A fitness experiment about one guy’s journey to get fit, cut out negative influences and establish balance in life with the help of the Inner Circle Gym.
One of my personal heros and favorite authors is a bald little dude named Seth Godin. He’s a marketing consultant (like me) but he’s in the Forbes/Fortune 500/Silicon Valley bracket and I’d be considered to be in the junior-leaguer-over-achiever-local-whiz-kid zone.
But the reason I bring him up is because he wrote this book called “Tribes” and in a nutshell it’s about the fact that nowadays everyone has an opportunity to start a movement – to bring together a tribe of like-minded people and do amazing things.
And it was actually Blaine, while watching a morning circuit class, who remarked that Cathy and Adam have themselves created a tribe. I thought about that for a while. And realized he’s totally right.
The people who work out at The Inner Circle are there for a reason and become transformed through a shared interest. We are an eclectic mix – male, female, young, old, whatever. We are not bound together by athletic fashion choices or socioeconomic similarities. What brings these people together is a desire, nay, a hunger to get a workout you can’t get anywhere else.
Sure it’s intense, it’s raw and if you push yourself hard enough it can be downright painful. But you don’t go through it alone. It’s a community – a tribe. It’s not a gym full of dudes staring at themselves in the mirror and girls on ellipticals staring blankly ahead while plugged into their iPods. It’s a community of people working their butts off together – a tribe.
As embarrassing as it is, here’s a video of one of the complexes we’ve been doing this month as a part of our extreme transformation classes we’ve been doing. This is the list of lifts:
Bent-over row
High-hang clean
Squats
Lunge left
Lunge right
Push press
And we did four sets of eight reps each with 90-second rests in between.
As burly as I feel while doing that – it all disappears when I watch myself on video.
So after months (3 so far) of screaming and sweating on the black rubber floors of The Inner Circle Gym I’ve seen some progress.
In my first month of the extreme transformation program I’ve lost nearly 7 pounds and gained 4 in muscle. Since I started training with Adam, Cathy and Blaine I’ve gone from a body mass index of 33% fat to 27%. The photo above gives you a good visual comparison between what 5 pounds of fat looks like vs. five pounds of muscle.
As you can see the muscle takes up a lot less space. And now, so do I…
But there’s still a long way to go. At the last weigh-in I was at 276. My goal is to settle in and maintain at about 230-40 and be able to do a warrior dash by the time I’m finished.
But I’m stoked with the progress I’ve had so far and I feel a lot different. My balance is better, I’m sharper mentally and there’s no achy pain in my wolverine femur (what I call my leg with a metal rod in it). I’m starting to lean out – my hands and feet look and feel longer, I’m feeling harder in mind and body and I’ve started to notice a jawline that had been alarmingly absent for a while…
I’m also feeling more aggressive. Which I asked Blaine about and he said that’s normal since your body begins producing more testosterone to rebuild the muscle you tear down when you train like this.
“You’re sex drive will also increase,” he added with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek humor.
Sorry I’ve been so reticent (not revealing in my thoughts or feelings) lately. I’ve been a busy boy – busy getting my ass kicked.
Or perhaps not so much kicked as reshaped – literally – these lunge matrixes are nuts.
The Knife blog/training project kinda snowballed on me. I went from eating Taco Bell at 2 a.m. to “eating clean” (as Adam is so fond of saying), downing IPA’s to drinking horrible green mixtures of powdered plant matter and screaming through karaoke at Trav’s to screaming through workouts. Y’know, basically sweating my guts out on the floor of this little gym I never knew existed until 6 months ago.
FUN FACT: I sweat so much that the halo of perspiration I leave on the floor after a workout is something Adam and Cathy have started calling “sweat angels”(you can see a slight example above).
But I wouldn’t trade it for the world…
And now I, along with two other brave souls, have begun the 4-Month Extreme Transformation with Blaine Davidson. You can check out the link for the details but basically it’s four 1.5 hour sessions a week for four months and he tells you what, why and when to eat.
Even though I was doing personal training twice a week, working out on my own and trying to eat healthier this training regimen has taken my fitness to the next level – in just three weeks.
When we started I weighed 285 lbs. In just a few weeks I’m down to 279 lbs. and I’ve put on more than 5 lbs. of muscle. And we’re just starting the cardio phase…
Blaine says I can get down to 220-230. After losing a mere 15 or so pounds since starting at The Inner Circle I shudder for a moment at the work I know that will entail. But I am also excited by the challenge and eager for the increased fitness, strength and mobility.
So stay tuned because we’re taking it to the next level…
Yesterday I experienced (arguably) the hardest workout of my life. Cathy set up a “Chipper Style” or Strong Man circuit for me and I had no. idea. what was in store for me when I walked into the gym…
It started out innocuous enough, I warmed up on the Airdyne for a bit and then we did some overhead warm ups with the PVC pipe.
Then shit got real.
The 30-sec.-on-15-off interval circuit started with tire step-ups with single-arm overhead alternating thrusters for 30 seconds followed by a 15-second rest and then it was right in to tire flips. A tire flip is exactly what it sounds like – you flip a big ‘ole tire over and over again. Following that was inclined pushups on the same. damn. tire. I just got done flipping and stepping up on (I hated that tire by the end of the workout).
Then it was on to bucket pulls, which is also exactly what it sounds like. You pull a wheelbarrow without wheels around the room – but first you load it down with weight! The weight in this instance was Cathy herself (plus a 40 lbs. sandbag).
Then it was on to battling ropes. After that was a 1 minute rest. Then it started ALL OVER again. And she put me through the paces four times.
After that it was a Tabata bottom-to-bottom squat finisher and then I felt like I was simultaneously going to puke and die. Then I felt great!
In addition to personal training sessions twice a week I’ve been trying to hit a yoga class and a group crossfit circuit at the Gym once a week. As a former high school athlete, working out in a group brings a motivational intensity as well as an element of support you just don’t get working out by yourself or with a single partner.
And the thing about ICG’s circuits specifically is that you work TOO hard to care about anyone else.
In fact that’s what I adore about these workouts and The Inner Circle Gym in general – no one comes to people-watch, they come to work.
It’s not about your clothes or shoes or protein shakes or your tan of any of that nonsense. The vibe, the attitude, the atmosphere (whatever you wanna call it) is about pushing yourself to be better, faster, stronger than you were last week.
And it’s the people who workout at the ICG that make the classes so much better than anywhere else I’ve worked out.
Even though I sweat profusely, grunt, moan and breath loudly and have been known to excuse myself to go vomit no one seems to mind (and if they do no one lets on).
And for that I am truly grateful…
Here’s what we did for today’s noontime circuit class (which was PACKED btw):
