Workout v4.0 (HIIT) and Diet v5.0

In the Spring of 2013 I decided to focus solely on workouts and diets to promote additional fat loss until I reached a body fat percent that I was happy with. Over the last couple years I had been playing around with my diet enough to realize that for me there are two modes of dieting. One I can eat in manner to maintain strength and build muscle but I will not lose any body fat on this eating regiment. The other is to eat at a caloric deficit to lose body fat, however when I sustain this type of diet over an extended period of time I begin to lose some of my strength. If I had an outstanding genetic makeup like some people (Arnold Schwarzenegger for example) I could use my maintain diet to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously, however that isn't my body type so I have to use different eating methods to accomplish my goals.

At this point I had first decided to change my diet up. Ever since I had got back on track and had converted over to Intermittent Fasting (IF) I had been getting decent results and was steadily losing weight each week. I decided to add one more element to my diet, Low Carb. My goal was to keep my daily intake of carbs at around 50 grams or less and then on Saturday I could eat my fill of carbs to refill my muscles with glycogen. Glycogen is how carbs are stored as energy in your muscles. Glycogen is where your body pulls from first to burn energy, after you run out of glycogen it has to pull from other sources such as fat. This is why Low Carb is effective, because once you run out of glycogen you have to burn fat. However when doing exercise on a consistent basis it is important to have one or maybe even two days with carbs (preferably on a workout day) so that you aren't constantly exercising without glycogen stores in your muscles. Low Carb is an absolutely excellent way to lose fat but it can also cause muscle loss. If I was working out with depleted glycogen all the time due to the Low Carb it will hasten strength and muscle loss. This muscle loss occurs because of burning additional calories from the workouts and constantly eating at a caloric deficit and having no glycogen stores in your muscles causing your energy production from burning fat cells not to be able to keep up. When you get to this state of being energy starved from your fat not producing enough energy your body will start to "burn" muscle. This effect is the same as what happens to starving people and why their muscles are so atrophied. So to avoid my body losing muscle I made sure to have at least one day to refill my glycogen with carbs.

Along with this additional change up I decided to give HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts a try. I had been doing long 30min - 45min cardio sessions, these were the first exercises I changed over to HIIT style. Instead of running on the treadmill, or whatever machine I was on, for those extended durations I would run fast for 1 minute and then do a slow jog for 1 minute to catch my breath. I would repeat this process until I had done 8 sets of running with jogging at the start and finish for warm up and cooldown. This lowered my cardio routines down to 17 minutes. Not only does it save you a bunch of time, but I still got a superb workout because of how much energy I exerted while doing the fast running. If you want to try this make sure you build up your stamina first before just trying to jump straight into HIIT style cardio. Either do steady slow running or begin with shorter run intervals like 30 seconds running and 90 seconds jogging. I also went to a HIIT style of weight lifting called Hundreds. In hundreds You do 10 sets of 10 reps in quick succession with low weight (enough though that it is still a bit difficult to complete 100 reps) then you follow up with like 3 sets of 5 with a heavier weight.

With these combined efforts of low carb and HIIT workouts I felt that this was a good combination for me in being successful at burning fat. I lost quite a bit of additional fat and lowered my weight even more. With this combination of diet and exercise I got down to as low as 191 lbs. Just remember though if you want to plan out a  similar diet and exercise regiment make sure it will be something that is designed for you. You will want to make sure that it will be something catered to your nutritional needs and that the exercise routine will be something your current level of fitness can handle.

Plateau 3 and Changing to Diet v4.0

In October 2012 I had another run in with a plateau which was my third encounter with this hindrance. At this point in time I was now down to about 215 lbs from my original starting point of 270 lbs. I had been making excellent progress but yet again ran into an all too familiar roadblock. This particular plateau was my longest to date and was mostly due to my own fault. Since I had been making such good progress I got very lax with my diet and was cheating quite frequently. It all started with a trip to Las Vegas in October and continued on through the holidays into the new year. Granted this is a hard time of the year for anyone to stay true to their diet but I was most definitely not making my best effort. Even after the new year I had let my cheating continue on for quite some time afterward. I also slightly tried to justify my cheating by thinking that it was ok since I had gained some muscle and would burn more calories naturally, which is true but the excess I was eating was far too much for a successful diet. I really wasn't making any headway on my weight loss and had even gained a few pounds.

Another reason my cheating was in excess and that I wasn't keeping very good track of my diet was because at my job, during this time, I was provided a free lunch. I would usually try to mentally keep track of what I was eating but more often than not I'm positive that these meals only added to the excess in my diet since I wasn't 100% sure of the total calories I was consuming. At this point I had realized I needed to stop being lazy and get back to a regimented way of eating that would be easy for me to follow and keep track of my caloric intake. I had to remember that cheating happens (sometimes more frequently than we would like) and even if it does it doesn't mean that my success had ended I merely needed to buckle down and get back on track and my good progress would return.

