Month: November 2017

AllPro Review – Cycle 2

/ Chris DiMarco / Leave a comment

Back at the end of July, I made a post discussing a new workout plan I was starting. I had originally planned to review it immediately after the first “cycle,” but I decided to wait until the close of the second pass through to do a review.

The Routine

There are seven exercises that make up the three-day-a-week routine: squats, bench press, bent over rows, overhead press, straight-legged deadlifts, curls, and calf raises. Before starting the plan, you go into the gym and figure out about how much weight you can comfortably do eight repetitions of each exercise with. That will be your max weight for the first day of the first week (heavy day), of which you will do two working sets. For the first three exercises, you add in two warmup sets, the first with 1/4 of the working set weight, and the second with 1/2 of the working set weight. The table below shows my first day’s routine:

Heavy Day (Monday)
Exercise Warmup 1 Warmup 2 Working Sets
Squats 35 70 140
Bench Press 45 90 180
Bent Over Rows 30 60 120
Overhead Press N/A N/A 70
Straight-legged Deadlifts N/A N/A 135
Curls N/A N/A 65
Calf Raises N/A N/A 70

For the following two days of AllPro, Wednesday and Friday, you decrease the load to 90% for Wednesday, and 80% for Friday.

The number of reps to get in is a five-week cycle. Week 1 you perform eight reps in each set, Week 2 nine reps, and so on, until at Week 5 you are doing twelve reps in each set.

At the end of each cycle, you increase the heavy day weights by 10%, and repeat the whole process.

You do not have to do these exact exercises with an Olympic bar. You can sub in Smith machine or dumbbells if necessary. That’s exactly what I had to do at Snap.

SFolathe

It’s a gym. Mostly.

Results

Since there are changes to both reps and weights across this time, the most useful metric for comparison is looking at the one rep max (1RM, see here for the calculator) and the improvement. Note that there appear to be some inconsistencies, but that is primarily due to rounding up or down to make the “plate math” easy.

1RM Comparison
Exercise Start Finish
Squats 175 220
Bench Press 225 286
Bent Over Rows 144 179
Overhead Press 88 114
Straight-legged Deadlifts 169 214
Curls 81 107
Calf Raises 88 107

Overall, I am satisfied with the strength progress to date. Other than the strength increases, the size gains are nice. In only a few short months, I am noticeably bigger. Nothing huge, but my shirts and jeans fit more tightly.  It’s excellent motivation to keep on going with this routine…at least until I need to buy new clothes.

What I Like

First off, I think the balance of this plan is excellent:

  • Squats – Quads, Gluteus Maximus, Abductor, Hamstrings, Erector Spinae, Obliques and Rectus Abdominals
  • Bench Press – Pectorals, Triceps and Shoulders
  • Bent Over Row – Back, Glutes, Hamstrings, Biceps
  • Overhead Press – Shoulders, Triceps
  • SLDL – Lower Back, Glutes, Hamstrings, Rhomboid, Lats, Quads, Ab’s and Obliques
  • Barbell Curls – Biceps
  • Calf raises – Calves

When I get home, I feel like I’ve done a great job at hitting everything important. Next, I find that the psychological profile of the plan makes it easy to keep going. The progress from heavy day to light day forces you to go, questioning your manhood the whole way. “What? You don’t wanna go? It’s LIGHT DAY. Can’t handle a LIGHT DAY, you big sissy? You just did 10% more two days ago.” In the same manner, after that light day, you get two days off before you only add in one single rep for each exercise.  Also, after you complete a cycle, the beginning of the next is a psychological win as you’re lifting heavier weights, but from the perspective of 1RM you’re actually in a deload phase by virtue of lifting for fewer reps.

There are even options for making up missed days: if you miss a medium day, you simply replace the light day with another heavy day. If you miss a light day, you just skip it. Miss a heavy day and Mark Rippetoe will find you and give you a stern talking to.

What I Don’t Like

My gripes with this plan are minimal and normal for most routines:

  1. ‘Missing’ exercises – as in, “I miss doing them.” I really enjoy standard deadlifts and tricep pull downs, but this plan hits those same muscles pretty hard without them.
  2. No variety – this is a double-edged sword of the AllPro workout. It’s nice that you don’t have to think or plan at all for the next several months (which makes it great for establishing a routine), but sometimes you just want to throw in some flys or lat pull downs.
  3. Unsustainable rates – this workout cannot be continued ad infinitum at the rate of 10% increase per cycle. You will eventually plateau. This is not a big deal, as this is billed as a beginner/intermediate workout.
  4. No method for balancing poorly performing exercises. You’ll notice in my results that my lower body is kinda crap compared to my upper body. AllPro provides no direct method for working that out.

