Congratulations!! We have made it through another session of glibfit!! I hope you achieved your goals, or at least learned something!
If anybody is interested in taking the reins for the next round of GlibFit, let me or SP or somebody know. I’m thinking that late March or early April is a good starting point for the next GlibFit, but I don’t really want to lead the next one. Frankly, I’m running out of material.
Happy Thanksgiving and happy GlibFitting from me and Mrs. trshmnstr!!
Okay, this week I get to be a nasty nasty hypocrite. This is all about incorporating fitness into your lifestyle. As somebody who has been bouncing in and out of motivation, I’m in a “do as I say, not as I do” position.
Fitness as some form of torturous summer camp never lasts. Diets, cleanses, purges, bootcamps, and all the other 5 or 10 week challenges (oh wait…) get you only so far as you have established a habit. That means:
1) setting fitness as a priority of your lifestyle. Do things in your daily life that healthy people do, like walking 10,000 steps, like eating natural foods, like getting 30 minutes to an hour of HIIT exercise at least 3 days a week, like keeping track (even if only vaguely) of what you eat, like setting goals and meeting them.
2) adjusting your intensity to your goals. Thrashing between crash diets and binge periods is a great way to gain weight and hate yourself. When you live a goal-based fitness lifestyle, you may increase your intensity at times when you have hard goals, and you may reduce your intensity at times when your goals are less strenuous. When you set realistic goals and match your intensity to those goals, you do less yo-yo’ing and you have more likelihood of maintaining your motivation.
HIIT Workout of the Week
Go pick something from a previous week!
Recipe of the week
CLANK!!!! BHUFF!! CRASH!!!
Oh yeah, there’s a crossfitter throwing weight around like a lunatic. Any bets on how long before his next injury? Oh wait, there it is!
The weight floor is a great piece of people watching if you like to see who cares more about appearances and who cares more about results. Ever see that guy who basically yanks on the barbell, using the momentum to reduce the strain on his muscles? How about that person who locks out their joints to take the strain?
It’s all over the place! Knowing your lifts and using proper form is more efficient and has a much lower likelihood of injury.
Seriously, nobody gives a shit how many plates you have on your bar. Drop weight and do things correctly. Learn the difference between lifting with power and yanking. Learn how to modify your cadence to achieve endurance versus peak strength. Generally, fewer reps and a faster cadence gets you peak strength. More reps and a slower cadence builds endurance.
By the way, women. You won’t get “bulky” by lifting more weight. You’re not a man and you’re not on steroids, so you’re much more likely to get “toned” than to get “bulky”. Seriously. You may see some gains on the scale, but that’s only because you’re replacing loose pillowy fat with dense, lean muscle. The metrics that actually matter (appearance, fitness, and performance) will universally improved when you strength train.
HIIT workout of the week
Read it from the source, here.
Healthy meal of the week
This isn’t actually a meal, but it’s instructions on how to properly cook a healthy food.
Specifically, salmon. People abuse the hell out of salmon and it still tastes half decent. Eventually it’ll get chalky and chewy once you render all the fat out, but you shouldn’t cook it that far.
Once I learned how to properly cook salmon, I realized why half decent isn’t good enough. I’ve essentially ruined restaurant salmon for myself except at nice restaurants. The key, just like almost everything else cooking, is to cook based on temperature rather than time.
We usually get cheap Aldi Atlantic salmon and it tastes better than an overcooked Pacific Sockeye. We should splurge for a good salmon filet and see how it turns out!
Essentially, the method is as follows:
-pat dry before cooking to prevent steaming the fish
-cook the filet on medium-low heat to prevent chalkiness
– cook to 120 before giving a quick sear on the meat side and pulling the fish
I don’t know if this is a common preconception, but before I knew better, I thought interval training was a bunch of bullshit used by soccer moms to avoid the mundane monotony and increased effort of a sustained consistent training pace.
The reality is quite different. Interval training benefits heart health, burns fat efficiently, and has other health benefits. If you’re going to spend time in the gym, you owe it to yourself to get the best results the most efficiently. Nobody wants to put in the effort for so-so results. high intensity interval training gets you better results in less time (granted, you need to exert more effort during the high intensity portion). Double up on the efficiency by combining cardio and strength training, and you’re going to see great results quickly.
HIIT workout of the week
It’s build your own HIIT workout week!!!
Healthy meal of the week
We’ve spent a few weeks talking about food, but that’s only half of the equation. The other half is activity.
