matthearn.com

When last we left the narrative, I was eating enough rare red meat that I was becoming ruminant, while doing an odd variety of exercises designed to keep me interested and build muscklez. I did some poking around on the Men’s Health TNT Diet, and discovered the Men’s Health Forums, which led to significant changes in my diet and exercise routines. Here are the things you need to know about the forums:

1. there are separate forums for weight lifting, running, miscellaneous cardio, diet, injuries, general health, as well for specific Men’s Health diet plans (TNT, Ab Diet, Huge In A Hurry) and also a few “off-topic” forums where folks espouse remarkably narrow-minded conservative political philosophies;


2. there is a lot of good information on the forums, particularly in the “stickies” (post threads that have been deemed especially useful and always appear at the top of every forum);


3. there are a lot of well-meaning folks on there with anecdotal experience but not a lot of actual fitness or diet expertise;


4. there are five or six smart, knowledgeable people who want to help you, particularly if you demonstrate some intelligence and ability to comprehend science; and


5. there are five or six utter douchebags who, while they may be knowledgeable, simply crap on everything with which they disagree.

I tend to put the douche-bags on “ignore” and just don’t respond, because I’m tired of arguing with trolls.

Having gotten that off my chest, I will say that the forums are a great place to find a whole wealth of information (even if it’s just links to other sites) about how to lose fat, gain muscle, proper exercise form, a whole host of stuff. It also alerted me to the fact that the rinky-dink routines I was doing as part of the TNT diet may have been effective, but they weren’t ever going to be as effective as barbell training with big ol’ compound movements (even though much of the TNT stuff was still basically compound movements, many of them involved dumbbells or just bodyweight, which is less effective).

A “compound” movement is an exercise that involves more than one muscle group (such as deadlifts, back squats, and bench presses); exercises that target a specific muscle (like bicep curls, or calf raises) are called “isolation” movements. Compound movements are the foundation of any serious muscle-building routine, for the simple reason that you exercise a whole lot more muscles at one time. For example, a leg press machine works primarily the quads; doing a barbell squat exercises the quads, the hamstrings, the lower back, the upper back, and the abdominals.

(Squatting is rad. I’m a fan.)

Now, my focus is to try and get big ol’ muscles. Getting strong is handy, but to be honest if I could get big ol’ freaky muscles and not really gain any strength, I’d take it, because I’m no professional athlete and a 500-pound deadlift doesn’t really have any use in my daily life. So, I started googling up hypertrophy plans, which is where I made my misstep, about which I’ll talk later this week.

Haha! You thought I wouldn’t post again for like 3 years, didn’t you? You were wrong! Although to be honest I think the odds on two posts in one week on this blog were 75:1 when I checked with my bookie yesterday afternoon (his name is Hmayek, he is from Armenia, he loves taking NBA bets, and you really really REALLY do not want to get to know him or his friends if there is any way you can possibly avoid it).

This will be the first post in the extremely long and unpredictable series tentatively entitled “How Matt Hearn Became Marginally Less Fat And A Little Bit More Muscular (But Let’s Be Real, It’s An Ongoing Process And Hearn Is Still Pushing Two-Fitty)”. It starts thusly:

In late September of last year, after a summer of trying to keep the fat at bay by running incessantly in my Vibram Five Fingers but still eating whatever I wanted, I was somewhere around 260 pounds, and my feet and shins were essentially destroyed by running in un-cushioned shoes. I had to completely stop running and wait for my feet to heal up, occasionally getting out on my bike a little but mostly sitting on my butt eating 4000 calories a day and wondering why I had so much trouble getting back to my fighting weight.

Then my good buddy Brian Smith sent me a link to the TNT Diet book, produced by Men’s Health. I flipped through the sample sections and said “Wow, this makes sense.” The book, among its other qualities, alerted me to fact that losing weight was a grand idea, but dudes like Daniel Craig aren’t just skinny, but muscular.

Duh.

