Training for Treeplanting Part IV: Dealing with Disappointment

So, remember that time I said I didn’t have cancer? Funny story about that… well, it’s not so much funny as it is I actually DO have cancer.

It seems the initial test was incorrect and my doctors pronounced prematurely that I needn’t worry. So, in light of this news, Justine and I won’t be joining the legions of unwashed young people flocking to logging communities across Canada in the next few days. Instead I’m booked to move back Vancouver to be shot with radiation and pumped full of poisonous chemicals. This, of course, also means our travel plans through California and Australia are off.

But that doesn’t mean the lesson of mental preparation doesn’t still apply. Because I’m prepared for the worst cancer can give me, likely I’ll find my ‘cancer experience’ somewhat subdued compared to what my conjured it up to be be. Hopefully.

Dealing with such disappointment is key to being a successful treeplanter. So many times the planter will awake in the morning feeling his/her absolute best, and ready to plant an all-time high score. Only to find that due to a misreading of the map, his/her crew only reaches the block at 2:00 PM after driving around bumpy logging roads all day long. Or they find that they’ve run out of trees. Or that today they’ll be stuck in a mosquito infested gully for an inadequate tree price. Or that, after finishing his/her difficult piece, and being ready to head back to camp to eat dinner, they are told to head over to some other piece to help close up the block until 8:00 PM. All these things are practically daily occurrences, and the only way the planter can remain successful in the midst of them is to be prepared to banish all stress that comes from such disappointments.

My finding out I won’t be going travelling/planting and instead must be treated for cancer was an extreme disappointment, but I was already mentally prepared for it in the course of my planting training. Back in March, I was told I would have an opportunity to grade for my Black belt in Karate, something I never got around to doing before leaving for university. That entire month, I increased the intensity of my training and pushed myself even harder than I had ever before. By the day of the test I was easily in the best shape of my life, and was more than ready for whatever they threw at me. Only, just before the seminar, at the end of which the test was to be held, began, I was told that the senior instructors had decided suddenly that I wasn’t eligible to grade as I had been away from the organization for too long. As crushing a disappointment as it was, I didn’t have long to dwell on it before this much more serious business began.

But the message remained. And although we won’t be planting or travelling this year like we planned, it has prepared us for adversity. And I would advise those who are heading into the bush this season, to keep this in mind, and try not to let the Gong-show that is treeplanting get you too riled up.

Training for Treeplanting Part III: The Most Powerful Muscle of All

Please forgive me for the lack of activity these recent months. I’ve been dealing with a series of challenges that have required my full attention, and though they were gruelling and difficult, I feel I’ve come out of them stronger than before.

Most recently, we’ve been virtually paralyzed by having to live with the terrifying possibility that I had, at age 24 and in otherwise excellent health, developed cancer of the Lymphatic system. It sounds absurd, yet my doctors were taking it very seriously, and therefor so did we. After three awful weeks of testing and waiting, a biopsy has finally shown that there is no evidence of Lymphoma. The true cause of my symptoms, however, is still not known. But that is of little concern to us, as we are just happy that the worst of our fears didn’t come to pass. Now, of all the cancers you can get, Lymphoma is one of the most treatable and survivable. Numerous celebrities and athletes have contracted it, been treated in the off season, and been back in time to keep on looking good on the big screen. So it wasn’t so much death that was our main concern (though that fear certainly was present), but the complete inability to live our lives and make our plans for the future in the face of such grim uncertainty. Living for a month with the possibility that everything you want to do in life is in jeopardy and then suddenly finding out that there is nothing to fear tends to give one a new lease on life.

But specifically what this has done for me is to allow me to actually look forward to going tree-planting (crazy, I know). Sometimes people get excited for the planting season as they remember the good times and conveniently forget all the bad times. But there’s always that dread in the back of your mind. The dread of the cold mornings, the sweltering afternoons, the aching muscles, the swarming insects, being treated like a child and having your life entrusted to people you wouldn’t trust with caring for your goldfish. All those things that make planting not so fun. Well, I can now say I look forward to all those things. Because for the past month, the alternative to them meant that I had cancer. And anything looks pretty good compared to having cancer.

For, more important than all the physical training in the world is adequate mental preparation for the planting season. By being fully mentally prepared for a much worse situation than even the worst planting has to offer, anything I must do this season will feel so easy. This is an exercise I use regular basis in order to simply go about my daily business. Currently we’re staying at my childhood home on Gabriola Island. The house is situated at the bottom of Barrett road, which is known to many locals as “Heart-Attack Hill” as it is easily the steepest hill on the island (though there are other contenders for ‘toughest hill’ which are less steep but much lengthier, such as the infamous ‘Brickyard Hill’ on the other end of the island). This monstrous 18% incline is the very first thing we have to ride up in order to go anywhere on he island, meaning we’re often riding up it first thing in the morning without a proper warmup ride to ease into the painful ordeal. However, as difficult as this is, we’re getting the hardest part of our ride, if not our entire day, out of the way at the very beginning. After making it up the hill (which gets easier and easier all the time) I know that there’s likely to be nothing more difficult than that coming my way for the rest of the day, and suddenly everything I do feels so much easier by comparison!

In everything I do, I generally try to make my preparation more difficult than the task will be in every regard. In my first season of planting, I was mostly used to wearing the lightest shoes I could find. So when first I put on my hiking boots to plant in, their increased weight threw my balance off and slowed me down greatly for my first few shifts. Since it’s been a couple years since I last planted, I won’t make that mistake again. Today, I currently wear a pair of steel toed boots that weigh approximately twice as much as the boots I will be planting in everywhere I go. This means everything tree I plant in my real boots will feel all the easier!

