Stay with me, friends. This post is going to start off with a lot of seemingly self-indulgent data about me and my workouts.  I feel that’s necessary background for the rest of the post to make sense.

As many of you know, working out is a big part of my life.  I get up at 5 am most mornings and head to the gym for a little over an hour.  With some minor variations, this has been my routine for about 10 years.  For the 10 years before that, I trained sporadically, resulting in about 20 years during which I bought into a fairly uniform methodology and workout philosophy.  My primary goal was simple.  I have always had a very high metabolism, and for much of my life I starved my body of protein.  I didn’t know I was doing so, but I’ve had a limited taste for meat, a relatively small appetite, and a general disinterest in food, other than as a means to survive.  Those characteristics kept my body weight at about 165 during periods when I wasn’t training aggressively, and drifting up to about 175 if I went through a spell of training intensely, pounding myoplex shakes and supplements, and really focusing on bulking up.  Everything I read, and everyone to whom I spoke who had a reasonable claim to knowledge, had one common theme:  to gain mass, do low-rep sets to failure; to gain strength and get ripped, do higher numbers of reps with lower weight.  Given my goals, I’ve always trained in the 6-8 rep range, and I’ve become, over the years, very strong for my size.  With a body weight of around 175-180, I’ve maxed my single-rep barbell bench press to over 340 Lbs, and would alternate this with dumbbell flat bench presses using 110 lb dumbbells in each hand (the highest I’ve had available in some of the gyms at which I’ve trained).  I’ll leave it at that, rather than indulge myself further and bore my few readers with a laundry list of my maxes across exercises.  Suffice it to say, I’ve long been strong for my size.  Not stronger than the monsters, mind you, but strong for a lean 175-180 lb-er.  I’m not alone in this approach or in the corresponding results.  One of my closest friends, Brian Wallins, is even leaner than me, and of comparable strength.  When we used to train together, the “big” guys were sure we were going to hurt ourselves when they’d see us set up with the dumbbells, as we were moving more weight than they were, in most cases, and training with more intensity.

But I can feel my metabolism slowing.  I’m in my early 30′s, and I know my HGH production levels are due to drop off depressingly quickly.  I know I need to mix it up with interval training and other methods to trigger HGH production and keep myself at a level of fitness that won’t frustrate me.  I’ve been working on that.  It’s not fun.  I bought a new bike, and live on a 71 mile, scenic bike trail.  I plan on riding a great deal this summer, and hope that will be one of my primary avenues to staying lean.  I’m still a very fit guy, I think, but a week or so ago I tipped the scales at a higher number (188) than I think I may ever have hit before.  That scared me into action.

I did some reading, and it seems that science has changed a great deal on me in the past several years.  Much of what I’m reading now suggests that I was actually misguided all along, and that the optimal number of reps for growth is 12+, rather than the 6-8 for failure that I’ve done for decades (which actually developed strength, moreso than size).  Ironically, I have no real desire to get any more muscular than I already am.  I’ve grown out of the delusion that more massively muscular is necessarily better or more attractive, and am much more interested in maintaining a strong, fit, youthful physique, for as long as humanly possible, to optimize my overall health and keep me feeling good about the way I look.  Still, it seems the 12+ rep approach will have a number of benefits that I just can’t deny.  First, it is a massive move towards muscle confusion.  I’ve had similar workouts for way too long, and I’m sure I’ve generally plateaued.  Second, higher repetitions will likely burn more calories, (provided they are sufficiently intense), and will further my goal of keeping lean and advancing my overall health.  Finally, if they do in fact trigger more HGH production, and even if they build more muscle in the short-term, these benefits will definitely advance my overall health and fitness goals.  So… I decided to do it.  And it has me thinking.  This morning at the gym, the metaphor of this change in approach seemed almost humerously obvious.

The hardest part is not the change in routine.  Not by a long shot.  It’s fun doing things a little differently, especially when I’ve been pretty consistent in my approach for years.  What’s really difficult for me is managing the implications for my own ego.  It’s a little embarassing to say, but I’m realizing there is a part of me that likes knowing I’m working with the heaviest weights in the gym.  Dialing that down to the weight I would have used years ago, to enable myself to do more than 12 reps with reasonably good form is a psychological challenge.  I feel, somewhat irrationally, like people notice.  It’s silly, I know.

 Still, the reality is that, based on just two workouts using the new approach, the pump is definitely more dramatic.  That could just be attributable to the change, and to muscle confusion, but it’s very real. 

 But enough about the physical side of this.  What is more interesting for me is the metaphor, which I spent most of my workout this morning chewing on.  Let me restate the conclusions from above in a way that makes the broader application bubble up:  By recognizing my changed circumstances, and and re-calibrating my approach to better align with my long-term goals, I know I am improving the probability that I’ll achieve my desired results.  However, the process of doing so is psychologically challenging, primarily because of my tendency to be-for-others, and my preoccupation, at times, with my presumptions of their perceptions.

