Hitting Recharge

Good morning everyone! I'm up and at is bright and early today so I figured I would write to you all before my work day begins. I had planned extra time to shovel the snow off of my car this morning but when I awoke and found that we didn't get much more than an inch or two in Portland, I decided shoveling wasn't really necessary. I hope that all of you who celebrate Christmas had a nice relaxing few days with friends and family and those of you who don't celebrate, well, I hope you at least got in some good end-of-year rest and rejeuvanation! My holiday was relatively low-key, just the usual Christmas day spent with family who luckily live close-by. Yesterday I travelled to Masachusetts to visit some other family for the day and now I can happily say its all over! All of the temptations toward spending, over-eating, and gym-slacking are past and I am so ready to take on the new year with a recharged mindset.

I've been thinking a lot about my 2014 goals. As you know I detest the word "resolution" as that conjures up thoughts of swiftly abandoned diets and other good intentions. To be honest, I don't really have any specific goals. 2013 did not pan out in remotely the manner in which I had foreseen at the start of the year and I'm not in the mood to set myself up for any more disapointments in the year ahead. I guess one lesson that seems to have been driven into my head over the past 12 months is to "expect the unexpected". I'll just leave it at that.

I have however come up with two separate lifestyle changes that I plan to make more of an effort to live by going forward:

1. To live more peacefully. To take a deep breath before responding to things in a totally freaked-out manner. To close my eyes and force my heart rate to slow down a few notches before sending myself into an anxiety-fueled tizzy over the tiniest inconvenience. I seem to respond similarly whether a nightmare happens at work, my car breaks down and requires the third $1,000+ un-warranteed repair in a month's time, or whether someone simply steps in front of me in the gym mirrors when I'm trying to balance 1-legged on a bosu! I usually internalize my frustration which in some circumstances is best while in others it just builds up the anxiety until I blow. This goal is certainly not one that I can set-out clear steps to achieve but instead will have to be something I constantly remind myself of. Stress has such a detrimental impact on one's health and as a bona fide health nut I'd hate to end up with serious health issues over something that I should be able to change. Stress-induced zits are about all I can handle LOL!

2. To live more simply. This is more of a financial goal than anything. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am about the most money conscious person you will ever meet. Okay, borderline cheap at times, but when you grow up feeling that you need to keep what you call a "Fuck You Stash" of 100 dollar bills hidden in your bedroom for "emergency situations" you tend to be rather careful what you spend your hard-earned money on as an adult. That being said, while I don't tend to spend my money on small frivolous items, I do tend to spend it on large "investments" that seem to have slowly cranked up my personal debt this year. Debt is another major stress-causer of mine. I realize that I probably don't have as much as most Americans but owning someone anything gives me a queasy feeling in my stomach. Thus I am forking over a large sum of my savings next week (the start of January) to fully pay off my BMW and Visa which has grown exponentially due to vehicle repair costs, competing expenses, and last-minute unsuccessful trips south this year. The thought of spending all of this cash at once is already making my heart race but I know that come February when I don't have to pay either bill, I will feel so much better! Back to my goal though, going forward I am going to make every effort to pay for everything in cash. I may not have as big of an "FU stash" for a while but at least it's one less thing to have to worry about.

As far as fitness goals go, I just plan to continue to eat clean, drink sparingly, build muscle and not take on another show until I feel 100% ready. I'm already getting antsy to start a new cutting plan but I must fight the urge LOL! I've been researching 2014 shows and which organization I may want to compete it. I found a couple that have shows in Italy and France; how fun would that be to do a show and then spend the next week on a European vacation?! Uh-oh...here I go again with the unnecesary large purchases! Maybe that will have to wait for 2015 LOL. Come January 15th when my month of track-less dieting ends I will probably start up a new highly structured plan but it won't involve any cutting just yet. I just feel better when I have a set routine to stick to. Anyway, that's all I can think of for personal goals for 2014. I just feel like making lifestyle changes is going to be more beneficial to my long-term health and happiness than small goals with specific end dates. What about you? Do you make resolutions, goals, or lifestyle changes when a new year starts?