This method of preparing for, and coming to terms with the worst of possibilities is nothing new. Samurai warriors strove to accept death fully, so they could fight unimpeded by fear or other distractions, and throw their entire being into the task at hand. I don’t think anything so drastic as that is necessary, but if you want to plant at your best, or take an exam without freaking out, or make anything you do in life feel richer, easier and more carefree, try mentally preparing yourself to deal with the the worst possible scenario in that situation, and be amazed at how much less awful reality is than what your mind made it out to be.

Click here for Part I

Click here for Part II

Across So Cal and Oz

Back in Ottawa, graduating from highschool, a wannabe image-maker, hangin’ with the comic-book keeners, I never imagined that someday I’d actually find my way to San Diego, and to Comic Con. I’m not one for conventions, and although animation has always been a far-flung ambition of mine, it’s an impenetrable, personally perplexing version of drawing, working in 4 dimensions rather than in 2. Happily though, the medium between those realms, I’ve recently decided, exists as the Graphic Novel, full of cinematic, time-based qualities, but on the flat surface of a page or screen.

From my story 'Strange Fruit', yet to be concluded.

Graphic novels — they’re the perfect mix of storytelling, visual aesthetics, key-framery, and writing. They allow for limitless control on the part of the singular artist; no matter what the budget, and no matter what the scale of the production, a graphic novel can prevail despite being conceived, written, drawn, inked, scanned, cleaned, and set up for distribution by solely one person in a reasonable time-frame. They have the potential to be the most self-sufficient of all the visual arts, in my opinion, by communicating the maximum of ideas and influence without the blockbuster film-making cost.

So now, Stephen and I plan our trip down to the convention (July 2012) through California by rail, carrying along our bicycles which we will then cycle back up to Long Beach for a departure by freighter to Australia (August 2012). I’m currently straightening out the logistics for traversing or perhaps even circling Australia, but time will tell which route will possible. This is all to say that interesting stories usually benefit from interesting life experiences. Hopefully our upcoming time on the saddle will help out.

UPDATE: The Comi Con badges sold out this morning with tens of thousands of individuals in the online queue ahead of us. Jeez. Our internet is just not cool enough for that kind of stuff I guess…

Training for Tree Planting Part II: Alternatives to Heavy Lifting

If in the course of your preparations for planting you are unable (or unwilling) to engage in heavy weight training, but still want to develop the explosive power and heavy load-carrying capacity required to excel at planting trees, there are alternative to pumping iron. These methods can also be used in conjunction with a weight training regimen to get the benefits of both styles.

The main alternative to moving a heavy object in order to gain strength, is to move a lighter object very quickly. The same fast twitch muscle fibres are used for fast movements like sprinting and jumping as for heavy lifting. Track stars can squat and deadlift huge weights, Olympic weightlifters have a faster sprint (for 10 metres) than Olympic sprinters and a higher raw vertical leap than high jumpers, and most champion powerlifters engage in speed training with low weights in order to improve their bench press. It’s pretty well established that speed generates strength, and vice versa.

In the previous instalment, I mentioned ‘High Intensity Interval Training’ as a way to develop explosive speed during your cardio workouts. Another alternative is just to run 100 metre dashes alone. If you don’t have a track nearby, just pick a spot roughly 300 feet down the road from your driveway, and run to it as fast as you can. This will be a different sort of run than the lengthy jogs people go on to build stamina and burn calories. Instead, you should treat these sprints as strength training sets, meaning, you take nice long breaks in between each sprint, and limit the number of sprinting ‘sets’ to four or five. Running as fast as you absolutely can four or five times is surprisingly taxing, and is quite comparable to doing four or five sets of squats. Of course, squats carry their own sets of advantages, just as sprints have theirs, and that’s why I strongly recommend cross training when preparing for tree planting.

The other main alternative to weights is jumping. Like sprinting, jumping mimics weight training by putting sudden stress on your muscles and moving your body very quickly. Legend has it that the Shaolin Monks in medieval China developed incredible jumping power by digging a shallow hole and then repeatedly jumping in and out of it. Each day they would dig the hole a little deeper, thereby increasing the distance they had to jump. Eventually the hole would be so deep that the monk would effectively be jumping higher than his own height.

Repeated Box Jumps are the simplest and most popular form of Plyometrics training. Just leap up onto the box, and then imediately hop backwards down again, jumping back up onto the box as soon as you land. Use a box that is %80 to %90 of your maximum vertical leap.

Today, this method of training by jumping up onto an object and then back down again is called plyometrics. It develops strength in the legs both by the stress of jumping up onto the target, and the stress of jumping down and landing again. Modern plyometric training is done using padded, incrementally tall platforms that make the training very safe and comfortable, allowing the trainee to jump his/her hardest without having to worry about tripping or getting injured.

However, for the purposes of tree planting, I prefer the Shaolin method. This is because the act of jumping and then furiously digging to deepen the hole trains most of the muscles used for planting, both in the upper and lower body. If you just did Shaolin jump training as your sole preparation for planting, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d have a pretty successful season.  Like with sprinting, it’s best to treat these ‘jump sets’ like strength sets, and take nice long breaks in between, limit the number of sets to four or five, and limit the number of jumps per set to around six to eight. This isn’t about endurance; it’s to build maximum power, which means you have to stay fresh and at your best. If you try speed or power training when you’re tired out, you’ll just under perform.

