Practice What You Preach

And what I should be preaching is preacher curls.

Nope.

On a side note: the industry tells trainers that doing isolated exercises like bicep curls is not good. It's a waste of time and not a functional movement. You should be working on your biceps by doing compound exercises like seated rows or chin-ups. This is what I have started doing lately and it seems to be working well for me.

For one reason or another I have a mild shoulder injury at the moment; thus limiting me from doing movements that will pull on my shoulder or raise my arms above shoulder level while bearing weight. Cool. No Worries, I'll be ok in no time.

But I don't want to totally neglect my training so I got back into the curls for a little while.

Pow. Too much weight doing a barbell curl and I have a severely painful back injury. I am not 100% how severe but a few opinions and a little movement exploration tell me that with ice and rest I should be ok in a few weeks.

Fantastic. Should I start an injury scoreboard? The CURRENT totals are:

1) Tibia fracture with lateral meniscus damage
- under investigation by orthapedic surgeon; surgery a high possibility.
2) Rotator cuff/pectoralis minor tear
- light rotator cuff exercises diagnosed
3) Intercostal(?) partial tear
- Minimum 2 weeks off heavy lifting and sleep deprivation due to pain. It hurts to breathe.

Awesome!

Your Body Mass Index indicates that you are overweight.

One of my assignments asked me to analyse someone's body mass index based on their statistics so I thought I'd enter my stats into CalorieKing while I was there and:

"Based on your BMI, you are overweight and should aim to reduce your weight to between 69 and 91 kg."

(I am sitting between 92 and 93kg)

Losing this amount of weight will not only affect your appearance but also decreases your chances of developing many major health risks.

This alone leads me to question the BMI scale. I suppose it is designed for more sedentry people and doesn't account for me being jacked. Does it?

Going Green

I have always dismissed tea in general, let alone a tree-hugging hippie drink like green tea. I mean just look at the name; it strikes you as a hippie drink instantly with a word like Green in it.

Damn hippies.

Getting into the fitness industry I quickly noticed green tea was pretty popular among the die-hards. I even started to notice green tea caps and various supplements containing green tea extracts. What's that all about? Since when are beefed bodybuilders hanging out with strung out hippies?

This led me to investigate the benefits of green tea:

Tannins - A group of simple and complex phenol, polyphenol, and flavonoid compounds. Produced by plants, all of the tannins are relatively resistant to digestion or fermentation. All tannins act as astringents, shrinking tissues and contracting structural proteins in the skin and mucosa.

What do Tannins do exactly?

Having a cup of green tea after a meal can aid in digestion. Green tea has been used for thousand of years in Asia as a digestive.

Catechins - Catechins are a category of polyphenols. In green tea, catechins are present in significant quantities, more specifically; epicatechin (EC), epigallocatechin (EGC), epicatechin gallate (ECG) and epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). EGCG makes up about 10-50% of the total catechin content and appears to be the most powerful of the catechins - with antioxidant activity about 25-100 times more potent than vitamins C and E.

A cup of green tea may provide 10-40mg of polyphenols and has antioxidant activity greater than a serving of broccoli, spinach, carrots or strawberries.

Meaning?

Well having a powerful anti-oxidant coursing through your system after a heavy workout is just what you need to reduce free radical damage. Free radicals, to the layman, are nasty little suckers that tear cells apart as they float around... freely.

Flavonoids - Flavonoids are plant pigments, and are the brightly colored chemical constituents found in most fresh fruits and vegetables. They may aid in protecting against infection. Deficiency can result in a tendency to bruise easily. Learn more about flavonoids, click here!

Which will do what exactly?

Obviously your workouts will suffer if you are sick. Cough cough means no buff.

Theanine - An amino acid that produces tranquilizing effects in the brain, theanine is a unique amino acid found in the leaves sencha. Theanine is quite different from the polyphenol and catechin antioxidants for which green tea is typically consumed.

What Does This Do For You?
Give it a try, you feel pretty good after a couple of cups of green tea, and you don't even feel like lighting up afterwards either. It leaves you with a peaceful feeling without compromising motivation and mental activity. Try saying that after a joint or two.

Bodybuilding & Fitness Uses

Pre-workout - Green tea is a great alternative to the ECA stack. Ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin is 'the shit' in the body building world. But give that a shot and you feel like crap. You feel like you should probably lay off the whipper for a while you great jittery mess.

ECA makes you irritable, slightly depressed later on and a bit angry. The green tea is great because it does have some caffeine and the Theanine really relaxes you mentally but lets you perform physically.

Cutting up- Supplementing with green tea can raise your resting metabolic rate by 3%. In order to get this benefit you must have about about 3 glasses a day. If you have a bmr (basal metabolic rate) of 2000 or so that means 60 extra calories a day. Bruce Lee was pretty ripped yeah? Its not the kung-fu. It's the green tea!

All About Tea

Most tea comes from the same place. The tea plant is a member of the Camellia family (Camellia sinensis). Black tea, oolong tea, and green tea are all derivatives of this one plant.

It is the way the tea is prepared that determines its color. After the tea plant is picked it is fermented and then heated to stop the fermentation process. This fermentation process is responsible for the caffeine content of the tea. The longer it is fermented the more caffeine the tea will have. It is for this reason that green tea has its colour and low caffein content. The reason why green tea has the most health benefits is because a longer fermentation process destroys many of the beneficial substances in the tea plant. That is why knocking back bags and bags of your Lipton tea is not even remotely comparable to having a cup of green tea.

Qualities Of Tea

From what I have heard there is a big difference in the quality of tea. Tea you get in bags from the supermarket has had the crap blasted out of it and very little of the nutritional benefits remain. And I have my doubts about the latest Nestle product on the market. Apparently the best is to get whole leaf tea from your crazy little herbalist type places. So far I am still on the dried supermarket variety- but I am drinking it in the loose leaf variety rather than bags. So I am heading in the right direction going green.

The Stack

I did the stack. 7 reps at 102.5 kgs. Let's see how many PBs I can rack up over the next two months... Pity I am sporting a small shoulder injury; making chin ups and shoulder presses impossible.

Will the Real Blog Reader Please Stand Up?

If you're reading this your name is most likely Aly McPhee. If not, what's the story there??

So I haven't really been doing this blog as per the plan. I have not been taking before photos in preparation for the after shots. The whole concept is a little much and too hard to organise. If I were to do this properly I should have taken some measurements and that kind of thing as well. Ah well.

I can say that I am getting ready to breach the 92kg mark (that's a little over 200lbs for you North Americans) and my body fat % is a solid 15%.

I had my knee looked at and I need to get another MRI and see the surgeon again. Going under the knife again is a very real possibility. This could pose problems for me keeping up on the jacked track.

Getting started

So I am getting started. It's not much but hey, I'm a busy guy.

After two years of traveling, partying and drinking; this is the shell I have to work with.