Mrs. trshmnstr wants to make sure that priorities are in order when it comes to working out. While the type and the amount and the intensity all matters when you’re trying to hit a goal, the important thing when starting out is to get your body moving on a daily basis. Mrs. trshmnstr recommends 10k steps a day as a goal. If you do nothing else, this will incrementally improve your fitness level.
This is especially important when you’re largely sedentary during the day. I, as an example, spend most of my workday sitting on my ass. Sometimes I use the standing desk to get on my feet, but the most I move in a day is to the pisser and back. Getting a base level of movement into my life improves energy, which improves mood.
It doesn’t take all that much to get to 10,000 steps. I find that I get 3-4k steps as a sedentary person. Add in an evening walk, a couple laps around the office during lunchtime, a trip up and down the stairs instead of the elevator, or a few extra steps from parking at the far end of the parking lot, and you’re getting pretty close to 10k steps.
The great thing about 10k steps as a goal is that most smartphones track steps these days, you don’t need anything except comfortable shoes, and it doesn’t take very long. It’s the perfect first goal for somebody who doesn’t have the time to get into the gym for an hour. You can be on a phone call, you can talk with a coworker, you can spend time with a spouse, you can do quite a few things while walking.
Anyway, enough trying to sell this concept. Seriously, don’t be a lump.
Workout of the week
Complete the following circuit four times, resting 1 minute after jumping rope in each round.
1. Mountain Climbers
Reps: 45
2. Pushups
Reps: 20-30
3. Front Plank
Duration: 1 min.
4. Jump Rope
Duration: 1 min.
(see this and more workouts here: https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/10-hiit-workouts-to-get-you-shredded-for-summer/2-jump-rope-interval-workout/)
Recipe of the week
Shrimp-and-Vegetable summer rolls
Short post this week, because I’ve been traveling and didn’t get far enough ahead on these posts before I left.
The single biggest factor that makes fitness advice a clusterfuck is the fact that different people react differently to the same exact plan.
On a macro (big picture, not macronutrient) level, there are three body types that affect your reaction to fitness plans.
Ectomorph – Ectomorphs are lean and have difficulty building muscle. The word that comes to mind is “scrawny”.
Endomorph – Endomorphs store fat easily and lose it slowly. They’re the big hosses with barrel chests.
Mesomorph – Mesomorphs build muscle easily and have a naturally high metabolism. These are the folks who can get “ripped” easily.
In summarizing a bunch of research that I read, the consensus is that you’re not locked into one category or another. You can be a blend of more than one category, and you can move between categories depending on age, fitness level, and other factors.
For example, when I’m regularly working out 4 or 5 days per week, I keep some of my endomorph tendency to retain fat, but I build muscle easily and do not store additional fat. When I stop working out, I quickly lose my muscle mass and store fat if I even look at food.
What does this have to do with personalizing your plan? It gives you more information about what to do and not do during your fitness plan. Using myself as an example, I’m sensitive to carbs, so my diet plan involves reducing my consumption of sugars and grains. When I keep my total carbs below 75g per day, I tend to lose 1-2lbs per week. Similarly, I know that when I plateau while doing my cardio on an elliptical, a stair stepper will usually break that plateau.
Since it’s a quick week, no recipe or exercise. See y’all next week!
There are about ten thousand different opinions on what to eat after working out. Some are wrong, some are being applied out of scope, and some are mostly right.
One of the most common myths is that you need to eat back your workout. If you’re working out to lose weight, you’re undoing a portion of what you just worked so hard to accomplish when you eat back the calories you just burned in your workout.
NOTE: This topic is a “gray area” according to Mrs. trshmnstr, and the info described here may not be accurate for all workouts and all post-workout meals. Also, it is going through a filter (me) that doesn’t understand this stuff at a very deep level, so I’m liable to screw things up.
When you’re working toward a goal of weight loss, one of the primary purposes of your workout is to create a calorie deficit. The math is simple. Calories in minus calories out equals change in weight. 3500 calories in a pound of fat means that if you have a 500 calorie/day deficit, you’ll lose a pound of fat per week. The complexity comes in determining the calories in and the calories out, but for our purposes this week, all that matters is calories in minus calories out.
There’s a tension at play when you’re working out to lose weight. On one side, if you can eat less than your basal metabolic rate (usually in the 1500-2500 calorie range), any additional calories lost through working out are icing on the cake. If you have a BMR of 2000 calories and you eat 1500 calories per day, you’re losing 1 lb per week. If you also burn off 1000 calories at the gym every day, you go from 1 lb per week to 3 lbs per week.