At this point in time I had been looking into intermittent fasting as an option to help me better organize my eating habits and eating schedule at the time. Intermittent Fasting (IF for short) isn't a diet so much as a way of rescheduling your eating habits. While doing intermittent fasting it is still necessary to count calories and make sure you are getting appropriate amounts of protein, carbs, and fat for your nutritional goals in your particular diet. The basic idea behind IF is that you consolidate your eating to a certain window of time so that you put yourself into a "fasted" state for 16-20 hours per day. Being in a fasted state longer than 8 hours has many benefits such as lowering insulin levels, and increasing leptin and glucagon which all aids in fat burning as well as increases in natural growth hormone and testosterone (in men only) which helps build muscle. IF however isn't a miracle method to lose weight and build muscle but it will aid in weight loss and muscle gain with proper nutrition and exercise. The other benefit to IF is that it can give you more flexibility with your eating schedule and more time to do things other than cook or prepare food 3 or more times a day.  There are three methods to go about IF the first is a 16 hour fast with an eight hour eating window. This is probably the most popular method that people use because with the 8 hour eating window you can have two meals that are slightly larger than if you were eating 3 meals a day (still within your caloric limit though). The second is a 20 hour fast with a 4 hour eating window where you have 1 large meal with a few small snacks during your 4 hour window to meat your caloric goal.  The last method of IF is where you eat normally 3 meals a day and 1 or 2 days a week (max) you do a full 24 hour fast. So if you had dinner at 7pm on Thursday you wouldn't eat until 7pm Friday.

The method of  IF I chose to do is the 20-4 split. This provided me with lots of extra time not having to make breakfast and lunch, and since I was skipping my lunch at work I could more carefully monitor my nutrition at home where I was making everything. The other benefit for me in going to this method/schedule of eating is I like to eat a bunch of food and this provides me the ability to eat one big meal that leaves me feeling full. Eating three small meals a day was very difficult for me because it always felt like they would never fill me up and I would wind up snacking on things sometimes because I didn't feel full. It took me a little while to get used to the new schedule of eating once a day. After about a week I became accustomed to the new schedule, but that first week was a little bit hard when I still got my normal hunger cravings at the times when I used to eat. To get through the first week I made sure to drink lots of water to help keep my stomach full during the day. With this new schedule of eating I was able to get my food intake more under my control and it was a big help in getting back on track to weight loss. If these benefits look like they would help with your particular schedule or eating habits I would recommend looking into IF to see if it would be a good fit for you.

Overworking and changing to Diet/Workout v3.0

Around May of 2012 I started to feel a bit off. I noticed that I had a lack of energy. I also was getting hunger cravings all the time that were astonishingly hard to resist. Along with these problems I also noticed that I was having troubles during my workouts as well. During many exercises I was having trouble completing the same number of reps that I had normally been doing, as well as maintaining the same amount of weight with those exercises. At this time I was very perplexed as to what was going on and went back to researching things to try and figure out why I was having these difficulties with my diet and exercise. After much reading I realized I was having trouble because I was overworking myself due to a combination of an inadequate diet and too much exercise for my current fitness level.

At the time I was doing a 1500 calorie per day diet and working out 5 days a week. In my diet I wasn't bothering to track my carbs, protein, or fat intake. After all the reading I did I realized I was being too aggressive with my diet. With my BMR being around 2100 I realized that cutting 600 calories a day along with working out was too much. By cutting this many calories while on a routine workout schedule I was over a long period of time causing myself to be malnourished, thus causing my hunger cravings and muscle fatigue. I was also working out 5 days a week doing 1 muscle groups and 40-60 minutes of cardio. This workout routine was a bit excessive for my diet and fitness level as it aided in causing myself to be overworked and malnourished. When you have too aggressive of a diet and workout like this, eventually the glycogen in your muscles is constantly depleted. Glycogen is the energy our bodies burn first before it pulls from other sources like fat for energy. When you are constantly working out in a state like this it will burn fat but after extended periods of time the fat stores aren't enough to keep up and you start to burn muscle for energy as well. This is what happens when you are slowly starving yourself, which with my combination of diet and workout routine I was doing.

To combat the cause of this fatigue and hunger I decided to change up my diet to v3.0. After much reading about eating correctly I decided to make several changes this go around on my diet. To help make sure I am getting most of the vitamins and minerals I need I decided to start taking a mens multi vitamin and an omega 3 fish oil pill. Since on most diets you are eating less it is an easy way to help make sure you are getting all your vitamins and minerals. Along with adding the vitamins I lowered my caloric deficit from 600 calories to 300 calories. So from my 2100 calorie BMR I was aiming for my daily intake to be at right around 1800 calories instead of the previous 1500. Eating just these 300 more calories made a big difference so that I was not slowly starving myself. I also took a closer look at how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat were important for helping to balance your diet with working out. The biggest thing I noticed was that with all of the working out I was doing I needed to be eating lots more protein. I wanted to lose fat weight, but not muscle. So I used  a pretty generic, but popular, method to estimate how much protein a person should eat to help build muscle which is 1 gram of protein for every 1lb you weigh. This would put me needing around 200 grams to help aide in maintaining and building muscle, previously I had only been getting maybe 100 - 150 grams a day. As an easy way to get my additional protein I started buying whey protein. All that whey protein is is a byproduct from the process of making cheese.