On a final note, if you can already jump more than a few feet high, you might want to start off by picking a rock or something to jump on and off of, and when that gets too easy, start digging a pit from which to jump onto it from. Otherwise you may find yourself having to start off by digging a three or four foot hole just to get started jumping. Which I guess really wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Click here for Part I

Training for Treeplanting Part I

In order to finance our latest expedition, Justine and I have made the decision take up our planting bags once more and come out of tree planting retirement. There simply isn’t a better paying job for young people in our position. Planting money financed both our previous travels as well as our University educations. Now it’s time for one more big score.

Yet every year, Canadian youth (I guess there’s tree planting elsewhere in the World, but as far as I know it’s much less extensive) hear tales told of the massive wealth to be gained from taking up the bag and shovel, and head out to remote regions of BC, Alberta, Ontario or Quebec only to be bitterly disappointed to find planting isn’t what they expected and that they don’t have what it takes to succeed, or even endure this highly physical work.

With this in mind, it’s important, especially for the rookie planter starting their first season, to physically and mentally prepare for the coming ordeal. Since you’re payed by the tree, there’s plenty of incentive to ensure you’re in peak condition in order to plant the most trees you possibly can. I know I owe every ounce of my planting success to my physical prowess and mental toughness garnered from years of training. If you’re heading out for the Spring planting season, now is the perfect time to start training (if you haven’t already). You’ll have three solid months to progress up to reach peak performance just in time for when you start planting.

Adding sprints to your runs will improve you ability to race across the 'cream'. Running on the beach isn't a bad idea, either.

Most people I’ve planted with who talked about any training or preparations they made for the season seemed to put a strange emphasis on cardio. To be sure, cardio is essential. You need to have a good lung capacity and endurance to be able to keep up a steady pace all day long, and those long, gruelling runs build up mental toughness like nothing else. But what is often missed out on in extensive cardio training is the explosive power needed to really plant quickly. You can build this into your runs (and I do recommend running over cycling or ellipticals when it comes to planting training) by engaging in High Intensity Interval Training. This method, used by numerous athletes, including the Legendary Bruce Lee, allows you to go on lengthy, endurance building runs, while also developing speed and power. Basically, after you’ve gotten fairly comfortable with a running route (30 to 40 minutes running time seems good), instead of keeping the same, consistent pace the whole way through, every 300 feet or so, quickly speed up into sprinting as fast as you can for another 100 feet, before going back into jogging at your regular pace. Repeat. You’ll very quickly find yourself much more spry and agile.

This method actually simulates the rigours of planting fairly well, as not all terrain will be equal. There will be slow going, ‘slashy’ bits that you just have to slog through (don’t slack off, though!) but, if you’re lucky, this will give way to some ‘creamy’ pastures, like ash fields or open sand. This is where you sprint, and pound in those trees like nobody’s business! If you’re working on prepared ground, the need to move fast will be all the more important.

The usefulness of explosive power extends beyond sprinting across cream. In order to highball the camp, you should be launching yourself from one tree to the next, using long, powerful strides. This requires strength, an element which seems to generally be neglected in most planter’s training regimes. There’s this idea that because tree planting is so endurance based, strength training isn”t useful to it. This couldn’t be more wrong, as I mention in a previous article.

Strong legs and lower back are key to planting success. You need to develop your muscles to the point that the weight of your bag up of trees simply isn’t an issue for you. If you can carry 700 or 800 trees with ease, you can sprint with 500 or 600 trees. Strong legs also allow you to power over rough terrain more easily. And the easier an action is for you, the less tiring it will be, which means you will be ale to do it for longer and at a faster pace, which in planting means you will make more money.

I recommend a strength training regimen that focuses on ‘total body power’. Big, compound lifts using barbells and some dumbbells (don’t bother too much with machines) will stimulate growth all over your body, and prepare it to carry heavily loads. This means doing mainly Squats and Deadlifts. If you only have time for a couple of exercises, make it these two. Both primarily develop the legs and lower back, which is what we need for planting, but because you have to use virtually your entire body just stabilize and hold the weight, you will get bigger and stronger all over.

In the first few weeks, use a weight you can perform 10 to 15 reps with. As the season approaches you can increase the weight and decrease the reps, but don’t bother building up to a one rep maximum, as this probably won’t help too much with planting. What we want to do is train our body to be able to do lengthy, gruelling bouts of grunt work. Do as many sets as you can until you can longer perform the exercise properly with a decent amount of weight for a decent number of reps. This could be as few as three or as many as 10. Everybody’s legs are different, though the goal here is to turn yours into powerhouses.

If for some reason you can’t do squats, the Leg press machine can be an acceptable alternative. It won’t develop the rest of your body the way squats can, but it will build up your quadriceps well enough to carry heavy bag ups.

This excellent illustration demonstrates the dumbbell and the barbell lunge variations.

Other useful exercises for the legs are Lunges and Farmer’s Walks. These two will develop your ability to launch from one tree to the next quickly and powerfully. The lunge can be performed with a barbell on the neck like a squat or holding a dumbbell in either hand. Either position has its advantages and disadvantages, and both are applicable to planting, so change it up from time to time. Farmer’s walks are basically just walking while holding heavy stuff, either dumbbells or specialized apparatuses.

Good Mornings and Stiff Legged Deadlifts are a great way to prepare your lower back and hamstrings for all the bending over you’re going to have to do. The lower back is one of the trouble spots where many planters get injured, so keeping it in good health is key.