On the other side of the coin is sustainability. Your body will begin to push back against your abuse if you don’t fuel it properly. When you workout, whether you do cardio or weight work, you are tearing up your muscles, literally. Your body has to repair your muscles with protein. If you’re eating a 1500 cal/day deficit, but your protein is deficient, you’re going to feel miserable, struggle to recover from your workouts, and be prone to injury and illness.
However, factors such as intensity of the workout come into play when determining how much of your workout to eat back. If you’re doing relatively low intensity work, you need less protein than if you’re burning the same number of calories in a high intensity workout.
Personally, I shoot for the fewest amount of calories where I don’t feel my body increasingly drag through a week of working out. It’s not very scientific, and it requires a bit of experimentation, but you want to fuel your body’s regenerative process without undoing your calorie deficit.
For strength training, the calorie deficit isn’t as important, but giving your body the fuel necessary to build muscle is very important. The biggest mistake you can make is to do a strength based workout and not bother to make up for your body’s increased need for protein. There are easy ways to get a quick hit of protein after a workout. Some of the shakes aren’t disgusting. Some of the bars aren’t terrible. You could eat a hard-boiled egg, as an example. You want to ingest a significant amount of protein within 30 minutes of the end of your workout because your body begins repairing your muscles almost immediately after the workout, and you don’t want your body to start tapping into your unused muscles as a protein store.
Personally, I’ve found that it’s a night and day difference between strength training without a protein supplement and with a protein supplement. Fatigue and soreness go from a major issue to a minor annoyance at most when protein is properly administered after a workout.
HIIT workout of the week
Ass kicking treadmill intervals:
3 Min at 2% incline and a slow jogging pace (3.5-4 mph) (“Warmup/Cooldown”)
2 Min at 5% incline and a jogging pace (5.5 mph) (“Jog”)
1 Min at 8% incline and a running pace (6.5 mph) (“Run”)
2 Min at Jog
1 Min at Run
2 Min at 8% incline and a jogging pace (5 mph) (“Hill Jog”)
1 Min at 10% incline and a running pace (6.5 mph) (“Hill Run”)
2 Min at Jog
1 Min at Run
2 Min at Hill Jog
1 Min at Hill Run
2 Min at Jog
1 Min at Run
2 Min at Jog
1 Min at Run
2 Min at Hill Jog
1 Min at Hill Run
3 Min at Cooldown
Recipe of the week
I shameless ripped this recipe from Cooking Light, so I’ll link the recipe so that they get the clicks.
Garbage in, garbage out. I remember hearing that saying in a circuit design class, talking about why it’s important to match impedances on I/O pins. When you put a low quality input into a system, there’s only so much the system can do to improve the output. You may be the fitness equivalent of analog TV. The input can be full of garbage, but you can still see the picture through all the snow. Some of us (myself included) are the fitness equivalent of digital TV. Unless the input is pristine, the output is unwatchable.
With food, garbage usually means two things, 1) carb- and calorie-heavy food; and 2) natural and artificial preservatives. I’m not gonna tackle the latter issue in depth, but I’ll say that I generally prefer not adding things to my food unless they positively contribute to my body. Doesn’t mean I think the preservatives are bad, only that they are symptoms of a compromise that the food manufacturer is making. They’re focused on more than just providing you with great tasting and nutritional food.
The big issue with processed foods is that they’re carb- and calorie-heavy. Usually this is because they’re using shit product with no flavor, so they spice things up the easiest way, by adding tons of tasty, tasty carbs and fat. Not only that, but they use the super cheap stuff like high-fructose corn syrup. You’ll find sugar in some of the weirdest foods. Why? Sometimes because it masks the flavor of preservatives. It aids browning (and evenness of browning). It acts as a preservative itself. And as mentioned before, it tries to make up for the fact that they’re using shitty, bland ingredients.
What sorts of shitty, bland ingredients? Eat a store tomato and then eat a tomato from the farmer’s market (or, even better, from your own garden). Eat a store cucumber and then a homegrown one. Eat frozen green beans and then fresh vine picked green beans. Produce growers are incentivized to grow uniform, good looking produce, because that is what people will buy off the grocery shelves. Ugly, delicious tomatoes would rot on the shelves. Misshapen but delicious cucumbers would be passed up for bitter, shapely ones. Odd-sized backyard green beans are unpopular in comparison to the bland cookie-cutter green beans you find in the freezer section, the canned section, and the produce section of the supermarket. Add on to that the fact that the food manufacturers putting together processed food aren’t even buying the top grade grocery produce, and you see why they need to do something to spruce up their bland dishes.