This is not my workout but it is actually pretty close to my schedule.

Along with changing my diet I decided to change my workout to v3.0 also. To help combat my overworking and fatigue I decided to cut back my cardio time. Previously I had been doing cardio on all 5 of my workout days, anywhere from 40-60 minutes. I decided to lower my cardio times by half which put it at 20-30 minutes. In all my reading I learned that too long of cardio sessions can cause loss of muscle, which is why professional distance runners look so skinny. I also decided to consolidate my workouts into 4 days a week rather than 5. I wound up doing 3 days with 2 muscle groups and a short cardio session and 1 day with core and a long cardio session. This wound up being roughly the same amount of weight lifting each week but provided me with much shorter cardio sessions and 1 more rest day.

A couple weeks after I made these changes I was getting very positive results. I no longer was getting uncontrollable hunger cravings, since I had stopped slowly starving myself with my diet. In beefing up my diet and cutting back on my workout a little I also began to see a decrease in my muscle fatigue. I was able to slowly get back to my previous amount of weight and reps and start progressing again. Make sure if you are dieting and working out that you plan your diet and workout to work together rather than against each other like mine were.

Plateau 2 and Workout v2.0

In February of 2012 I had run into another of the dreaded plateaus that happens during weight loss. I had been sitting at the same weight of 230 lbs for quite some time with this particular plateau. If you have read my previous post about my first plateau you would know that the cause of that plateau was because my diet was quite lacking in direction and discipline. To overcome that plateau I did get my diet in line and set specific caloric goals that got me back to losing weight. This plateau however had a different culprit that eluded me for a while. I knew my diet was good and that I was at a sufficient caloric deficit, so I was fairly certain that my diet wasn't the cause and went back to researching other possible causes. After reading several articles about how to get over weight loss plateaus I realized that my workouts had become stagnant. I had been using the same amount of weight with the same amount of reps for quite some time and my workouts were not pushing me enough to induce weight loss.

My workout had been the same routine now for several months. I would go to the gym and use the same exercises on the same days (which isn't necessarily bad) with the same amount of weights and the same number of reps. I was in a set routine and my body was too used to that particular workload. When you don't push yourself your body isn't forced to react to overcome the situation and if your body isn't reacting to overcome the situation it means you won't lose fat or build additional muscle.

I started to figure out what I needed to change to swap my workout to v2.0 so that I could overcome this plateau. There are several ways you can change up your workout to make your body work harder. One of the ways you can accomplish increasing your workout intensity is by changing which exercises you are doing. Even if the exercises are ones that workout the same muscle groups, sometimes the slight variation is enough to cause your body to react and start the process of fat loss or muscle growth again. The second way, instead of changing exercises, is to add additional exercises or increase the number of repetitions in your exercises. If you have been using 30 lbs for curls and doing four sets of ten start trying to do four sets of twelve or more if you can handle it. Or if you have been only doing one bicep exercises try doing two or three types of bicep exercises. Obviously this will be more total work and help increase your workout intensity. The third way is to lift heavier weights. Again in the example of the curls if you are currently doing 30 lbs for four sets of 10 instead try doing it with 35 lbs. The last and fourth way to increase your workout intensity is to decrease your rest time between exercises. This will help keep your heart rate up and will cause your cardio vascular system to work harder.

What I decided to do with my workout was to implement a couple of these options to bring up the intensity of my workouts. For starters I changed the types of exercises I was doing. I had predominantly been doing most of my exercises on the weight machines and changed over to doing stuff with free weights. This helped to vary how my muscles were being used. I also added a couple additional exercises to each of my muscle groups. This was a big help in increasing my intensity in my workouts. Lastly I also decided to try to keep my rest periods between workouts shorter. I also decided on a system that I would start for all my new exercises to ensure my intensity would keep increasing in the future as well. On pretty much all of my exercises I would do four sets of eight reps and continue to increase my number of reps until at that specific weight I could do four sets of ten to twelve reps. Once I could achieve this I would use a heavier weight and start back at 4 sets of eight and work my way up again.

All of these small changes added up to big results because I wound up overcoming this plateau and continuing down the path to weight loss and muscle growth. So if you find yourself hitting a plateau either in your weight loss or your muscle growth, remember that your workout might be suffering from stagnation. If your workout is stagnant you will need to revise it to ensure you are keeping the intensity of your workouts high to keep you on track.

Injuring My Back

Sometime around April of 2012 I had a sudden and devastating injury take place. I was doing my super set routine that I use for my shoulder exercises. I don't use max weight but I do five exercises in a row to complete one set and do a total of 4 sets. On this particular day I was on my fourth and last set and the second from the last exercise I felt a little bit of discomfort and ignored it. I thought to myself "Ehh, I just have one last set then I will be done", and proceeded with my last shoulder exercise. Almost at the end of the set is when it happened I got a sharp pain in what felt like the muscle between my shoulder blade and spine. At first I thought I might have partially torn the muscle the pain was so bad, I came to find out later that it was a pinched a nerve in between some vertebrae in my spine.

