Beck showed up at my door this past Tuesday visibly thinner. He had ventured up from Northern Virginia for his second visit. Today we would cardio walk and weight train.
He indicated that he was completely fired up about the process and how our seven week journey had revitalized him. The best thing, he said, was how much he enjoyed the workouts, "I love my outdoor cardio walks; the heart rate monitor provides me with a consistent benchmark and allows me to have a frame of reference. The weight training is a complete blast; by concentrating on a relatively few number of exercises you can get really good at the few you do. Everyone is telling me how much better I look!"
He grabbed his still ample (yet smaller) gut and said, "Now if I could only get rid of this!" He laughed.
I gave him another of my endless analogies. "Your gut is the equivalent of America's Strategic Oil Reserve. Your body's biggest reservoir of fat resides in your stomach. Fat is fuel - food energy that the body stores away for starvation times. Your body will drain down all its other fat deposits before he turns its attention to drawing down gut fat. That is why your limbs and face look so much leaner and trimmer. You've lost fifteen pounds of body fat and that fat has been drawn from your legs, arms and glutes. This is why your face looks so much thinner. In the next few weeks the body will start mobilizing gut fat. We've still got a ways to go."
We started off with a fairly intense cardio walk at the farm. In contrast to his first visit in week I when I had to stop every five minutes to let him regain his breath, this time he was able to walk ahead of me and we only stopped four times in fifty minutes and those were at my command. I showed him a few tricks to make "walking harder." Most people walk with their arms hanging limply at their sides. They use very little leg drive. By pumping the arms hard and really digging with the legs - almost like an ice skater - the heart rate can be elevated 10-20 beats per minute.
Beck ate up the hills and using our new walk techniques was able to register a 165 heart rate cresting one steep hill. His heart rate was dropping 20 beats in a minute (a good thing) after cresting the hills and at session's end he registered 79% of his age-related heart rate for our 47 minute session. He indicated that in his previous life this would have exhausted him and now it invigorated him.
We headed back to my garage gym to hit the weights. The idea was to hone and refine his techniques. In the squat I broke his form down completely: he was stiff and inconsistent and was attempting to rebound out of the bottom position. I showed him how to push the hips back while descending and how to "allow" the poundage to push him downward to the deepest point - all the while maintaining a vertical torso. At rock bottom he would push erect "on the heels" while keeping his hips under his shoulders at all times. I also showed him how to keep his knees forced out on both descent and ascent.
I opened up his stance to allow his gut room to descend between his thighs. 65 pounds was kicking his glutes; which was great. By cranking him way back on the poundage, by insisting that he use an extreme range of motion, by teaching him how to maintain a vertical torso throughout the lift, a relatively light poundage was taxing his thighs so dramatically that his legs were shaking with effort while coming erect on the final reps of a 5-rep set.
"That was incredible!" He commented after three sets of five reps with the light poundage. "My thighs are blasted to smithereens! It was as if no other muscles were being worked."
Beck was experiencing precision muscle targeting. His dumbbell bench presses needed no corrections. He was extremely strong in this lift (remember this is a 59 year old man who'd done nothing physical as recently as two months ago) and he handled a pair of 50 pounders for three sets of ten reps, quite impressive! We moved on to the sumo deadlift ("Think of it as a reverse squat.") and he was able to crush 135 x 5 and 165 x 5 reps using nice technique. By incorporating what we had learned a few minutes earlier in the squat, i.e., vertical torso, knees forced out while rising and lowering, head looking up, push off the rear of the foot, and using those same techniques on the sumo deadlift, Beck was able to harness his power quite effectively.
After his workout he was drenched in sweat. He had hit his scheduled target body weight of 214 two days prior and I remarked that he was likely 212 pounds now. I gave him a triple serving of Parrillo's 50-50 Plus, a post-workout Smart Bomb shake, and sent him on his way. He left elated, invigorated and reenergized. Our goal is for him to achieve a 199 pound bodyweight by January 1st whilst adding 10 pounds of solid muscle. He appears locked onto this goal like a cruise missile heading towards a target.