You’ll see pasta sauce with substantial sugar in it. Loaves of bread chock full of sugar. HFCS lurks everywhere. In the abstract, these are just carbs, and 5g of sugar from an apple is the same as 5g of HFCS in your pasta sauce. However, we don’t eat in the abstract. The reality is that we usually don’t even notice the sugar (or oil) in our processed foods, causing us to overeat. “Whole” foods are naturally balanced. Yes, you ingest sugar when you eat an apple, but you also get a substantial amount of fiber, and quite a variety of nutrients. When you strip out all of the nutrition and just put the caloric essence into your foods, you unbalance your diet and threaten nutrient deficiencies, obesity, and diet related diseases (diabeetus).
What’s better? Inconvenient eating. Start with ingredients that are recognizable as crops or animal byproducts. Rather that buying that HFCS laden white-whole-wheat loaf of bread, mix up some whole wheat flour, some yeast, some water, and some salt, and make your own bread. Rather than heating up that salisbury steak TV dinner, fire up the grill and toss a sirloin and a couple cobs of corn on. Rather than buying peach rings in the candy aisle, get some decent quality peaches from the local farmers’ market. When she goes to the grocery store, I tell Mrs. trshmnstr that I want to eat meat and veggies with some fruit for a snack.
If you haven’t done so already, teach yourself to cook half decently. Buy a few cookbooks (I recommend this one), and make recipes until the end product is not only edible, but better than the crap you can get in the freezer aisle or at the local Chili’s.
The single best improvement to my health was when I shifted my diet away from processed foods and focused on eating inconvenient fresh foods partially or fully from scratch. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass to learn to cook well, and it’s a pain in the ass to source quality ingredients, but the gains in energy and in fitness have been worth it. Not that I never splurge on a McDouble or a Sharing Size Bag of Pretzel M&Ms, but they’re exceedingly rare treats, and the less I eat them, the less I crave them.
Repeat 3x for a 30 minute workout.
Tundra’s Sheet Pan Chicken
Instructions
Let’s say you’re on board with tracking your intake, and that you’ve established the habit of tracking your calories. Some of you are there, some of you are a few days into a new habit, some of you couldn’t give two shits. The next step is to dive deeper into the numbers and track your macros. I know a few of you already do this, but I want to extol the virtues of macro tracking. For the longest time in college, I tracked my calories on a daily basis. I’d hit my calorie goal most every day, but I wasn’t feeling the way I thought I should feel. I was constantly hungry, and I wasn’t seeing a ton of improvement in the gym. I had plateaued, and I couldn’t break through. It turns out that I was way heavy on carbs and too light on protein and fat, resulting in me losing traction for my fitness goals.
Carbs – These include everything from fiber to sugar to starches. Carbs are fuel for your body, and despite the media and the fad diets out there, carbs can be your friend. Different types of carbs have different effects and purposes. For lack of a better description, some carbs are more potent than others. Simple carbs are a quick hit of energy for your body. They’re easy to break down, and they’re quick to take effect. This is the traditional “sugar high”. Simple carbs include refined sugar (pastries, candy, etc.), simple sugars (fruits, vegetables, etc.). Complex carbs are more difficult for your body to process, but provide a steadier source of energy over a longer period of time. This is why distance runners carb load prior to their runs. Complex carbs include starches like found in grains, potatoes, etc. As you are fully aware, spiking from sugar high to crash all day long is miserable and ends in morbid obesity after a while. Most of your carb load should be in complex carbs.
However, it isn’t as simple as choosing complex carbs over simple carbs, you want to balance the amount of carbs you get with the other nutrition you receive, including fiber, minerals, and vitamins. One of the easiest ways to balance your carb load in comparison to other nutrition is to focus on using whole ingredients in your meals rather than processed ingredients. Next week, we’ll go into more detail.
Protein – Ahh, meat! Protein can also be found in legumes, some grains, some vegetables, eggs, tofu, and hemp (for those of you in CO). Protein is your foundation for successful fitness. Working out, whether cardio or strength training, involves tearing down your muscles and rebuilding them stronger. How does your body rebuild your muscles? By pulling protein from your food and incorporating it into your muscles! If you wear down over long periods of working out, a protein deficiency may be the culprit. If you struggle with inordinate soreness and fatigue after strength training, protein may help with recovery. Timing can play a role in recovery, and we’ll cover that in a few weeks when we talk about post-workout eating.
