Hi there,
I'm Joe, a 6' 3", 300lb ex-athlete who - like all ex-athletes - has had to come to terms with the fact that life isn't what it used to be.
Back in the day, I was a wrestler, football player and judo player - I could eat a whole large pizza three meals a day, every single day, and still maintain a healthy body weight with 12% - 15% body fat percentage. And so I did, almost literally.
Pizza, pasta, sausage, hoagies, wings... Over the years, I've cultivated quite a taste for these finer foods. My palate is so refined that I could probably score in the 90th percentile in a blindfolded taste test of wings or pizza from every single vendor in the city of Atlanta.
The problem is, I don't wrestle anymore. Or play football. Or play judo... Except when I sling the nephews around in their socks on linoleum floors... And that hardly accounts for the metabolism I used to have.
My goal in this challenge is to lose body fat, the same as Jeremy. The reason I want to do this... Well, honestly, there's a number of them, some of them aesthetic (it'd be nice to shop for pants and shirts in regular stores), but the vast majority relate directly to quality of life and the fact that I just don't want to make my wife a widow at 45 due to my ham-sized heart giving out because I was too damn lazy to just go run a mile now and again.
Given my background in wrestling and Judo and the fact that trimming weight was a vital aspect in both sports, I feel I have a strong program lined up to melt the fat and get me to a healthy weight without sacrificing muscle or core calorie count. In most workout scenarios, when the goal is to burn fat and "tone up," resistance training is reduced or minimalized to make room for or focus exclusively on interval training, which second-for-second burns more fat than lifting weights or long-distance, long-burn cardio routines.
My plan is to turn my lifting sessions into interval training sessions, raising the heart rate while maintaining a mid-tier resistance training program. The strength I will build is a different type of strength than that which is usually sought when weights and resistance training is pursued. I'm not looking to "up my bench max", or increase the total amount of weight I can lift at my peak strength.
Instead, I will be reducing my weight amounts and increasing my repetitions to increase muscle endurance - the long burn. I will be performing related yet different exercises in succession in order to change the working positions on my muscle groups to best pack a large number of repetitions into as short a time as possible without hurting myself.
For instance, instead of the tiered approach to bench press and a "one exercise at a time" mentality, I will do four sets of 15 repetitions of the same weight on bench press, and in between each set, I will grab a dumbbell or a cable and work my triceps. This will keep my heart rate at the optimal pulse to best burn fat, lowering and raising it between stacked sets.
Another new concept I'm introducing to my stale old workouts is the idea of running BEFORE lifting weights to get the heart rate to 145 as quickly as possible. I'll be running about a mile before each lifting session in order to get the heart pumping, then I'll systematically raise it and lower it between 85 bpm and 145 bpm to best maximize my sessions.
At the end of my workout, I'll be running between 2 and 5 miles each day, depending on time allowance and my willingness to stare at a tv screen on the treadmill for an hour. I'll also be doing stair runs and sprints in an effort to add yet another form of interval training to my regemin.
The final - and biggest - key to my training plan is my caloric intake. While I was training to be a professional football player, I was working my cardio and getting stronger, but I maintained between 3500 and 5000 calories taken in a day to keep my weight up - you can't be a lineman losing weight, it just can't work.
This time, however, I'm cutting my caloric intake to 2500 calories a day. This does NOT mean I'm going to "earn" extra calories by running longer or lifting more. Regardless of how much I work out each day, 2500 calories spread out throughout the day is all I'm going to allow myself.
I'm not running a marathon anytime soon, and I have no major century rides to train for. There's no reason whatsoever for me to be ingesting so many calories... So I quit. It's time to take things seriously.
And all of this leads to why I will kick Jeremy's ass:
Because the boy just can't hang with the mad plan. My plan is solid and sound, and has been proven to work through years of experimentation. I will be burning between 800 and 1400 calories a day, 5 days a week, and intaking 2500 a day. This leaves 1000 calories burned by my base metobolic rate, which is upwards of 4000 calories a day - leaving me at -3000 calories a day, which will lead to -21000 calories a week - or about 7 lbs weight loss a week, if I behave and really dedicate myself to losing the weight.
And I just don't think Jeremy has the discipline to handle me. I think he's going to take one look at the first week's numbers and just run to the nearest corner and suck his thumb until he pushes his front teeth out to a severe overbite, which will further negatively affect his self-esteem. He's going to get punched in the arm 15 times and cry for each one, and at the end of it all, I'm going to take his entire 500 bucks in chips in Vegas and put it on one round of craps, just to show him how little I regard his loss.
Because I'm callous.