Want to train personally with Marty? Email him at: mgso@embarqmail.com
He indicated that he was completely fired up about the process and how our seven week journey had revitalized him. The best thing, he said, was how much he enjoyed the workouts, "I love my outdoor cardio walks; the heart rate monitor provides me with a consistent benchmark and allows me to have a frame of reference. The weight training is a complete blast; by concentrating on a relatively few number of exercises you can get really good at the few you do. Everyone is telling me how much better I look!"
He grabbed his still ample (yet smaller) gut and said, "Now if I could only get rid of this!" He laughed.
I gave him another of my endless analogies. "Your gut is the equivalent of America's Strategic Oil Reserve. Your body's biggest reservoir of fat resides in your stomach. Fat is fuel - food energy that the body stores away for starvation times. Your body will drain down all its other fat deposits before he turns its attention to drawing down gut fat. That is why your limbs and face look so much leaner and trimmer. You've lost fifteen pounds of body fat and that fat has been drawn from your legs, arms and glutes. This is why your face looks so much thinner. In the next few weeks the body will start mobilizing gut fat. We've still got a ways to go."
We started off with a fairly intense cardio walk at the farm. In contrast to his first visit in week I when I had to stop every five minutes to let him regain his breath, this time he was able to walk ahead of me and we only stopped four times in fifty minutes and those were at my command. I showed him a few tricks to make "walking harder." Most people walk with their arms hanging limply at their sides. They use very little leg drive. By pumping the arms hard and really digging with the legs - almost like an ice skater - the heart rate can be elevated 10-20 beats per minute.
Beck ate up the hills and using our new walk techniques was able to register a 165 heart rate cresting one steep hill. His heart rate was dropping 20 beats in a minute (a good thing) after cresting the hills and at session's end he registered 79% of his age-related heart rate for our 47 minute session. He indicated that in his previous life this would have exhausted him and now it invigorated him.
We headed back to my garage gym to hit the weights. The idea was to hone and refine his techniques. In the squat I broke his form down completely: he was stiff and inconsistent and was attempting to rebound out of the bottom position. I showed him how to push the hips back while descending and how to "allow" the poundage to push him downward to the deepest point - all the while maintaining a vertical torso. At rock bottom he would push erect "on the heels" while keeping his hips under his shoulders at all times. I also showed him how to keep his knees forced out on both descent and ascent.
I opened up his stance to allow his gut room to descend between his thighs. 65 pounds was kicking his glutes; which was great. By cranking him way back on the poundage, by insisting that he use an extreme range of motion, by teaching him how to maintain a vertical torso throughout the lift, a relatively light poundage was taxing his thighs so dramatically that his legs were shaking with effort while coming erect on the final reps of a 5-rep set.
"That was incredible!" He commented after three sets of five reps with the light poundage. "My thighs are blasted to smithereens! It was as if no other muscles were being worked."
Beck was experiencing precision muscle targeting. His dumbbell bench presses needed no corrections. He was extremely strong in this lift (remember this is a 59 year old man who'd done nothing physical as recently as two months ago) and he handled a pair of 50 pounders for three sets of ten reps, quite impressive! We moved on to the sumo deadlift ("Think of it as a reverse squat.") and he was able to crush 135 x 5 and 165 x 5 reps using nice technique. By incorporating what we had learned a few minutes earlier in the squat, i.e., vertical torso, knees forced out while rising and lowering, head looking up, push off the rear of the foot, and using those same techniques on the sumo deadlift, Beck was able to harness his power quite effectively.
After his workout he was drenched in sweat. He had hit his scheduled target body weight of 214 two days prior and I remarked that he was likely 212 pounds now. I gave him a triple serving of Parrillo's 50-50 Plus, a post-workout Smart Bomb shake, and sent him on his way. He left elated, invigorated and reenergized. Our goal is for him to achieve a 199 pound bodyweight by January 1st whilst adding 10 pounds of solid muscle. He appears locked onto this goal like a cruise missile heading towards a target.
Want to train personally with Marty? Email him at: mgso@embarqmail.com
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