That’s it.

Moving Forward

I plan on continuing the AllPro workout straight until I stall out. I’m satisfied with my progress physically and aesthetically, and it is a piece of cake to lock into the routine. I am thinking of working in some minor leg exercises to try to improve my lower body performance, but I’ll generally stick to this plan. Once I plateau (hopefully not until late next year), I’ll switch to a 5×5 plan like this one: Bill Star 5×5. Double thanks to user AllPro on the BB forums for this excellent plan! That’s all for now!

Note: 

The clever among you will notice that the time between 7/23 and 11/11 is not ten weeks. Right around the end of the first cycle, I had a minor back sprain to deal with and I took a small vacation. ‘Twas just life!

 

 

Chaos

/ Chris DiMarco / Leave a comment

In a break from the (til now) norm, I’m going to talk about a topic I adore: Chaos. I will try to make most of this post relatable for the layman.

What the hell is it?

In the sense of the dictionary, chaos is some occurrence that seems so unpredictable as to appear random. In the physics & mathematics world, we have a slightly more technical definition:

Chaos is the behavior of dynamics systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

For the uninitiated, let’s start with some basic terms from that sentence:

  1. System – a series of connected parts that operate together to produce some measurable output. An electrical circuit, a mechanical device, a chemical process. These can all be modeled as systems.
  2. Dynamics – the study of the change of these systems over time. This is in comparison to statics, where the system is unchanging.
  3. Initial conditions – the starting point of the system. Think of ball in a bowl. It can begin in the bottom of the bowl, along the sides, or at the top.
  4. Highly sensitive – small changes in the initial conditions lead to large differences in the end result.

For a textbook version of non-chaotic systems, we can look to the archetypal Van Der Pol oscillator in two dimensions:

VanDerPolOscillator

Phase Portrait of the Van Der Pol oscillator (source: Wikipedia.)

This oscillator is a model of an electronic circuit that has a cyclical output under certain conditions (check out wiki for the schematics). Even for those unfamiliar with dynamic systems and phase portraits, you can interpret the image above like this: the blue lines are the path of the system starting at some arbitrary point. Think of the graph as a topography with the arrows pointing downhill, and the system as a drop of rain that flows with gravity.

At some particular space on the phase portrait, the system is being “pushed” in some direction. For example, you can see that at the edges of the plot, it is being pushed towards the center in every position.

The red “pool” shape is an orbit that the system gets locked into, a pattern that keeps repeating itself. As you can see from the portrait, no matter where you start you end up in the pool orbit.

vanderpol

2D Van Der Pol Equations

For the geeks like me, I’ve attached the 2D variant of the Van Der Pol equations above. These (x-dot and y-dot) are the equations of the slopes (or gradient) in each direction, at a particular point on the phase portrait. μ is a constant value that changes the shape of the pool, and is ~1.5 for the plot above. Plug in a value of x or y on the portrait (say X=10, Y = 10), and you’ll see that the sum of those vectors gives you the direction and magnitude of the arrow at that point.

The Lorenz Butterfly

The go-to demonstration of nonlinear chaos is the Lorenz Strange Attractor, also known as the Lorenz Butterfly. Lorenz came across this system when he was studying atmospheric convection – the study of heat being passed through the air from the warm equator areas of Earth into the areas nearer the poles.

I’ve put together an animation in MATLAB to show two things:

  1. How awesome chaos in three dimensions is, and
  2. The sensitivity to initial conditions. The black point starts at (x, y, z) = (1, 1, 1), and the magenta point starts at (x, y, z) = (1.1, 1.1, 1.1).

lorenz

Pay special attention at the beginning to where the two points start, how rapidly they start to veer apart, and where the tracks decide to switch sides of the butterfly. Also notice that there appear to be two attractors, points that the system hovers around, but never crash into, like the pool in the Van Der Pol oscillator.

lorenzeq

Ordinary Differential Equations for the The Lorenz Attractor

Since we’re in three dimensions, there’s an extra equation for the system. Naturally, the phase portrait would also be three dimensional, and tough to display. In these equations, dx/dt, dy/dt, and dz/dt are equivalent to x-dot in the oscillator. They determine the gradient in the phase portrait at a point (x, y, z).  The fancy Greek letters (σ, ρ, β) are again constants like μ. In this case, (σ, ρ, β) = (28, 10, 8/3).