Weekend In Review

Hello & happy Monday gym rats! This week is sure to go by too fast as weeks with holidays and PTO days almost always do but I'm thankful for some quiet time in the office and no major plans otherwise. Today marks 8 straight days of work in a row for me as I not only worked my usual Saturday shift at my 2nd job but also picked up another shift yesterday afternoon to make up for the day I missed while out of town two weeks ago. I don't mind it though, the time at that job goes by really fast and it's a much less stressful environment!

My weekend began Friday night when I did that leg routine I told you all about in my last entry. BRUTAL! Fridays are definitely not good leg days as I'm usually pretty exhausted from the past 4 days of training and work but I pushed through knowing that a half-ass effort just wasn't going to cut it. It was a great workout and I left feeling very accomplished and ready to take on the weekend. I stopped into Whole Foods on my way home and picked up my absolute favourtie burrito for dinner. I consider it a "clean cheat" because while it's high-carb, it's still all clean foods. I always order the same things; a spinach burrito with shredded beef, steamed sweet potatoes & apples, black beans, baby spinach, sautéed onions & green peppers, roasted red peppers, scallions, and steamed zuccini. It's easily a pound of quality muscle-replenishing nutrients! I also picked up what I thought to be my favourite sesame tahini cookie for dessert but it ended up being one of their weird macrobiotic cookies, whatever that means! It was OK I guess but not really worth the treat calories! I had a little of my favourite Pinot Grigio still in the fridge from earlier in the week so I poured myself a glass to complete this delicious dinner!

Saturday morning I awoke bright and early and headed to work. Man was it BUSY!  That makes for a fast shift though so I can't complain. The ice storm we were supposed to get hadn't yet arrived so once my shift was over I decided to get all of my weekend errands done just in case I was stuck inside on Sunday. I was also feeling a little pale and depressed again so I decided a tan was necessary. Off to World's I went to get some color but how could I go to the gym and not workout?! I know Saturday is my off day but I also had plans to go out that night and knowing I'd be taking in some excessive alcohol calories I decided a quick cardio hit couldn't hurt. With increasingly sore legs from Friday night I decided to hit the row machine for a half an hour. Well, rowing has to be about the most boring type of cardio on the planet and not only is there no TV to help pass the time while on these machines but they are literally placed in front of a wall so you don't even have any studs to help motivate you! I lasted 15 minutes and then switched to the arc trainer since it's the lowest impact piece of lower body cardio equipment I could think of. All-in-all, not exactly a great workout but better than nothing!

Saturday night I met some friends for dinner at my favourite Thai restaurant, Boda, and then went to the recently re-opened Top of the East for some holiday cocktails. I don't go out often so when I do I try to go to places that are worth my dime! Dinner was fantastic as always. Instead of my usual chicken pad thai, I ordered the pork hawks braised with star anise. WTF is that you ask?! Well it was a fancy name for a delicious yet simple plate of steamed jasmine rice with a massive mound of what was essentially pulled pork, a little asian broccoli, pickles, and a chili-lime sauce. It was quite delicious and again, while admitedly a massive quantity of food for one meal it was still a pretty clean dish. I also ordered a really good glass of Sauvignon Blanc, yum! At the Top of the East I ordered a brown sugar and pear martini which was decent but for a $14 drink in Portland, Maine, I expected more. I should have stopped there but my all-time favourite drink is an espresso martini and after having my friend order it and rave about it I had to have too. Oops! Oh well, it was heavenly and totally worth it. All-in-all it was a fun night and a good opportunity to dress up and be social.