Fat – Ignoring the screams from all those who have been taken by the ’80s and ’90s fad diets, fat is a very good thing, and it’s very important to long term success of your fitness goals. If you want to be miserable, go on a low-fat diet. Fat helps you feel satiated at the end of a meal, and it helps stave off hunger throughout the day. However, one temptation with fad diets (including Keto) is to jack up the fat consumption to insane levels. Mrs. trshmnstr is skeptical about the health of going to insane in the opposite direction and eating tons of fat. As always, a balanced diet is the recommendation.
Overall, a good baseline ratio is 35% carbs (mostly in high-fiber whole foods), 35% protein, and 30% fat. We’ll talk next week about adjusting those ratios to account for body type, fitness goals, etc.
As always, Mrs. trshmnstr recommends trying this out 3 or 4 days this week. As always, don’t kill yourself and modify the exercise where you need to based on your fitness and abilities.
3 rounds of:
This is a 30 minute workout, so the goal is to do 2x for a full workout.
Trashy’s daily breakfast. Mrs. trshmnstr says this isn’t a healthy breakfast, and that I’m an idiot for posting this, but I’m gonna do it anyway!
I used to struggle with mid-morning hunger and fatigue issues when I ate a granola bar or nothing for breakfast. This breakfast is a good mix of fat, protein, and whole food carbs with enough flavor to get going in the morning. I think the eggs are the most important part. I could probably sub out the toast or the sausage for a fruit if I wanted to be super healthy, but I’ve found that I can lose 2+ lbs per week with this breakfast if I’m good about my other meals. I’ve also found that it doesn’t take me an hour or two to get ramped up for work in the morning. I’m firing on all cylinders the minute I open my laptop.
The one thing that most strongly indicates whether or not you’ll success with your fitness goals is whether or not you track your intake. It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in weight loss, building strength, distance running, maintaining mobility, or any other fitness goal, garbage in results in garbage out. The most common way to track intake is MyFitnessPal, and I know that many of us here in GlibFit use it. However, there are plenty of MFP tips and tricks that you may not be aware of.
First, you can adjust which nutrients are tracked in the food diary. This is helpful if you are sensitive to certain micros, sodium for instance. It’s also helpful for macro tracking, which will be covered next week.
Second, you should be familiar with your profile and goal settings.
The information you provide here sets up all of the day-to-day numbers for MFP, including your calorie goal, your macros goals, etc. As you progress toward your goal, it’s good to check back in and make sure that MFP is configured to your life as it is currently.
Third, you should regularly track your fitness. People are notoriously bad at guessing how much food they have consumed, how many calories they have burned, and how much weight they have gained or lost. Even if you are on a purely strength building goal, tracking your progress will give you insights that you couldn’t have seen otherwise. MFP has a report function to aggregate your data.
Mrs. trshmnstr recommends relying on your Garmin/Apple watch/whatever whenever possible for tracking exercise. Most smart watches can integrate with MFP, and the data they provide will be substantially more accurate than if you manually enter the data. However, if you’re pounding the treadmill or doing weights work, your wearable isn’t going to be too much help.
Finally, Mrs. trshmnstr wants me to stress and stress again that what you don’t track, you don’t control! You may be able to make some progress by haphazardly changing your eating habits and haphazardly tossing weight around at the gym, but the pros track the minutae of food intake and of exercise in order to better understand how to best achieve their goals. It’s a bit of a burden to start, but once you get used to it, you’ll reap the rewards.
As always, Mrs. trshmnstr recommends giving this a try 3 or 4 days this week. Also, please don’t kill yourself on these exercises. There’s a different between pushing yourself healthily beyond your comfort zone and blindly pushing your body into dangerous territory. Modify the exercises if you’re not capable of completing them as written.
Set a timer to start counting up from 0:00. Each exercise listed is a 1 minute workout. If you complete it before the minute is up, the rest of the minute is a rest period. If you haven’t completed it by the end of the minute, switch to the next exercise. Each exercise has an alternate for if you are unable to do that specific exercise. These are all fairly common exercises, so search for them if you don’t know them.
5 rounds of:
This is a roughly 30 minute workout (5 rounds x 6 one-minute exercises). The goal is to do this 2x for a full workout.
This is my (not) secret chicken thigh recipe. I make up a batch for lunches most weeks.
I like to do these on my Weber kettle grill low and slow, but they’d also do fine in an oven.