While lower body training should be your main emphasis, don’t neglect the other muscle groups. Huge biceps won’t help planting too much, but strengthening your arms will help you put on your fully loaded planting bags more easily, as well as allow them to absorb the shock of plunging your shovel into a rock, which, if done repetitively, can also cause injury. If you’re going to limit the amount of upper body training you do, you might as well make that training all about the Bench Press, as the muscles involved will help your shovel handling, and there’s no other upper body exercise that stimulates overall growth like it does. I also recommend you build up your shoulders, and strengthen your rotator cuff, not only to improve shovel power, but to prevent injuries to this delicate joint.

If you have a space where you can do farmer's walks, I highly recommend you do so.

It’s a good idea to work on your grip strength, to help you close up tree holes, but don’t overdo it, otherwise you could be in for some tendonitis before the season even starts.

If you include some core work, do lots of movements that involve twisting actions. On the block, you’ll find yourself in this position from time to time, and if your body isn’t prepared, you may pull a muscle.

Finally, build up some flexibility. Heavy lifting through the full range of motion combined with stretching will make you more flexible. The more flexible you are, the less likely you are to get injured, particularly on those cold, rainy mornings where your whole body stiffens up. Focus on stretching the hamstrings and lower back. Stretching the glutes and quads can’t hurt either.

Start out with very general workouts at first. Don’t push it to the limit and take your time figuring everything out and getting into a groove. Over the weeks slowly increase the intensity and challenge yourself. Try to time things so that a week before planting starts, you’re training as hard as you can and performing better than ever. Then, take that final week before the season off. Just do light workouts and don’t push yourself in any way. Like an athlete preparing for a competition, you want to be well rested and and in peak physical condition when planting starts. If you keep all these elements in mind, over the next three months you will quickly develop into a fast, powerful and tireless engine of reforestation. And you’ll be making crazy cash.

Click here for Part II

Want a Big Bench-Press? Grow Big Shoulders.

I hesitate to open this article with the cliched observation that the most common question any fitness enthusiast is likely to be asked is “How much can you Bench-press?”, but quite simply, this is the truth. It is also true to say that the bench-press is held in such high regard for no arbitrary reason. The bench-press is hands down the best test of one’s overall upper-body strength, as it involves all the major muscle groups working together in a single, unified motion. To be sure, there are other motions that can be said to be a better test of one’s overall athletic ability (There’s a strong correlation with an athlete’s ability to perform the Snatch and their success in their chosen sport), but none isolate the upper-body while at the same time putting it in a position to produce its maximum power output.

The bench-press shirt supports your upper body and creates tension during the negaive phase of the movement. This stored energy is released as you press the weight up, assisting your muscles and greatly increasing the amount of weight you can lift. Most people aren't too interested in wearing a bench-press shirt, but the majority of advice one is likely to find is catering to those who do.

It’s almost tragic how desperately young men seek advice on how to increase the weight they can press, and how much of the advice they find is almost completely useless to them. It’s not that the advice available is innately bad, but that it simply does not apply to their goals. Bench-press advice is likely to fall into one of two categories: 1) Advice for bodybuilders trying to grow huge pectoral muscles. And 2) Advice for juiced-up powerlifters wearing a bench-press shirt.

The first kind of advice is useful in it’s way, as every style of training has its proper time and place, but the techniques you’ll learn won’t produce maximum power, but rather isolate and grow the pecs. The second kind is also quite useful, and shouldn’t be completely ignored, but it tends to skew the trainee’s perspective to a heavy bias of training the triceps. Strong triceps are essential to a heavy bench-press, and they allow you fully extend your arms into the terminal phase of the press. But the advice one is likely to encounter will practically tell you to only train your triceps. This is fine if you’re wearing a bench-press shirt, as this will keep heavy tension during the lower and middle phases of the movement, effectively glossing over any weaknesses in the shoulders or pecs. But most lifters aren’t wearing a bench-press shirt, and if asked, would probably consider doing so ‘cheating’, as the elasticity of the shirt allows you top lift up to 30% more weight than usual (but only if you train for it; you can’t simply put on a shirt for the first time and expect to lift 30% more).

So what most lifters are interested in is increasing their ‘Raw’ bench-press. That is a bench-press that is free of any special equipment such as bench shirts. In order to do this, one must now focus less on triceps, and more on the shoulders. This is because the weak-spot, or ‘sticking point’, for most people’s bench-press is either near the bottom of the lift, when the load of the weight is being transferred from the pectoral muscles to the front deltoids, or slightly higher, when the load is moving off the deltoids onto the triceps. Very few people ever have trouble during the ‘tricep’ phase of the movement, and often you’ll see guys ‘bench-pressing’ huge weights by just moving the bar up and down at the very top of the movement. Needless to say, this doesn’t count as an actual bench-press, and it is also a really great way to get injured.

So, in all this, the key is to build up one’s shoulders in order to power through these ‘sticky’ points of the weight transferring from one muscle to the other. In particular one should focus on the Anterior (front) deltoids. Overhead presses, front dumbbell/barbell raises, and upright rows are all key. Another motion worth considering is the under-hand press. This variation of the overhead press especially focuses on the front deltoids. However, it should only be performed with dumbbells in order to maintain a comfortable, ‘natural’ position and to prevent injuries.

Finally, it goes without saying that you should train the other two heads of the deltoids (the lateral and posterior deltoids), as well as the pectorals and triceps. And, of course, you should train all your other muscle groups as well. There’s more to life than bench-pressing… apparently.