I immediately grabbed a copy of the book off Amazon (for about $5, which I guess isn’t a very good sign). The TNT “Diet” is essentially a low-carb one, although it adds in a bunch of stuff about carb timing and insulin and stuff that was largely meaningless to me because unless you’re within about 15 pounds of your ideal weight you should be doing “Plan A,” which is: eat from this approved list of foods that don’t contain carbs. I’ve had great success on low-carb diets in the past (I dropped about 40 pounds in 2004 doing one), so I said let’s knock this out for a few months and see whatup.

The more important thing I learned in the TNT book was some basic muscle-building, however. Weightlifting, using a variety of techniques, to build muscle. The book says don’t even bother with cardio (although it mentions some High-Intensity stuff to do if you are insistent upon it). None of this was particularly revolutionary, I’d lifted weights a little before, but what I’d never done was focus on diet and exercise AT THE SAME TIME. Either I was running and lifting and going nuts but eating like a pig, and therefore seeing no fat loss, or I was eating well but doing no exercise so I would lose some fat (and muscle) and then watch it come roaring back as soon as I stopped “dieting.”

I specifically remember the date that I started the diet and exercise plan: October 4th. I remember this because my boy Josh got married on the 2nd, and the food we ate that weekend was unbelievable and rich. I probably gained 3 pounds just from red wine. That Monday morning, I weighed myself and the scale reported 265 (and cried out for a moment when I first stepped on it). Yeah, it was time to fix this.

The diet was a breeze, I’d low-carbed before. I loaded up on meat and cheese, avoided bread and potatoes, and dropped 5-6 pounds in a week, the usual water loss. The workouts were fun and interesting, with the exception of the “Dynamic Warmup,” which I did religiously, and which consists of jumping jacks, arm circles, lunges, various other calisthenics, finishing up with something called “groiners” which are about as enjoyable as they sound. The first workout contained “static lunges,” “incline dumbbell bench presses,” “hip extensions,” “seated rows to neck,” and finished up with the “prone cobra,” in which you lie on your belly and left your head and feet off the floor for 60 seconds, tightening the back muscles. The workouts switch up fairly frequently to keep you from getting bored, with “goblet squats” and “planks” and things, and the rep and set counts change as well as you get stronger. I was losing a little weight every week, mostly enjoying the routines, and hoping I’d be looking like Dwyane Wade by spring.

Then, while looking for more info on the diet and exercises, I stumbled across the Men’s Health Forums, and discovered a whole new world of exercise and diet advice, as well as some of the most outrageous douchebags ever to operate a computer, which is where the story will continue next time.

This is yet another in the seemingly unending series of posts in which I say “Sorry I haven’t been posting!” and “I’m going to start posting more!” followed by disappearing into the ether for another 4-7 months because I’m a schmuck.

My bad.

It’s not deliberate. I still feel that explanations are owed, however, so here it is: I got two kids, playa, and a third on the way. It is amazing how much time is taken up by entertaining two children while trying to keep up with housework and keeping one’s overly-pregnant wife from going Hormone Crazy and throwing daggers at you. Not metaphorical daggers: literal daggers that she keeps in a belt, looking like Danny Trejo in Desperado but without all the tenderness.

Another reason is that my life’s been sort of devoid of things to share with all-a-y’all. Over the last 9 months, my primary activity other than job and family has been attempting to turn my body from a blancmange into something approximating Captain America, or at least The Tick. I considered writing a bunch of stuff about it, but there are already fitness blogs on the internet written by people with more success and more knowledge than I’d ever be able to come up with. I didn’t want my site to become a fitness blog, where I just throw up a weekly post saying “Got my squat up to 245!” or “Diet was crappy this week, so I’ve decided to give up eating until Labor Day!” Those are lame and useless, and don’t exactly promote great readership.

Then I said, well, it’s not like I have any readership now. (Oddly, my site still gets page-views, mostly from people looking for information about 1998 Mazda Proteges. A fine automobile, for sure, but not exactly trending on The Twitter.) And while other fitness sites have lots of information, they 1) aren’t MY experience, which might be useful for someone in a similar position, and 2) they aren’t funny. I can usually be relied upon to do something funny, usually at my wife‘s expense.

