To Blog or not to...

A lot of my friends are constantly on my case because of my healthy lifestyle. When eating a healthy salad with protein: "What the hell are you eating?"  like they've never seen green vegetables. When drinking a shake when everybody else is drinking a soda: "Why are you drinking that??" as if I was downing a glass of acid. When I'm working out at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning when everybody else is nursing a hangover: "You've got some issues." At least I didn't sleep with "Brenda" the dubious-looking chic with an adam's apple...and call her the week after for a date.

Why do I hang out with these people?

I've been working out for what feels like years on end. I would go into the gym for a few weeks, and then quit. Back to the gym with a different workout. Back on a break. There was never a real focus except for "get ripped." Whatever in the world that means. Other than the very subjective way of checking yourself out in the mirror ("Has that vein always been there?") the only way to track success or failure is to put down quantifiable goals. Whether that is to lose a certain number of pounds, drop 14% body fat to 10%, increasing your deadlift by 20 pounds, those are better methods to know if you've succeeded or failed miserably. 

And boy, have I failed miserably...

The problem is that I wasn't even cognizant that I was failing (double fail!). I would just train aimlessly and wonder why nothing was changing. Well, probably because I didn't know what I was training for! We are becoming such a spoiled society in respect to available knowledge. We browse the net on a certain subject for five minutes and think we're experts. Well, no amount of knowledge will replace application, dedication and purpose. I was really good at doing that.

In reality, I've only been training with a purpose for the past year or two. And would you believe it, it works. Who would've thought that having goals (both small and large, short and long term, attainable and not so easily attainable) would make you work harder to try to meet them.

Going along this train of thought, I recently purchased a book that follows the above logic of goal setting and outcome based evaluations of weight training. Eric Cressey's Maximum Strength is a great bridge to the land of outcome-based training, washboard abs, 900lb squats, and multi-million dollar pro sports contracts (like Pro Poker). Give or take a few, it's a very good source to get me going further along this path of weight training. 

So that's what I'm about right now. I'm that guy that's always looking for a challenge. Once I get something in my head that I can't do easily, I get a little twitch in the eye and become almost obsessive. I'm constantly thinking about how to meet my weight training goals despite my poor genetics. How to overcome a new plateau. How improving my deadlift means further integrating my glutes which means humping the air with supine hip bridges while mom covers up little Elizabeth's virgin eyes because decent people just don't do that sort of thing in public.  

Whatever it takes. And this blog is where I intend to document my successes and failures. 

Succeed or fail, let's see what happens...