Tag Archives: fitness

Exercise

After a week on the RPM System

I recorded a video last night, after my third workout on the RPM System. I’ve completed a week’s worth of workouts, and I can already feel the program’s effect on my body.

My core muscles have begun to tighten, and my muscle tone is improving. I like the slow burn I get in my muscles after the workouts — not enough to make things painful, but just enough to let me know I’ve done some nice work, and that my body’s getting better.

The interesting thing about the workouts is that they’re easy to under-appreciate, until you begin to do them. You start doing the exercises, and you think it’s a piece of cake, until you get to the second or third run-through (it’s circuit training, remember), and your muscles begin to give up, and you’re drenched in sweat and gasping for air.

I thought I’d post some “before” photos, so I can track my progress accurately. I’ll use these, along with my initial measurements, to see how my body improves as I advance through the workout regimen.

Continue reading →

Standard
Exercise, Reviews

The RPM System: first impressions

I had my first workout on the RPM (Results Power Movement) System last night, and I recorded my thoughts in a video clip which you can see below, or on YouTube.

As it turns out, I like the workouts. Of course, I’ve only had one workout so far, but for me, it’s an interesting change to work out without weights. As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve always worked out with weights. I’ve never really dedicated any significant time, on a regular basis, to working out with just my body weight, doing anything else but crunches, pull-ups and push-ups. So my first workout was a revelation of sorts. I discovered I could get sore and work out all sorts of muscle groups using only my body weight, an exercise ball and an exercise band…

… with one caveat: you need a couple more things, without which you can’t do the workouts properly.

You also need a door wedge — something to allow you to anchor the exercise band so you can do band presses and band rows. I didn’t get it, so I had to improvise. Make sure you find one at a sports store, and buy it along with the exercise band. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find it as a set with the exercise band.

Make sure you read through the Equipment PDF, which mentions the door wedge (the general website doesn’t), and also make sure you get an exercise ball that’s the right size for your height. Check the PDF, which has a table listing the various ball sizes for height ranges.

You also need a metronome. If you don’t have one around the house, see if you can pick up an inexpensive one from a music or sports store, or if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, get a metronome app from the App Store. I opted for the second choice, and got an app called Metron, a highly rated metronome app, which costs $1.99. I like it, and it’s got a ton more options than I need for the workouts. The important thing for your metronome is that it needs to be able to go down below 50 BPM, and, just in case you need it, go up to 200 BPM.

The metronome is important, because almost every one of your exercises on the RPM System will have a beat which will dictate how fast or how slow you need to do it. The beat may increase or decrease, depending on the exercise, making it harder to do as you advance. Without a metronome, you won’t be able to keep the proper beat, and you won’t reap the full benefits of your workout regimen.

Another thing I recommend you do before your first workout is to read through the Strength Program Description PDF, which explains how the circuit training works the RPM workouts. It’s really important you do that, or you’ll be looking at your workout schedules like a hen looks at a newspaper, which is how I looked at it the first time…

That’s pretty much it so far. I look forward to the next workout!

If you’d like to try out the RPM System, use this code (553677456) which will get you a free week’s trial.

Standard
Exercise

Started on the RPM System today

I’ve always had an abiding interest in exercise. Perhaps it was brought on by the fact that I was very thin as a child. I was shorter, thinner and looked much younger than my age as I grew up, and I got fed up with being treated like a little boy.

When I got to college, I read about weightlifting voraciously. I educated myself and began lifting weights frequently, advancing from 2-3 times/week to 6-7 times/week. I started weightlifting regularly my sophomore year, and by my senior year, I’d put on about 60 lbs of muscle, without illegal supplements.

After college, even though I was still lifting weights intensely, I lost about 25 lbs. There were a few reasons for that. For one thing, I turned vegan, and I didn’t balance my diet properly. Then I had an operation on my right knee for a torn ACL, and was out of commission for 6-7 months. I became unhappy with going to the gym, for other reasons as well… so I focused my efforts on my job and my personal projects, such as writing for my websites. Over time, that meant more weight loss, until my weight settled around 155-160 lbs. I was still interested in exercise though, and I wrote several articles about the subject when I began to publish online in 2001.

On a side note, if you ever wonder whether you should play rugby or not, keep in mind I broke a rib, then my nose, then tore my ACL playing rugby. It’s not an easy sport on the body. I decided to stick to regular exercise and leave rugby to those with sturdier constitutions and cauliflower ears.

Back to my adventures in exercise… I coasted onward, relying on my previous years of workouts to keep my body in a residual shape, and that worked, for a time, until I noticed that even though my weight stayed the same and my waist stayed the same, I was getting flabbier. The basic shape was still there, but muscle tone was nowhere near what I used to have, and I was accumulating body fat, slowly but surely.

I had several false starts over time, where I tried to go to a gym regularly, but that didn’t work out. So far, my exercise routine has been irregular. I do pull-ups and crunches every now and then, but it’s not enough.

Imagine my surprise, when out of the blue, I was contacted by one of the founders of the RPM System — a low-cost, highly customizable fitness program that tailors itself to each user’s needs after a baseline fitness and diet assessment — and I was asked to review it honestly, without pulling any punches. (RPM stands for Results Power Movement.)

Here was a fitness program I could do at home, with minimal equipment (an exercise band and an exercise ball), using only my body weight. Absolutely, I said, bring it on!

So here I am! I did my initial assessment today, and you can see my results below. My power score is 64, which, on a scale from 1-100, gets me a D (barely). It looks like I need some serious work…

It’s not that I could only do 4 push-ups, and so on… Their website grades each of my numbers on a scale of 1-10, then assigns me a score on a scale of 1-100. Here are my actual numbers for each test:

Continue reading →

Standard