Losing it Like a Winner Part II: Vegan Edition

In my last article, I emphasized the not-so-revolutionary concept that eating a diet with equal proportions of carbohydrates to protein can allow one to cut excess fat while maintaining muscle mass. This is easily done by anybody who is willing to chow down on steaks and salads, but for those who, for whatever reason, choose not to eat meat or other animal-based foods, it is a little bit trickier. This is not for the bogus ‘reason’ that one cannot get enough protein from non-animal sources, which simply isn’t true, but rather because the majority of plant-based protein sources are also high in carbohydrates, making it difficult to match carbs for protein.

Pressed and Extra Firm Tofu are best for frying, and tends to have the highest protein content.

Beans, nuts and legumes are the standard protein sources for the vegetarian/vegan, but not only are they individually each higher in either fat or carbohydrates than they are in protein, but they must also be eaten in combination with one another in order to create a ‘complete’ protein that contains all the essential amino acids. This makes it doubly hard to meet protein requirements while cutting carbs.

Of all the plant proteins available, only soy is high in protein (a complete protein at that), while simultaneously being low in fat or carbs. Many people are wary of eating too much soy. Either because of fear of increased oestrogen in men, or a fear of unamed ‘toxins’ supposedly present in soy beans. I can assure you that both these fears are unfounded. Every piece of ‘evidence’ for these claims is anecdotal, and thus can’t be trusted, and/or is being put forward by a company or website that just so happens to sell meat, dairy, or other soy alternatives such as hemp (hmm… nothing fishy about that). I have yet to see an independent peer-reviewed scientific study that supports any of the anti-soy propaganda I’ve encountered.

With that said, it’s probably a good idea to eat a wide variety of foods, and I can’t blame anybody for getting bored with just eating tofu. But if you’re trying to lose weight as a vegan, your best bet is a diet with a sizable proportion of soy products.

A typical meal I would make on such a diet would be Grilled Tofu with a peanut based sauce, served on a bed of lentils with steamed kale and carrots. The peanuts, tofu and lentils combine to create an undeniably complete protein. While the high protein of the tofu cancels out the high proportion of carbohydrates found in the lentils. And finally, the vegetables provide needed vitamins and fibre, while also helping to fill you up without adding unwanted food energy.

The trick to making tofu delicious is oil. Most foods food in a vegan diet are unlikely to be high in fat, but you absolutely need some fat in your diet to maintain hormone levels. Adding a nutty, olive oil filled sauce to a stir-fry, baked tofu or veggie burgers is a delicious way to get this needed component of your diet. Plus, using nuts as your oil source will provide you with extra protein!

Dried Textured Soy Protein

If you’re going to be drinking soy milk (and I recommend you do, as other vegan ‘milks’, such as almond milk, simply don’t have a diet-friendly protein content), buy the unflavoured, unsweetened variety (if it’s sold in your area, buy the weird Chinese brand that comes in four litre jugs and tastes like liquid tofu). It’s the only kind of milk (including cow’s milk) that has a higher amount of protein than carbohydrates. It can be mixed into sauces, shakes, and other recipes as a way to boost protein levels, which is useful if you can’t get used to the taste enough to drink it straight.

Another ‘essential’ tool for the vegan dieter is ‘granulated soy protein’, also called ‘textured vegetable protein’. This is made from processed soybeans with air whipped up into the mix to give them a meat-like texture. They’re sold as dried chunks, and when mixed with water, flour, and some spices, they simulate a meat-burger with great accuracy. However, at 20% protein (when wet, 50% when dry), they have a higher protein content than any ground meat. Put them in a chili or pasta sauce with some fried walnuts, and meat-eaters can’t tell it’s not ground beef. I like to put them in my morning oatmeal (along with peanut butter, walnuts and sunflower seeds). You can’t tell the difference between it and regular oatmeal, but this version has enough protein to balance out the carbs. Our latest creation using these versatile chunks is homemade vegan wontons… I think we just made meat obsolete!

A product like Granulated Soy Protein essentially allows you to inject protein into any meal, while giving the dish an interesting texture and without compromising on taste. Keeping your food tasty and your morale high is key while dieting. The only short falling of granulated soy protein is, while it is quite inexpensive, it can be rather difficult to obtain. Even in vegan-friendly Vancouver, I could only find one store that sold it (in bulk, thankfully. You’d better believe I bought sacks of it!). Your best bet will be to order it online, where it is considerably more widely available.

Homemade Vegan Wontons from scratch. Another high protein culinary creation using Textured Soy Protein!

The one final diet food I recommend is a good protein powder. Even carnivorous dieters frequently supplement with protein, as it is especially useful right after a workout to ingest an easily absorbed source of protein. If you’re a ‘mere’ vegetarian, supplementation is easy; you just buy the same whey powder the meat eaters do. But today, there are numerous vegan options available as well. There is the obvious soy powder, and many people today are raving about hemp protein (I’ve tried it… nutritious, but not too tasty). My personal favourite is Interactive Nutrition’s blend of soy, rice and pea protein. It’s almost entirely protein, with no carbs and only one gram of fat. I recommend buying the unflavoured version, as you, quite simply, can’t taste it, and can put it in any food to increase the protein content. The best time to lose weight is just before and during the summer, and there’s nothing better on a hot, sunny day than a high protein fruit smoothie. With a high quality protein powder that is low in carbs, you can have a sweet tasting, fruity smoothie without throwing off your carb-to-protein ratio. Of course, these powders are always expensive, so they should really only be used in an ‘emergency’. Your diet should always be first and foremost based on ‘actual food’.

