40 Days + 10,000 Swings E-Book

Chad V. Holtkamp

• Herausgeber: Briefcase Media Group
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: Home Gym Strong
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 149

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Are you tired of fitness guides that skim over the details? Discover the steps you need to take with a behind-the-scenes look at one man’s healthy lifestyle.

Author Chad V. Holtkamp knows that no health routine is perfect. 40 Days + 10,000 Swings: A Journal shows you the nitty-gritty and the highs and lows of his year-long fitness program, reaching the best shape of his life. By paging through the author’s own daily journals and detailed accounts, you’ll see his food intake, his exercise routine, and even his state of mind. Through this over-the-shoulder look at how he dealt with personal trials, you’ll find your own roadmap for personal success.

In 40 Days + 10,000 Swings, you’ll discover:

-Daily journal entries for a real-world example of a fitness plan in motion

-The steps you can take to balance your professional, personal, and fitness challenges

-How Chad managed to stick to his plan despite daily life and his father’s lung cancer diagnosis

-A step-by-step exploration of the 40 Days + 10,000 Swings workout program

-How to stay in shape in the face of unexpected adversity, and much, much more!

This hands-on fitness memoir is a companion guide to Sink or Swing, the second volume of the Home Gym Strong series. If you like real stories of fitness struggles and success, practical advice, and life-changing workout programs, then you’ll love Chad V. Holtkamp’s candid exercise guide.

Buy 40 Days + 10,000 Swings to take the first step toward your ideal body today!

Leseprobe

40 Days + 10,000 Swings

A Journal

Chad V. Holtkamp

40 Days + 10,000 Swings: A Journal is the companion guide to Sink or Swing in the Home Gym Strong series.

Visit chadvholtkamp.com to join my reader’s group and stay in the know.

You can also visit HomeGymStrong.com and follow my workout adventures on a more frequent basis.

Book publishing is all about reviews. If you enjoy this book or get anything out of it in any way and think it might help others as well, I have a teeny, tiny favor to ask of you. Would you please leave a quick review on at your favorite online store?

They’re hugely beneficial for others seeking that same guidance, and much appreciated by everyone!

Click here to leave a review

To My Family

Introduction

In January 2015, I spent a week writing the first draft of my first book. The working title was On Track, Off the Rails, which changed at the last minute before publication later that summer to Work Out Pig Out.

Still excited from the initial rush of writing that book, and stuck inside due to it being winter in Chicago, I wanted to dive right back in and create another. Not knowing what to write next, I kept a journal of my latest workout routine, which focused on doing one plan for the next 40 days. I thought if I wrote 500 words after each workout, there could be enough material for another book once I finished.

Little did I know how my life would play out over that time.

40 Days + 10,000 Swings: A Journal is a companion guide to my second book, Sink or Swing: Working Out When Life Isn’t Working Out.

Whereas Sink or Swing is an in-depth look at my life and workouts throughout 2015; 40 Days + 10,000 Swings is written in a daily journal format and focuses solely on the workouts themselves.

In spring 2014, I did Dan John’s 40-Day Workout program in which you do five lifts for 40 workouts. At the time I chose squat, bench, chin-up, deadlift, and loaded carry. When I was deciding on what one routine to use in early 2015, I read a post from Dan on Dave Draper’s site about adding in 10,000 swings broken up into 250 per session. It seemed like a great combination of gaining strength from the lifts with the cardio benefit of the swings. I’d found my plan.

If you haven’t read Sink or Swing yet, I’d recommend picking that one up first and then coming back later to read 40 Days + 10,000 Swings.

40 Days + 10,000 Swings - Take 1

Day 1 - 26 January 2015 - Monday

F&*k me.

If this workout doesn't get me in the best shape of my life, I don't know what will. It's absolutely brutal but somehow fun at the same time. I haven't pushed myself this hard in a long time.

I actually look forward to the sets of five on presses, chin-ups, and squats since those are the easy parts and where I get to rest up a bit.

Continuous swings with the 24 kg for sets of 15 and another set of 35 is the tough part. During the chin-ups, I broke the last set of 35 into 20 and 15 just because I needed the breather. Plus, doing sets of five on the chin-ups is too much right now so I might need to do 3, 3, three instead of 5, 5 — at least until I get stronger at chin-ups.

Potatoes and rice are my new best friends. I added them back into my diet as I can’t do this workout and keep going with a low-carb diet. I think I’m done with low-carb anyway, or at least the zero-carb mentality that I was following before. At this point, any diet will work, and it's just whatever one will keep me mentally sane and happy. I love sweet potatoes in butter. I haven't eaten a white potato in a while, and it was weird eating what tasted like a French fry. Maybe I’ll get used to it.