This injury was severe enough that I couldn't do anything for the next two weeks because any movement would cause me a great deal of  irritation and pain. After two weeks I finally was well enough that I did cardio for a couple weeks until I finished recuperating enough to go back to doing light weights. Grand total it was 4 weeks before I was able to get back to weight lifting with light amounts and 6 weeks before I was able to  go back to lifting as heavy as I was before the injury. And this all occurred because I ignored my body's signals saying something wasn't quite right.

In retrospect this really was a minor injury in comparison to what other dangerous things could potentially happen and it also turned out to be a valuable learning experience. Now if anything at all is feeling weird or I don't feel 100%  I skip the exercise or even stop my workout completely and wait for the next workout. It is important to make sure and continue to push yourself and try for new personal bests all the time by upping your weights, however not so important to warrant injuring yourself. Injuries are never fun and if you do wind up injuring yourself you will only be setting yourself back from all the progress you have made. So don't be like me and ignore the signals your body gives you, listen to them and take it easy or even stop your workout so you don't injure yourself.

After injuring myself and having to deal with the recovery and setting myself back in my progress I became interested in ways to help myself avoid injuring myself again. At this point I took a good look into how I lift weights to make sure I was using correct form. Having correct form in weight lifting is very important. Good form is important for two reason. The first is that it will help you avoid injury and the second is that with correct form you better exercise the target muscle you are trying to build.

There are many good ways to learn correct form for lifting weights. In particular I went to YouTube and started watching numerous short videos about correct form when doing different weight lifting exercises. Another good way is to get a personal trainer for a couple sessions to help show you the exercises and the correct ways to do them. If you can't afford a trainer you can also ask some of the people at your gym for advice. I know I picked up a few pointers from some of the guys that went to my gym that turned out to be very useful. Once you have learned correct form for weight lifting that also serves as a good indication if the weight you are trying to lift is too much or not. If you can't do the exercise with correct form you are using too much weight for that particular muscle group and you will be increasing your risk of injury. If this is the case make sure to lower your weight until you can do these exercises with correct form. Remember guys pushing yourself to new limits and continuously progressing is important but not at the expense of injuring yourself. So if you are hesitant about your condition for that exercise or workout take it easy or stop for the day.

If you do wind up with the unfortunate injury and it seems fairly serious don't try to tough it out for a long time before you get help. Get yourself in to see a Dr., chiropractor, physical therapist or some other form of a medical professional to get it checked out(depending on the injury). More often than not they can give you some easy to follow directions on how to help yourself heal faster and more completely from an injury, however let's hope that you don't ever get injured in the first place.

Plateau 1 and Diet v2.0

When you have a lot of extra weight like I did that you can lose you will more than likely run into a plateau for losing weight. When this happens you will get stuck at a particular weight for a while and it will seem like the results aren't as good if you are strictly going by the weight on the scale. For lots of people this can wind up being very frustrating and sometimes they might even give up on their workouts and diet, this FYI is the wrong move.

In November of 2011 I had hit such a plateau. I got down to 245 lbs, from 270 lbs since I had started, and then the weight just seemed to stop coming off. When you hit a plateau  (which you most likely will unless you have super genes for losing weight and building muscle) make sure to not let it get you down. When you reach a plateau make sure to realize there are many reasons for it and also several things you can do to get back on track. Hitting a plateau is one of the biggest reasons you need to track your success via multiple styles, when the number on the scale stops dropping you often still notice a difference in pictures and how your clothes fit better.

First off I will go over a few of the reasons why we have plateaus in our weight loss as we get in shape. If you were like me and pretty badly out of shape your lean muscle mass will have been pretty low. Shortly before this I had finally started lifting heavy to promote building muscle since I had gotten healthy enough to do so by building my base strength. Right off the bat when you start doing heavy lifting you will build up quite a bit of muscle in a short amount of time before it tapers off. This muscle you are building weighs more than fat per volume of space, which will make it seem like you are not losing weight. On the contrary, you will still be losing weight in fat loss which you will notice in pictures but not on the scale. Another reason you might run into a plateau is because your workout has become stagnant. What I mean by this that you get into a set routine and just go to the gym and lift the same amount of weight for the same amount of reps with the same types of exercises. If this happens your body will become too accustomed to the amount of work you are doing and it will wind up being too easy of a work out.  The last thing that will make us plateau is not being careful with your diet (this is what caused my plateau). If you are badly out of shape like I was when you first start working out you can have a pretty wimpy diet and still see lots of weight loss right off the bat. The reason for this is because you haven't worked out in so long your body will react highly and you will burn a lot of fat. After this initial fat burn your weight loss will slow down as your body grows more accustomed to working out, which is where your diet will come into play to make the big difference. My beginning diet was pretty lackluster and it was causing me to slow way down in my weight loss.