One final note that I fear I didn’t emphasize enough in the first part of this series, is that you absolutely have to keep exercising while dieting. I kept on lifting heavy weights as though I was trying to bulk up in order to keep my muscles stimulated and my nervous system primed. As a result, though I lost tons of weight, I lost little to no strength or muscle mass. You should also do some higher rep sets and cardio in order to burn calories, but don’t give up on lifting fairly heavy (if you care about that sort of thing). Furthermore, remember that, unless you’re somebody whose excess body weight is so great it puts you at risk of health complications, it is always a better investment to gain muscle, than it is to lose weight. Weight that is lost and not replaced with anything is difficult to maintain, and too many diet enthusiasts go through cycles of fat loss followed by breaking down and gaining it all back again. If you’re at a reasonable weight or body-fat percentage, and you’re having trouble losing any more weight to meet a certain goal, back off from the fat loss and try building up some muscle. This will raise your metabolism, making future weight loss easier (the more you weigh, the easier it is to lose weight), as well as improve your physical abilities. Skinny isn’t necessarily healthy. It’s far better to weigh a little more than you think you ‘should’ weigh, but have a level of muscle mass that allows you to perform feats that untrained individuals can’t. Muscle that is built up now can often stay with you the rest of your life, whereas fat that is lost can always find a way back onto your midsection the moment you let your guard down.

Propulsion

 

As it stands, the boat can now be propelled by rowing oars. We installed them (after several failed attempts) a couple of weeks ago. She’s currently at the dock, her insides being painted white, as we attempt to get some work done during the season of rain.

To do list:

– Install deck fittings (so there will be no more leaks).

– Install the new plexiglass windows (so there will be no more leaks there either).

– Put up all the mast and rigging. Sail away.

– Paint the interior floor.

Attempt One

Attempt Two

 

Attempt Three -- Successful!

Losing it Like a Winner Part I

In my recent post about vegetarian/vegan diets, I mentioned that the real challenge for the non-meat eater is not weight gain, but healthy weight loss. The key word being ‘healthy’. Whether you’re a meat-eater or vegetarian, it’s very easy to lose weight badly, by which I mean losing muscle along with the fat, and effectively wasting away and becoming weaker and less-healthy overall. It’s the easiest thing in the world to lose weight badly, but no matter how much you want to shed some pounds, it’s not worth it to do it this way; mostly what you’ll have to show for your efforts is diminished physical abilities and muscle tone, a lack of energy, and a depressed mental state.

So how do you avoid these problems and lose weight while keep high energy and a positive attitude and without compromising your health and huge muscles? I advocate what is often called a ‘high protein’ or ‘low carbohydrate’ diet, but I’ve always felt these titles were misleading. Really the goal is to reduce caloric intake in order to initiate weight loss while still eating enough protein to maintain muscle mass.

First, hopefully everyone knows that the only way to lose weight is to use more energy than you take in, it’s simple arithmetic. In order to do this don’t just cut your calories, while that might result in some short term weight loss, your body will quickly adjust its metabolic rate and go into a kind of ‘starvation mode’ where it reduces energy usage (making you feel sluggish, cold, and depressed) and begins storing all the food energy it can as fat, making your weight loss come to a grinding halt, if not causing you to gain some weight. Almost more importantly, if kept in this state for a prolonged period, your body will cut back on ‘non-essentials’, like muscle mass, and you may quickly find your biceps and bench press shrinking in stature.

So, it’s important to know how many calories you should eat while trying to lose weight, without shocking your body into entering this starvation mode. The basic rule is 10 x your body weight in pounds. So, if you weigh 150 lbs, aim to eat around 1,500 calories per day. You can most certainly get away with eating more than this number, but never go below it.

More importantly, you need to know how much protein you’ll require. It’s essential to get enough protein when in this ‘calorie reduced’ state to ensure your body has enough raw material to repair and maintain your muscles. If you don’t get enough protein, but your body isn’t taking in as much food energy as it normally would, it will simply absorb the muscle tissue that needs repairing to use its protein to make vital enzymes the body uses just to stay alive. Again, the simple rule is around 1 gram of protein per 1 lb of body weight. So our 150 lb subject should also eat around 150 grams of protein each day. The human body cannot absorb more protein than this, so don’t bother trying to eat more.

Next, you need to match carbohydrates to protein. This means our 150 lb subject who eats 150 grams of protein per day is also eating 150 grams of carbohydrates alongside that. Carbohydrates are a great source of energy, and your body needs a steady supply of them to maintain your blood sugar levels while still burning fat reserves. Don’t eat ‘carbs’ alone in a meal, always make sure they go with some protein. I should stress that the majority of these ‘carbs’ should come from vegetables, as these will fill you up, and provide essential vitamins and fibre. Rice and bread are to be avoided, as they’re high on the gycemic index, which means they’re absorbed into the bloodstream rapidly, and cause a spike in your blood sugar levels, which causes you to be more likely to store energy as fat. Potatoes and oatmeal are better choices in terms of starch, but even still, they should be kept to a minimum.

Both carbohydrates and protein carry 4 calories per gram. So, to make up our 150 lb subject’s 1,500 calorie diet we have 600 calories from protein (150 x 4) and 600 from ‘carbs’ (150 x 4). That only adds up to 1,200 calories. The remaining 300 should come from fat. Too many dieters cut out fat altogether, and that’s a mistake. Dietary fat is essential to maintaining hormone levels and the nervous system. Fat has 9 calories per gram, so that comes to around 33 grams per day.