So, fun stuff! It always fascinates me how rather unassuming physical systems can lead to surprising dynamic studies. If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz.

The Changing of Fates

/ Chris DiMarco / Leave a comment

When I was a young boy, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind as to what I’d be when I grew up: an astronaut. So why am I an engineer? And what’s that have to do with you?

Early Developments

My favorite early memories involved parking around the TV with my family to watch the newest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The exploration, the political strategy, the cool space battles, and the gorgeous starships hit all the right buttons for first grade me. We were religious Trekkies; my Dad owned the entire original series on VHS, and we had all the movies to that point in our cabinet. I thought Star Wars was “okay,” but the Trek world was the one I wanted to live in. At one point, I recall making about thirty different paper airplanes, and giving them names and registration numbers from ST. I had an obsession.

My passion for space grew as I caught other flicks from that era: The Last Starfighter, Space Camp, Dune, ET, and yes, even Buckaroo Banzai. It was reinforced in elementary school in several ways. In the 2nd grade, NASA brought vans out with transmission equipment so that we could all watch the shuttle launch. It blew my eight year old brain to smithereens, the crackling sounds, the fury, the size of the thing…incredible! (I still get a kick out of launches and watch them whenever I can.) In the 6th grade, my Gifted & Talented group participated in a project to design a the sewer system for a mission to Mars, where we competed against other schools.

BBZAI

Look at these sexy MFers. (Buckaroo Bonzai, courtesy of Gizmodo)

My parents did everything they could to keep me marching down that path. They took me to the  Franklin Institute in Philly regularly. At one point, it had an incredible ST exhibit with early voice recognition and touchscreen systems. The experience was just like being on the Enterprise, and I went bananas! They signed me up for classes there in robotics, space station construction, and holograms. I was on course for my uniform and collar pips.

Along the way, mother nature started wreaking havoc with my plans. In the fourth grade, my parents discovered I was having trouble seeing the board from the back of the classroom. Soon after, there’s a big, bulky pair of glasses on my face. Fantastic.

That wasn’t even the final nail in the coffin. I would get gassed when running around on the soccer field, and I had serious trouble breathing while sick. The doctors quickly diagnosed my symptoms: I had exercise & illness induced asthma.

I had seen The Right Stuff — to be an astronaut, you had to be in the best health — and that meant I was screwed.

The Middle Era

After that blow, my interests ran off towards music. I became a decent saxophone player, learned some guitar and piano. I got into drums and I developed the terrible habit of tapping on everything, everywhere. In high school, this pushed me towards the marching band, and later drum corps. These things became my entire life. My friends were musicians, and all my romances were in the band/corps.

As high school came to a close and I needed to choose a path, I was presented with the problem of divided talents. I had received scholarships for engineering and science, but I was also pretty darned good at drums. But marching drums isn’t exactly a lucrative field, I wasn’t very good at drum set (yay rock star), and I didn’t really care to teach music. So, I went away to be an engineer…and failed miserably.

After my initial attempt at college, I took stabs at being:

  • Mechanic
  • Surveyor
  • Civil Engineer
  • Rock ‘n Roll Drummer
  • Race Car Driver

None of these stuck. I needed a plan.

The Plan to End All Plans

In June 2010, while I was cleaning up my GPA at the local community college, I made a little timeline for my future. I don’t have the complete timeline, but I have the high level notes from my journal. At the time, it looked like this:

  1. Get my BS in Mechanical Engineering at UNCC
  2. Earn my  MS or PhD in Aero/Astro at NC State, Maryland, or UF
  3. Work at Langley/Boeing/Lockheed for Aero experience
  4. Move to a more cutting edge company, like SpaceX, TSC, or NASA
  5. Start my own company

Seems like a pretty reasonable plan for a 29-year old, eh? I thought so, too. While this isn’t how things have played out (I got my BS/MS at UNCC, and I now work in Garmin’s aviation department), it’s not too concerning. The important part is that I had a goal that I directed myself toward, and I achieved something incredibly useful and important. The fact that the course turned and twisted is simply life.

After a few months at Garmin, things started falling into place. I had felt considerable guilt about not contributing to society fully with my skills, so I immediately started feeling more comfortable in my own skin with that burden lifted. I could even afford to buy things that I desired! I nabbed some quality guitars and nicely outfitted my apartment. I bought a sporty new car. But something was missing…

A host of things were missing.

