A Week in the Books

I've completed my first week. In total, I took 5 trips to the gym with one off day and a day lost to my volleyball league. I'm keeping up the three miles a day, with slight variations each day until I find my pace and get my stride back.

I figure this is a good time to discuss the workout schools of thought. There is a ton of information out there (especially on the internet) with regard to weight loss and training. Hopping around the internet, you'll probably stumble on some variation of one of the following philosophies:

The Bodybuilder
This is the most common information found on the web. This school of thought suggests that you should go through bulking and cutting phases. Bulking being the building of raw muscle, cutting being the rapid loss of fat. I can not stress enough, if you are reading this blog, this system is not for you. This is for serious weight lifters. People doing max weight, low rep sets who are building muscle mass. The Bodybuilder philosophy is eat more, lift more, gain more. There are lots of high intesity cardio routines designed for this sort of work out. Again, not good for someone trying to drop a few pounds. If you want to look like The Arnold, then this is for you and by all means good luck.

The Marathoner
This school of thought is for the long runner or endurance event competitor. This sort of philosophy will often be found on the runner's world website. You need to be super fit to train this way. Lots of rest days are built in around insane high intensity interval and distance (upwards of 20 miles) workouts. A lot of people who are interested in losing weight may do well with this sort of training, but it's not for the beginner. No unfit person will ever benefit from a 2 hour run. There is far too much risk for injury when your body is not prepared for this sort of workout. Injury and overtraining are the obvious fallouts, but loss of motivation and development of poor form are equally detrimental to anyone's weight loss.

The New Ager
I don't want to say too much about this one because it's pretty obvious. This is the soy drinking, meal bar eating method to getting fit. Lot's of yoga and pilates advice will be found as well as new compound variations on old excercises. Again I don't think this is a beginner tool. The diet end of it is great, but it is really expensive and requires more planning than most of us can afford. Add to that that alot of the training and excersises require a correct form to avoid injury of unbalanced training. This approach is great for losing weight but if you want to do it this way, higher a trainer and plan ahead.

The Old School
This is the school of thought I fit into. It's also the least available workout source around. It's principles are simple - eat less, move more, lose weight. The Old School believes that if you finish a run and feel like you could run more, you didn't work out hard enough. This involves repetition of the same excercises over the course of 6 or 8 weeks, then a change, then 6 or 8 weeks of repitition. This worked for me my whole life as a soccer player. Believe me, I was super fit. The caveat is you need to listen to your body. You do not want to push to the point of injury or over-exertion, but just to that limit. Stretch your breaking point and your breaking point will get harder and harder to stretch.