I was thrilled to see that this week Beck dropped another two pounds of body fat. He now tips the beam at 212. He has methodically and consistently added poundage or reps to all his training lifts. Simultaneously he has been tearing up his cardio regimen, hitting every predetermined weekly goal. For the eighth consecutive week Beck has made progress on every front. I am real big on "keeping score" on a weekly basis: hit the small incremental weekly goals and the big overall goal takes care of itself. Way back when we started this process he told me he would be "thrilled" if he could drop 30 pounds of fat and add 10 pounds of muscle in fifteen weeks. Not coincidentally the end of the 15 week period would coincide with his 60th birthday. At the end of week eight we have lost 19 pounds of fat and added 5 pounds of muscle, so we're actually ahead of schedule.
One huge change to his training regimen made at the end of week seven was dropping his weight training sessions from three per week down to two per week. This is something I will often do when a trainee is making staggering progress. As is often the case, when newcomers are subjected to my Purposefully Primitive regimen I often reduce weight training sessions from three (the industry standard bare minimum) to two session per week. Fitness instructors and insiders freak out. "This is completely unorthodox and counterintuitive: how can a person make progress only weight training twice a week? This seems impossible!" Personal Trainers nationwide routinely recommend 4, 5 even 6 weight sessions per week using a huge menu of training exercises. Here I am dropping from three sessions to two using three exercises. This is mainstream fitness heresy!
The less-is-better rationale all relates back to the original plan and the individual's goal. The goal of the resistance element of the Purposefully Primitive philosophy is simple: build and strengthen muscle. That's it. We seek to strengthen target muscles simultaneously using key exercises that force groups of muscles to work together to complete the assigned muscular task. Make a muscle quantifiably stronger and that muscle is forced to grow. That is a physiological fact. Being a Purposeful Primitive, when it comes to muscle building we believe in doing fewer things better. We do the same workout every session: we squat, we bench press, we deadlift. Since the end of week four Beck added some light, end-of-workout curls and tricep pushdowns. That's it : five exercises done three times a week. For seven straight weeks he made rep or poundage progress in every exercise in every session. He was showing signs of fatigue.
His training poundage in the squat, bench press and deadlift had gone up so radically, so dramatically, so consistently that, while improvement came easy, recovering from one session to the next became problematic. Young people recover from draining physical tasks far quicker than older individuals engaged in identical tasks. My solution is one that I've used for decades: eliminate the middle training day. Each week we have predetermined weekly goals: if the trainee achieves the specified weekly poundage or rep goal - what difference does it make if he achieves the target improvement using two instead of three sessions? By lifting on Monday and Friday instead of Monday/Wednesday/Friday, Beck indicated that he felt far more rested and recovered. He rolled into Monday and Friday's weight sessions "fired up instead of dragging ass." He now weight trains twice a week for 30 to 40 minutes. That's it.
His trusty heart rate monitor indicated that in week eight Beck oxidized 600 + calories in his two weight training sessions and 2,200 calories in six weekly power-walk sessions. Last week we instituted a cardio training procedure where he would forget about aerobic session duration and simply walk for as long as it took to burn off 500 calories. Keep in mind that as a 212 pound, 59 year old man, his caloric expenditure rate is far greater than say a 120 pound athletic woman. Beck powers along using a brisk power-walk pace that (for him) burns calories at a nice 12 to 15 calorie-per-minute clip. Nutritionally Beck has followed the Warrior Diet strategy since day one. He eats little during the day. If he feels famished he'll "day binge" on fruit. At night he eats lots of great tasting, nutritious food. His wife is a chemist and a terrific amateur gourmet cook and on the weekends he'll have some wine and not feel guilty about it - if you are "good" six-and-a-half days a week, have some pizza and beer or wine and pasta on a Friday or Saturday night - have it and have it guilt free. Just get back on the proverbial wagon the next day. So far, I could not be more pleased with Beck and his progress. Our goal is for him to weigh 199 by January 1, 2009. He will drop 35 pounds of fat and added 8-10 pounds of solid muscle. Having a renovated body will be a great way for a 60 year old to roll into 2009.
Want to train personally with Marty? Email him at: mgso@embarqmail.com
Cool stuff; congratulations to Beck.
It would be nice if each blog post had some links to the previous/next entry. When I link people here, I would like them to be able to read from the beginning without having to hunt.