Unfortunately, Ms. In-Bed-By-9:00 PM did not get to sleep until around 1:30 AM. A "normal" person would thus use the opportunitely to sleep-in but I didn't want to miss my favourite yoga class Sunday morning so I was jolted awake at 6:30 by my annoyingly loud alarm and forced myself out of bed with a raging headache to get ready for yoga. I called the gym, somewhat hopeful that it was cancelled due to weather, but it wasn't so I rallied and thankfully it was so worth it! I got there a little early so I warmed-up with 15 mins on the elliptical, alternating 3-min segments of front and back strides, increasing the resistance with each switchover. I was so dehydrated from the night before so I was downing the BCAAs and sweating a lot more than usual! I feel like a good sweat is the best way to get rid of a hangover though. Back in my college days I went out A LOT (and also had a crazy high tolerance living in Canada where drinking is a national pastime) and I swear the only reason I never got fat was because I would get up every morning and sweat it all out in a cardio kickboxing class! Anyway, yoga class was excellent as usual. Just the absolute perfect pace and mix of stretches. I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up but even my headstand was on-point! My hipflexors are extremely sore today due to some long-held deep lunges but it's a good kind of pain. My body needed the stretch so badly! After yoga I did another 15 min elliptical routine (the same as before) and then went home for a while where I literally did nothing until it was time to go back to work again.

Finally at 6:30 I got home and was done for the day. A full weekend of non-stop busyness with great food, good drinks, good company, a little too much moulah spent but so worth it once-in-a-while! For dinner I made myself my go-to meal of baked salmon with sweet potato and veggies sautéed in olive oil & garlic.

No wine this time LOL. I think I'll try to stay away from the alcohol until New Year's Eve. Yesterday morning I did my weekly weigh-in which I expected to be higher due to having stopped diet tracking and also having easily consumed upwards of a day's worth of calories the night before but it was even higher than I expected - up 5 pounds in two weeks! KSNVYWNTYISKSGHIL! Deep Breath...I still don't feel "fat" perse so I'm trying to convince myself that it's most likely an equal and healthy combination of both fat and muscle. While my daily calories are definitely up a bit, it's all clean foods so I'm not too concerned. It's really just incentive to work harder in the gym; really push through that extra burning rep each time! Tonight's lift is back & triceps which is always a good one. Here's the breakdown:

-Rope cable pushdowns
-1-arm bentover DB rows
-Wide grip pulldowns
-Seated cable rows
-Straightbar pushdowns standing on MB
-Sitting EZ bar skullcrushers
-Close grip BB bench press
-Standing cable rows on Bosu

I can't wait to get after it! I'm sure it will be a mad house in there with college students home for the holidays and others trying to get in their pre-holiday last chance workouts but I haven't had much issue getting my needed equipment lately. I detest the new cables World's got so I'm perfectly happy to modify my workout by using all free weights if need be. Anyway, that's all for today's post. I seem to have gotten on a role and written way more than I planned so I applaud you if you made it to the end LOL. Do you plan to keep up with your usual routine this week or take a little time off for Christmas? If you are travelling do you modify your workout if you can't get to a gym? I'd love to hear your holiday workout plans so please comment below! Have a great day everyone and keep warm! xo

Superstitious

Do you consider yourself a superstitious person? For example, do you avoid black cats, step over cracks in the sidewalk, walk around ladders, consider the number 7 an unlucky number, or fear Friday the 13th? I personally have never been very superstitious. I'm more of a realist. In fact, it always irritates me how in some high-rise buildings you'll find floor 14 to be directly above floor 12. I mean, any truly superstitious person would thus be equally afraid of floor 14, knowing all along that it's really floor 13, right? I'm not just rambling here. Going forward in life I think I am going to be a little more weary of traditionally "bad luck" occurrences and here's why...

 

It's that time of year when you reflect on the past year's events, what you accomplished, what you didn't, and think about changes you'd like to make for the coming year. Last year at this time I blogged about how I'm not a huge fan of the typical "New Year's Resolution" and had personally made a list of goals that I wanted to achieve in 2013. Some I met with ease, others I worked hard at but didn't quite accomplish in their entirety, and others I flat-out failed at. Looking back over 2013 though, the year seemed to be filled with more disappointments than anything. I know you can't succeed at everything in life but I'd like to think that the harder you work, the more success you will have. After a series of failed attempts at things though, discouragement sets in and being a glass-half-empty person, this eventually makes you look at everything in a negative manner. Not any more though. A couple of days ago a friend of mine pointed out that this year was 2013. I repeat, TWO THOUSAND THIRTEEN!!! Clearly it was just a bad luck year and having survived this year, I can survive anything! I now consider myself a superstitious person and will forever avoid the number 13 at all costs. Bring it on 2014...it can only go up from here! Or so I hope anyway :)

