground, they still hurt.  With Vibrams, the pain was greater on the hard surface but the relief was much greater once back on softer ground too.
• The soles are a lot thinner than I expected.  I had not been expecting to have trouble walking on very stony surfaces.  I felt like a kid at the beach walking down a stony footpath near the end of our 8 mile walk.
• I cannot imagine trying to run in them with my well-worn heel strike.  I would be in bits within a few hundred yards.
• They are a lot warmer than I anticipated.  If you are used to wearing sandals or very light and airy trainers, Vibran KSO’s will probably seem quite hot in the summer.
• The black KSO has the letters “VIBRAM” stitched into the left foot over the big toe knuckle.  Unfortunately, the stitching on the inside rubs slightly against your foot.  Nothing that a bit of climbing tape can’t handle but not great for such an otherwise well-made product.

Let me know if you’ve also bought a pair recently or if you’re thinking about it.  Let’s compare notes. 

The Graduate

So what?

Well, until he arrived, I thought I was pretty new to my line of work.  Looking around, I could see plenty of people who have been doing the same thing for a lot longer than me.  Then he turned up, saying, yeah, like I’m 22 and I’ve just graduated, what do I need to know?

Damn, I thought.  I’ve been doing this 10 years already.

Ten years of experience takes a while to relate

I discovered that a few weeks is not long enough to convey 10 years of experience.  So I boiled it down to a few bullet points for him:

1. Decide what you want most
2. Based on (1), have an ultimate career goal
3. Identify role models who have already achieved that goal and learn from them
4. Establish what you are prepared to do to get there… and what you are not
5. Plan your long-term progression
6. Periodically check progress against your ultimate goal
7. Have short-term goals
8. Identify blockers to your short-term goals and remove or go around them
9. Seek advice from people who have faced the same challenges
10. Frequently check progress against your short-term goals
11. If in any doubt, do as you’re told
12. If still in doubt, do what the most trustworthy people are doing
13. If doubt still unresolved, write everything down and proceed… slowly
14. Invest in your skills
15. Invest in your network
16. Invest in your family and friends
17. Keep challenging yourself to try new things
18. Don’t underestimate yourself
19. Don’t forget to take time out to rest and recuperate
20. Lighten up and have fun from time to time… no, really

And then I realised that was quite a good checklist for me when I’m thinking about my training…