In My Absence

Once again it’s been a long time since I have been active in maintaining my blog. I am restarting it again and I have also been posting videos on my YouTube page again. I’ll put the link at the bottom. Right now they have been supplement reviews but at least I’m getting active with it again.

A lot has changed since my last post. I don’t remember if I mentioned that I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and have been receiving IV infusions for it. UC has changed my life and I am trying to adapt to the changes as best as I can but it is not easy. It starts with the food I eat. A lot of the food I used to eat I had to give up. I can’t eat lettuce so salads are out as are most fruits and vegetables. I gave up peanuts and peanut butter, almost all dairy, I try to avoid bread and gluten. It is not easy. Some things that don’t affect me today when I have it will hurt me the next time I try it. It’s really hard to predict how and what will set it off.

I’ve been in an active “flare” for over a year. It has made doing the simplest things difficult and has caused a lot of embarrassing times and uncomfortable situations. It is hard for me to go to the gym because I keep having to run to the locker room and when I get back someone else is using the machine I vacated. This has caused me to buy my own gym equipment for my garage but I still go to the gym when I travel for work. (more on that part of my life in future posts).

This blog is going to be more than a place for me to post about my working out, it’s going to be a place for me to open up about being healthy and dealing with my UC while pushing myself every day. I will still be posting reviews of supplements and other things and posts from my YouTube vlog as well as stories about me, my wife and my dog Chance. They are my rock and safe place throughout all of this.

So stay tuned for more.

Average Steve’s Fitness Vlog

Long Time No Post

It has been a long time since I have had the time or energy to sit down and type stuff that isn’t work related but that doesn’t mean I have stopped working to achieve my goals.

I have been continuing my workout plan and coming to the end of the 6th week which also happens to be the end of the first half of the plan. I can see and feel the changes and if you follow me on Instagram then you can see them as well. I am very happy with my progress especially when I look back and see how my weight numbers are going up every week.

It is a slow road, there is no shortcut for hard work but if you enjoy what the work that goes into it than there is no such thing as hard work. There are some exercises that I hate doing (bench press, squats) but all that means is that I need to give myself an extra push to do it and shatter my previous personal records.

The Youtube page is up and running and has a few videos and reviews already posted. You can visit at Youtube until I get the chance to purchase a domain name for it. I am enjoying making the videos and hopefully they actually help someone when it comes to purchasing supplements and other random stuff.

I will keep coming back to post more, it just may be few and far between but I am loving the video aspect and have been putting a lot of my free time into filming and editing the videos and putting them online. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and “like” the videos. Your support means the world to me.

First YouTube Vlog Post

This past week I posted my first vlog on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at Amazon Protein Sample Pack Video. Please watch and subscribe to my YouTube channel!

My First Week at Planet Fitness

Currently I belong to 3 gyms, yeah I know that is a lot but one of my memberships expires this month and won’t be renewed (the University gym which is my favorite gym). Usually my go-to after the university is Retro Fitness which is your standard 20 dollar a month gym which has all the free-weights and machines that one would expect to find in a gym.

Since my wife is going to be working at a new university which is too far away for me to use their gym, we decided that we would join a cheap gym in the area on the side (it is also a second gym membership for her) so we joined Planet Fitness for 10 dollars a month, comes out to $10.70 with tax. Not bad for a 24-7 gym.

My first impression after getting the tour at Planet Fitness was wow, this place sure is purple and clean. Once I got past how clean things looked and how much cardio equipment they carry I realized that the gym tour didn’t show any free weights. They have an awesome section for a 30 minute workout as well as a 12 minute ab station which I love but where are the free weights?

I finally found them in the corner. Shocked that they hid these in the tour because it takes up a nice size portion of the gym, they have 8 or 9 adjustable/flat benches as well as a curl bar rack, 2 double row racks of dumbbells and 4 smith machines with adjustable benches. That is a lot of equipment but the problem is that if you don’t like doing your exercise on the smith machine than you are stuck. There are no free barbells. Bench presses, squats, deadlifts, they can only be done on the smith machine and it gives the machine a strange feeling. Needless to say I won’t be doing these exercises at this gym.

Outside of exercises needing a free barbell, this gym has everything I want for a low price. The best part of the gym I would say (other than 24-7) is that everyone there is nice and people put their weights back where they belong. When I go to Retro Fitness I notice a lot of people just leave their dumbbells on the floor or put them anywhere on the rack instead of where they belong. At Planet Fitness, everything was there it was supposed to be.

So the skinny of the post is that I am enjoying the gym as long as I don’t have to do anything with a barbell that day.

Cheers!

The Art of the Push Up

Finding an exercise that can be done just as well in the gym as it can be done at home is not easy. Whether it is due to the equipment not being the same quality, the space being to small or just the not vibe in the room, working out at home can be difficult. I happened to come across a great article from BodyBuilding.com (link will be posted at the bottom) about push ups. Was shocked to see an article about something so basic that I was forced to do in gym class back in elementary school but figured it worth the read.