Much like my low-rep workouts, I’ve spend much of my life rabidly and relentlessly chasing professional accomplishments, accolades, and validation.  This approach has generally served me well, in my opinion.  I am a Vice President of what I believe to be one of the greatest companies in the world, and I’m young.  I have lots of “stuff”, that I probably enjoy more than I should. I’m not a rich guy, by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a good life, and I think it’s more balanced than most people who enjoy similar luxuries or who have made similar decisions (e.g., law school).  Still, I’m feeling like it may me time to re-calibrate.  Maybe it’s time to adjust my behaviors to re-orient them towards the goals I have now, to the extent they’re pointing me to the goals I had when I initially developed them.  This may pose similar ego challenges.  I’m not sure yet, as I’m not yet sure what the re-calibration will entail.  Maybe I’ve already been experimenting in small ways, with things like the guitar lessons.  Maybe I have the discipline, now, to take a longer view, and aim for wins that are further out, and may not validate my incremental success as frequently.  The idea that I can move less weight, more times, in ways that might not impress the casual observer, and in so doing achieve a greater long term net benefit to myself, is compelling. 

For years, St. Pat’s has been one of my favorite holidays.  As some may know, my American-Irish heritage is a point of irrational pride for me.  To be clear, I’m not one of those don-a-green-unitard-and-big-silly-hat-and-get-drunk-beginning-at-8am guys.  There is, though, something about Irish culture and music that has always appealed to me, and I suppose this holiday allows me to celebrate the happy coincidence that my father’s mother and father were from Ireland, and that, at least to this generation, we still have ties to our family there.  I am Boston Irish, for better and for worse.

Well, this St. Patrick’s day finds me far from Boston, and far from the friends with whom I’d most care to share a few pints.  Still, I’m grateful for all of my many blessings, and will certainly raise a pint to the health and good fortune of those I love.  Sláinte!

Had a near-death experience Sunday.  I was in my basement, (looking for a hammer, I think), and an 8 x 8 framed wall section fell on me.  Idiotically, I had left it leaning against an “I” beam, rather than secure it to the floor, as I have many other sections to complete.  The top horizontal board, an 8ft 2×4, made impact squarely on the back of my skull, with the weight of the rest of the structure behind it.  I don’t know precisely how heavy the wall section is, but it seems incredible to me that this accident wasn’t the end of me.  The angle of impact, along with the weight of 10 2x4s was enough to make my vision go black for a moment, and to cause my legs to buckle.  I somehow managed to stay on my feet, though I’m pretty sure I was unconscious for a moment.  The wall fell, bounced off of my skull, then bounced off of my right shoulder, at which point I turned my body to the left, instinctively, and the wall bounced one final time off of my left shoulder before finally hitting the ground, the corner shattering on impact with the concrete floor.

In a word, ouch.  For a couple of hours after the accident, my jaw hurt, as though the impact had actually knocked it loose from its hinge.  Today, I’m actually feeling pretty much perfectly fine.  I managed to get to the gym this morning and get a decent workout in, in spite of some horrible bruises.

My thick skull has saved me again.

I’m old.  I’m not saying you have to express my age in scientific notation, but I’m likely older than your average Facebook user.  I signed up for MySpace and Facebook maybe five years ago, for a couple of reasons.  I spent a good deal of time hanging out with people a bit younger than I was, who pressured me to do so, and I was interested in the implications of social networking on privacy and online advertising.  Mostly, I was genuinely there for intellectual and professional reasons.  Seriously.  And, seriously, I felt like I might be perceived as someone who happens to like to wear trenchcoats, who happens to walk by a playground on his way home from work everyday.  Though I had no ill intent, I felt like I had inserted myself into a community where I didn’t quite belong, and it made me self-conscious.  I didn’t post many pictures.  I took every opportunity to set any available privacy settings at the most restrictive option.  I turned down anyone I didn’t know very well when they requested friend status.  I was lurking, learning, and sightseeing, but I didn’t belong. 

Over the intervening years, I’ve attended several lectures, read several papers, and had discussions with a number of brilliant people about why the so-called millennials (and the later Gen X’ers) were so obsessed with publishing their lives in a level of intimate detail that makes parents cringe.  Over and again I’ve heard about how different they are, because they’ve grown up with technology as such a pervasive part of their lives.  I’ve heard and read about how they’ve developed an unprecedented ability to multi-task, and that, as a result, their attention spans have diminished, and their performance on individual focus-driven tasks has deteriorated dramatically.  I’ve advised clients on the implications of their herd-like mentality, and their limited capacity for independent, unilateral purchasing decisions; they need user reviews, and require the affirmation of some number of peers before they can feel good about a specific course of action.

