rings and ricebags

Such a belated update as this is most unsatisfactory and I will cast at least a fair portion of the blame to China completely blocking any access to this blog and almost any other western blog available.

Moving on, although this time of the year is around the coldest and most sofa-enducing season, the spirit of a new year provides a decent off-set from lethargy, at least for the first portion. After this, a goal-focused, motivated mindset is needed to persevere and see the fruits of any labours, a consderable amount of time and focus needed to achieve much that is of real change or value.
With this in mind, my own training goals and motiations remain largely unchanged or affected despite different circumstances. At the moment I am living in a village in the east part of China in close to a city called Yangzhou. Unfortunately there is a distinct lack of any gyms or much 'equipment' for training, but the job can always get done in different ways. The body will adapt to any new or progressive stimulus, regardless of whether it is a barbell or a stone, a treadmill or a dirt track. The body doesn't register the differences in aesthetics of an object or surroundings. All thats needed is to be challenged, the nervous system and the muscles and bones and tissues all need the appropriate stimulus to achieve the desired goal, something that can be achieved in any surroundings.
Fortunately for me I had the foresight to take a pair of gymnastic rings with me which are a really effective and versatile tool to have if travelling. I would highly recommend them to anyone who travels much, all thats needed is something to hang them off like a goal post or a tree branch.
So now the small courtyard of the house I am staying in has become my training area, my equipment being a pair of gymnastic rings and a 45 kilo bag of rice, borrowed from the family stock-pile which weighs around 1 tonne in total. With these I have been able to get full body sessions working on upper body pulling and pushing movemens, as well as squatting and bending with the lower body and mid-section. A sample workout from few days ago:

Over head rice bag presses: 5 sets
Ring Dips: 5 sets
Bulgarian split squats with rice bag: 5 sets
Ring Pushups: 5 sets
Hanging Leg raises: 5 sets

Post-training nutrition: 10 spring onion and toufu dumplings. Happy days.
At the moment I am keeping it simple, training once every two days alternating between upper body pushing/squatting, and upper body pulling/lower body bending, such as good mornings or romanian deadlifts. Due to an inability to vary the weight of the rice bag without making a lot of mess and hassle, I am using a simple template of 5 sets for every exercise, going to or near failure for every set. So although I know I won't improve in some areas with such training and equipment, I can at least progress if not certainly maintain other aspects. With the rice bag so far I have been training bear-hug squats, over head press, split squats, lunges, good mornings, romanian deadlifts and bent-over rows.


The other major aspect is a change in diet, a typical Chinese household diet involving frying 95% of the time, with rice or noodles eaten with every meal. While the use of cooking oils and salt may er on the heavy side, at least this type of energy-dense diet which has grown dramatically in the last 10 years provides enough calories and nutrition to cover almost any training one does. Each meal usually consists of a bowl of rice each, and about 4 dishes in the centre of the table all picked at and shared by the family. Although fried fairly heavily, the varity of vegetables consumed each day would exceed the UK average many many times over. This being said, meat is still central to meals and seen by most as the most desirable and nutritious food group, the more the better. Being a vegetarian of the stubborn kind has lead to some puzzled and concerned responses, and a doubling of the portion of eggs, toufu and vegetables, which is never a bad thing. The abbundance, variety, home-grown origin, and low price of foods like vegetables and toufu seems to account for the difference in consumption levels between the UK and China, most people in more rural areas such as my host family growing their own rice and vegetables which are eaten on a meal-to-meal basis.

As for the gym, predictably the formalities and legal proceedings are taking a good while, but as some of you may have noticed, the 'To Let' sign outside the building has re-assuredly been replaced by a 'Let' sign. Any news will get posted swiftly on here now that means for posting from China have been established.

Keep enjoying the process!

An Update

I hope everyone's training and life in general is good, and remember don't join any big 'globo' gyms, wait for us to open and train in your garage or something in the meantime!

Joking aside (do wait for us though...), we just wanted to keep everyone informed of current developments. So far, things are going without any hitches. We have formalised a few things such as website domain names, opening a business account, having already formed a limited company, and other bits and pieces that are needed to be done have been done already or are in the process of. As far as the gym itself goes, solicitors are battling it out (fortunately not physically) to get the contracts drawn up so we can all sign for it. Since the last update there were a couple of other things that we wanted to clarify and change, and they have been agreed upon, so we are still looking at getting access around February time. Up until then it is a matter of getting the suppliers lined up for optimal equipment delivery time, and when we do get the keys, it will be sleeping bags on the gym floor and decorating and fitting all day, providing some good midnight painting delirium videos to post here I suspect. Leaflets will be printed and disseminated this month to spread the good word, and the official website is in the works and should be primed ready for going live sometime shortly. I do plan to make more clear what form the gym will take, but it will be focused on group-based circuit style sessions. That is all for now.

In the meantime I am going to China for a month and will be looking to post some things that may be of interest to everyone while over there.

Below is a video I filmed in 2007 while over there showcasing what can be considered a standard scene across many parks in China between 5:00am - 8:00am. Certainly a different scene to the UK. Exercise has a massive social function in China, and you can clearly see the vibrancy and diversity of the activities performed by everyday people, not just athletes. This is how exercise should be, natural, enjoyable, and an enhancement to one's life.



Remember, no 'globo' gym memberships!

Move!

Happy New Year! The start of a new year and a fresh canvas to make our mark upon!

Now, how awfully predictable that shortly after the Christmas and New Year period a blog about training and fitness will throw up a piece about "smelting down that Xmas pud of a belly!", or something to that effect. However, keeping in line with such tradition, I am going to do just that very thing, albeit brief.

Losing weight, technically, is a straightforward procedure, somewhat obscured by circumstances, subjective experience, the media, etc. That is another issue, the good thing is that if we take away all the things clouding fat loss and just concentrate on the body simply as is, the equation to weight loss becomes clearer, and good job too.

Its essentially the law of thermodynamics. One must expend more energy (calories) than one intakes. If someone is training but still not losing weight, somewhere along the line they are still taking in too much too lose the excess weight. The above equation is true for the overwhelming majority of the population.

Fat and glucose are two of the major energy sources for any activity, even just sitting down doing nothing. As for anyone laying any claim to some sort of "fat burning zone", some mysterious intensity of exercise where fat is most efficiently burned, such notions can be flatly ignored. In fact, the body utilizes fat as an energy source the MOST when it is at rest. So why don't we just do nothing and burn off all the fat? Because unfortunately, doing nothing expends very little energy (calories), and so the above law says that we will not lose weight. However, what IS important, is how many calories you burn, not how much fat as an energy source! And to do this, we simply need to move!

Post-exercise, our metabolism is raised, and as a result, more energy is being 'burned' for hours after training. So after exercise we are burning much more than before we started, and as a result, that fat is being scorched away too.

After spending a year-long dissertation researching all the potential factors as to why the Chinese population is becoming more overweight in recent decades, it all came down to one simple reason. Calories in are increasingly greater than calories expended. There are a plethora of contributing factors to this, but at the heart of it this is all it is, and its all the body knows and responds to.

So at the end of the day, just remember to expend more than you are putting in, and that means moving and eating healthy.

Also, this stuff doesn't have to be boring! Push Training is all about taking exercise back to how it felt when being a kid, like play! Of course, we play hard...

A prime example here is of one high school teacher, Sam, showing how its done. Starting three years ago at 125kg, Sam has now lost 40kg through finding joy in the movement he does. Just compare the top video, of him before, to the one below.





Here is his blog: Sam Books and Thoughts