Certification Announcement

 Hello Everyone!!!!!!

I am very excited to announce that I will be working through the certified personal trainer exam this year and will be able to offer coaching to you all by 2021.  It has been a long road to reach this decision but I am finally here and excited to bring things to you that I wouldn't be able to without this piece of paper saying that I am legally allowed to.  Anyway here is a bit about my journey to this point. 

Middle and High School:

I started lifting because of sports and found out that I really enjoyed it.  Never was able to increase much of anything but really enjoyed working towards a goal.  I had one coach that really helped me understand my love for the gym and sport and pushed me to be my best self. 

University:

Here I spent a lot of time trying to find out what I wanted to do.  It is hard to have a direction when you don't know the destination.  The one thing that was always there for me was the gym, and it was one of the highlights of my day to be able to go and workout with the rugby team or whoever happened to be in the gym at the time. 

Post University:

I have spent the last 18 years working with young adults in special education.  I love working with this population but about two years ago I had a breakthrough.  I got to work with a young man in the high school weight training class who has a disease that makes him require a wheelchair for movement and accessibility.  Due to the nature of his disease we worked really hard on muscle maintenance and working on balancing some imbalances in his muscular system.  I enjoyed that experience so much that I ended up implementing some of the techniques that I used to help him to my track athletes that I have been coaching.  

I remember coming home every day while I was working with this special young man excited for the work ahead.  It made me feel that I was really doing something to help out and make life better for this child.  Unfortunately I did not realize the possibilities at that time so I put these great feelings away and pushed through with everything that I thought I should be working towards. 

Present:

The quarantine surrounding the Covid-19 Pandemic made it so my current job of working in the schools with people who have special needs not possible in the traditional sense.  This combined with a new hobby of competing in the Scottish Highland Games got me to spend a lot of time in the gym or outside.  During the height of quarantine I was really struggling figuring out how to stay healthy with so much seat time happening.  I spent a lot of time creating and implementing new fitness regimes utilizing the items I had access to around the house. I had so much fun pushing myself in this way and realized that if I could wake up every day and help those around me to realize health I would be extremely happy.  So I decided to enroll in an online course in which I would walk out of it as a certified personal trainer.  

Announcement:

I will be getting my certification this year and start taking on clients in the new year.  My goal is to make fitness available to those with special needs, but I will also be available for any clients who may desire some help.  

Phase 2: Reintroduction to The Gym

 As the Longs Peak Highland Games has been approaching I have been working hard to build some strength in my muscles.  It has been an amazing program and I feel really confident in how I have built up some good strength in my body.  There are a few tweaks that I will be making next time that I have a strength phase as some of the lifts that I chose are not that great for performance (i.e. shrugs) and some of the lifts I had in the wrong order (i.e. snatch pulls, lat pulls).  One of the joys of creating your own program is that you get to test out different exercise orders and really try and figure out what works best for your own body.  Creating my own program has been almost like a game of chess, where I have to figure out the best movement for my body and how to implement it in my life. 

The games are next week which means that I will be taking a week off for active rest.  It has been a long time since I have had to figure out what active rest means.  I think what I will do is a basic weight circuit Tuesday and Wednesday where I will work at 50% capacity on the major compound movements to keep flexibility up without expending too much strength.  My goal is not to get stronger next week it is to make sure that I have the best chance of performance.

After our competition we will be heading into phase 2 of the gym.  I will be working for 4-6 weeks on muscle hypertrophy, which is the growth of the muscle fibers in the muscle to make them look bigger and hopefully increase energy stores within the muscle.  I will be attempting to do this by bringing down the weight and increasing the reps.  If this sounds familiar this is what many bodybuilders do to maximize growth.  During this phase I will be working on two of my greatest weaknesses, eating enough for muscle growth and getting enough sleep to convince my body that it is not under stress. 

Phase 2 workout: (Mid September - October)

Upper/Lower Split

Lower:

Squat 3x10 @ 60%, 65%, 70%, 65%, 70%, 75%

Deadlifts 2x10 Session 1,  Cleans 3x10 Session 2

Leg Extension 3x10

Leg Curl 3x10

Calf Raises 2x20

Upper:

Bench 3x10 (Same percentages of max as above)

Row Variation 3x10

Shoulder Press 3x10

Snatch Pull or Upright Row 3x10

Lat Pull 3x10

Tricep Extension 3x10

Bicep Curls 3x10

This Phase is all about muscle growth.  The goal is not to exhaust your body every set it is to overload your muscle.  If you are following along at home the tempo should be somewhere between slow and medium speed on the lifts, I personally try to employ a 3 second lower followed by a two second push.

Stay tuned for more information and a follow up of the Highland Games. 

Why Returning to Fitness is (Sometimes) Harder Than Starting.

