Lifestyle Motivation

Disclaimer: I haven't posted anything in a long time, so this is going to be a long one.

I like to exercise. I like training more than playing sports. I didn't realize that until roughly the second or third club football practice I went to in college. Up until that point I had operated under the delusion that I was a football player/athlete who enjoyed competition with other people. Then I had an epiphany.

I prefer competing with myself.

Maybe that is because I am an only child and I was always competing with myself with hardly any local kids around in the rural part of South Carolina I grew up in. Maybe it is because I am my own worst critic and always got anxiety when I let teammates down. Either way, I'd rather go to the gym than play a game. Exercise IS how I play. I love the routine. The structure. The progress. (Side note: I don't know how to lift weights without a training log. How am I supposed to know where I'm going if I don't know where I have been?)

I wore "husky" pants as a kid. I was always at least in the 85th percentile in weight growing up, usually over 90th. I remember being a 5'6" 170 lbs. eighth-grader with a 38-inch waistline. I remember my dad dragging me to 8 am football workouts the whole summer prior to 9th grade (even though I wanted to go at 4 pm because summer storms would likely limit the amount of sprints we could do outside. I also liked to sleep in).

So glad he did that.

I remember weighing 145 lbs. at the end of that summer. Football was fine too, I guess, but I made far bigger gains in the weight room than I ever did on the field.

I remember not being able to bench 95 lbs. as a high school freshman.
I remember how awesome it felt to bench my bodyweight for the first time.
I remember the first time I bench pressed 200 lbs and the first time I benched 300 lbs.

Now I'm trying to get back to 300 lbs. after going through a lot of training ADD over the past couple of years. I tried a lot of different things: two months of bodyweight training, one month of circuits, 8 weeks of total body workouts, 8 weeks of upper/lower splits, etc. Rotating exercise programs provides great variety, and you can make physique improvements, but you're strength numbers in any one particular lift aren't really going to change because you aren't doing it consistently enough to see progress (have to love training specificity...). I also spent what seemed like an eternity in that "hypertrophy" range of 3 sets of 10 repetitions. Again, that might fool the mirror, but Type II muscle fibers don't give a damn about what you look like. They have to be STRESSED.

Along the way though I did discover how awesome "cardio" is when pushing a Prowler across an asphalt parking lot in Columbia, SC in the summer. I understood better what "stability" means when after doing push-ups and chin-ups with gymnastic rings, or while doing a one-legged squat standing on a bench or plyo box.

That being said, it's fun to get back to the basics. Loaded barbells. Heavier weight. Needing a de-load week here and there to recover. Getting used to, and craving, the feeling of delayed onset muscle soreness.

Mentally my motivation for hitting the gym is simple. Don't regress. Be better today than you were yesterday. Also, loving the way you feel is a gift only you can give yourself. Energy, and having it, is a beautiful thing. Lastly, DO NOT join the masses. I saw a recent report stating that by 2030, 42% of Americans will be obese! Not me. I don't care so much for BMI on an individual basis, but when used to observe a large group (such as the population of a country) it is pretty indicative.

I don't even want to be "not fat", or "average". Why in the world would anyone aspire to make a C?

Going hand-in-hand with this is my diet. I am not "on a diet". I am nowhere near as knowledgeable about food as I am on exercise (and I'm no genius at that either), but I think this article is exactly how people should eat and how I eat. Of course, there's room for variation and points of debate with this article, but basically I agree 100% with the message. If it's natural, go for it. If it has a bunch of ingredients (or is battered and slathered), leave it alone, because it's not food. Yes, it's edible, but food is fuel and that processed garbage is poor fuel. I find it ironic people will whine about ethanol gasoline and then use their ethanol-fueled car to dine on a Big Mac, or a doughnut. Or a hot dog. If you think 10% ethanol gasoline is bad, that's liquid gold compared to those "foods".

The funny thing is, when you start eating natural food, you no longer crave the other stuff. I'd rather eat a handful of strawberries any day of the week than a Snickers bar. It's not because I am "supposed" to, it's because I "want" too. There's nothing appetizing to me about pizza. I'll eat a piece or two if I have to, because no one likes an elitist and straying from the "rules" every now and then keeps you sane, but it's never something I crave anymore.

As a "husky" alumni, that's quite the statement.