Guest Post: Part 1 - A New Routine

Happy Wednesday everyone! Today, I'm super excited to introduce to you our first guest blogger, my sweet husband, Chris. As I have mentioned before he is the person that got me out of my 'health' rut and really educated me on what it looks like to live a balanced life. Because of him we now share a mutual passion for physical health through exercise and a well-balanced diet. Today he'll be sharing a brief overview of what we have been working on the past few years and tomorrow's post he will share a much more in-depth review of our current programming and how it works. Hope you all enjoy!

Hi, I’m Meghan’s husband Chris. When Meghan and I got married she wasn’t super into working out. She would occasionally go to the gym, and ate “healthy” by normal American standards: avoiding high fats, eating whole grains, maintaining portion control, not eating too many sweets, etc. Well, she ended up marrying a gym rat, who by nature takes everything to extremes. On our first solo date I was cutting weight for my fourth professional MMA fight, and she wasn’t quite sure what to think of the guy who was only eating meat and veggies… She described me as “intense”.

Through three years of marriage she has been awesome though, open to trying new workouts, and a new healthier “whole foods” diet (think Paleo-ish), which in conjunction with prayer and the Lord’s grace, has reduced 99% of her previous digestive and health issues.  Since she had no formal weight training experience other than using machines at globo gyms, we spent the first year of marriage doing power routines, incorporating lots of squatting, deadlifting, presses and exercises designed to add muscle onto a tiny little lady. 

We started her on a version of Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program (review of the program via Bodybuilding.com here), progressing through the Madcow 5x5 linear progression, and ending with the Greyskull barbell linear progression. Each has its own merit for the novice trainee, and she gained a ton of relative strength. After about a year she had enough of a solid strength base that I felt comfortable taking her back to Crossfit.  I’d been doing Crossfit since about 07-08, had my Level 1 Crossfit Certification, and had done some coaching in the past, so we were both pretty excited about the opportunity to get out of the local YMCA and back into a “real” gym. 

We spent the next two years at Crossfit Albuquerque. We had great coaches there, made a ton of awesome friends, and Meghan really got to develop her olympic (oly) lifts, as well as a much broader skill set (pull ups, toes to bar, ring dips, handstand pushups) thanks to the Crossfit programming.

When we moved to Houston a month ago I thought it would be fun for me to get back into programming our own strength progressions. I absolutely love programming, and I kind of nerd out about the intricacies of it. We found an amazing gym, Studio Fitness, located in the Heights, which has a ridiculous amount of good equipment (bumper plates, squat racks, pull-up rigs, and even a sprint pad!). Meghan and I sat down and discussed her goals, which are to focus on strength and oly lifts, as well as having an aesthetic element to the programming (check her goals post out here), because who doesn’t want to look good? 

Tomorrow I'll be sharing a document that contains the linear progression I currently have her doing. We’ll stick with it for a 8-10 week cycle before revisiting it for modification. Her program is similar to mine, but has a few small differences as I’m focusing on building a stronger power base after two years of generalized Crossfit style programing. It’s a four day a week program, incorporating heavy movements on Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri, with two days of short metcons (metabolic conditioning), incorporating sprint work for speed and power, basic oly lifts, and a little bit of hypertrophy/aesthetic based movements.  Be sure to check back tomorrow and I’ll go through the specific days and methodologies.

{Image Source: Crossfit Albuquerque}