iamshendy

Story of a champion. Sorry I’m a champion.

If you saw my checkpoint from a few weeks ago, you’ll see that I am progressing in the general direction that I had hoped when I started out in January. I just booked a trip to Vegas with a few buds, which means pool exposure just went up 1000%.

Fortunately the trip is just over 3 months away, which is the perfect amount of time to harden down the fitness regime, set some specific goals – and focus on the prize.

Diet

I saw some results with the visceral fat diet that I was on for about a month. I shed between 5-10 lbs. This diet is not practical for the long term as it doesn’t involve any sugar (fruit included, even as strict as no root vegetables, carrots, beets, potatoes, etc). My new focus is to eat well constantly, save for 1 meal a week.

To be successful at this, I have to maintain proper portions. Generally this is only a problem at dinner, but breakfast I can get a little out of hand with the Kashi GoLean Crunch and Yogurt. I’m going to continue to measure my breakfast portions (1/3 C rolled oats before cooking and 1/4 C egg whites, or 1/2 C Kashi with enough yogurt to cover it).

My protein intake has been pretty good. I’ve been having egg whites for breakfast every morning, 2 protein shakes throughout the day, a can of tuna, and 1/2 a chicken breast. I’m not going to change anything here.

I’ve been really good with my alcohol intake. Aside from a glass of wine here and there I have only had 2 ‘drinking’ nights since New Year’s day. This will continue aside from my ‘planned cheats’.

Planned Cheats

• March – Minneapolis. I’m heading on a small road trip at the end of the month to Minneapolis. This will be my first milestone (3 weeks) at which I’m allowing myself some Arby’s, Pizza, beer, Cheesecake Factory. This will of course be all offset by the 14 laps I’ll be doing around the Mall of America.
• April – Birthday. My birthday coincides with my brother in law’s wedding social. This will be a drinking evening, followed by what I’m sure will be delicious social food – cold cuts on rye with pickles and mustard. MMMMMMmmmm.
• May – 1st Camping weekend of the year. The May long weekend is Winnipeg’s first real opportunity to come out of hibernation and enjoy some 50/50 weather. This means some hot dogs, chips, booze, and monopoly. Although the monopoly isn’t a cheat, I will try and stay off beer and focus on gin and soda. We’ll see.

Fitness

Weights – I have been extremely happy with my weight lifting at the gym, and there is not much I want to change here. I am pushing myself more and more in terms of load, and only want this to increase.

• Power lifts: I will be trying to incorporate more power lifts a la CrossFit to try and improve cardio and fat loss while lifting weights.
• Core – I will try to incorporate more core into my routine (2x a week). These sessions will include:
• Front Planks (2 X 1.5 minutes)
• Site Planks (2 x 1 minute per side)
• Decline situps
• Medicine ball twists
• Wood chops

Cardio – My cardio has fallen over the last month. Previously I was doing interval training 2-3 times a week. My current goal for cardio is to go 3 times in addition to my 6 day weight lifting cycle:

• Monday I have 90 minutes of intense rugby practice (core, plyometrics, sprints, etc)
• Wednesday/Thursday – Interval training for 25 minutes. I want to see how far I actually run in this time, and set more specific goals after that.
• Saturday/Sunday – Interval training for 25 minutes.

Size/Weight

I’m currently floating between 225lbs and 230lbs. I want to get to 215lbs by June 7th (90 days from today). I will be posting pictures probably tonight of my current progress to date, for bi-weekly trend comparison. This should bring out the definition I’m looking for in my abs, and also get rid of excess fat on my love handles (still got ‘em) and chest.

Stay tuned!

Shendy.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. Twitter has pretty much killed my need for blogging. Check me out there for more recent updates.

I did want to take some time (and more than 140 characters) to update my progress thus far. I’m back to ‘Vegas Shape’ as I’m calling it – the shape I was in last June went I went to Vegas with the boys. I have been going to the gym 6 days a week now, actually incorporating a Saturday workout for the first time in forever for the last 4-5 weeks. I am very happy with how the gym is going. My arms, chest and shoulders are starting to get more defined (and bigger hopefully), and most importantly – I can start to see those “abdominal muscles” I’ve heard so much about.

