Revival

I have been often asked, "What happened to the blog?" And my evasive (and only partially honest) reply has been, "Well the basics of my fitness philosophy are already there, so not much to write about." To be perfectly transparent, I was keeping myself occupied with academic and non-academic interests, and yes I am calling watching TV shows an interest too. I did keep working out during all this time, and there were several ups and downs. So, let me deviate even father from the pedagogical narrative style, and tell you a bit about how my workouts and life in general evolved since I moved to San Diego for grad school. Hopefully you will also find nuggets of insights in the story, some thing to motivate you towards fitness and overall wholesome life, and this should allow me to segue in to the new things that I tried fitness wise.

I came to San Diego in the fall of 2010, and after a brief stay with my host family, who have been wonderful friends since, moved to the on campus grad housing and started my first quarter. The first shocker was the absence of household help that we start taking for granted. So not only I had classes, some research (this was more me trying to see what the field was all about), singing (I joined an a cappella group) and tai-chi, I was also supposed to do laundry, dishes, shop and clean. Combined with my less than sonnet inspiring cooking skills, I was getting a little lost with nutrition. And one thing that my grad students friends would have experienced, and which started becoming a part of my own eating habit, were the ever present free food events in school. The food lover in me would argue that with consistent workouts, what's a few slices of pizza or some cookies, after all, that should be one of the perks of working out. With the rationalisation in place, I would allow myself a "few" cheat meals per week, and within the first couple of months I started noticing the effects manifested as a layer of fat. This was the first time I noticed my resolve to eat clean failing since I started back in February 2010, and I hit a phase where I just couldn't say no to unhealthy (albeit tasty) food, even though I knew half way through that it is messing up all my work in the gym. I realised I had to do something, this constant submission to cravings would not work!

What I should have done is to avoid the stimulus and practice moderation. But what I did instead was to increase my cardio, and there was a period when I was doing 1.5+ hours of high intensity and HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) cardio. Workout had started becoming a chore by then, and my motivation swayed a bit. The only good that came out of that was an exceptional cardiovascular health, with my heart rate lingering around 40 bpm and my blood pressure around 50/80, which was low enough to make me pass out once (story for another time). This clearly wasn't sustainable, and even with all this work, I wasn't getting in better shape. In fact, I had lost most of my muscle definition and almost reverted back to my before lifting state. I also injured my left knee doing declined bench presses, I felt the knee cap shift and obviously I freaked out. My doctor assured me that no permanent damage was done, but I didn't feel a 100% either.

I spent the spring break of 2011 in San Francisco with some friends, taking a break from heavy workout routine. In hindsight, that is exactly what I needed, a hiatus when I can regroup my thoughts and formulate a more sustainable plan. I also did this: write down whenever I would eat unplanned junk food, which helped my curtail my all-out unhealthy food feasts. The reasoning that they are free wasn't sufficient anymore when I could see how royally that was screwing up my body. I was also getting better with planning my meals, cooking in advance. Now I could cook twice a week and be good for the entire week (which for me is 42 meals). With the train starting to get back on track, I jumped on a 4-days a week lifting and 4-days a week cardio routine, the details of which were very similar to the ones in my earlier posts. This lead to slow yet steady improvement, which continued for one year till the spring of 2012. During this year, I made some head-way on classes and research, picked up a few more fun classes like fencing and dancing, and worked over the summer as an intern at Oracle, Santa Clara.

By the time spring break 2012 rolled in, I was pretty much back in the game, and had been in my cutting phase (loosing fat) for a few months, which is rarely as exciting as bulking phase (gaining muscles) or even maintenance phase. I was sticking to the same nutrition and workout philosophy as I did 2 years back, and I was seeing progress, but lord was it slow! We went hiking around Grand Canyon during this break, and this is when sh*t happened. I have had flat feet, so my knees end up enduring more beating than normal (I also think evolution needs to work on the joints, I mean how crappy are those). Then like an overconfident moron, I ventured for miles and miles of hiking in my gym shoes, as if I can compensate physiological constraints with my high level of conditioning. The end result of the hike was a hurting knee, although we did have a blast. Now here is where it gets a little interesting, and by that I mean I do something even more dumb. I come back and the first thing I do is hop on an elliptical for 45 minutes, aggravating a likely minor injury to the point where it hurt real bad to walk. So, misplaced over enthusiasm can be as bad as the other extreme. All cardio and leg workouts went out the window, and all I could do was to hobble to the gym and lift a little to hopefully keep the routine in place.

Now you might quip, "Well, I get it! You frakked up every so often. How does that help me look like a Norse God?" For one, I think all those Norse Gods were on steroids, so it might be really hard to look like that, unless you are genetically really gifted. Nonetheless, we can try to be our best, and that in itself is a great feeling, with aesthetic improvements as a fringe benefit. In my following posts, I am going to talk about how things changed when I had to completely give up cardio after my injury, the changes I made to my eating habits, as well as workouts, and how I managed to stay in shape through all that. I know this is a cliffhanger, but like they say, "good things come