This thread’s intention is to describe the health and fitness routines and logs I keep for personal training purposes, and what you can do to become a healthier person (not just lose weight). A little background on me: I’m 23 years old, male, 6’0”, 200 lbs, and I’m training to become a baseball player. When I moved to Seattle 12 months ago, I was about 230 pounds with a high bodyfat percentage – it came with the territory of working from home, eating poorly, and never exercising. Pretty standard stuff, all things told. Sick of being fat (and starting life anew in Seattle), I joined 24-Hour Fitness and started taking the weight loss drug Phentermine. This drug suppresses the hunger signal by switching on your fight-or-flight response. It’s effective, although the side effects are similar to high doses of caffeine – it is, after all, a low-grade amphetamine.
After losing 40 pounds within a few months, I eventually decided to start playing baseball again. What follows are my health and fitness routines for my path to become a stronger, faster, and more fit baseball player.
My Exercises: Becoming a Better Athlete
My exercise plan can be found here:
Not included in this plan are the following exercises:
• Wind sprints (3 times per week as part of a HIIT program)
• Pitcher mirror work (5 days per week)
• Pitching lessons (1 day per week)
• Bullpen – Long Toss – Baseball Skills Workout (1 day per week)
• Stretching, random core work (various throughout week at home and office)
The muscles used in most baseball activities are in the core and the legs – not the arms. When people say “that kid’s got a cannon arm,” it’s really due to his good mechanics, genetic ceiling for velocity, and his strong core/leg muscles. This is really the case in most sports and physical activities – your strength mostly comes from your back, abs, obliques, and legs; your arms are merely stabilizers and initial force levers.
When I’m in the gym, I do my best to get in and out as quickly as possible. The gym is not for socializing – it is for busting your ass to get results. Also, I don’t waste time with exercises that have no practical application in my skill set. These would include, but are not limited to: Triceps extensions, curls, leg extension, and many other machine-based workouts. I want all of my exercises to work out the key muscles I need to succeed on the diamond.
That being said, if the only workouts you do are the full squat, deadlift, and power cleans, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor. These are the three best workouts that work your core, legs, and upper body via stabilizer muscles.
Lastly, even though this exercise log is pretty detailed, you should seek to vary your routines from day-to-day. Sometimes I’ll run 2 miles on the treadmill instead of the elliptical, some days I’ll do push-ups instead of bench press, and sometimes I’ll throw in a few sets of chest fly workouts instead of cable rotation.
My Diet: Adding lean body mass and dropping fat pounds
I use a food timing schedule for eating – which is to say, I do my best to eat 4-6 times throughout the day while restricting myself to 2000 calories. Here’s a sample spreadsheet you can use:
You can also add fields and checkboxes for multivitamins or other supplements that you might be taking. Here’s the list of supplements I am taking, and why:
• General Multivitamin – Good to take these daily, for all people
• Conjugated Linoleic Acid – Has been linked to reduced bodyfat and increased muscle
• Taurine – Free-form amino acid taken because of…
• (unnamed) Thermogenic – This thermogenic raises body temperature and helps burn fat as a result. I will elaborate on this further down.
• ZMA – Zinc/Magnesium/Aspartate. Developed by BALCO (ha, ha); taken at night ZMA can help increase lean body mass, raise testosterone and IGF-1 levels.
• Optimum Nutrition Protein Shake – Fortified with BCAA’s, these help ensure that muscle mass is added and allows for better fat burning.
A thermogenic is a product that will raise your body temperature and increase your metabolic rate. The end result is more calories expended, and hopefully most of it comes from your fat stores. Examples include ephedra/ephedrine (often in combination with caffeine and aspirin – better known as the ECA stack), Xenadrine, and other OTC fat burners that jack up your heart rate. I won’t name the thermogenic I use for both advertising purposes and the fact that it requires a prescription if used on humans, and I’d rather not disseminate that information for potential abuse.
As for general diet rules, I try to stick to lean meats, a good amount of carbs, and low fat products. I have cut out almost all caloric intake for drinks, and drink a fair amount of water throughout the day at work and any physically-intensive environment. Eating multiple small meals throughout the day helps to regulate your insulin levels, and your body can more efficiently use the calories when it is spaced out as such. In doing this, you will lower the amount of calories stored as fat. Hopefully it is obvious to you that eating 2000 calories a day over 5 meals is a lot healthier than 2 large meals from Wendy’s and McDonald’s, so this principle should be easy to grasp. This might be the number one most important part of weight loss – eating a lot of small meals often. The other is developing a good cardio plan and sticking to it.
So, what can you do?
The previous paragraphs mainly illustrate a diet and workout plan for me, who aims to become a better athlete. However, I realize that most of the people interested in this information are white-collar sedentary types with no aspirations to become an athlete – and that’s fine.
Here are some common myths I’ve run into on this board and from the general public (and believed in many of them myself):
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Lift heavy weights for mass, light weights more often for tone. Lifting heavy weights is the best way to maximize your workout in the gym, get your heart rate going, and help your body burn fat. Lifting heavy weights will increase your overall body tone, power, and strength, while multiple reps of lighter weight will only serve to increase endurance. This is not really what you want if you want to lose weight.
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Don’t do resistance training – only do cardio to lose weight. Lifting heavy weights while running a caloric deficit will not only help you lose weight quicker, but will also add to your general lean body mass. Gaining muscle is a good thing – you should not be focused on the scale weight. You should be focused on becoming an overall healthy individual.
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As long as I eat 2000 calories a day, I’ll be fine! Like I said above, you need to eat multiple healthy meals throughout the day (even just a piece of fruit can count as a meal) and get good nutritional value (aided by supplements) to help you lose weight quickly.
Remember at the onset of your decision to lose weight – this will be a lifestyle change, not a single event. You will need to be in the gym three days per week and eating healthy for the rest of your life. A reasonable goal is to lose 1.5 pounds per week. There are 3500 calories per pound of fat, so you need to run a 5250 calorie deficit per week via diet and exercise to achieve this goal. (I don’t recommend eating less than 1700 calories per day.)
To find out your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), you can use a rough calculator found here:
http://health.discovery.com/tools/ca...sal/basal.html
Using the values above, you can see that my BMR is about 2100 calories if I was totally sedentary. This is a good number to use if you basically sit at a desk or play online poker for a living. I shoot to eat 2000 calories per day and burn about 400-750 calories per day in my various workouts, depending on the load. Therefore, I’m running a 3500 calorie deficit per week if you use a value of 500 calories/day, and should expect to lose 1 pound per week. Several things can affect this number, however, including the use of supplements (mainly thermogenics).
Finally, I should say that building lean mass is important for losing weight. Just simply dropping pounds is not good enough – having a goal weight and such is really detrimental to your psychological and mental states. Your weight can vary by 3-7 pounds per day just based on what you’ve eaten, water levels, and time of day. Stick to the plan of becoming an overall healthy individual by gaining muscle and losing fat, and lose sight of the scale. Log all your progress (and failures too – be honest!) in both dieting and exercising, and you’ll see that you can really motivate yourself by sharing this data with others to help keep you on the plan.
Good luck – if you have any questions, feel free to ask. If others are interested, I will start a food/exercise log here or in another forum until The Gym (my proposed forum) is opened for everyone on TwoPlusTwo (check About The Forums for the link and show your support!).