[quote]JR249 wrote:
Do you mix up new goals from time to time? How do you feel, overall (conditioning wise), by following this type of protocol as opposed to, say, a dedicated lifting regiment?[/quote]
Good question.
About a month ago, I posted a bit of a callout to myself for getting TOO wishy-washy on goals. I was a hard-training football player from teenage years through the end of college (2007), and then spent most of 2008-2012 doing a pretty serious bout of competitive distance running, so it’s still fairly recent that I’ve left the realm of more focused programming. I was letting myself get a little too carried away, setting new goals every 4-6 weeks but rarely STICKING TO something long enough to see any progress.
In any case, I’m a work in progress, but I feel pretty good these days. I’ve had better raw strength before…but I was fatter and had much more chronic soreness. I’ve been faster before…but had to take time off at several points because of IT-band problems, plantar fasciitis, and runner’s knee, to name a few.
Thus, broadly speaking, I may be sacrificing a bit of raw performance, but I have what feels like a pretty sustainable lifetime approach to “staying in shape” to some degree. I know how to do a lot of things - powerlifting, Olympic lifting, kettlebell work, distance running, bicycling, yoga, rock climbing, etc - with at least passable, if fairly mediocre, knowledge of each…and I genuinely like a lot of them, so it gets tempting to try to do them all at once.
My call-out to myself (I think it was on 6/29) was to stop nattering around setting different goals every 4 weeks and focus on improving performance in two things. I chose the seemingly-odd goals of doing 100 total pullups in 20 minutes and doing 100 kettlebell clean-and-presses in 20 minutes. Why?
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I bike to work every day because a) I enjoy riding my bicycle, b) it’s faster than riding the bus partway and walking, and c) it’s nice to have some exercise built in to the day.
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I do hot yoga for several reasons, mental and physical. I’ve always been horribly inflexible; yoga makes me work on that. I’ve always been loath to work my “core” at all; yoga makes me work on that. I’ve always had poor balance and been prone to ankle soreness; yoga helps with that. My parents, girlfriend, and many of my friends do yoga; it’s great to have that shared practice, knowing we’re all taking care of our bodies. So that’s a practice I want to keep up at least a few times a week.
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With the basic constructs in place that I’d like to ride my bike daily and practice yoga a few times a week, I wanted to choose a “strength” goal or two that would complement those things and fit into my life fairly easily (additional note: my girlfriend is a professional opera singer, we travel a lot, and thus it’s hard to count on gym access consistently).
A kettlebell-related goal seemed natural because a) I really enjoy working out with a kettlebell, b) they generally travel pretty easily - on road trips I can just wrap one in a towel and stuff it under our luggage in the backseat - so I know that I’ll always be able to get a KB workout in every few days, whether I’m at home or at my GF’s place. It’s pretty sustainable to guarantee that I’ll do 2+ kettlebell workouts weekly.
The pull-up goal…I just like doing stuff outside, there’s a nice pullup bar at CMU within a short bike ride of my house and the office, and I just like the idea of getting better at them.
You’ve seen from my log that I still do some other stuff besides kettlebell workouts, pull-ups, and yoga, but those are the mainstays for now. If we’re traveling, staying in a hotel with a dumbbell rack (most Hilton properties now have a rack going from 5’s up to 50’s, plenty for my taste), I’m happy to make that my day’s workout.
I will say that, over the past year, I definitely backtracked a bit in terms of physique, and I think that was due to a little too many cheats in diet. I spent a lot of time training so hard that diet cheats didn’t really do much (it’s pretty hard to get fat running 40+ miles per week), and when I backed off, I think my physique suffered a little before I started to dial in how I really want to eat to maintain a good physique on a low volume of training.
I do occasionally wonder what it’d be like to go back to steady hard-and-heavy lifting, but I enjoy the so-called “Activities Guy” lifestyle, using the much-maligned term of “functional fitness” although that just sounds like my rationalization for being weaker than powerlifters and fatter than bodybuilders 
