Chris Risner . Com

With my birthday and a 4 day week quickly approaching, I ended up taking last Wednesday through this Tuesday off from working out and instead to gorge upon a diet of fatty food, beer, liquor, and nicotine.  During that time, I decided to do something I’d been planning to do for several weeks now, plant some trees in the backyard.  Not just any trees though, trees that would help me cut back on yard work.  How is this possible?  The spruce tree, specifically the Norway Spruce.  The spruce tree is acidic so it will kill the grass around the tree.  Now, most spruce trees grow pretty slowly, but not the Norway Spruce.  It will grow up to a meter (or about a yard for you non-metric sorts) a year for the first 25 years.  So all of this means the grass in the far end of my backyard will die and I will have to mow less.

Some of you are probably thinking, “What the hell is a morlock doing planting trees?”  Don’t worry, I have two things to say to you.  First is that these trees will aid in blocking the sun (that great big spherical thing in the sky that keeps me from leaving my cave like home) and secondly I’ll burn anything that falls off the trees, thereby destroying our environment and making it safe for morlocks everywhere to wander outside.

Now that the weekend of lush like living is over, I’m getting back to the P90x program.  I’m officially 7 days behind though.  Tonight was another night of Shoulders and Arms.  One thing I will say of the (minimal) workouts I’ve done from P90x is that each and every one has left me pretty sore which I take to mean they’re actually doing a decent job.  I would like to get more cardio in to my routine though (perhaps do more doubles) as the 3 cardio X routines just don’t seem to do enough (though I’m use to running).  In an effort to keep with the program, I’ll hopefully update more about working out.

After months of encouragement from my friend Kevin, I finally got off my ass and ordered ripcords last Thursday so I could start P90X.  Kevin began doing it several months ago and has extolled the benefits of the program to me on a pretty regular basis (and writes pretty regularly about working out, nutrition, etc…so all of the things you probably don’t care about if you’re reading this).  After the bands got in on Saturday, I decided I had spent too much money and time to continue to ignoring it.  So today after work, I came home and decided to attack the fitness test and day one of the program, “Chest, Back, and Ab-Ripper X”.  The program doesn’t, and I wouldn’t, suggest doing both of those on the same day, especially without taking a break in between like I did, but I felt i was in good enough shape to give it a go. 
     The fitness test is primarily a way of making sure you’re in good enough shape to actually do P90X (I’d recommend figuring this out before you GET P90X) as opposed to a real work out.  The woman got a huge laugh out of my first attempt to do pull ups with the bands.  The way that works is that you jam one end of a small piece of fabric through a door jam and close it.  You then run your band through the exposed end of the fabric.  This works under the idea that the end you put through the jam has a small item in it which prevents it from coming through the jam.  Unfortunately, the first time I did this, that item (I’m not exactly sure what it is) was not fully through the jam.  This resulted in the band flying back to hit me in the chest in a very painful manner.  After Erin cleared the tears from laughing so hard she cried, we continued on.  After finishing the test, I decided to jump right into day one.  Erin felt like getting a bit more exercise (she ran earlier in the day) so she joined me for the workout.
   Day one, “Chest, Back, and Ab-Ripper X” has left me already sore.  The workout (“Chest and back”) is for the most part alternating between pushups and pull ups with 2 or 3 different band moves thrown in.  The pull ups weren’t very difficult at all (I think I’m going to be investing in a pull up bar very soon to make this a bit more difficult) but the pushups wrecked both Erin and I.  I’ve attempted (but gotten too lazy to finish) the 100 pushup challenge before and gotten a good distance into it but the amount and different style pushups in the first day was unbelievable.  I feel no shame in admitting that I was doing less than the woman on the video.  Following that, we did the Ab-Ripper X workout as well.  Ab-Ripper X was short and sweet and only involved ab related moves (as you might imagine).  So far I’m not disappointed with getting this going (finally) and look forward to tomorrows cardio.

For the past year, I've been trying to exercise and lose weight pretty consistently.  I've made some pretty good strides during that time including the following:

• Losing 40 pounds.
• Building a good amount of muscle mass.
• Building up my endurance.
• Ran a half marathon.
• Started swimming again.

A lot of this had to do with moving to Kalamazoo where I wasn't quite as distracted by going out and drinking every night.  Now that I've moved back to the Metro Detroit area I'm a bit more distracted (I've got stuff going on the next two nights before going up north for the weekend).  However, I've been able to work out during lunch since work seems to be ok with it.  All in all despite going out more I've been making it to the gym and eating pretty consistently every week (with some notable exceptions).  One thing I find very useful during this time is keeping track of what I do.  I don't really count calories like many people on diets do and insist that I stay beneath a certain number, but getting the numbers for everything really helps you remember what's good for you to eat and what's very bad for you.  One tool I've been using is myfitnesspal.com which makes it very easy to keep track of everything you eat.  You basically go in and add what you eat and drink for each day.  Here's an example of what I ate today:

You'll note that it allows me to split things up into different "meals".  In addition when you click on the "Add Food" link, it remembers the things you've eaten for that meal before.  Also, you can search for previously entered food items (in fact I haven't had to enter a single new thing in their site, everything I've eaten or drank was already there).  While it obviously allows you to keep track and "count" calories, as well as several other things (protein, fat, carbs, sugar, sodium, etc).  Another portion of the site also allows you to enter your work outs.  When you generate your account you basically put in your current weight and what your goal is as well as how often you work out each week.  It will then tell you how much you should eat to achieve your goal in the timeline you've chosen.  So if you're interested in keeping track of what you're eating and really being held accountable, I'd suggest giving it a try.  I'd definitely throw some props to my friend Kevin who pointed out this site to me.  If you're interested in someone's journey to be a bit healthier, Kevin's blog is a good site to read.