Current weight: 223.5 1/2 lbs – My lowest in at least 10 years. My goal is 215 by mid-April.

Diet

• I have stuck to a diet targeting visceral fat for 3 weeks now, and have cut out sugar completely (except for cheat days).
• I have been eating protein right after my workouts
• Water – I have been consuming about 4-5 L of water a day, but not on the weekends

Improvements/Goals

• I want to see if I can get my heart rate to “target” (192 bpm). No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get about 160.
• I want to improve cardio for rugby. This will involve my weekly dry-land training with the team on Mondays, but also including a spin class once a week, and an interval run once a week.
• I want to increase my bench press. My goal is 275lbs for 10 reps for 3 sets
• I want to increase my squats. I currently push between 225lbs and 275lbs for free weight squats. I would like to get this up 315lbs (three 45lb plates).
• I want to consume more water on the weekends.
• Stretching and strengthening my hips – due to sitting all day in front of a computer, my hips become very tight from time to time, and I have a lot of lower back problems that come and go throughout the year. I have really been focusing on squat stretches, squats in general, hip adductors, and also a lot of stretches for this area.

As soon as I charge the batteries in my camera, I will take some progress pictures. I’m very happy with how far I’ve come, but have a lot further to go.

That’s it for now – I’m off to the lake for a poker tourney with the boys, some Prime Rib a la Brandon Boone, and some delicious chicken wings. Cheat meal? I think I deserve one.

Shendy.

I.
Will.
Not.
Lose…

Ever.

Put me anywhere on God’s green earth,
I’ll triple my worth.

275lbs for 2 reps.

When working with a DataSet object, I got this error.

“Failed to enable constraints. One or more rows  contain values violating non-null, unique, or foreign-key  constraints.”

Talk about annoying – this took me the better part of an hour and half to figure out where this error was coming from. Quite descriptive if you ask me <rolling eyes>. It’s as useful as this:

As with any bug the more information you can get on it – the better. The code I put together thanks to a tip from Roy Osherove’s Blog gets into the DataSet object to see which column is actually throwing the error.

foreach( DataTable table in dataSet.Tables)
{
if (table.HasErrors)
{
     foreach ( var error in table.GetErrors())
     {
         if (error.HasErrors)
             throw (new Exception( error.RowError));
     }
}
}

This produced a much more descriptive error that allowed me to track down the problem:

Shendy.

I’m doing the best I ever did.

I’m doing the best that I can.

My food for thought’s so hot, it gives you dudes ulcers.

Since I started using WordPress in January/09, the whole permalinks thing has confused me – mainly because I didn’t spend the time to implement it correctly, but also partly because their documentation is confusing.

I dedicated some time today (ended up taking 10 minutes), to figure this out.

The default for WordPress URLs is http://www.iamshendy.ca?cat=10, or http://www.iamshendy.ca?p=12. This doesn’t fair well for users that want to  access your site directly and can’t remember what “cat” is, or which number “p” was supposed to be set to. More importantly – it prevents search engines from better indexing your content. If a link within your site appears as http://www.iamshendy.ca/fitness/ – a user will have a better chance of remembering it, and a search engine can now index the ‘fitness’ keyword for your site.

With the intro out of the way – here’s a few tips to consider while following through WordPress’ documentation

1. Edit your Permalink Settings by accessing the “Settings” menu, and clicking “Permalinks”
2. Don’t follow the pattern of the “Common Settings” in WordPress’s Permalink Settings
   
   This was the biggest thing that was throwing me off. I had typed in

   http://www.iamshendy.ca/category/postname

   which according to their example – looks like it would work:
   
   But on fact does not – you actually have to use the tags provided.

3. Once you’ve entered your desired custom permalink – you’ll need to update your .htaccess file. This is a file that sits in the same directory as your index.php (usually the root of your site). Create this file, and upload it to your ftp server. Be sure to copy and paste everything that appears in the TextArea after you save:
   

Hope this helps you out – email me if you have any questions.

Shendy.