The article titled “How (And Why!) To Do Push Ups” shows the benefits of doing the body weight exercise and explains how it helps to benefit the muscles that are not being used during the bench press. To me the part that hit home was when they talked about scapula movement and the benefits in mobility and strength to the area around it. After having two shoulder operations in the past, my shoulders feel fine and are strong but I get a pain behind the shoulder blade which I can seem to sooth. Push ups may not sooth the pain but they at least stimulate the muscle in the shoulder where the pain and discomfort is more tolerable.

Other variations of push up which are not mentioned but also help to make push ups more of an all around upper body exercise is to add an incline or a decline. This works out different muscles in the chest as well as the arms and shoulders and allows for different types of mobility.

In order to do either the incline or decline push up, a weight bench or another solid object that is 3 feet wide and 1 to 1.5 feet high is required.

For the incline push up place your hands at the comfortable place on top of the bench with your feet on the ground and allow yourself to slowly lower your chest to the bench and than squeeze your chest when your press to raise yourself from the bench.

The decline is similar yet the opposite. The main difference is now your feet are on the bench and your hands are on the floor and you want to bring your chest as low to the floor as possible before squeezing your chest together and pushing back up.

I did 3 sets of 15 reps of each type of push up which comes out to 135 total. The fun thing about this is I can always add more reps or more sets as needed but that I can do this exercise at home and still feel as if I had a complete chest workout.

BodyBuilding.com – How (And Why!) To Do Push-Ups

Images from:

Breaking Muscle

Men’s Fitness

BodyBuilding.com

Schooled by the Trainer

I don’t claim to be an expert when it comes to working out. I know a few things and I try to learn a few other things, so when the trainer at my gym comes up to me and asks if he can help me out  I appreciate it very much because it is only going o help me.

Picture Credit rightfitpersonaltraining.com 

So here I am at the gym, just finished my dead lifting (posted on my Instagram @avgsteve) and my barbell shrugs when I decided to move to the bench. As I am setting up at the bench I notice my wife is on the other side of the gym working with the dumbbells and talking to one of the trainers. I can see that he is pointing out things to her that she should be doing and things that she is doing wrong (probably taught to her from me). After a few minutes she calls me over to talk to the trainer with her and we get into a conversation about bench pressing.

Time for some history on the relationship that I have with this gym and their trainers. I have not met with this guy as a trainer, for the sake of the blog let us call him John, but I have met with another trainer who workers there who we will call Mark. I had originally signed up for 90 minutes of training time which I wanted to break up into two 45 minute sessions. I told them that I wanted to learn power lifting exercises and other stuff using the barbell. That I wanted to make sure that I was using i safely.

Now this isn’t the first time that I have had a trainer, I used to have a very good trainer a few years back but I am no longer at that gym. Immediately I did not feel comfortable with Mark. Something about him told me that he did not know what he was doing or preaching, so I decided to test him. I may not know much about how to dead lift, but I know plenty about how not to dead lift. I did the first two as correctly as I could but then for the last 2 I purposely did them wrong. the first one I hiked the bar (popped it up) to myself and shot my hips up and he said “good good” and last one I curled the bar in (low weight obviously) and lifted from my toes and he said that I did all 4 perfectly. I just remember looking and thinking, really?

This was a pattern that continued throughout the rest of the session at the end of which I told myself that I would not be using the remaining time that I had. He tried to contact me several times about setting up an appointment and I either had plans and couldn’t make it or I just said I wasn’t available. Luckily our times weren’t the most compatible. I just did not feel comfortable working with a guy who could be so blind to the wrong way of doing heavy and unsafe exercising when done wrong. In the weeks to follow I saw him exercising a few times on his own and he just looked clueless taking care of himself so I did not want him to work with me.

Back to the current day where I am talking to Greg and he is pointing stuff out to me that is actually helpful. He is showing me what I am doing wrong and even when I try to throw something in to test him, he is catching it. This is what I want in a trainer. Someone who actually knows and makes you feel comfortable with their knowledge. He helped me with my shoulder placement when bench pressing as well as was helping my wife with her shoulder placement when she is dumbbell benching. He spent a good 25-30 minutes with us and I was happy to the point where I want to use that remaining 45 minutes that I paid for but only if he could be the trainer assigned to me.

Nobody likes to be told that they are doing something wrong, especially when they have been doing it that way for a while, but when the right person comes around and points out to you what you are doing wrong and how to fix and is taking the time out of their day to do so, I can only appreciate them for it. I may have to lower my weight to start doing things the right way but if it means that I will be safer when lifting more weight and get the actual gains that I am looking for than it is worth it. Just like how I went back to benching 135 when I was up to 220 so that I can put more time and effort into learning proper form to make sure that I am being as safe as possible.

Cheers!

When to Add NEW Exercises to Your Workout!

This is a topic that I come back to a lot because there are so many different ways for me to look at it. Am I adding new exercises because I want to learn new ones? Are certain exercises causing unwanted pain and being replaced with others that are more comfortable? Is there a medical reason? These are just a few of the reasons to add new exercises to a workout.