To help me get back on track after seeing how my weight loss had been stuck for about a month I decided I better have a second look at my diet and wound up starting Diet v2.0. If you recall, I had been shooting for around 2250 calories per day, eating 3 meals, and cutting out junk food and that was the extent of my diet. After doing some looking I figured I should find an actual number of calories that would apply to me and my weight loss efforts. First off I didn't know how many calories I should have daily just to operate normally so I went about figuring that out. In doing this I found out about your BMR (Base Metabolic Rate) or also sometimes called RMR (Rested Metabolic Rate). Your BMR is how many calories you burn just to stay alive, even if you were to lie around all day you would burn these calories. This is caused by all the functions your body performs naturally like breathing, blood circulation, thinking, digestion and all of your other vital bodily functions. Just check out a BMR calculator and plug in a couple numbers and you can find this out very quickly. My BMR turned out to be 2100 calories. To successfully facilitate weight loss you need to be in a caloric deficit from your BMR (eating less calories than you burn normally throughout the day). Most dietitians recommend to subtract 3-500 calories from your BMR to steadily and healthily lose weight. I changed my diet and decided to do 1500 calories per day, so 3 meals at 500 calories each (this was a bit too aggressive of a caloric reduction as you will see in a later article - don't be stupid like me listen to the safe amount). After I changed my diet and was making sure to be at a caloric deficit my weight loss got back into action.

Other than tightening up on your diet to get back on track after hitting a plateau you can also change up your workout.  Like I had mentioned earlier if you think you might be hitting a plateau because you have let your workout become stagnant step it up a notch. Start making sure to up your weight to push yourself harder with heavier weights or if you want to stay at the same weight for a bit longer add more reps to all of your exercises. If you get on the treadmill and typically run at 5 miles an hour for 20 minutes bump it up to 5.5 miles an hour for 20 minutes. This will help you spur your body into having to react to overcome these new challenges and it in turn will respond by building more muscle and burning more fat. If we don't push our bodies they won't react, but when we do push our bodies we get great results.

So, make sure to mix it up with either your diet or your workout if you wind up hitting a plateau and you will soon start seeing positive results again. Remember if you give up once you hit a weight loss plateau you will never get results, so instead continue on and it will be a bit tougher but you will wind up reaching even greater heights in your fitness success.

Starting my Heavy Lifting v1.0

After a couple months of just working on increasing my base strength at home I went and signed up for a gym! The gym we had available that was affordable was Planet fitness so that was where we went. Planet Fitness isn't the most killer of gyms but they did have all the equipment you could need to do all of the different exercises. It fit our needs just fine. After I started at Planet Fitness I continued to do lower weights with higher reps on the machines for a while to continue to build my strength up to be ready for some hard workouts. In August of 2011 I decided to finally start doing free weights and go to a workout routine that was heavy weight lower reps to start working towards building muscle.

When I started to go about changing my routine I looked up a few pointers online to try and get started in the right direction. After doing a little research I decided to go for a routine where the amount of weight was just enough that I could barely finish 4 sets of 8 reps. Now that I look back on it most of the weights I was doing were probably somewhere around 70% of what I could do for a 1 rep max (as much weight as you can possibly do only being able to complete 1 rep). My goals were to continue with that weight until I could do 4 sets of 10. Once I could do 4 sets of 10 then I would up my weight a little bit so that it was hard to do 4 sets of 8 again and work my way back up. Make sure that once you can do 4 sets of 10 to do it 2 or 3 times in a row to make sure you can get repeat results. This will help make sure you don't go upping your weight too fast. I had to learn this the hard way as you will learn later on in another post about how I wound up injuring my back. If you are unsure about starting heavy lifting by yourself ask pointers from people in your gym, do some research on the internet or take a class or two to get tips from a personal trainer.

When you go about doing weight training like this to build muscle make sure you try to exercise all the different muscle groups. It is important to exercise all your muscles and build total body strength because it will make you more healthy and you also want to avoid causing imbalances in your physique. Some problems can occur if you cause imbalances in your physique. For instance if you do lots of shoulder exercises but never work your rear shoulder it can cause problems in the way your shoulder joint moves since there is an imbalance in the muscle strength in the front and back of the joint. To avoid problems like this make sure to do plenty of research to get a good complete workout for all your muscle groups. Getting a complete workout will ensure that your muscles build up equally and you will build a better overall complete strength. Also the more muscles you work out means the more lean muscle you will be building throughout your body, this will assist in raising your BMR (Base Metabollic Rate) and helping you to lose weight faster.

Also for the girls out there don't be afraid of lifting weights. I can assure you that you will not look like the crazy bulky body builder chicks that everyone so dreads. First of all it is impossible for women to look like that naturally. To do that they train 5-7 days a week on a pro body builder schedule (3-4 hours a day or more) and secondly and most important they take hormones such as testosterone (male hormones) and supplements to force their muscles to grow like that. If you are a typical fitness girl that goes to the gym 3-4 times a week and lifts some weights you will become toned and curvy, develop a nice booty, and feel more energetic. You will wind up looking like the girl below. So guys and girls make sure to get out there and after you have rebuilt your base strength start pushing yourself and lift some heavier weights to build muscle!!

