I’ve managed to cross a year of training with the EVOUltrafit guys in Arizona. It’s been an interesting year full of challenges and learning. Some notes on my progress:
1. Back in October, I got a program that was to be done while I worked out with kettlebells. This made time commitments a lot better as my workouts were approaching 3 hours from doing KBs, and then a EVO/POV workout afterwards!
2. Dialing in my nutrition has been key. I wrote about this in Eating as Training and a Discipline. But as I wrote, I am also attempting to self regulate food so that I do not overeat on days I do not train.
3. Listening to the webinars has been very helpful. It’s a slow process of piecing together the hows and whys. Lots to learn still and over time I am being more observant to the results I get and do not get via training.
4. Managing variables has been tough with all these life changes I’m going through. But I also know that if I cannot hold as many of them constant as possible, I cannot know for sure why something happens, or doesn’t happen.
I’m buying up gadgets to help with data collection. My Beddit is helping a lot, and I just bought an Exergen Temporal Artery Thermometer. Most of the ones I got from the pharmacy were total crap – they would read temps in the low 90s – I think it thinks I’m cold dead! But this one works awesomely and consistently. I still have my Withings scale which is good.
One that I am hoping Beddit will solve is knowing how many sleep cycles I had. Since Zeo’s demise, there has not been another good sleep tracking device.
5. The last program I tried to do for about 3 months. One goal of mine was to see if I could attain a power of 100 on the POV with each protocol. I managed to get to 100 on 2 out of the 4 – the other 2 still remain out of reach and would love to find out more on why and how to have gotten there.
6. I did find out that doing overhead movements with load, and getting stimmed on my arms during those movements were exceedingly dangerous! The vibrations induced by the fast flexing of my muscles challenged my control of weight overhead. On days where I stimmed, I had to concentrate doubly on the movement, and sometimes I had to back off on weight if it was more of an endurance move, like overhead carry of a KB for 100 ft.
I suppose that Jay and Charles would have said that the POV provides an irritant and that blasting through the irritant provides for improved results. This may be true, but I have found that probably it would have been a lot safer with a spotter, and also I could not lift as many reps as without the stim. I think the stim also used up resources in the rapid contractions and made for less movements possible, when compared to movements without stim.
However, I have a program now that removes stim from my KB workouts. In the few days of this new program, I have found improved results with my usual workouts. I hope that these displays of performance continue.
7. Some other cool results:
a. These last few weeks were filled with sick family members and children and made for stressful days and sleepless nights. A protocol involving my thymus and feet really helped me recover from these weeks.
b. I was messing around with a particular foot protocol with the cables crossing from left to right sides and found that after finishing the protocol, my walking pattern firmed up! My gait was very good, and the correct muscles fired. Just recently, I tried a variant of the foot protocol where the cables were on the same side and found that this version didn’t improve my walking pattern. How fascinating. I need to dig more into the various effects of the protocols even on the same body parts.
Just the other day, I had different results from a bicep/pec pad combination. In the crossover configuration, the stim was equally felt. However, in the same side configuration, the left bicep pad lit up well before the other 3 pads!
I definitely want to dig more into the difference in results between the crossover and same side configurations in any pad placement.
c. This is less a POV result but definitely an EVO result. After a ton of KB swings and snatches, I managed to wreck my right elbow. It started as a forearm problem but then moved to my elbow where it became chronic and not go away. I would take a week off from any working out, and the whole week it would still be the same soreness. Then the week after, I’d get back to working out, which was probably a mistake in terms of my elbow, but being an athlete I was unwilling to stop training. Ultimately, it took a Somapulse to bring my elbow back to health and no pain, but it couldn’t do it alone because I needed to fix something in the form of the swing to stop it from coming back.
After much experimentation, I figured out that it was the lack of ability of my triceps to flex strongly during the swing. Taking the tricep out of the force absorption chain meant transferring that force to the forearm, and then to the structures of the elbow. How was EVO involved? I started doing the Preacher Curl Isoextreme which trains the tricep to flex strongly in a raised position at 90 degrees out from the body. This was extremely hard for me – I found that if I started in the raised position, my triceps were totally soft no matter how hard I concentrated! So I had to lower my arms to a point where I could get and maintain a strong contraction of the tricep, and then raise it to as high as I could where I could still maintain contraction. I also started doing it one arm at a time, using my other arm to poke at the other tricep to make sure it was still contracted. Over the last few times of doing this, I could slowly raise my arm higher each time a little bit more, while maintaining a contraction of the triceps.
Going back to swings, I would now forcefully and consciously contract the triceps and the combination of isoextreme and conscious tricep contraction during swings allowed me to get back to pain free swings, as my Somapulse helped heal the damage that was there.
8. In thinking about how I started, I think that remote training and management is really tough. Jay/Charles set me on a good program, but in examining how I adapted to their training programs, I think I was completely unprepared. I sent them videos, yes, but I think that is only the tip of the iceberg. They like to talk about variables and there were plenty that I’m sure weren’t considered in the creation of my programs. Some of them simply were not visible in the initial tests that I submitted via videos. These were things like my ability to recover, or what were barriers to my training like work and family.
I think that I should have talked to them about being totally unprepared and to take me up the training curve from rock bottom. I think I would have learned more and adjusted better to the process versus jumping in mid-stream.
But now after a year of working with them, I’ve come to know my body even better and think I can adapt better to their programs, and also know more about how to approach them.
9. I’m currently dealing with a family member with a serious illness. It is taking up an incredible amount of time in the short term, wreaking havoc with my schedule. I asked the EVO guys for some help with this and they came back with a program that has a maintenance day workout, and also protocols that train me overnight! I am very curious to see the effects of this overnight training. Will report back in a few weeks hopefully on how that goes!