My obsession with the gym has only started in mid October (7 months) and during that time I have learned a lot. I started off with just a handful of random exercises to having a 15 exercise workout everyday, which is too much for me, or at least was at that point. Thanks to a few friends and the BodySpace app by BodyBuilding.com (not a plug but still showing support) I was able to learn more exercises to work out various muscle groups in my body. While learning more exercises I was able to teach myself various other exercises to work out the same muscles which I could use to either extend my workout or to offer variety to the exercises that way they didn’t become boring.

Several months after starting my gym obsession I came down with a nice case of either tennis or golfer’s elbow and had to back off on some of my workouts. My legs loved/hated me during the time period. I lowered the weight on exercises that didn’t cause me as much pain and I avoided the ones that hurt. It sucked because the ones that hurt the most were the ones I loved the most. I should mention that it was my fault I got the elbow injury because I was doing the same 15 upper body exercises everyday, 5-7 days a week (with 1 day for legs mixed in).

This injury was a blessing and curse. It forced me to separate my workout and to learn more exercises. Some of these new exercises have replaced ones that I was doing prior to my injury and some of them I ditched once I was feeling better. The curse from this is that I haven’t been able to kick the full extend of the injury and it keeps coming back. Currently I am avoiding doing any exercises where my arms are tended and supporting all of the weight at the hinge of my elbow, curls are a prime example. This is allowing me to find new exercises using machines or different ways to lift where my elbows are getting more support from the rest of my body. Knowledge is power!

Now some exercises are just uncomfortable to do. Seated leg curls are a good example for me as I could never find a comfortable position on the machine and it caused a pain what I did not need to have knowing that I probably wasn’t in the best position to use the machine. I was able to replace this with squats and other leg exercises which allow me to take this machine out of my workout entirely.

I have also recently replaced concentration curls with preacher curls and a few other bicep machines which have helped. Concentration curls were fine but for some reason when I put the weight down at the end it caused a sharp pain to my right shoulder. Since I dropped the concentration curls I have not felt this pain.

There are more reasons than what I have listed to change an exercise in your workout but these are the few reasons that I have run into and so far I have yet to look back.

If you have any more reasons to add, feel free to comment them below!

Cheers!

 

 

Starting the Vlog

Apparently the term is vlog, and I will be starting one of these “vlogs”. I have already recorded 2 reviews and after some updating I will be posting them on a YouTube page. Will possibly be getting a domain for it as well. Stay tuned for links to be posted here as well as typed out posings of everything that I have on the video show…

Also, I will be posting more coming up, been busy with work a lot so keep reading!

And don’t forget to add me on Instagram and Twitter, just click the logos!

The App That Changed My Life!

These days enarly everyone has a smart phone filled with apps, but how often is it that an app comes out that actually changes your life for the better? Don’t get me wrong, Angry Birds was a great way to kill time when bored in a waiting room but than it also became a great way to procrastinate when I needed to get work done. “I’ll do it in 5 minutes, I really need to kill this green pig!”

The app that changed my life (and this is going to sound like a huge plug) is the BodySpace app by BodyBuilding.com. Before I found this app, I used to go to the gym, do the same 5-6 exercises (which had nothing to do with each other) because they were the only ones I knew how to do and went home after. Average time spent at the gym was 30-35 minutes and a good chunk of that was spent trying to figure out what to do next or waiting for someone to get off the machine I wanted to use.

With this app I was able to either pick a premade workout from a long list of them or make my own workout from a choice of over 960 exercises. Each exercise comes with both readable and video instructions on how to do it and it records and saves the sets/reps/pounds that you lifted. I feel like I am the only guy in the gym who actually uses his phone for his workout between sets instead of checking Facebook or Instagram (though I am guilty of that sometimes).

When I first started with this app after gaining weight on my honeymoon, I got myself up to 14-15 exercises for over 1.5 hours a day working out just my upper body. (had a separete leg day). This was great for me because I was learning a lot of exercises and watching as the numbers went up but along the way I started to get pains in both of my elbows. Apparently doing this massive workout (for me) 5-7 days a week was getting to be too much and I started getting a case of golfers/tennis elbow, not sure which one.

This allowed me the opportunity to figure out how to break down my workout to having one day for arms, one day for back/chest/shoulders, one day for legs and one day for power lifting. I usually will do one of the first 2 twice a week. Doing this I was able to learn more exercises and how to do bigger lifts. It also allows me to shorten my gym time during the week so I could work out each section more in less time and get home. Getting home at 730 and get by 8 to have eat dinner at 945 and get to sleep to wake up at 4am to do it all voer again takes a lot out of you so having the extra time at night to do stuff or be with my wife is just as important to me.

The next great thing about this app is that it is more than just a how to and record keeping app. It is a social network with thousands if not millions of people who started out just like me and all working towards reaching the same goal. Can post progress photos, interact with others, status updates, forums. This has added extra motivation to my workout because if they can do it, than why can’t I? Everyone on BodySpace has been great and motivating and extremly helpful.

This app has changed my life, it takes time to get into it and discipline to make it work, but if you are willing to put in the effort, it will surely help anyone who uses it.