So, here’s the deal. This is still not a fitness blog. I’m hoping that just getting back into the swing of writing every few days will get my brain operating in a manner conducive to writing about all kinds of things just like the heyday of 2002-2005. I’d like to talk a bit, for example, about how Hunter Pence makes my heart go pitter-pat. But, a lot of the posts you’re going to see here for a while are going to be about my process from flab to fly (current status: flower). I’ll endeavour to add plenty of hilarity, so please tolerate me while I get it out of my system and return to discussions of why someone should start a Hobo Eating Competition (in which the hobos are doing the eating, not being eaten themselves, as I believe the latter would be illegal in most jurisdictions).

Gracias!

Holy crap! I don’t sound like complete ass! Here is mp3 evidence:
The People That Walked In Darkness
Right?

Oh yes. This happened.

You’re right, I have had professional vocal training!

Josephine receives a kitty card from her lovely Auntie Rach. In lieu of subtitles, here’s how it went down: “Kitty! Meow!” ::hug::

Newsflash: I am a HUGE nerd. Like, staggering. Wait, let’s back up.

A few weeks ago, Brian revealed to me that he had ordered a new diet book, the TNT Diet, off of eBay for like $4. I found it on Amazon for like $6 (the price appears to have gone up), and since I have free Prime 2-day shipping, I had it in, well, two days; Brian’s took longer, eBay being what it is.

The book is basically a low-carb diet (specifically high fat, and we all love fat, right?), along with a detailed program of weight-lifting to build muscle. I’ve had good luck with low-carb diets in the past, so I figured this would be a fantastic way to get back under 18 stone and maybe develop those wicked arms and shoulders that drive the ladies crazy.

This is where the nerdiness comes in. While reading up on TNT, I discovered that Men’s Health (the publisher of the diet book) maintains a kickass forum for asking questions and chatting with other dieters, sharing your knowledge and goals and successes. From this, I learned all kinds of completely awesome things, like how ideally when trying to build muscle you should take in 1 gram of protein for each pound of “lean muscle mass” (which technically includes bone and water, anything in your body that’s not fat), and on the diet you want to try and stick to a 60/30/10 ratio of fat to protein to carbohydrates.

So during the roughly 30 minutes a day when I’m not at work or being bossed around by my family, I’ve been making nifty little spreadsheets to show me how many calories I need to take in, how much protein powder I should eat every day, fantastic stuff. I’ve even ordered a set of calipers and tape measure to reasonably-accurately calculate my actual fat percentage, which led me to some interesting data.

I currently weigh 254 pounds, and am roughly 6’3″, depending on time of day. My best guess, based on a number of online fat percentage calculators, is that I’m probably about 30% fat, and no more than 32%. (I’ll know more Friday night after my kit arrives.) If I’m 32% fat, that means I’m 68% muscle/bone/water, or about 172 pounds. Now, according to Wikipedia, if I get myself down to 14% fat, I would be very, very fit, almost “professional athlete” fit. Assuming that I gain no muscle (and I intend to, if possible), 14% fat on top of 172 pounds of muscle is 200 pounds. Someone who is 6’3″ and 200 pounds has a Body Mass Index of exactly 25, which is still technically in the “overweight” category. How crazy is that? Even if I was as fit as I had ever been in my entire life, a doctor might look at my BMI and tell me to lose a few pounds.

Sorry, are you asleep? My bad. I enjoy this stuff. See also: Nerd, Matt Hearn is a.

I started the diet at 257, so in about 10 days I’ve lost 3 pounds. Here’s hoping I can keep it up. I haven’t seen my wang in months.

I find this hilarious. This is the current picture that’s up on the website for Concord Mall:

As someone who works roughly 1/4 mile from the Concord Mall, I’d like to ask: where in the hell was that picture taken? It certainly wasn’t at the mall. It wasn’t anywhere NEAR the mall. Believe me when I say this: this is the nicest bench in the mall. (Click to embiggen.)

Who got a perfect score (15 out of 15) on this quiz about general religious knowledge? THIS GUY. Take the quiz, and then check out the demographic information. The second most knowledgeable were Atheists/Agnostics. “Worship Service Attendance” (weekly, monthly/yearly, seldom/never) had almost no correlation to increased knowledge. All in all a pretty interesting result.

I can’t decide if this is funny or not. Thoughts?