This past week I spent the day job hours in Salt Lake City. Jaron invited me to his gym so we could go through all three days of scheduled workouts; chest & triceps, legs & core, and back & biceps. Thank goodness Krause was there to spot my five reps of five with 160 pounds on bench press bar. His official training gear helped run interference on the gender neutral she-males giving the stink eye. Vera de Milo two benches down shot me the look with a carton bubble that read; "Man up... or join the jazzercizing water buffaloes in the pool."In retrospect, chest day did not result in major bodily convulsions. Then came day two of my Wasatch Range business trip, ending with a leg smack down. The formal introduction to a big boy leg workout. Hack squats followed by a brutal death mark of walking lunges, and some extra lactic acid gravy with a final set of leg curls. The technical verbiage for walking lunges is, functional isometric. Basically it is keeping the muscles engaged through the entire set, with no rest or relief for twenty lunges across the gym. This lovely little nugget is a 48-hour grenade; pull the pin with the workout, two days later... BOOM! If it was socially unacceptable to wear adult diapers in one's thirties, I might need a Costco ten pack in sky blue. So, until the standing loo is installed in our house, my poor wife and kids will have to manage REM sleep while I scream louder than a 1980's horror flick chick attempting to lower upon the porcelain throne of manhood, which of late has become a midnight iron maiden.
And the road toward the goal of dunking a basketball begins with this guy struggling to hop over my broken ego strewn about the gym floor.
Walking lunges are the Devil spawn of the exercise world. What Jarvis failed to emphasize were the two 30 pound dumbbells I had him toting on those bad boys. As a trainer, I feel I need to pay forward the pride dousing reality check I was once given by a former trainer of mine: Jarvis lost almost 40 pounds, so really it was like doing lunges with 10 pound dumbbells. Don't cry for Jarvis, Argentina. That said, ole boy's Latin is in fact faulty, as advertised. Hypertrophy is the opposite of atrophy. It is muscle gaining. And I know I'm taking you back to 9th grade Biology, but muscle must tear to rebuild and improve, so Jarvis's midnight visits to the Iron Maiden are a prerequisite to his goal. On the bright side, hypertrophy only lasts ehhh...4-6 months. Poor bastard. Also, while I'm thinking of it, how, HOW do you still have "chicken legs"? When I lost my weight, I discovered that carrying around an extra 75 pounds for close to a decade grew me some fantastic calfs! (the one upside of being a former fatboy). Don't worry though, we'll work on that. I for one, demand a before video of how close you currently are to dunking a basketball. Anybody else wanna see that? I've been led to believe there are two more blogs to follow shortly, so "what's the score here, what's next?" P.S. if you feel lost from time to time reading this blog, you may have missed the required reading list: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. That's the whole list. Uhh, buy the ticket...uhh, take the ride.
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