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13 thoughts on “Mon, Oct 6th”

1. ME Day

   Deadlift 5-5-5-5-5

   100-105-105-100-None

   Bad, bad day overall. A mixture of tiredness, fatigue and dehydration turned my favorite lift into a nightmare of arched lumbar vertebrae and ripped calluses. Called it a day after a piss poor set of 5 for 100kg. Depressing.

   Great link to that Jeff Tucker interview Colm, he seems like the epitomy of a good coach.

2. Another interesting (again, to me) point from Eat Stop Eat. The author contends that three meals a day and the related hunger every 4-5 hours is a learned response based on social norms. Again, I’m no expert (not even a novice) but it seems that many of those in know argue for a model of HG’s having one big kill per day or less, which would support this view. So the theory being that you could teach yourself to only eat once or twice a day. The posts I see about individual experience with IF seems to be mixed. It’s easy or becomes easy for some, while hunger remains unbearable for others.

   Now if true, this helps resolve something that did not make sense to me because anytime someone uses the argument that ‘this is the way your body was meant to work’ then it seems it shouldn’t be too hard to do. However, if its short-term and overcoming an artificial barrier that did not exist before (example of the initial difficulty of giving up carbs), then I could buy into it.

   Any more thoughts? Comments on how many days in a row I can hijack Colm’s message board?

3. Just from experimenting with different meal frequency myself, I’d definitely go along with the idea that hunger has a trained component to it.

   I’ve been everywhere from 3-6 meals per day, and after a week or two on a particular frequency you don’t have to look at the clock anymore, you just get hungry at the right times.

   One meal a day would be bloody hard to do while staying anywhere near Paleo/Zone guidelines though. You know what 17 cups of brussels sprouts looks like?

   If you want try to emulate HG eatign patterns, then I think the key element has got to be randomness. Sometimes you’ll have regularly available food all day, sometimes you’ll be going hungry etc

   (That’s one of the points that seems to get lost in intermittent fastign protocols: there’s nothing intermittent about always eating one meal a day)

4. To plagiarise Glassman to an extent. It’s not my message board, it’s yours. I’m just the caretaker.

5. So how did they eat something for a week with no means of preservation?

   So as I’m sitting here eating my Snicker’s bar I just can’t help but wonder why, when it’s everything that’s bad for me, do I find it as irresistible as the Siren’s song?

   That’s it, I’m going back to school for my Anthropology degree. I knew Accounting was a mistake.

6. Starting Arabic language classes tonight (a double whammy of classes running all evening), so won’t make it to the gym.

   Did my new favourite workout protocol for when time is short.

   Deadlifts (100kg)

   1 on the first minute, 2 on the second, 3 on the third etc. until the required number of reps can’t be completed in the allocated minute.

   10 rounds (then I lay down)

   Interestingly this only highlights that my problem with Diane are those pesky handstand push-ups. Guess that’s what I’ll have to work on next time.

7. So Kyle, just to follow up on the oddity of different generations of bodybuilders getting into remarkable shape using very different nutritional strategies, I think it’s worth reflecting on the fat-loss wisdom of one modern pro: “take as many drugs as you can afford and starve yourself for as long as you can stand it”.

   This might lend credence to the suggestion that the nutritional strategies of top bodybuilders may not be terribly relevant to the rest of us.

   That said, it’s worth noting that it’s ridiculous to think there’s only one correct way to do anything. If that was true, then nobody who used any of the other methods would ever get any positive results, which clearly isn’t the case.

   Of course, just because the concepts of right and wrong don’t apply doesn’t mean that we can’t have better and worse.

   Big Shane – on the question of how much of the success of crossfit is due to the Zone, I think the only sensible answer has to be “quite a lot”. I’ve seen Nicole say that if you do the WODs, but don’t change your diet, you’re only going to get half the benefits of the programme. I get the spirit of what she’s saying, but I don’t like putting numbers on this kind of thing.

   You’ll see people saying things like “80% of your results are determined by nutrition”, but it’s been remarked before that if this was really true, I should be able to eat 100% like Dorian Yates in his prime, and then without changing anything else, automatically look 80% like him. This is, of course, completely at odds with reality.

   So really, nutrition is bloody important, but hard to quantify.

8. Watched Supersize me last night, hadn’t seen it in a while and I must admit it’s one of those movies that makes you look at the food you’re eating and remind that “oh yeah the bad stuff will actually kill me”. Kinda fell off the Zone wagon this week and have been feeling the ill effects of it, so the eggs & salmon and broccoli were back on the menu this morning for breakfast and a good zone friendly salad for lunch. But yeah, if anyone hasn’t had a look at Supersize me yet, give it a watch, reading Fast Food Nation is good also.

9. Whatever about watching Supersize me, try and live on McDonalds and booze for a week. Believe you me, you won’t ever want to even smell the stuff again (McDonalds, not booze).

   It was on my recent trip to America that this happened. Travelling long distances, sleeping very little and eating only Maccy D’s comes back to bite you in the ass. Honestly, I nearly fainted at one stage while eating a chicken BLT thing. It reminds me of parents who give their kids a cigarette to smoke so they’ll be disgusted and not want to smoke.

10. Interesting discussion the last few days. So Will, good point on the problems with quantifying results attributable to diet. So let’s say you wanted to leave the theoretical world of Grok pre-agriculture and into the Glassman world of measureable, repeatable results. You would do a ‘black box’ approach, no? Try different diet protocols, and measure results on whatever criteria you have determined are important (e.g. WOD performance times, strength, recovery time, energy, body comp). But there are so many variables affecting each of those outside of diet, it becomes difficult to measure, doesn’t it (did my Cindy time go up because I’m zoning or because I’m pulling 10 fewer kilos)? Glassman had/has the advantage of a large stratifiable population with which to observe effects so I guess it’s just best to take his word for it. Anyway I think individual variance counts for far more than anything else. After all, Robb’s answer to almost any diet it ‘Give it a try and then tinker, let us know how it works!’ So do I dare attempt the Zone again?

    Shane—continuing on the Armegeddon theme, at some point in my life I feel like I need to learn how to butcher a hog and clean and fillet a fish.

    Pix—wasn’t it interesting though, that there was a guy that had been eating 2-3 Big Macs a day since the chain opened in 1950 or something and had no noticeable ill effects? I mean, we all know that McDonald’s food doesn’t’ actually break down in your system due to the preservatives, right? He should have a few years of undigested food floating around. It’s a great movie, and I really enjoyed it but there was some rather blatant propaganda in there as well.

    Alright, enough with the long posts.

11. Hi lads,

    new to the crossfit (2 weeks) and love it, where else would you get that lovely burning breathing hard feeling after a work out!

    I have been reading up on the zone diet and have tried it on a couple of days. The problem for me is that in the morning, I tend to stay in bed too long to make eggs or cook, (that snooze button is far too tempting!). Im wondering does anyone else have this issue and have any quick 4 block breakfast recipes that works for them?

12. Claudia: 45-50-55; 5 rounds (21:28), 17Kg/Box Jumps
    Shane 1.0: 90-100-105; 1 round, 25 Wall Balls as rx’d
    Big Shane: 110-120-125; 4 rounds, 13 swings (sledgehammer swings for Wall Balls)
    Pixie: 90-100; 3 rounds even as rx’d
    Pistol: 70-90-70; 2 rounds, 5 Jerks
    Spicy Meatball: 80-85-90; 2 rounds, 8 jerks as rx’d
    Eoin: 80-85-90; 3 rounds, 15 wall balls (30Kg Jerks)

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