This all sounds very measured and regimented and hard to keep track of, but the truth is it won’t turn out that way in reality (unless you obsessively keep track of everything, which I definitely do not recommend you do.) These numbers are just a guideline, and you’ll very quickly get an intuitive grasp of what to eat without having to count everything up. In the case of our hypothetical 150 lb subject, he/she could roughly attain these numbers by eating three meals, each with two fist-sized servings of both carbohydrate and protein heavy foods, along with a table spoon of some kind of fat. I know that by the end of my recent dieting experience, I barely needed to keep track of what I ate, as it had quickly become habit, both for me personally and for my digestive tract, to eat in a way that sustained healthful weight loss. If you’re doing things correctly, you should actually be eating about the same amount of food as you normally would, in terms of volume. And you should never feel as though you’re starving or denying yourself anything. If you treat your body well, it will only crave things that are good for it.

Finally, keep on exercising. Cardio is a great way to burn energy, but I’ve actually found it isn’t essential, and a lot of professional bodybuilders don’t even do any at all! While I was dieting this summer, the only cardio I did was mine and Justine’s weekly ride out to the boat, and I managed to lose close to 30 lbs in less than three months! Regardless, you need to keep stimulating your body and using up energy, you can train hard, but don’t over-do it.

Topside

We’ve been working on the deck, removing every fitting that’ll come loose (some of those brass bolts might be in there for good it seems), filling in every hole that’ll take the paste (we’re using Duraglas — sands like wood!), and painting every surface that we can while still having a place to stand (at anchor it can be tricky — the cockpit will have to wait until we get some moorage at a dock).

One layer of paint, and then one layer of sand, sprinkled on.

Half-way painted.

Somehow managed to slither off the boat, into the dingy without getting too much paint on our pants.

Later on, Stephen sanded off some pain that got onto the wood trim.

Pull-ups, not Pampers Part II

Instead of fully extending your arms like in the diagram, stop just a little short of the bottom.

Some months ago I had reached a plateau in my training regarding my performance of wide-grip, overhand pull-ups, which led me to question whether or not I should continue regularly performing them. But I have now found the solution: Lose weight. It’s not a very satisfying solution, particularly for somebody interested in strength training. But it’s a simple fact that if you have less weight to lift, you will be able to perform more repetitions. This, in turn, allows you to build more muscle and become stronger. Once again, the lesson here is to try different things, and arrange your workouts in different phases (hypertrophy, strength, weight-loss, etc.)

Another tip I learned for improving one’s pull-ups is to not extend y0ur arms all the way down, but rather, stop just short of fully extending your arms at the ‘bottom’ of the motion. When you fully extend your arms, you lose the tension in your latissimus dorsi. This breaks your arms’ connection with your core and causes you to swing around and lose momentum, and you’ll have to waste a lot of energy regaining your stability. By not fully extending your arms and losing this connection, your body will perform the motion in an efficient straight line, conserving tons of energy and allowing you to perform many more reps before fatiguing. The other benefit of this is that it will stress the lats more fully, stimulating more growth in them and therefor causing you to become even better at pullups!

By following these two simple steps, I was able to literally double my pull-up repetitions this summer!

 

Reflecting on my first year of being a Vegetarian/Vegan

Having not written any articles for our little training blog in some time, this first anniversary of taking the plunge into a position I once held in utter contempt seemed to be the appropriate occasion for a comeback.

“Pale and frail” is the phrase my good friend who is a personal trainer has used to describe most vegans, and until this year I would have agreed with him completely. Now I only partially agree. Too many people seem to have the misconception that becoming a vegan or vegetarian means cutting out meat (and other animal products) and replacing it with nothing. No matter if you’re an omnivore or full-fledged vegan, if your diet doesn’t provide you with adequate levels of complete proteins, iron, and B-12 vitamins, you will become anaemic and skeletal in no time. I once held the position that anybody who is highly active (like myself) will never be able to meet these nutritional demands without consuming animal based foods. And while perhaps with strict scrutiny of their food intake, the vegan athlete could maintain a reasonable level of health, they would never be able to function optimally and would not progress beyond a mediocre level of physical ability. I now must admit that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was actually re-watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that tipped the balance for me. I began living by the maxim "What would Jean-Luc Picard do?" And I realized, the rational and ethical Captain probably wouldn't eat animals.

Last year I took a Critical Animal Studies course at Emily Carr, during which the seeds of doubt regarding the morality of eating animals had been planted. Justine had already decided some time before this to stop eating sentient creatures, and while I respected her decision, I was still too firmly set in my nutritional opinions to go through with the transition myself. In the ensuing months we discussed the matter quite frequently and I became more and more convinced that if one were to remain ethically consistent, one would have to, whenever possible, avoid causing harm to any creature with a conception (no matter how rudimentary) of its own well-being. Put simply, if you could maintain good health without exploiting animals, then the right thing to do would be to not exploit them. Of course, it was the point of ‘ maintaining good health’ that I remained skeptical of, and so I continued eating several servings of meat and drinking a litre or two of milk every day.

Then, almost exactly one year ago, after progressing to a new ‘peak level of performance’ in my training, my body crashed and I came down with a cold, as frequently happens when one is working that hard. During the week that I was sick, I realized that now was the perfect opportunity to test out my nutritional prowess. If I really knew so much about nutrition, then shouldn’t I be able to continue my strength training while avoiding animal products? And so, I began a new training cycle, where I would over several weeks increase the intensity of my training, eventually building up to a new ‘one rep maximum’ on all my main exercises. Only this time I was to do it on a vegetarian diet. I didn’t go ‘full-vegan’ right away simply because a) it rarely works to rush into a lifestyle change of any sort rather than easing into it over time, and b) I still had 10 lbs of milk-based whey protein powder in my cupboard that I wasn’t just going to throw away (how disrespectful that would be to the cows who produced it!)

