Link Theory Vol. 5

Hey, I'm back--it's been a crazy couple of weeks, and I'll tell you all about it over the next few posts. For now, I want to talk about some online tools that can help you with your weight loss.

I've talked about fitday.com over and over again. Let me try to sell it to you a different way. This is how Jason Statham talks about it in a Men's Health Article here:

2. If it goes down your throat, record it on paper. "This is the bible," Statham says, holding up a black hardbound journal. He writes down everything he swallows, including water (he tries to drink 1 1/2 gallons a day -- that'll keep you feeling full). "Writing everything down makes it impossible for you to muck it up," he says.

This physique is the result:


More tips on achieving the Jason Statham physique here and his 2006 workout here. He's really come along since he added in weight training, hasn't he? You can read more on how I use fitday here and here.

One useful way that I've found to track my weight and bodyfat percentage over time is at physicsdiet.com. This site takes a moving average of your weight, so that odd day where you weigh 6 lbs more than you did yesterday doesn't frustrate you quite so badly, and the day where you weigh 3 lbs less than you did yesterday is taken a bit more in stride. This is an important concept for anyone who is losing weight, but this is absolutely critical for people who are on Cyclical Ketogenic Diets (like the Men's Health TNT Diet--which I highly recommend) because their weight will vary not only with their fat mass, but also with how many carbs they ate during their carb-up.

physicsdiet.com borrows its important concepts from the Hacker's Diet which explains how and why the graphs work, as well as a geek-friendly way to lose weight. This is a full length diet book, with an engineer's approach to weight loss. It is definitely geek-friendly, but it shouldn't be too intimidating to complete laymen either. I recommend reading it, even if I think the representation of the human body as a black box to be overly simplified.

I have to shout out to Google Docs as well, since I use a docs spreadsheet to record and calculate bodyfat percentage, waist measurement, and weight alongside the physics diet site. This way I don't have to keep track of USB keys or software incompatibilities if I'm traveling. It's very convienient, and for excel users, pretty intuitive.

If you're looking for new ways to make your kettlebell workouts the "same... but different," check out the kettlebell workout generator.

Lyle McDonald talks about genetic limits and realistic goals in this excellent post.

Gary Taubes is back with another talk. He's changed up his slides and presentation again, and the short Q&A at the end is refreshing. I'm still hoping I can see a presentation of his where he isn't rushed through the last slides.

I think I'll wrap things up with this link about process visualization via The Simple Dollar. This reminds me of this article on how Allen Iverson applied Psycho-Cybernetics which talks in detail about this kind of process visualization.

Enjoy your weekend.

My Current Workout

Hey, I just wanted to give you guys a taste of what I'm doing with all my home gym equipment right now. This is the basic format that I build my workouts around. I'll give you some of the twists that I've come up with to burn more fat later in the Pulse series.

Here's the basic progression, which comes from Pavel Tsatsouline in his book Enter The Kettlebell! Strength Secret of The Soviet Supermen.

This is my version of the "Rite of Passage" program. The Rite of Passage is to be able to press 50% of your bodyweight and snatch a 24kg (53 lb) kettlebell 200 times in 10 minutes.

M: Light workout
T: "Variety" or off
W: Medium workout
R: "Variety" or off
F: Off
S: Hard workout
U: Off

On variety days, feel free to perform other workouts: do other kettlebell drills, calesthenics, just keep it light and easy. Or take the day off.

On the light, medium and hard days, what I do is alternate sets of chins and presses in a ladder format. You could easily substitute dips and chins if you don't have kettlebells or dumbbells, or just do the presses. You could also alternate bench presses and rows.

I do these as "ladders", meaning you take a short (5-90 second) break in between the sets. You can take a longer break after all the sets in a series are completed. Clarence Bass explains the technique here, and the reasoning here.

These are in the sets x reps format.
Week 1: Light 3 x 1; Medium 3 x {1,2}; Hard 3 x {1,2,3}
Week 2: Light 4 x 1; Medium 4 x {1,2}; Hard 4 x {1,2,3}
Week 3: Light 5 x 1; Medium 5 x {1,2}; Hard 5 x {1,2,3}
Week 4: Light 5 x {1,2}; Medium 5 x {1,2,3}; Hard 5 x {1,2,3,4}
Week 5: Light 5 x {1,2,3}; Medium 5 x {1,2,3,4}; Hard 5 x {1,2,3,4,5}

On the light days, do one clean and many presses, the medium and hard days, perform a clean before each press.


A kettlebell clean and press in good form

Take two days off and test your new maxes with a heavier kettlebell or dumbbell, or test the number of pullups or dips you can now do.

I vary the pullup type on each workout as follows:
I roll two six sided dice and the result indicates the pullup type that I do:

2: Towel Chin
3: Mixed-Grip Chin
4: Wide-Grip Chin
5: Narrow-Grip (hands touching) Chin
6: Standard chin
7: Standard Pullup
8: Narrow (thumbs touching) pullup
9: Wide Pullup
10: Neutral (palms facing) grip pullup
11: Side-to-side pull (pull to left hand, then pull to right hand)
12: Side grip pullup

If you know about probability, then you know that I will be spending most of my time doing numbers 5-9 and less time doing the outliers, so I designed the workout to focus on the basics in the center and only occasionally get into the weirder pullup variations. This is the idea of "different, but the same". You want enough variety to force your body to keep adapting, but not so much that the stimulus is random. Not enough variety leads to staleness (the guy who is still doing the workout that he learned as a beginner) and too much leads to a failure to adapt (just doing Crossfit WODs). The key words then are, "different, but the same".

Each workout is "finished" with swings or snatches. I roll two six sided dice again to determine the length of the finisher, from 2-12 minutes, and I perform 50-60% of my max snatches on the light day, 70-80% of my max swings on medium day, and 100% all out on the hard day. Again, this uses the "same but different" principle, by changing the difficulty and length of the rounds every workout.

I've just completed another cycle with the 32kg (70 lb) kettlebell. Since I weigh 100kg (220lbs) this is 32% of my bodyweight. My next "official" bell is the 40kg (88lb-40% of bodyweight) but I also have another 70lb kettlebell with 10lbs of plates duct taped to the bottom. This throws the weight distribution all off and makes it harder to clean the weight properly, so I'm hoping to bypass the 80lb "ghetto 'bell" altogether and move straight into the 88lb 'bell.

Coming up on Wednesday, a post about an 80s fad that I think should come back. Stay tuned.