I started the morning off with some basic Maffetone cardio for an hour on the treadmill. It was easy enough and just a way to burn some extra calories and get some light recovery movement in play.

Work was crazy, too. I was so busy and worked from home for the first time on a Monday. We’re hiring so much that we needed to hire more people to hire more people and outgrew the new space we just moved into back in early December. So that means I get to work from home three days per week and just go into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Scott Abel came out with a new book on hardgainers today. I don't think I'm one of those, but he had a section at the end with meal plans for various calorie intakes. My meals are pretty much planned this week so maybe I'll add those in next week.

The book is back to the bodybuilder mentality of eating six meals a day, though, and eating first thing in the morning and then right before bed doesn’t count. Spacing out four meals the rest of the day isn’t that different from what I’ve been doing. The problem is that what I’ve been doing hasn’t been working so I guess I need so switch it up.

My sleep sucked last night, and it was hard to fall asleep for some reason, which never happens. Once I got to sleep, I slept. Then my wife woke up early, so that woke me up for a bit, but I was able to get back to sleep. I’ll see how that plays out tonight. After the potatoes and 250 swings, I think I'll be tired.

I got a bit cranky towards the end of the day, but I managed to get my workout done by 6:00 P.M. Afterward, I pre-heated the oven for the potatoes and then went to the mailbox for some packages. Then I got back and had to wait for the potatoes to finish. They still weren't done after an hour so back into the oven they went, but even then they still weren't done. By that point, my patience was at an end. I still had to eat and shower and try to write. Now it's 8:45 P.M. and I’m going to eat a tablespoon of coconut oil and an apple and drink some water before bed.

I'm looking forward to keeping this up and see how well it works. My abs were SORE during the workout, so I took that as a good sign. I'm still feeling fat from Christmas, so I need to get back and stay on the wagon.

Day 2 - 28 January 2015 - Wednesday

So things aren't quite as bad with Day 2 in the books. My abs are sore and will be sore for the foreseeable future. It's only been since Friday that I jacked up the number of swings I do per day, but I'm starting to see some obliques working through the flab. My lower back was a little sore yesterday, so I worked to tighten up my swing form today. Nothing good will come from added swings if that sucks.

I planned on working out last night and going with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday schedule, but work kept me in the office later than I planned. Even though I work from home most days, I have to go to my office near the Merchandise Mart on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Anyway, today's workout started with another hour on the treadmill at 6:00 in the morning. I took it at a slow pace around 120 bpm on my heart rate. Then I mixed up the lemon and apple cider vinegar concoction I make most mornings before cracking open my laptop and getting to work. Needless to say, my company is growing, and I'm busy with no letup in sight.

Once 5:00 P.M. hit, though, I was through with my work and headed down to the basement for my workout. Monday took 35 minutes, so I wanted to shave some time off that without killing myself. I managed to end at 32 minutes so that plan worked and I didn't kill myself. My average heart rate was 152 bpm, though, so plenty high. I didn't seem to need as much rest between sets as Monday. Or maybe I'm just embracing the pain and finding pleasure in that zone.

I still think the actual weight lifting is the easiest part and where I can get some rest, even though my heart rate is still in the 150s after a set. That was much lower than the 170s after a set of swings, though. Like I wrote on Monday, I can’t see how I’m not going to get in the best shape of my life with this workout. The key will be the consistency in doing it, and being smart when it comes to the weights. If I'm tired and the first set is too much, I'll back off the second set. I moved to 3 x 3 on chin-ups, too, and that worked much better.

I'm now looking at a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday schedule. That means a hellacious four days in a row each week, but at least I'll get some extra time between Sunday morning and Monday evening. And work really shouldn't screw that up too much since I work from home all those days.

The biggest question will be diet. I've been on goofy Paleo-Keto-Low-Carb-Fasting-Feasting for so long that I don't remember how to eat square meals. I have both plain and sweet potatoes in the oven right now. I took some to work yesterday and plan the same for tomorrow. I'll probably end up heading down to the cafe for an omelet for breakfast, so we'll see.

Tomorrow is a busy day, and I'm booked for an 8-minute Skype call with John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire about his Fire Nation Elite Mastermind group. I'm not sure if I'm ready for that yet, but I'm going to talk to him and get more info and run my plans by him. Today I listened to his first podcast with Pat Flynn from 2013. It was funny how he said that no one likes the sound of their voice on the radio or the way they look on video or being on stage in front of people.

Um…I do.

Day 3 - 30 January 2015 - Friday

154.

That's the beats per minute average of my heart rate over 28 minutes during tonight's workout. I managed to shave nearly four minutes off Wednesday's workout, which had shaved three minutes off Monday's workout. My beats-per-minute average keeps going up as well.