My Bad Knee.

When I first started working out to get back into shape my right knee was very bad. It was so bad that when I tried to run I was at the risk of hyper extending it backwards. In fact one time when I was playing baseball with my friends it did just that to a minor degree. For a few days it was very sore. It also made me apprehensive to try and stand on just my right leg for fear of it bending backwards. The joint was very sloppy, it caused me pain whenever I tried to move weight with it, and it was much weaker than my left leg (I am right side dominant).

This was a big concern for me as I was starting to do weights. I knew that I had to strengthen it and slowly work it out to get it back to being healthy. Even after starting to do heavy weights on my upper body I was still slowly working on my right leg. For gradual progress I did very light weight and a medium amount of reps. I continued to do my leg exercises but made sure to take it easy with very low weight on the exercises that aggravated it the most. During this recuperation period I made sure to pay very close attention to the aggravation and the pain. If anything at all felt more aggravated than normal I would take additional breaks and do less reps. If it was too much still I would lower the weights even more. If my knee just wasn't feeling up to it sometimes I even had to take a week or two off from doing a particular exercise to let it recuperate. 

I had to baby my leg along for months but eventually It started getting stronger and having less pain. As the pain gradually got less I would slowly add additional reps first and once I could do more reps I would bump up the weight a little bit. I would rinse and repeat doing more reps up till I could do 15 - 20 reps then up the weight again. I would say it probably took me about 8 to 10 months of this slow progression till my knee started to feel much better and became stronger. After about a year and a half I would say my knee was back to 100% strength and all the pain was gone. It took me a long time but the functionality and strength in my right knee returned. At this point I could stand on my right leg and it would crisply lock into position without me having to worry about it hyper extending because it was so bad. I was then able to get in the gym and start doing some serious leg workouts with squats and leg press.

So if you guys, like me, have certain body parts that ache or are bad make sure you still work them out. Even though it may hurt a little these are the most important places to workout to make sure you get completely healthy again. So when you start don't ignore them, instead start with really low weight and reps and make sure to be very careful as you work them. If you are not sure what to do yourself I would highly recommend talking to a physician or a physical therapist to get advice on what to do and what exercises to use. Also they can give you advice on what to avoid or take easy as well until it starts to heal. And when you start to workout these body parts make sure to be attentive to pain and don't over do it. Injuring yourself further will only set you backwards in your progress.  So make sure to strengthen your weak body parts and be careful while you do it!

Beginning my Diet v1.0

As I got started into the fitness portion of things on my way back to getting healthy, I also decided to start taking a look at my diet and doing something about it. All I knew for sure was that I definitely ate way to much and that I needed to do a bit of analysis on my diet and change what I was doing for my food intake. The first place I started was to try and figure out how many calories I was eating on a typical day. I went online and started looking up all sorts of calorie information on foods I was eating. After a bunch of meticulous searching for caloric information I found out that depending on how much junk food I was having during the day along with the regular meals I was consuming anywhere from 3500 - 5000 calories. When I realized this I was absolutely shocked. It never occurred to me that I was eating such an exorbitant amount of calories per day. Food I ate that contributed highly to this were things like greasy foods such as burgers, fried chicken, and french fries or lots of soda and juice or lots of junk food like cookies, cheesecake, and ice cream. All these high calorie foods along with the fact that I love to eat and eat large quantities was a bad recipe for me putting on weight.

Along with eating way too many calories throughout the course of a day I also had a couple of other bad habits that needed changed. For one I often would eat my dinners very late at night right before I went to bed. This is another very detrimental thing to do if you don't want to put on weight. Eating right before you go to bed will cause the food when it is digested to more actively go towards fat storage because you are using minimal amounts of calories while you sleep. I would also get up and have midnight snacks which is another big no no because it will also cause the same results of additional storage of calories to fat.

After figuring out how many calories I was taking in in a day I decided to change it up. I didn't do anything too crazy as far as investigating diets (I do later on as I progressed with my fitness and diets) or figuring out how many calories exactly I should have, but I did decide to aim for 3 meals a day at 750 calories each for a total of 2250 calories. The second thing I wanted to focus on was to get rid of all my snacking on junk food and to swap from drinking soda and juice to just drinking water. The last thing I decided to change about my eating habits was no more late night meals right before bed and no more midnight snacks. I figured this would at least be a step in the right direction for starting towards a more healthy lifestyle in my eating habits.


I had tried earlier in life to do some extreme type diets that I wound up failing, so this time around I decided to try an take things at a slower pace since this was going to be a permanent change for me. The benefits of starting gradually and working your way to a more strict diet are numerous. First by starting off with something that you can handle easier in the beginning you will be less likely to cheat on it. Also I didn't really eliminate any foods my diet but was focusing on much less overall calories which made it easier for me since I could still eat things when I had cravings for certain foods. Being able to eat any food also helped me not want to cheat. I would eventually go on to much stricter diets and watching specific things like carbs, protein and fat consumption but for now I started off easy. The other benefits of starting off gradual with your diet is as you begin to lose weight you will probably eventually run in to the ever dreaded plateau where weight loss will slow down for a while because your body is becoming accustomed to your diet and workout schedule. When you plateau this is a good point in which you can tighten up your diet some more to help bolster your weight loss again.