“What Do You Want For Yourself?”

The above quote is from the film The Last Samurai. There is a scene where Tom Cruise (a prisoner) asks Ken Watanabe (his captor, a samurai), “What do you want from me?” and Watanabe replies with the heading above. This has stuck with me for a long time, as I adore that movie. There is a point in a man’s life where he must decide which pieces he will add to make up his life.

This topic became deeply frustrating for me.

There is a motivational speaker that I freakin’ love, Eric Thomas, the Hip-Hop Preacher. He gets me fired up. He’s exciting and moving, and spreads the right messages about integrity and responsibility. One place he is lacking, I believe, is in describing how to find your personal mission. His mission came somewhat built in, as he had a family and wanted to provide for them and become successful to support them the best that he could.

I don’t have a family of my own, my parents don’t need me to take care of them, and I have the frustration (poor me) of having several things that I’m talented at. I could throw myself into any of them and likely become successful. Do I continue as an engineer? Should I spin off and start something new? Should I form another rock band and become a crazy awesome guitarist?

ET

Eric Thomas, PhD is the MAN.

With no obvious external answer, I turned inward. I meditated for a long time, and thought about the moments in my life that brought me true joy. Unsurprisingly, they all revolved around family and friends, and many moments with children stood out as bright spots in the timeline of my life. I love being around kids, and I discovered that I want my own big family. Out here in Kansas, I am relatively far away from all my dearest pals from NJ and NC, I have no fulfilling relationships, and I have no children of my own. Two holes to fill. Also in this same meditation, it became obvious to me that something else was deeply lacking, and that was spirituality & accountability to a higher power.

These were enormous empty spaces in my life. They had simply been overshadowed while I caught up in the rest of my life. But in the comfort and quiet of my empty apartment, the alarms had grown loud enough that they could no longer be ignored. My mission, and the course of my life, needed to sway from education and work into something completely different. While many can find their ‘why’ through their family…my ‘why’ was that I needed a family.

I immediately set out to define the scope of the problem as best I could. I enlisted my old friends Stephen Covey, Jack Donovan, David Deangelo, Steve Pavlina, and Zig Ziglar.  I set out to fill four gaping needs:

  1. Finding a higher power to cast my desires, failings, and gratitude toward, so that I may become a great human being
  2. Finding a valued companion and forging a robust relationship, so that I may become a great husband
  3. After 2, starting a family as soon as possible, so that I may become a great father
  4. Improving my health for the future and for my future family, so that I may endure as long as necessary.

These each require planning and dedication to handle properly. I plan on going more deeply into #2 & #3 in separate posts, but #1 is described in the spirituality post above, and #4 is covered here.

Who Cares?

Why should you, random internet user, give one single crap about any of this?

There are many people out there that simply have no idea what they want or how to act. There is likely a greater number that have never asked themselves those questions. So, if you find yourself in a place where you don’t feel fulfilled and are unsure of which path to take, follow these breadcrumbs:

  1. Actually ask yourself what you want. This seems like a rather bizarre and obvious statement, no? Think about this: why is it that sometimes you don’t immediately know the answer to something, but if you ask yourself, the answer pops up? We have very complicated psyches with many layers of distraction and obfuscation. Spend the time to relax, meditate, and ask yourself what might be missing. I guarantee you that responses will rise up from the depths of your mind. Sometimes dwelling on your favorite memories can bring up those things, as they did for me with children.
  2. As a follow up to the ‘what,’ ask yourself why you want these things. What will your life be like 5 years down the road if they are part of your life? What will your life be like in 5 years if they are not?
  3. Consider balance. This is a big part of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits books, which I recommend reading of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for everyone. You may find yourself over-weighted in work, or in taking care of family. Look to the sides of education or spirituality to be more complete inside, and vice-versa. If you pray and read all day, but nothing productive is done, you may want to look that direction for rounding yourself out.
  4. Try something new. This is a bit cliche, but it is for good reason. Sometimes, simply trying something outside your comfort zone can activate circuits in your brain that have been dormant. This can be as simple as going to a place you’ve never been, or as complicated as taking up a hobby you have interest in. It is amazing what small details can awaken desires in us.

Obviously, this is nowhere near a thorough or complete guide to mission development or goal setting, as I’m no expert. But this group of experiments worked for me, when most guides for mission discovery didn’t. Maybe this is just what you need to read today?