About Geek Fitness Network

Geek Fitness Network is a blog that I started to try and help fellow geeks and nerds to have a spot where they can go to learn about how it is still possible for anyone to get fit and in shape. If any of you are like me and enjoy doing physically inactive hobbies such as playing video games, watching anime, watching movies at the theater, watching tv shows, and playing card games or even if you work at a desk job all day you know it makes it more challenging to stay in shape. All of these activities or jobs typically don't aide in helping to keep you fit and make it more challenging but that doesn't mean it can't be done. I've come to learn over the past few years that it is still possible to get back in shape and wanted to be able to share some of my experience in this blog so that others might be able to pick up some useful tips. I also wanted to share my experience so that others could learn from some of my mistakes and might be able to avoid them so that they can travel down the road to fitness faster and safer than I did. Along with my personal experiences I wanted to share general tips about fitness and nutrition, as well as post motivational articles to help people find the drive and motivation to pursue their own fitness goals. Lastly to tie in with the whole geek theme I wanted to be able to post a few articles here and there about geeky things I find interesting.

The MY TRANSFORMATION section is where I will discuss all the different things I learned and mistakes I made along the way during my endeavor to get my health back. This section starts from back in May of 2011 when I decided that I had finally had enough of being unhealthy and was going to get back in shape. Throughout the various articles I post in this section I cover the various stages of how my diet and workouts evolved as well as what I did to motivate myself and how I made several mistakes and what I learned from them.

The FITNESS TIPS section I will cover a wide variety of fitness tips from beginner to advanced and it will also cover all sorts of workouts. I wanted to cover from beginner to advanced so that any reader can find something that might be able to help them no matter what level of fitness they are currently at. The workouts will range from simple workouts you can do from home to serious routines that will help you to build muscle at the gym lifting weights.

The NUTRITION TIPS section will cover a wide variety of things including diets, nutrition science, and general recipes that I like that I think are delicious and healthy. There are so many diets to talk about there should be one that could be tailored to meet anybody's lifestyle and requirements. Nutrition Science will have a bit more advanced articles about nutrition to help better build muscle or lose fat.

The GEEK NIGHTLY NEWS or GNN for short will be my section to talk about all things geeky. It has sub sections for video games, anime/manga, tv/movies, technology and a final section for anything else geeky. Posts here will just be about something I found interesting from my geeky hobbies and wanted to write a small blurb about it.

The MOTIVATIONAL section will be devoted to articles that will hopefully be able to help any readers that visit my page to find motivation and determination to pursue their fitness goals. I also have a section for what I call Picture of the Month. These will be a motivational picture with a short post about how I interpreted it and how I think it will be a motivation to the reader. Lastly there will be a section for success stories of fellow geeks who have made an awesome transformation for themselves.

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.

What is Defeat?

Here is the new PotM (picture of the month) that I chose for this go around, Bruce Lee and his quote "What is defeat?". Defeat, or failure, is something that we will all experience during our life times and how we respond to it will have a drastic influence on the outcome of our success in the future.

Before I delve completely into the meaning behind this quote from Bruce Lee I wanted to talk a little about the man himself. Bruce Lee was born in Chinatown, San Francisco on 27 November 1940. His parents moved back to China and he was raised in Kowloon until the age of 18. Bruce Lee then moved to America to go to college and try to make it on his own. To help pay his way in America he started teaching martial arts. He initially learned Wing Chun style in China but went on to develop his own style of martial arts known today as Jeet Kun Do. Bruce Lee is well known for such movies as Enter the Dragon, The Big Boss, and Game of Death. Bruce Lee Died on July 20, 1973 shortly after finishing the the film Game of Death. Though Bruce Lee's life was short, as he died at the age of 32, he accomplished many great things for the world of martial arts and the way westerners viewed people of Asian descent. Undoubtedly Bruce Lee knew very well the harsh taste of defeat in both his martial arts and in his personal life, however he chose to use it rather than be dragged down by it. His philosophy and way of life, I believe, go to show the validity of this statement that he has made about "What is Defeat".

The full statement is "What is Defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.". To me this is about how, in our own lives, we view defeat or failures. Many people, in my experience, think that a defeat or a failure is a bad thing and that it means we can not accomplish what we set out to do. This statement is implying that defeat as a bad thing is completely incorrect, which I agree with 100%. If we let it, defeat or failure will surely get us down and make overcoming things harder because we let it affect our determination and mentality. Instead if we approach defeats or failures like Bruce Lee suggests in his quote as education we can use these and learn from them. If we learn from our defeats and failures instead of letting them overwhelm us we come out the other end of the situation as a wiser and stronger individual (whether that is physically or mentally). This is how we can take these negative situations and turn them into positives to move on towards something better.

I truly believe the greatest people throughout history are people who do exactly this and learn from their defeats and failures and go on to overcome them. As an example take Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln went into bankruptcy twice, failed to get elected multiple times, and the first lady he was engaged to died before they were married. Even with all these trials and hardships throughout his life he wound up becoming one the most influential and remembered US Presidents in history.

Defeat or failure can happen for us numerous ways when it comes to learning how to become fit or lose weight, but remember folks just because you experience a defeat or a failure doesn't mean it is the end of things. Stand up, learn from it, and continue to press on towards completing your goals and dreams!! I hope in the future I will continue to learn from my defeats and that you all will too.

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.