So when you are starting off remember that no matter who you are you can't out exercise a bad diet. You have to get your eating under control and be careful about what you eat. If you do you will have much better results and become healthier faster. If you want go ahead and start slow to make it easier on yourself so you will be less likely to cheat and quit your diet, but remember you eventually need to get it to where you are eating balanced and at a caloric deficit (I'll cover this later on in Diet v2.0).

Rebuilding my strength

Back when I began figuring out what to do for my workout routine I had an eye opening experience about my health. When I first got started I was just doing some stuff like push ups and sit ups and light body resistance type exercises. Then I decided to brave the world of cardio because I knew that it would be effective in helping to shed pounds faster. It was an unbelievably nice day out when I decided to start so I threw on my old gym shoes and was going for a jog. I figured I'd make a lap around my neighborhood and see how it went. I did a couple light stretches and rushed out the house and started down the side of the road. After maybe 2000 feet I was already completely out of breath and had a side ache and had to stop to rest. I sat there for a few minutes and still couldn't hardly catch my breath, so I started walking back to the apartment. By the time I got back to the apartment by walking I was again completely out of breath, so much so in fact that I was getting dizzy and had to lay down on the sidewalk. It was at this point I realized a cold hard truth that I was terribly out of shape. Just because I used to run lines in basketball in high school doesn't mean that after 8 years of not working out I'll be able to jump right back into it at a full speed.

After this incident I watched several YouTube videos trying to educate myself about methods for getting back into working out. After watching these videos (as well as my jogging incident) I learned the importance of needing to rebuild your base strength when getting started after having not worked out in a long time. You can't expect to do things like intense cardio or a heavy lifting weight routine if you are starting from being horribly out of shape like I was. I then realized that it was going to take me some time to build up enough stamina and base muscle strength to get to the point where I could work out like I envisioned.

I accepted the fact that I needed to take it slow at first and get back to where I was healthy enough to be able to push hard. I then started instead of jogging to walk on a treadmill with a slight incline for 3 sets of 10 minute intervals. I would gradually increase my speed or incline a little bit as I got better. Pretty soon I was able to do 1 30 minute session of an inclined walk. For my weight lifting I did lots of reps with low weight to all my muscle groups. By doing low weight with high reps this will help your muscles become accustomed to being active and it will prepare yourself for when you start upping your workout. If you do start at a gym using the weight machines is an excellent way to start off. The weight machines give a slight mechanical advantage for starting out easy as well as helping you learn good form. If you try to lift too much too quickly you run a very high risk of hurting yourself. After about a month at home working on rebuilding my base strength I signed up for the gym (now that I didn't feel completely embarrassed about my lack of fitness). I then started to slowly increase my weight while lifting and my intensity during my cardio.

Remember folks getting started and doing your workout and sticking to it is important. But please understand the importance of rebuilding your base strength. If you haven't worked out in a long time like I had you will want to build your stamina and strength back to a point where you can start to work hard again. If you don't you will run the risk of injuring yourself and setting yourself even further behind in your quest to get healthy. Besides hurting yourself physically you might also hurt your pride. I know I did and it makes it hard to continue on when you see how bad it is. So start off consistent and with a real expectation of what you are capable of with your current health. In no time flat you will regain your stamina and be able to push harder!!

Finding motivation and starting

Getting myself motivated was one of the hardest parts to getting started. It is also the most important factor when starting down the path towards regaining your health. Looking at the road ahead can be daunting and seem like your goals are so far away. The good part though is that your goals are attainable and you can get there. You just have to find your motivation and keep it to overcome the that initial speed bump of doubt.



For me a big part of becoming motivated was that I had recently just watched Expendables. I saw this movie and was amazed at all these old action actors that still look burly. For instance Sylvester Stallone is in his mid 60's and he is still in great shape and pumping out action movies. This really spurred me to want to be in great shape even into my later years in life and I set that as a goal of mine. Another big thing I used for motivation was that I would visualize a clear image in my head of what I wanted to look like when I reach my goal. In particular I visualize myself  getting a 6pack, the slim indents on my hips, and the "V" shape of my upper body from my back muscles. Setting realistic attainable goals is an excellent way to get motivated and to help keep you motivated. These are some good long term goals that I had set. It is also good to keep some goals that are short term. When I started my short term realistic goal was to lose 1 pound per week. These are important because it helps you focus on the small successes.


Another way to help build my motivation was what I like to call the "Nike" method, get out there and JUST DO IT!! It really does sound cliche but it is an amazing help. Getting started is the hard part, a lot of times you just need to grit your teeth and jump into action. After you get past that initial mental road block of getting started motivation winds up naturally coming to you as you do your workout. I know for a fact when I didn't want to work out but did it anyways I always felt great about it after I was done, never once did I regret it.


