The Shakeology Cleanse

I've got a lot to cover so I'm going to try to get it all down while it's still in my brain.

I'm less than a week out from the USATF Indoor Masters National Championships in Indiana. I don't yet have my entire trip planned out , but I'm pretty close. Just working out some details of what time I can leave on Thursday. My first race is the 400 meters on Friday afternoon at 3:30 pm so I've got a little time if I didn't want to get all the way there on Thursday night. They are going to run the 400 as a timed final, so we should have a couple of heats and I'm not sure how they put them together. Then I think they just go by time for the places. So you could win your heat and not place. I guess I would rather do that than have to run prelims and a final.

I have been tracking my exercise time for a thing at church called the Journey to Jerusalem where we log our miles and try to make it a certain distance by Easter. As I tracked my time over the past few weeks I realized that I have not taken a day off from exercise during that time. I also did about a week and a half of two workouts a day. Some of those workouts were Insanity: The Asylum followed by P90X2. No wonder my back is mad at me. My lower back problems have returned, but I have stayed ahead of it so far. I had a few days at work with a lot of standing and that seems to be the worst thing for it. I just need to be really careful right now not to push it too hard.

I also weighed in last Friday and the scale showed 172 lbs. That's probably lower than I usually am at this time of the year, but when thinking about having a national track meet next weekend, that's a little higher than I would like to be. I still think I need to take about a second off of my 400 times that I ran so far this year and the lighter I can be while still maintaining strength, the faster I should be. I don't want to add too much more cardio into my workouts and I realized that it is probably my diet more than anything right now that is keeping me above 170 lbs. It's odd to think that not too long ago I was 200 lbs and would have been more than happy to be under 190.

What I decided to do was something called the Shakeology Cleanse. I will go into more detail on what it is on Promisetobefit.com, but basically it is replacing breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a shake. Then you only eat fruits and vegetables for the rest of your snacks. You're supposed to do it for three days. I am just doing it for one as a test run. Drinking the shakes is the easy part because I have three different kinds here at home and there is a lot of variety in some of the recipes. The eating of only fruits and vegetables the rest of the time was the difficult part. I think I could do this for three days and I'm sure it would really take some weight off in a short period of time.

P.A.P. Upper and Lower - P90X2 Phase 3

I've gone through both the PAP Upper and Lower body workouts this week. One thing I can say for those who are just getting started with P90X2. It all leads up to this. Just like the Karate Kid had to learn to paint the fence before he learned how to do Karate, you must first master Phase 1 and 2 of P90X2 to get to the P.A.P. (Post-Activation Potentiation). The workouts were not that bad. It's more of a circuit than many of the other workouts in Phase 1 and 2.

Dr. Marcus Elliot can explain things much better than I can so here's a video about how P.A.P is used in P90X2.


Good stuff. Well, I'm a week away from heading to Indiana for the Masters Track and Field Indoor Championships. I can feel that I am not in as good of shape as I would like to be right now. My lower back has also been bothering me so I've been trying to back off a little bit on some of the workouts after doing 2-a-days until early this week. Now I'm just trying to maintain some conditioning and keep my back healthy until next week.

What a month

February was a very busy month. I haven't posted to the blog much this month and probably haven't been doing a very good job checking in with the people I am coaching. I had a big project at work that took up a lot of time including nights and weekends. The problem is that even now that the project is almost done, everything else has built up behind it. It's like being gone on vacation for three weeks and coming back to everything that has come in during that time, only without the break of actually being on vacation.

So here's a quick update. I decided to run the USA Track & Field Masters National Indoor Championships in a couple of weeks. I plan to run the 400 and the 200 meters. Since I am not currently training on a track all of my workouts will be Beachbody programs. I'm still going through P90X2 and plan to stay on schedule, but I have also added Insanity: The Asylum workouts as well. I think the Asylum workouts help me to train my speed and endurance as much as possible without actually running on a track.

I'm currently doing 2-a-day workouts on about half of the days each week. Typically this would be some kind of cardio workout in the morning and then the P90X2 workout at night. I may also work in a high intensity cross-trainer workout for 20 minutes when I can get away at work. If I do the cross-trainer then I only do one other workout. I need to work on my endurance and also burn off a little fat. I'm about 7 lbs heavy right now for where I would like to be for competition. I'll need to focus a little more on the diet and may do a Shakeology cleanse this week.

I'm also planning to move to Phase 3 of the P90X2 program. I hear the workouts are pretty intense so that will be a good thing right about now. I'll take part of my competition week as the start of a recovery week which will include a few days of Yoga. I've got it all figured out in my head so we'll see how my body responds.

I'll try to update a little more often than I have been lately. It helps to keep me on track and think through what I am doing. We'll see how this all works out. Last year was the first time that I ran an indoor meet for a long time. This year I ran three indoor meets so far so I have at least been on the track. The competition looks pretty good for the Indoor Championships so I will have to step up my training, especially this week.

My Race with an Olympic Gold Medalist

I wanted to get one more 400 meter race in during the indoor season. I was planning on that being the MN Indoor Masters Championships in a couple of weeks. That meet ends up being pretty long because it is an all-ages meet attended by a number of high school athletes. I haven't been happy with my indoor 400 meter times so far this year and wanted to make some adjustments to see if I could bring my time down.

We had a ski trip planned for this weekend that ended up changing just a bit. Instead of staying at a hotel near the ski area, we stayed at a relative's house about an hour away. We did get some skiing in, but just on Saturday, which gave me a chance to go to the final indoor Charities Challenge track meet for this season. The meet was up in the Twin Cities and was on our way home so it seemed to work out well. For what seems like a sidenote, we decided to bring the old pocket camera instead of the SLR because we would be skiing and didn't need a nice camera. We also wouldn't need to take many photos at the track meet. As you can see below, the lesson is now to always bring the nice camera.