The swings are still the toughest part though the first set of 15 is gravy. I can bang out five presses each side and then go right into 15 swings and then five more presses followed by the full 35 swings.

It seems to take more mental strength than physical strength to keep going with that many swings. I have to break things down during the middle three exercises to a set of 15 swings and then do the next set broken up with 15 more swings and then 20 swings soon after. Only at the end do I just tough it out and keep going through the mental barrier and hit the 35 swings in a row. Once I do that, I can see getting my time down to 25 minutes. It's only the third workout out of 40, so I'm not going to push things just yet.

Chin-ups are still 3 x 3 since I'm not giving much rest between sets. Guess I need to ask advice of the Master Creator Dan John and see what the goal of this would be —faster times for the cardio hit or more rest between sets to tweak a bit of strength. I started a thread on the Dave Draper site last weekend, but I won't post again until I'm done with the workout on Monday. Doing the four days in a row will be the real test. So far working out every other day has been a nice way to break into it.

Double-kettlebell front squats with 24 kg might have been a bit heavy, but I didn't want to create two 20 kg bells with my Kettlebell Buddies. I'll just resign myself to that being a little too heavy for now but it will even out in the next week or so.

I weighed in this morning about a pound heavier than last Friday. Plus, my measurements went up about a 1/4” so that didn’t make me happy. I’m not sure if it was all the pizza I had over the weekend — and I ate a lot of pizza! — or if I’m just gaining ab muscles that I’ve never had. Let me tell you, for a simple $10 tool the ab wheel is killer, especially on my lower abs. Any sets of swings following just five of those are the man makers.

My digestion seems to be better having upped the carbs in both potatoes and rice. I also got a new Technivorm Moccamaster today, so my coffee making instantly improved. Once I get the funds to create a Bunnzilla grinder, I'll achieve coffee nirvana. The Bunnzilla is a beast, so that will have to wait.

I took the day off work today even though I checked emails a few times. Driving around Chicago in the middle of the day on a Friday in late January was interesting. I didn't have much to do and to set up the Moccamaster took some time.

The John Lee Dumas call last night was cool, and he noticed my mic sounded different but in a good way. It's a Shure SM7B, and most podcasters use the Heil PR40, so it does sound different. I sound like David Gahan from Depeche Mode when I sing, and that's the mic he uses.

I was sweating like a pig when I finished the workout, and I'm now just killing time until my wife gets home. They have a crazy pitch going on, so she'll be late even though it's Friday night. I'll do some blog writing and then check out what's up with Giorgio Tsoukalos on Ancient Aliens while grabbing a beer.

Day 4 - 31 January 2015 - Saturday

174 max heart rate. 152 average.

I started the workout this afternoon and just wanted to get it done but not kill myself by trying to shorten my time anymore. I figured I could take it easy since this was the first one I’d done on back-to-back days. I have two more planned for tomorrow and Monday night.

I only added 30 seconds to yesterday's time — so much for taking it easy.

I probably actually did the workout in the same amount of time as yesterday. I didn't rush my warm-up and did some extra rocking and pull-up bar hangs that easily added the 30 seconds.

This time I was concentrating on getting the lifting portions more exact with the movements. I wanted to focus and practice the press, starting with my less strong left arm. I tried to tighten my body and irradiate — as Pavel Tsatsouline calls it — and punch up the weight and make it crisp. Then move to my stronger right arm and do the same. It's only 20 kg (45 pounds), and I could easily do more reps, but I wanted to get the form right.

Again, the first 15 reps were easy. Then getting mentally in the groove on the second batch of 35 long-cycle wasn’t bad, either.

For the first set of three chin-ups, I'm sure I could have done four or even five but kept it at three today. I'm on Day 4, so when I get to Day 6, I'll go back to the full five reps. It's a nice breather after the 35 swings.

With front squats, I made sure to feel it and take it slow on the way down. I added a slight pause to really stretch things out. My heart was pounding when I was done with just the first five, almost as much as after a set of swings. Dan John was right when he said that they really hit you hard.

By this time I was sweating like a dog and gasping for air but kept the rest to a minimum. I was back on my pace of 5:00 for each lift and felt better at this point though knowing I just had the ab wheel and loaded carries left. The ab wheel is still stretching me out, and I can feel it more during swings at that point. I ended with 15 swings and then 20 more. I was at the 20:00 mark and gave myself 30 seconds before moving on to the carries.

I live in a vertical townhouse, and it's 3-1/2 flights up to the top floor. I did a suitcase carry with 24 kg (53 pounds) with my left hand on the way up and then switched it over to my right hand on the way down. That took at least 90 seconds for the first trip and then just under 2:00 for the second. Once I get into the second week, I'll probably add some weight. For now, the time under load seems right.