For me another big thing that helped in getting started was the fact that I came to the realization that I wanted to get back in shape and not ever fall back into being unhealthy again. This for me was going to be a lifestyle change. If I had approached it with the attitude that I would diet and lose some weight and then stop once I hit my mark I would have fell victim again to failure. A couple of times I had used extreme diets to lose weight, however when I stopped because I had lost the weight it would get put right back on. If you can shoot for a lifestyle change, rather than a quick fix diet, that is how you will best get results and keep them.

Despite what you see on TV there are no "shortcuts", miracle drugs, or gimmick diets that are going to get you results and keep you that way. It all boils down to hard work and being determined to eat healthy consistently. The best thing about fitness though is once you can wrap your head around the fact that you will have to put in some effort and use a little will power with your diet is that ANYONE can get healthy again.

The last method I employed to help keep me motivated was to keep track of my success. This gives you a good way to remember just how far you have come and allows you to celebrate your progress. It is much better to look at the road you have traveled and the progress you have made than to worry about the road that lies ahead and how long it will take for you to get there. In keeping track of your success using multiple methods is always best. The scale isn't always the most accurate way to keep track of how well you are really doing. The scale can give you a good indication of your weight loss but it can be misleading when you are getting stronger and putting on weight from building muscle. I still use it but I look at other methods as well. My favorite is taking pictures it gives an awesome visual of the progress you have made and how much healthier you look (and sexier ^_^ lol). Another good thing to notice when you are taking pictures is how much bigger the smile on your face will be as you get towards your goal!! I also like to take note of how my pants and shirts fit. It is fantastic to see your clothes size dropping and feels good when you go buy new slim clothes.

Intro to GFN author Karl Keim

Hello my name is Karl Keim. I am the author and writer of Geek Fitness Network. I decided to make this blog to help provide a means for people to come to the understanding that it is possible to be a "Geek" and be healthy and in shape. I know for a lot of people out there feel like it is an overwhelming task and that it just isn't possible, well I'm here to show you that I'm living proof (as well as many others) and that it is possible.

Growing up I always preferred doing the dorky things like playing video games or working on computers. I did however do lots of sports growing up as a kid and was very active pretty much year round. When I was in middle school I did wrestling and baseball. In Junior High I did baseball and basketball and Karate. During my high school years I did basketball and baseball. All the sports that I did along with the fact that I was still growing made it so I was able to overlook the fact that my eating habits were horrible. For the most part during my younger years I was in pretty good shape and only ever had a little bit of belly fat. At the end of my senior year I was 195 pounds.

After high school I went off to college. At college I was more content to just sit around and play games, watch anime and TV because I was no longer involved with any sports teams. Shortly after I started college I had a overwhelming life crisis that put me into a depression which only further stemmed my inactivity. This is where my lack of a good diet started to wreak havoc. I didn't know what I wanted to do so I quit going to college and started working at a job in retail. My retail job was a desk job where I sat and processed paperwork to order product for customers. I worked at this job for four years and then finally decided what career path I wanted to do and went back to college to get an associates degree in Information Technology. At this point in time is when I started to have a real concern about my health because I was at that time 270 pounds.I was also having all sorts of physical problems like my right knee was very weak and hurt me, being short of breath, low energy levels and even things like bending over to tie my shoes was noticeably difficult. Shortly after I started to be concerned about getting my health back. It wasn't too long until one morning I had an epiphany and realized something needed to quickly change. I decided to jump in to the fitness thing whether it was sink or swim. I am quite the stubborn bastard so by god I was going to swim!!

  

This is when I started my trek to get in shape. I didn't know anything about fitness or nutrition but that didn't matter I was going to do it. I knew from all my hard work in sports from my younger years that if you move you'll get in shape. I scrounged together with a buddy and found some rusty dumbbells and a workout bench and a old treadmill and went to work. As far as nutrition I didn't know anything other than I should eat less food so I aimed to have smaller portions in my meals and overall eat less.

All of the subsequent posts regarding my transformation will be about how I went through the trials and tribulations of getting healthy. I will go over the things I tried along the way and what worked and what didn't. These days there is a lot of information about ways to get healthy and lose fat and be in shape, some of it works and some of it doesn't. I am writing my story to try and clear up what people should expect, failures I had that you can avoid, and the methods that led to me finding success.

At the end of my story you will be able to see how I went from being 270 pounds, out of shape and physically deteriorating  in May of 2011 back to being fit and healthy at 198 pounds where I am at today. And I managed to accomplish this while keeping true to being an astounding geek and aiming for a path in an IT career!

I managed to make my fitness work even though I work in the IT industry at a desk all day. I am currently progressing in a career aimed at network and windows administration. As most of you can figure this entails lots of sitting in front of computer screens and not much in the way of physical activity. When I get home I also enjoy playing several computer and console games in my free time. In addition to gaming I have a slew of other numerous geeky activities such as reading manga, watching anime, playing trading card games, watching TV, and going to the movie theater. The only physical hobbies I currently enjoy, besides getting fit at the gym, are playing disc golf and baseball from time to time.