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}

Fitness Goals

Hi ya'll! Hope you had a great weekend. Ours was refreshing, we got a lot of rest, enjoyed a date-day on Saturday, hung out with some new friends, and had a great time of worship at church. It really doesn't get much better than that.

Anyway, this week I am pretty stoked, I have some really exciting things in store! I've decided I'll just dub this "fitness week" on the blog since most, if not all, of my posts this week will be related to just that.

Today, I thought I'd start off by sharing some of my fitness goals with you.

(Source: Women's Health via Shutterstock.com)

When Chris and I moved to Houston we began rethinking our fitness goals, after all, our goals would help us determine what type of workouts we needed to do and what type of equipment and gym would be most suitable.

To be honest, I had really never written out specific goals before, but I've been reading and learning more about the importance of setting specific goals the last few weeks so I wanted to give it a shot. At first it wasn't easy. I mean in the past my goal was simply to learn how to lift weights properly and gain muscle weight. As I've mentioned before I never used to work out much at all. I was the girl you'd find running on treadmill or barely working up a sweat on the elliptical. I also had a terrible immune system and what the doctors thought was IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), needless to say, I felt pretty miserable just about all the time.

When my husband and I got married, I was sickly thin and really had no idea there was something wrong with me. Thankfully, my husband being the fitness guru he is/was, knew exactly how to help. The first week we were married we immediately began eating clean (think paleo-ish) and Chris got me in the gym and began teaching me the basics of weight lifting. About a year later I had the basics down and we decided to get back in to a Crossfit gym.

Now almost three years later, I can honestly say I feel like a whole different person. Physically, I'm stronger and healthier than I can ever remember being. I don't worry about being sick, I sleep better and I have so much more energy! Since I have gained strength and feel like I'm in a good place physically, I decided to start refining my goals to focus on more specific areas.

My first goal is to continue building strength. I loved doing Crossfit but sometimes I'd get frustrated because I wasn't reaching my full potential when it came to lifting. I know I have a lot of bandwidth left in me as far as my lifting goes so I want to continue working my way up in weight. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm getting big, rather it means I'm building strong lean muscle.

(Source: skinnyms.com)

My second goal is to focus more on physique. I want to have a more toned body, specifically my arms and legs. My arms have always been little so I want to focus on building muscle there. For my legs, I want to continue building strength while also toning them. I've posted a few inspiration photos below.

Look at those legs! (Source: Glamour Magazine)

(Source: Jenn-Fit)

We began our new workout routine about 2.5 weeks ago but I'm excited to see how my body changes over the next 8-10 weeks. 

Be sure to check back this week as I'll be doing a two part guest post from my husband on our programming!

Back to CrossFit

Today C and I are headed to try out ABQ CrossFit. After getting married and moving from Dallas to Albuquerque, C decided it would be best to take some time off from CF and work on a linear progression strength training program. Seeing as I had never lifted more than a 5 lb. weight in my life I was incredibly nervous about strength training and olympic lifting for a number of reasons including my fear of becoming to "bulky." Needless to say, there have been many ups and downs, but I have become stronger both mentally and physically and I am incredibly pleased with the results. We have been working on the strength program for over a year now and started talking about the benefits of getting back to CrossFit. Not only will it allow us to workout in the morning, but it'll give us more time to do other things in the evening, will vary our workout routine and get us back in the CF community.

{Image Credit: CrossFit Deep Ellum}

My first ever experience with CrossFit at CrossFit Deep Ellum in Dallas, TX.