Returning to a fitness program can be just as intimidating as beginning a program for the first time.  One walks back into the gym and is inundated with familiar, yet alien, sounds that bring back memories of youth, of being in shape, of mountains climbed and goals fulfilled.  These sights, sounds, and (in most gyms) smells can also bring back memories of weakness, intimidation, and failure. 

Let's face it.  Most of us go to the gym to look good.  There are not many who go to a gym to feel good or to get better at a sport.  Most of us don't like how we look in the mirror and we start to question our value or personal worth to the world at large.  I hope that you are not one of these folks, but I'm going to play the odds and say that you are probably like this to some extent.  We are bombarded with advertisements and media that show us the perfect body.  We constantly compare ourselves to the Hollywood elite, the fitness models, the bodybuilders, or our favorite athletes.  If you are at all like me, you have started fitness routines many times.  You have started strong only to fizzle out just as strong later on.  

I'll share a little story about how it usually goes for me when I start a new program.  

Day 1: "I think I need to go back to the gym," usually said while sitting on the couch watching some sort of pop culture program stuffing my face with pizza.

Day 2: I research.  I go to bodybuilder.com I go to muscle and fitness, I watch youtube videos, I find the perfect workout.

Day 3: I study the workout and read all of the reviews about how the workout will change your life. I get excited about the work and nervous about all of the supplements that the workout calls for.

Day 4: I finally dust off the old running shoes and walk into the gym.  It is at this point that I promptly forget that I have sat on by butt for the last year and my only workout has been mowing the lawn or doing laundry.  I pick up the weights that I was at before I took a nice long break and then I work through a poorly executed workout.

Day 5: I want to cry myself to sleep and refuse to move too much from the soreness that has hit every muscle in my body.  I drag myself to the gym or to work depending on the program.

I keep this up for a while until poor form on lifts and too much weight too quickly causes minor injuries.  I quit working out for a couple days to recoup, these couple days turns into months, I find myself sitting on the couch, eating pizza, dreaming about the gym.

I hope that this doesn't sound like you, and that I am unique in this struggle to return to the gym, but if there is even an inkling of truth to this for you I am excited to say that there is a better way.  This better way to return to the gym is one that I have been using since returning after the Covid-19 crisis and I can say that it seems to be working.  Look for Part 2 in the coming days and we will look at how to return to the gym in a responsible and healthier way.

Monday Check-In: 5/4/2020

I had a rough weekend with everything.  I know that it takes a lot of hard work in order to lose weight, make your body work for you, control your eating habits, etc... and for some reason I did not do well with that this last week.  My goals were all around hitting my protein goals and making sure that my body got the nutrients it needed but I ended up eating a lot of calories and not working out as much as I was hoping for.

Every journey has its ups and downs.  I feel like this coronavirus situation has led to a lot of downs but every time I don't do well I come back more focused and ready to give it a try later on.  I think setbacks are an important part of growing.  Maybe I feel this way because of the amount of setbacks I have had in my own life, but rather than letting these situations define me, my goal has always been to define my situation.  So here we are at a new week and still miles from our goals of dropping below 20% body fat.

Here are my current stats.

weight:  240 lbs
body fat:  32%

sit-ups:  I am still unable to do 50 in a row without pausing.  This is the first goal that I gave myself on this journey and I look forward to hitting it soon.  My best from this last week was 25 reps on the first set then a slow climb to 50 afterward.  I can tell the importance of abdominal muscles while throwing and really have a strong desire to add a lot of strength to them soon.

Looking Forward:

The next goal to hit after I am able to do the 50 reps of sit-ups daily without pause is to hit 35 push-ups without pause.  This one might take a lot longer, but I have faith that through hard work I'll be able to hit this goal as well.

Monday Check In 4/27/20

It is the beginning of a new week. As I sit here, working from home, I look out the window and it feels that spring has finally sprung.

I haven't taken the time to weight myself yet because I woke up and jumped into work straight away but it got me thinking about scales. I was scrolling through TikTok last night and came across a fitness coach that talked about how scales are a tool, and you shouldn't use them if they discourage you or add stress to your body. I couldn't agree more. 

The number on a scale is just a number, it does not define you or tell you your potential. It tells you how you should eat. I look at the number on the scale in one way only, I use it to tell me how much protein I should be eating every day. That is it. I look in the mirror and see all the issues with my body, I don't need a scale to tell me I'm doing stuff wrong. All I need a scale for is to tell me what I should be eating and that is it.

My advice: If you get too caught up in reading the numbers on a scale that you no longer take care of you, then you probably shouldn't be using the scale. I'm sorry to be so brutally honest but that is the way I roll sometimes.

So above I mentioned that I use the scale to help me decide what to eat during the week. This is how:

I look at my body weight.
I write that number down (for last week I was 233 lbs of love btw).
I multiply that number by 0.7 (233 * 0.7 = 163.1)
That new number is my low end for protein intake, the high end is my body weight.

