Like all buildings you must start with the foundation first. The integrity of the entire structure relies solely on the foundations and soils below. I don’t care how strong and redundant your framing is, if the foundation is not there the building will collapse and fail. The foundation to this whole process is going to be establishing my diet and exercise plan which I got today. So stinkin psyched to get this ball rolling! Took Gretchen and I about 1.5 hours to go through it. Soooo much stuff! And holy cow… soooo much FOOD! Eek!
The exercise regimen actually doesn’t seem to be too far off from what I have been doing. It’s slightly less reps but more sets. There’s also a lot more unilateral lifts which I haven’t really done before. Apparently this is on purpose so that we can identify if any of my muscle groups are lopsided in terms of strength. Huh… one of those things I never really thought about but will be interesting to find out. She has me on a 3 days on 1 day off schedule. The muscle groups worked are broken down into: legs, back, shoulder/chest/triceps.
She actually completely ex-ed all of my cardio minus 2 HIIT workouts a week. Now you’re talking about a girl who used to do 30-40 mins of cardio everyday. It would be nothing for me to put the treadmill on 11.0 mph (5:42 min mile) and take off for 20-30 mins. So this was a shock to me. Also realized I had no idea what actual HIIT was. She told me it should be 20 seconds of effort and 1:40 minute recovery and that it should take me every bit of the 1:40 to recover and get ready for the next round of effort. I’m super skeptical on this… I feel like I can do just about anything for 20 seconds and not need a whole 1:40 to recover but we shall see. Actually looking forward to testing this out. I mean… she’s talking to someone that has been called the Cardio Queen on more than one occasion.
Now the diet… wow! Luckily I have been on a macro based diet for the past 1.5 years so that’s not entirely new to me, otherwise it would be COMPLETELY overwhelming and intimidating. For those of you that are not familiar with a macro based diet… you don’t count calories, rather you count grams of protein, carbs, fats, and fibers. The calories tend to work themselves out as each one of these macros has a set calorie count (ie – 1g of protein has 4 calories, 1g of fat has 9 calories, etc). Granted the diet I was following only counted protein and carbs so now there are two more moving targets I have to hit. Not only that but the macro goals vary based on training verses rest days and I have to consume a certain amount for breakfast and pre and post workout. Yeah… is your head spinning yet?! Cuz mine definitely is.
All good though… if I can design a building surely I can do some math to come up with a solution that satisfies all four variables… maybe a matrices is in order?! And they said you would never actually use calculus in real life. 🙂
Engineer Builds Body 