Trainer, Train Thyself

I have abs.

I suppose that's no surprise coming from a professional fitness coach, but the thing about these abs is that I've always had them.  Long before I started working out, I was a skinny teenager with abs.  Before that I was a little kid with abs, a toddler with abs, and, presumably, a fetus and a zygote, both with microscopic six-packs.  I probably had abs before I had a heartbeat.

I was tickling my 8-month-old son the other day and, even though his belly is round and chubby, and he doesn't know a hanging leg raise from a Swiss-Ball toe touchdown, I could feel his little twin ab ropes pulsing as he laughed.  Abs, apparently, run in the family.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things I'd change about my body if I could wave the magic physique wand.  The other day I was driving down Sunset Boulevard and saw a homeless guy pushing a cart.  He was wearing a shirt with cutoff sleeves, and I noticed--occupational hazard--that his shoulders and arms were defined like an Olympic-sprinter's.

Was it pushing that cart, day after day, that gave him those muscles, I wondered?  And I briefly considered jerry-rigging a weighted cart and shoving it around all day for a few consecutive weekends just to see if my arms would start to look like that after a few months.  The thought even crossed my mind, "Hey, would it really be so bad being homeless if my arms were that cut?"  But then the light turned and I realized that, as nice as it would be to have big, defined arms and shoulders like that homeless guy pushing that cart, they're probably not worth trading my home and family for.

So, I could make some improvements, certainly, but abs are something I've always had.  Not veiny and super-ripped, but visible.  When I'm working out hard, they just become more visible.

Which is nice for me, of course, but in a way, a disadvantage as a trainer, because I've just always had the exact thing that most clients come to me to acquire.  I never had to work for mine, so I can't really speak from experience when I'm talking to someone who exercises hard but has stubborn belly fat.

People come to me in search of abs, and I give them the spiel about being disciplined with diet, but the whole time my fingers are proverbially crossed behind my back because I can eat whole pizzas for dinner and still look my abs in the face in the morning.  Yep, I'm that annoying guy.

(Ahh, halfway done with dinner.)

So here's what I'm doing, folks:  I'm going on a diet.  It was Mike Robertson, I think, who recently told the story of the guru who was approached by a women who wanted to get her son to stop eating sugar.  He told her "Come back in two weeks."   When she returned, he simply told her son "Stop eating sugar."  She asked him "Why didn't you just tell him that two weeks ago?"  and he replied, "First I myself had to stop eating sugar."

So the point is that I'm finally going to start practicing a more rigid version of what I preach when it comes to eating.  Now despite my "pizza" confession above, I'm not a junk-food-junkie; I'm usually a pretty good eater.  But I tend to eat A LOT, and when crappy food is available, I tend to indulge.

I have no intention of becoming 100% pure, but I'm going to shoot for 90%.  Meaning at least 90% of what I eat is going to be squeaky clean.  Essentially I'm going to go for good protein sources (just bought some organic ground beef yesterday--wow, what a difference), fruits, veggies, green tea, water, dairy (which I can tolerate well), fish oil, protein powder--and that's going to be pretty much it.  I'm not going to worry about calorie-counting for now, but I'm going to try to get a little leaner yet, pretty much the same thing my clients want to do.

I'm about a week in to this diet.  I have some observations that I'll save for another day--it's an interesting process which I'll share with you as I go along.  

Have a good weekend--

Andrew

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Looks like I'm not the only fitness geek who was inspired by the funny pages.