So for last week my goals for protein intake was between 163 grams and 233 grams of protein.

That is what I use a scale for, nothing more nothing less. Unless you are an athlete that has to weigh a certain amount in order to compete there is no reason to look at the scale. Why? Because it is just a number you fools.

#protein #advice #fitnessadvice #fitness #FitnessJourney #Coaching #Training

Monday Check-In Week 1

Monday Check-In:

I decided to create some daily content now for our small and growing community. I'm calling it Monday Check-In as the name of this post implies. Here I will check in with you and share the ups and downs of the last week as well as the goals for the this week. Feel free to comment your own ups and downs as well, as community is one of those things that helps keep us all motivated to get better.

Without further ado:

This last week I lost all motivation. I posted the workouts and half-assed my way through them which is not a great way to accomplish anything. I don't know why but this last week of lockdown really got me down, I felt so isolated and alone that I was trying to find joy in things that don't better my position rather than staying focused.

Some of the ups for the week were joining my jiujitsu gym's live classes. It was good to sweat with some of those folks again, virtually at least. I found out that even though my body is used to eating a lot more calories than normal I will survive if I lower those intakes a bit and I won't gain all this fat that seems to enjoy a nice warm host such as myself. (Now that I have this information I guess we will see what I end up doing with it.)

Like I said above, this week had a lot of downs. If you do not know me personally I have always struggled around people. I get super anxious and feel that I am going to say or do something dumb. I chalked it up to just being introverted and would fake my way through most of my social interactions. Now I feel all those insecurities coming back, even with my wife, which has caused me to become a bit more reclusive than I normally am. I'm not sure why this is happening right now but I feel that it might have something to do with not having the ability to throw in the snow. I think I have been throwing as a way to compensate for these feelings and to clear my mind, almost like a form of moving meditation.

Goals:

This week I will be pushing forward and doing the workouts with a renewed intensity. I have a lot of motivation and am looking forward to lifting my attention towards becoming better at this sport, better at this life, and becoming a better person in general.

Now let's go out and accomplish something today. Even if that something is to change out of your pajamas and put on jeans for the first time in weeks, let's celebrate it.

Introductions Are In Order

Hello everybody.

I am excited for this project as it is one that I had been thinking about for a while, and while I was outside training I thought that it might be time to do it.  I am talking about chronicling my journey from a slightly overweight couch potato to a highland heavy athletics athlete.  Wow that does not roll of the tongue very easily does it?

Here is a little story for you all.  I had always wanted to go to the Longs Peak Highland Games and finally went up one year.  It was a lot of fun with so much to see from dancing, music, crafts, clans, genealogy, and of course the heavy athletes.  These are the guys that throw trees for fun and share a comradery that I hadn't seen since high school track.  My wife and I spent the day up there, we walked around and saw some of the events but it didn't really set that I was going to compete until two years later when I went to the Colorado Scottish Festival where I had the opportunity to volunteer with a good friend and my current landlord at a "Tartan Information" tent.

I was hooked.  Our tent was set up adjacent to the athletic fields so I had the opportunity to watch most of the activities and realized that I really wanted to do that.  I started going to practices the next weekend to learn some of the events that I have never done, or seen, before. Having thrown discus and shot put in high school and a dabble into collegiate track before the program got cut from my college I thought I could do it.  I had never been more sore the next day in all my life.  This sport was like nothing I had ever done before and after one practice I was hooked.  Unfortunately it was so late in the season when I discovered this sport that I was unable to compete last year but I bought some equipment and got ready for this year.

During the off-season (the winter) I started to live in the gym, at least live every other day there.  I found a power lifting program called the "Stronglifts 5x5" which got me seeing some amazing gains in the gym.  I was going up in weight every time I went into the gym and felt that my posture was finally improving and my energy levels were through the roof.  It was an amazing feeling.  The weather started to warm up, I was coaching track at the local high school, and everything seemed to be fitting into place.  Then *dramatic music* we got hit with the Coronavirus.  Everything came to a crashing stop.  I was no longer able to go to the gym.  Some of my equipment was stuck at work, that I was no longer able to access, and my motivation crashed and burned.

I sat around for about a week feeling sorry for the lost gains from the gym, for the loss of my season, and for the loss of my track kids season.  I was miserable.  Well last night (4/7/2020) I decided you know what? I could sit and feel sorry or I could actually come up with a plan and do something.  So here I am, I'm doing something.

I created this blog as a place for me to brainstorm, share the ups and downs of preparing for a highland season, share videos and techniques, and to promote a lifestyle of fitness while trapped inside during this "Corona Lockdown" (not as fun as it sounds).  I hope you, the reader, join me on this journey as we take back our health and learn to soar.

You can follow the daily journey here.
You can catch a weekly update on my YouTube Channel
Or connect with me on Instagram @wylesco