Privately, I always felt that I had a great deal in common with them.  I was an early adopter of technology from the days of my original Commodore 64 and 2400 baud modem, and the network of bulletin board systems, MUDs and other quasi-social pre-internet pseudo-communities.   I remember how incredible it was, when I first received emails from my sister, appreciating the immediacy of the discourse, and recognizing that, but for the ease of the protocol, we’d almost never write.  I knew there was something about the “cyberspace” (for lack of a better term), that could make me feel more connected, to more people, than I otherwise could at certain points of my life.  Maybe it was amped by the general sense of existential angst and the related funk I’ve climbed into a few times over the years, but I loved technology, and I’ve long maintained relationships with and through it.

So there were the Millennials and the Later Xs, then there was me, then there were my age peers, and finally (literally and figuratively) there’s everybody in heaven’s waiting room.  We’ll leave that last category for another day’s discussion.  My attention span and available time is running short for this post, so I’m going to dial it down a bit and get to where I was headed when I kicked this off.  I think I’m seeing that the differences between the early Facebook users and those of my age group have a different explanation.  Culture’s changing, and the younger folks just reflected it more clearly and more perfectly, as they were a tabula rasa when they were immersed in these technologies; they had less to forget, less to change.  My age peers, on the other hand, were skittish, uncomfortable.  The same feelings that made me feel like an outsider in social networks at the time of their launch completely excluded many of my age peers.  It was something for children and perverts, not for normal people.  But I’ve watched, over the past two years, as the social networking phenomenon has bled into the late twenty-somethings with accellerating velocity, then the early thirty-somethings, and now even folks older than me are signing up, buying in, and embarassing themselves by installing 500 annoying widgets that crowd their pages and annoy their younger, savvier friends.  It was just a function of exposure.  Like so many other pervasive, culture-shaping technologies, the adoption curve for social networks has a long tail, but the core appeal speaks to unchanged aspects of human nature, which are not really unique to the young.  I’ve watched myself post more content, and I’ll watch my older sisters post more content.  We may be wiser than a teenager that’s talking about drugs and sexual conquests in a forum that will very likely come back to haunt them down the road, but we weren’t necessarily any wiser when we were that age, and would likely have made many of the same mistakes, if properly equipped with the technology to do so.

Enough of a rant for today, I suppose.

Cheers! 

Sometimes I get cold

as I suppose all do

It feels as though my blood retreats from the surface

from my skin

from the parts of me that touch the world.

My joints and neck creak and crack like an ancient engine of war

an old machine

moving, only grudgingly.

I strongly suspect

and have long believed

that I have a significant deficit of attention.

Others remain focused

or at least maintain such an affect

while my mind races and wanders

far away.

Tomorrow I hit the usual routine.  Up well before sunrise, feed the dogs, let them run, then back in and get ready for the gym.  Decide which car to take, largely depending on the weather… and head out.  Train for an hour or so, mostly strength, but a bit of cardio so as not to get girthy…  A quick sit in the steam room, shower, then dress for the office.  Work’s only a few mins from the gym, but I often stop at Starbuck’s on the way in.  Orange Mango Banana Vivanno, for protein and fiber, and a grande Christmas blend because the “coffee” at work is swill…

 Then into the office.  My actual office will finally be ready this week.  I’ve been in a temporary interior space while they constructed my new digs.  It hasn’t been bad, but I’m looking forward to the wall of glass and the opportunity to actually have a plant, and to have my assistant in earshot, as I feel like a lazy tool IM’ing her.  Tomorrow isn’t the biggest of days, but I have a few deliverables I need to make sure I’m on top of.  A good workout will help.  It always does.  Helps me focus.

I missed an important meeting on Friday due to a migraine (which pretty much never happens to me).  Lots of stress lately, I guess.  So many things going on.  Trying to keep a lot of balls in the air.  This week I’m meeting with some people a good deal more important than me (at least in the eyes of my employer), so I need to find my “A” game.  Birthday coming up, lots of big (and little) things to wrap up, so I can start 09 right, and ensure it’s a better year than 08 ever could have been.

So many moving parts to life right now.  House is shaping up, slowly.  I’m going to take on finishing the basement soon, which will be (by orders of magnitude), the biggest construction project I’ve ever tackled.  I’d guess it’s almost 2000 square feet down there, and I have several neat ideas about what I’m going to be putting in.  Being the relentless geek that I am, and in furtherance of my neverending commitment to dabbling myself into mediocre execution of everything that I do, I registered www.finishingmybasement.com, and will set up a worklog, where interested folks can give feedback and suggestions as I go along.  At this point, the only piece of work I’m tentatively planning on outsourcing is roughing-in a half bath down there.  It may be overkill, with three and a half baths upstairs, but I think I’ll appreciate not having to go upstairs if I’m working out down there.

I also just registered enrights.info, thinking I’ll set up a bulletin board for family members around the world to check in on how the different parts of the tribe are getting on.

 Dabble, dabble, dabble… That’s what I do…