 

As far as 2014 goals go I haven't yet thought much about what I'd like to accomplish in the coming year so expect another post (or more) in the next couple of weeks. Right now I'm just trying to survive the pre-Christmas craziness and get my life back on track now that I've mentally accepted that I'll be pushing through another frigid Winter in Maine!

 

On another note, tomorrow marks 1 week of successfully avoiding the myfitnesspal app! It's funny how when you're addicted to something you feel like it would be impossible to quit whatever it is but once you actually get up the strength to do so, you realize it really wasn't such a big deal in the first place :) I actually do feel quite a bit less stressed throughout the day just by not having the option of clicking on it a gagillion times per hour to remind myself what my current level of macros are or how many calories I have left in the day. My diet is exactly the same as it was beforehand except that I'm less anal about adding-in a little extra here and there (a glass of wine with dinner or an extra fruit during the day for example). I know my carbs and cals are thus a bit higher than they were before but I'm just going to use this month of track-free dieting as an experiment to see if I get any muscle growth from the increased intake. I do feel a little fatter in my problem areas but given that it's only been a week I'm sure it's more in my head than anything. Right now I'm enjoying a Nonfat double-shot medium latte as a mid-afternoon snack; something I should not feel guilty about but normally would because its an extra 19 carbs (mostly from the sugar naturally occuring in the milk) that I don't need in my diet! My justification is that I'll need the extra carb and caffeine boost when I train legs tonight LOL. Friday is supposed to be my cardio-only day but we're supposed to be hit with freezing rain on and off this weekend and since I can't foresee when the gym may unexpectedly close or when my car may not budge out of the driveway, I figure its best to get it done tonight and have a cardio-only or a true rest day this weekend if need be. Weight training is WAY more important and beneficial to me right now than cardio is!

 

I wasn't really thrilled with the leg day I originally designed for this month so I've modified it a bit. Here's the current agenda:

-Smith machine wide stance squats

-Walking BB lunges w/glute squeezes

-DB plie squats

-Cable side & back leg raises

-Machine leg extensions

-Machine prone hamstring curls superset w/donkey kicks

 

This is a pretty brutal routine and leaves me sore for a good two days afterward. After a friend showed me the donkey kicks earlier this year, I've incorporated them into almost all of my leg routines. They are awesome glute burners! What's your favorite leg exercise? I'd love to get some good idea for future workouts that I design for both myself and clients. My plans usually incorporate traditional moves that are always effective (squats, lunges, etc.) but it's nice to add-in somthing new and creative to avoid boredom and plateaus!

 

Anyway, people are wrapping up the day here and I am about to heat up my fav banana nut Quest bar as my pre-gym snack. Happy Friday everyone! Keep up the hard work in the gym and stay away from the number 13! xo

Lady In The Streets...

Good morning gym rats. It’s been a while since my last post and that has been on purpose. I was planning a major life change that I was naively confident was going to work out and thought that my next post would be a grand end-of-year announcement. Unfortunately though, just like most of my “grand plans of 2013” have played out, my latest goal played out with  a rude slap-in-the-face rejection and thus I’m stuck back where I started, sitting here miserable in freezing cold Portland, Maine for the foreseeable future.

I would share my plans with you but it has been recently brought to my attention that someone / some people have made at least one manager in my office aware of this blog and while I have never mentioned where I work or any coworkers by name, it was strongly advised to me that I choose my words extremely carefully on here.

I know I can’t win and something I say will eventually bite me in the ass but for now I’ll continue on because I know that the majority of my readers are here for fitness / nutrition / entertainment purposes and I’m not going to let one rotten apple spoil the whole damn bunch (so to speak).