Furthermore, I still wasn’t convinced I could accomplish my goals without some kind of animal-based protein. I honestly thought this little experiment wasn’t going to last more than a few weeks before my performance declined and I would be ‘forced’ to return to eating meat. But by Christmas my lifts kept on improving and so I just kept on going in spite of the delicious holiday turkey dinners being served by Justine’s parents.

To say that, now, one year after abstaining from animal products, I have lost 20 lbs would be a little misleading. True, I do weigh 20 lbs less than I did when I ate meat, but I’ve also gained just under 10 lbs of muscle. So I suppose that adds up to close to 30 lbs of fat I’ve lost! And, despite my much reduced body weight, all my main lifts (bench press, deadlift, and squat) are roughly 10% heavier than they were a year ago!

I proved to myself early on that muscle gain and strength improvements were quite possible on a vegetarian diet, but until this summer, I wasn’t certain I could healthfully lose fat without also losing muscle. Again, I must admit my nutritional fears were unfounded.

Textured Vegetable protein, made from soy, is frequently used as a filler in prison meatloaf. I don't know why it should be considered 'filler', as it actually contains more protein than ground beef or any other meat, and has a texture that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing!

The main concern of anyone trying to lose fat but keep muscle is to reduce caloric intake, but maintain a high level of dietary protein. The omnivore athlete solves this problem by eating almost nothing but meat, with a few vegetables. But for the non-meat eater, the majority of high-protein plant-based foods are also quite high in carbohydrates, making them supposedly unsuitable for this type of diet. However, this is quickly revealed to be a non-problem when one considers options such as firm tofu, non-sweetened soy milk, and hemp seeds, all of which possess protein in equal, or greater levels than fat or carbohydrates. I’ll save the specifics for another article, but by eating these foods combined with various nuts, beans and vegetables, and was able to consume enough protein to keep my muscles, but reduce my caloric intake enough to lose 25 lbs of fat over a few months (I wasn’t aware I had 25 lbs to lose, but…) All the while without ever feeling as though I was starving, or denying my body anything it craved. I will also add that this was without doing much, if any, cardiovascular exercise, as I injured my thigh around this time and couldn’t put any hard impact on it. Besides, cardio is for suckers.

It was also at this time of dieting that I began the switch to ‘full-vegan’. Up until the summer, I was still in school, and so in an effort to save money I continued buying cheap whey-powder supplements. But when I began dieting, I realized that in order to cut back on ‘carbs’ I would need to purchase a higher quality protein isolate. Then I noticed that the expensive whey-protein isolates cost about as much as the vegetable-based protein powders, which had comparable levels of protein, carbohydrates, etc… So, I took the next step, and cut out dairy, and thus was no longer actively eating any animal products. And I never looked back.

So, after one year of abstaining from eating animals, my training is still going strong, and, short of being stranded in a life or death scenario, I can’t conceive of circumstances under which I would return to my old, meat-eating ways. My friends and gym-mates often claim that I’d be even stronger if I ate animals, but all I know is I still ‘out-lift’ the whole, meat-eating lot of them by margins of hundreds of pounds! While I’ve presented my training results after switching to a plant-based diet, I want to stress that I don’t believe that my success is specifically due to the plant-based diet, but rather I want to show that by eating a well constructed plant-based diet, one can attain the same results as a well constructed omnivorous diet. As long as you’re getting all the same basic nutrients, there’s really no difference between the two. Nutritionally, that is. Ethically, environmentally, financially… those are issues where the two start to diverge, and each of those issues probably deserves a blog of their own. All I can say now is that the ‘argument from nutrition’ simply isn’t valid.

Cycling, Grinding, Sanding

We cycled out to the boat this week, and then got to work sanding away all the chips and grime.

 

 

 

 

Zygo Rhiza

Her name references the type of ancient whale, Zygorhiza, a designation which means “yoke-tooth”. Many ancient creatures’ names seem to be derived from their dental situation. In any case, I know it sounds strange…but it just fits so well, seeing as both the boat and the whale are approximately 20 feet long, “twin-keeled” with vestigial type appendages, and similarly hull/skull shaped.

The work on her insides and outsides progresses slowly as Stephen and I struggle to get out to the Island each week amidst our double-jobs each.

Not an ancient whale, but a current-day cetacean, portrayed as I imagine future scientists will make reconstructions from their bones...

(Stephen removes the rotten bulkheads).

Marine Real Estate

We’ve decided to go with a sailboat. By working on this Vivacity 20, and rigging up some oars in the cockpit, perhaps we can get a feel for ocean rowing without having to actually start out with an ocean rowboat. She’s a beauty (despite the rough state), and we’re really excited to start working on her.

Nobody seems to understand us when we say we want to row a sailboat — as in not use a motor, however, I can envision exactly what it would look like. Several people have already rowed their sailboats successfully.

Habitat Crew (habitatcrew.com)

Colin Angus (angusadventures.com)

And then of course, there’s the more traditional form of oar-powering a sailboat called sculling, as demonstrated by sailor Lin Pardey.

Lin Pardey

I’d like to add our boat to the list of those exclusively under sail and oar power.