Colorado/Primal Experiment

Day 1 went off well; Jeff and I did our eight exercise workout today. Chest press, Leg press, bicep curl, dips, deadlifts, leg extentions, seated row, and weighted sit ups. Each exercise was five second up and five down, to failure and my neck has never been mroe sore in my life. I don’t know how that even happened. Still at 159 this morning.

Tomorrow is our fist official day. We’ll have one of our heavy lifting sessions tomorrow at 1:45 in the Carmichael Gym. Tyler passed along some advice today that will be relevant for doing this stuff. We don’t necessarily want to work with free weights all the time because one will fail with balance before failing due to weight load. So, hopefully we can incorporate machine lifting into the routine yet maintian the dynamic nature of what we want to accomplish.

And I don’t think I actually mentioned what my three month goals were. These are speperate form anyone else’s:

1) Weigh 175 lbs (more than I’ve ever weighed before) in lean muscle mass

2) Be able to do the Secret Service kettlebell challenge: 50 lb kettlebell, snatch, 200 reps, less than 10min

3) Be able to run 50 miles (preferrably, barefoot. literally. No Vibrams this time) by January. 100 miles by May.

High standards, but considering that Tyler didn’t put past me the possibility of ADDING 175 lbs of lean body mass to my current body mass (which would make me 325), I don’t think that any of this stuff is too unreasonable.

Jeff and I will be taking our before pictures tonight!

Welcome to the experiment! To check out the breakdown of Jeff and Garik’s workout plan, you can look at this google spreadsheet. There were some clarifying text boxes that didn’t get copied over, so I’ve pasted them below.

Heavy Lifting Sessions - 30min

The idea behind this is to do as much muscle breaking, intense activity as you can in the space of 30 minutes. The exercises should be dynamic and involve multiple parts of the body. For the most part, this means playing around with free weights and not attempting to isolate any given part of the body. For these sessions, if you don’t feel like you’re going to puke afterward, you’re not doing it right. After your body becomes accustomed to intensity, it will become easier to do intense exercises. Every other week, the nature of the exercises will shift slightly so that your body does not become too adapted to a particular motion. What is the purpose of being strong if you are limited in your available activities? Since Tyler is doing 7 lifts per session, I will also do 7. For These sessions, I will do sets of three, alternating exercises, with a five second cadence up and five second cadence down. I should attain a max weight and work mostly around 60-85%, which would give me an 8-12 rep, or until failure. This I can vary.

Explosive Morning Workout: approx 10min

This is primarily a way to push your body into action early ni the moring and to provide some explosive action each day. You can do one in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, and because it is all with body weight, you could do it at any point during your day. This is one of our additions to Tyler’s program, because the primal blue print reccommends explosive exercise, where Ferriss just quotes the use of the 5 up/down cadence. I think  it will be important for transferring the strength built in the heavy lifting sessions in a quick manner to do these explosive exercises. And this short burst of enery reflects primal life, as energy needed to be expended in massive, brief quantities often to avoid danger.

Sprint Sessions: approx 45min

To maximize primal gene expression, Sisson recommends sprinting as often as you can during the week in 30 to 45 minute long sessions. He says that this will be the most grueling part of the week. I have scheduled two. We can push each ourselves as our limits. It would be beneficial to find someone to run these for us so that we can release our minds from what we are doing and just listen for the whistle. The arrangement of the session would also be up to whoever had us sprinting.

Optional Intense Workouts: approx 30min

This is our opportunity to do big explosive lift sessions like working with kettlebell cleans or doing barbell power cleans at the gym. It’s optional, but might be fun to do these and have a good, exhausting Friday afternoon if we are around and in town. The nature of the lifts will be decided as needed. These session times should not be scheduled.

Caloric Down Regulation

This will be a particular day of the week where we consume about half of the recommended calories for the day, or less perhaps. Sission reccommends going on a fast, and a weekly fast would certainly help us adapt to the lack of food just in case it were to happen any other day of the week.