Now that that’s said and done, today’s post is on the topic of off-season nutrition. This is something I’ve been struggling with a lot lately and seems to be adding unnecessary anxiety in my life. I have an extremely type-A borderline OCD personality and am a MAJOR control freak. I can’t calm down unless I have every second of my day planned out and this includes every calorie and macro being consumed. While this makes for a successful competitor, this does not make for a generally happy person.

Around the time of my two spring shows this year I noticed I was becoming more and more easily irritable. Not just mildly irritable but angry-irritable to the point of feeling like my heart was going to explode out of my chest and fumes were coming out of my ears! “Stay away, mutherfucker!” is the only way to describe how I’d feel when triggered by the tiniest inconvenience or irritant. I figured this was simply a side effect of lowering carbs in my diet and pushed onward. Things did seem to improve in my “off-plan” months of May and August but now that I am nearly 3 months into my offseason I realize that the anxiety has little to do with competing and more to do with my unhappiness with several aspects of my life right now, many of which are out of my control. In addition to this, the past couple of months have been the most outrageously random string of consecutive bad luck hits. So much so that it’s become a joke between me and a few close friends, a seriously bad joke albeit, because who has something bad continually happen on pretty much a daily basis?! These things have been personal, financial, work-related, you name it, it’s happened! Anyway, I don’t want to confuse my readers (since I can’t currently elaborate on this public forum) or go too off topic here but my point is that I’ve gotten to the point where the fuse is about to blow and I need to find a way to loosen some steam before this happens. That’s where the diet comes in.

Last night I realized I have been tracking my diet in myfitnesspal for 445 days straight. Probably a good 400 of which have also been macro-focused. That shit is stressful! While I have of course increased my overall daily calories and adjusted my macros to a more live able level in my offseason, I sometimes feel imprisoned by the requirements I force myself to adhere to. Yes, I do have cheat meals but I am so obsessed with staying within my daily calorie goal that I’ll end up doing extra cardio or lifting longer to make up for it…which probably totally defeats the high-calorie / high-carb day purpose! It dawned on me this past weekend that it is time for a break. I’m no moron when it comes to how I need to eat to both stay relatively lean and be able to increase muscle so I shouldn’t need to track every single thing all of the time, right? What really hit me last weekend was that I was out of town for a few days trying to enjoy a short stay in a warm climate and I couldn’t even fully enjoy a 5 star dinner in a swanky restaurant with a beyond fantastic bottle of wine because in the back of my head all I was thinking was how badly it was going to fuck up my calories and macros for the day and “how on earth am I going to input this meal into myfitnesspal when I don’t know every single ingredient going into it?!”

This is not normal and I recognize that. The problem is finding a way to cut myself some slack once in a while without causing myself even more stress. I don’t think that tracking my diet on a regular basis is the problem here; I think not being able to stop and enjoy life once in a while is the real problem. I should have been able to ignore the app for 3 days and get back on track when I got home without feeling any guilt over treating myself a little while on a trip. Especially when I walked about a million miles a day and spend a gazillion dollars on expensive gym day passes while there so that I wouldn’t miss a lift!

After talking to a fellow competitor yesterday who is also in his offseason, I decided to take a month off from the diet tracking. I know how I should be eating so I’m going to try to eat like I normally would and just not obsess over the small things. I mean, that extra apple with PB before bed may inflate my carbs for the day but the likelihood of something like that making my body fat percentage double in a month’s time is pretty slim. Also, I want to be able to enjoy Christmas dinner and perhaps a few holiday martini’s without feeling like a total failure. I plan to delete the app off of my phone starting tomorrow and will not track for 30 days straight. My current macros for the past week (which includes 3 days of “vacation”) are 39% carbs, 31% protein, and 30% fat. We’ll see where I’m at a month from now. This might be a little more personal than most of my past blogs but I knew that if I didn’t write it down then come tomorrow morning I’d start tracking again. Like I said, CONTROL FREAK. Going forward I will try to only be a freak in the gym ;)