Exercise

My brother and I had talked about running the CanLake 50km ultramarathon about 9 months ago, but fter my marathon in May I decided that I just didn’t want to invest the time in training that such an event would require and so I pulled out. He continued training and ran the race last weekend, and I couldn’t be more proud.

A few months ago he asked me to crew for him, and maybe pace him during the race. I hesitated for a while but eventually decided that I’d do it. My main concern was that the race was being held on the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so when my family opted to have Thanksgiving dinner on Monday instead of Sunday I felt I could go.

I recently watched two interesting documentaries/instructional films about bodybuilding. Now, I’m certainly no bodybuilder but I feel that there’s a lot that I can learn from the bodybuilding community.

The first was Layne Norton’s UNLEASHED, and the other was Ronnie Coleman’s The Cost of Redemption.

Layne Norton was eloquent, educated and entertaining to watch. He takes a science-based approach to his diet and workouts, and he appears healthy, strong and vibrant. At the end of the film I was convinced that I should try some variant of his Power/Hypertrophy workout at some point in the future and I particularly liked his approach to bulking which includes a short cut cycle every few weeks paired with a whole-food diet.

I recently read Man 2.0: Engineering the Alpha by Adam Bornstein and John Romaniello.

It’s more than just another diet and exercise book - it covers the whole spectrum of manliness from behaviours and attitudes to diet and exercise, with a distinct focus on hormones.

The premise is that men aren’t manly any more because they’re hormones are all out-of-whack. I agree up to a point, but I find it hard to believe that it’s the source of all the obesity and disease in the world. I feel that “eat food, not too much, mostly plants, and exercise more” would be better advice for the majority of men.

I’ve been doing a lot of interval training during my current weight loss cycle. Initially I was doing 100m sprints but that became less appealing as the weather got colder.

I watched Dr Michael Mosley’s “The Truth about Exercise” and it reminded me that sprints can also be done indoors. The High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) plan that Dr Mosley examines in the documentary comprises of 3 x 20s sprints on an exercise bike with a minute of active rest between sets, so I decided to try it out on the spin bikes at my gym.