I signed up for the 200 and 400 meter races and my 8 year-old son was going to run the 60 and 200. As I was going to get changed I saw a familiar face and had to do a double-take. Olympic Gold Medalist Andrew Rock was walking in as I was going out. Rock was a part of the 4x400 meter relay team at the 2004 Athens Olympics. He was also a silver medalist in the 2005 World Track & Field Championships in the open 400 meters (coming in second to Jeremy Wariner) and World Champion in the 2005 4x400 relay. He attended the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse so he is kind of a local celebrity in the La Crosse area.

I assumed he was going to run the 400 meters and there was a good chance that we might end up in the same heat based on who else was there. Now, there's a good side and a bad side to getting to run against a world-class athlete. The good side is that you get to say you ran against a world-class athlete. The bad part for someone like me is that I am going to get beat really bad. That's pretty much what happened. I found myself during the race almost wishing I could just watch him run. He was finishing as I was coming down the home stretch, so any dream of saying that I hung in there with an Olympic Gold Medalist would be a pretty big exaggeration.

It was a moment that I will remember for a long time and I'm glad I was there. It was good to get a chance to talk to someone who's career I have followed for years. My son got to meet an Olympic Gold Medalist and I did improve my time a bit over my last meet. All in all it was a pretty good day. Hopefully I will get to see more of Andrew Rock at meets in the future.

P90X2 Phase 2

After four weeks of P90X2 Phase 1 I decided to move on to Phase 2. If you were going through P90X2 and missing all the pullups from P90X, you're in luck. The first workout in Phase 2 P90X2 has all the pullups you will ever want to do and then some. My back hasn't been this sore since my first week of the original P90X a couple of years ago. I'm loving my Rumble Roller now more than ever.

I started taking this E & E pre-workout supplement and that has helped me feel more energetic during my recent workouts, but I have also felt like I was going to throw up a couple of times. I believe that this has happened because I have pushed myself to the point of being nauseous. I'll have to monitor where I'm at during my workouts and try some workouts with and without the supplement to see for sure. I'm unsure if I will try to use this for my track workouts. I have looked into similar supplements in the past, but some of them had ingredients that were on the banned list for the NCAA, so it's not something I want to take a chance on since there is now drug testing in USATF Masters.

While I was doing my workout tonight my daughter came down and said, "Daddy, you used to be just a little bit fat before you were doing your workouts." I wasn't quite sure what that was all about, but when I got done I found out she had been watching a show on TLC called My 600 Pound Life. I caught some of the show and it is amazing to see the transformations that people can go through, but also how difficult it is to stay on track.

It's going to be a busy couple of weeks for me at work so the blog is probably going to be updated a little less frequently. But I'll be here. Shoot me an email at phaack@beachbodycoach.com if you have any questions or need anything.

How to keep going when life takes over

This is my craziest time of the year. I have a big project at work for our CEO with a tight deadline. As the deadline gets closer I know I will be working nights and weekends to get it done. Just because this big project is going on doesn't mean that everything else goes away either. So how does someone keep working out with even less available time in the day? The answer for me is commitment.

I have made a commitment to do my workouts and I am going to stick with it. That doesn't mean that I might not have to switch some workout days around or modify things a bit, but I will get my workouts in. I'll do it at 10 pm if I need to. As Jeff Hill said on one of the Team Beachbody Coach calls "Once you make a commitment, the decisions you make will be surrounded by that commitment."

There's a reason I started the P90X2 program. I want to to be healthy and energetic. I want to look good and feel good. If I forget that then I am simply going through the motions to get to the end. If I remember my "why" and focus on it, I can push harder and use that as my motivation to get through the tough times. Life rewards action.

I'll leave you with a couple of quotes today.

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." - Wayne Gretzky

"Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live." - Jim Rohn

The cooking experiment

I've been trying out some new recipes lately in an effort to help with the dinner around the house. I also wanted to make sure I am incorporating some P90X2 friendly meals for dinner. So far I have tried three recipes from either teambeachbody.com or the P90X2 diet guide. One has been moderately successful with the family and that was a breakfast frittata. The other two did not go so well.

Normally we do pretty well for having healthy dinners. My biggest problem is that I am a pretty picky eater, especially when it comes to things that are good for you. I could eat cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and pizza every day. But I have to choke down a chicken breast or most vegetables, especially cooked veggies. The rest of the family likes them, so that leaves me to either force myself to eat them or grab something else for myself.

So I picked out a few recipes from the P90X2 diet guide that I decided I would make. My first attempt was fish tacos. Now I'm sure that when prepared by someone who knows what they are doing these are probably delicious. The problem is that instead of someone who knows what they are doing, I attempted to make these. Needless to say they did not turn out so well. My son keeps reminding me of the time that we had fish that didn't taste like anything.

As I mentioned, the frittatas turned out well. For the kids I cheated a bit. What they got was more of a ham and cheese omelette. Mine was completely egg whites, but for theirs I still used some yolks. It's hard to mess up eggs too much and I have been making omelettes for years, so it's a small victory.

Yesterday I made up some chicken bacon ranch wraps. It's one way that I can eat chicken and enjoy it. It also has a good mix of vegetables inside that I can make up to bring to work. It's a complete meal all wrapped up in one convenient package. My son didn't like that there were onions in it and my daughter took all of the insides out and just ate the tortilla shell. My wife ate hers, but only wanted a little bit because she was not very hungry when we started to eat.

So I guess the moral is that I can still make up these foods for my lunches, but maybe I should stick to homemade whole wheat pizza when I cook for the family. I know they like that.