Rollerblading on the Charles River Bike Path

Posted on May 31, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Hockey has been a big part of my life ever since I was a munchkin. I got my first pair of ice hockey skates shortly after I could walk and then spent the next 18 years of my life eating, sleeping, and breathing ice hockey. So naturally I’ve been conditioned to have a negative attitude toward people who play roller hockey. It’s even worse for people who rollerblade and aren’t even playing hockey. I had to swallow my pride my sophomore year of college when me and some of my buddies joined a local roller hockey league, I had to get a pair of blades. It took a while for me to warm up to it but it became a decent alternative because my school didn’t have club or intramural ice hockey, roller hockey was the next best thing. We spent two seasons beating up on the local adult league teams before I transferred schools and headed to Tufts. Since then my rollerblades have been in storage at my parents house.

I realized part-way through this month that my rollerblades still existed so I had my parents bring them down on their next trip to Boston so I could use them for a day of fitness. They managed to escape my 100 Item Challenge last November because they were already stowed away up in Maine. In the spirit of this month’s fitness experiment, I decided I would give rollerblading a try, just to see if it was a legitimate form of exercise. Every time I run or bike along the Charles River, I see people rollerblading. I die a little bit inside each time I see people use that heel-stopper to slow down, ugh, maybe you’d only understand if you were a hockey player, it drives me crazy. I had memorial day off from work and it was a beautiful day so I decided it would be a great idea to do some rollerblading.

Me on the Mass Ave bridge overlooking the Charles River. If I have a shred of dignity left it's that my rollerblades are made for roller hockey not inline skating (i.e. hockey boot not some weak plastic thing with a heel-stopper).

Believe it or not I actually had a decent workout. I rollerbladed for 10 miles and really tried to push myself pretty hard on the straightaways. I got my heart rate up, got my lungs going, and pumped my quads until they wouldn’t stop burning. I even passed several people riding their bicycles (wah wah wah, sad trombone for the bikers). I saw half a dozen other rollerbladers out cruising the Charles River bike path as well. I felt pretty weird now that I was one of them but the heart rate, tired legs, and sweat drenched clothing helped to redeem the value of this kind of workout for me. It was extremely low impact but still gave me a great workout. My min/max/average heart rate was 91/155/137.

I wouldn’t say that I’m going to put rollerblading immediately into my weekly workout routine. I still can’t get over the mentality that I’d rather be playing hockey instead. With that being said, I would definitely do some rollerblading if I were coming back from an injury. I typically bike when I’m sore, injured, or recovering because it’s low impact on my joints. However, when I had a hip flexor problem last year biking was out of the question because of the demands it places on those muscles. Rollerblading would have been a perfect workout to maintain my cardio and keep my quads in shape.

Trevor Smith’s Fitness in Austere Environments on Kalalau Beach in Kauai, Hawaii

Posted on May 30, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Trevor and I went to high school together and we met on the cross-country team my freshman year. He was a fit dude then and he’s surely a fit dude now, the difference is that more than a decade later he’s now helping Army Rangers stay fit while on deployment, EPIC. He calls his program “Fitness in Austere Environments” or more simply “Man Strength”. The premise is to stay fit in harsh environments where you don’t have access to a gym. Imagine you’re a Special Forces dude in peak physical form as you head off for a deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan. How can you continue to stay in great shape if you can’t bring a gym with you to the Afghan mountainside? His program helps Rangers and other people stay in shape by using their simple tools they can find in their surroundings and easily modifying them for exercise: lifting tires, throwing rocks, doing burpees, lifting sandbags, endless squats/lunges, and other types of exercises. I’d describe it as if Cross-Fit and the World’s Strongest Man competitions had a baby together, it’d be Trevor Smith’s Austere Athletics Program. To quote Trevor’s new website, “If you aren’t training to be as strong as a berserk viking, and fast as greased lightning, you are wasting your time.”

I thought it would be great to investigate some of his workout routines for my month-long fitness experiment. So I emailed him and he sent me some of his YouTube videos where he’s training in his back yard in Norway so I adapted them for my workout on Kalalau Beach in Kauai, Hawaii. Kalalau is one of the most remote beaches in the world. It’s only accessible by boat or an 11 mile hike over a series of cliffs. So with absolutely no access to a gym or formal workout tools I thought this would be a great scenario to do some gymless training.

Based of his YouTube video I grabbed a rock of sufficient weight and did the workout below which lasted about 25 minutes:

5 minute warmup of arm circles, pushups, jumping jacks, and a few other moves to get my heart rate up and my body sweating
Pushups x 25 – in his video he wears a backpack filled with sand, I simply did 25 pushups, if I hadn’t already carried 50lbs for two days I probably would have done the pushups with it on. This time, I decided to pass on the extra weight.
Rock Squats x 15

ROCK SQUATS! I need a larger rock next time. I definitely had a few naked hippies walk by and give me weird looks.

Lunges x 15 (each leg)

ROCK LUNGES! These were pretty tough to do because it was hard to keep the rock balanced. Trevor uses a sand bag which I think would work better, just sling it over your shoulders and go to town.

Bent-Over Rows x 15

ROCK ROWS! Doing some bent over rows with the rock, I was certainly working up a good sweat by this point. Our lovely campsite is featured in the background.

Twist Toss x 9

ROCK THROWING! This was easily my favorite exercise of the whole workout, deep down there's just something satisfying about throwing large objects around.

Burpees x 20 in ~60s
Abs – Russian Twist (with a smaller rock)
Abs – Put it on the Shelf (taken from P90X+ but done with a rock instead of weights).

Based off my high number of reps above, I certainly could have chosen a heavier rock, but not wanting to injure myself with a new workout before my 11 mile hike the next day, I decided to focus more on my form than my weight. Even though I could have done a heavier weight, my heart rate was still cruising with a min/max/average of 75/161/131. I was drenched in sweat and had a blast. I don’t quite yet feel like a berserk viking but I certainly felt the workout.

Note to self: when you’re done working out with your huge rock, make sure to put it somewhere safe instead of the middle of your campsite so people don’t trip on it in the middle of the night (sorry Sarah).

Here’s one of Trevor’s YouTube videos, I used most of his exercises except the sandbag ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7f5Prr08AT4

Turning an Apartment Move into a Fun Workout

Posted on May 14, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Long ago I agreed to help Sarah move into her new apartment, however I didn’t realize the date was today until ummm today. So I decided it would be great to try and turn it into a workout, i.e. is moving your apartment a legitimate form of exercise? I wasn’t sure if I could count it as a workout or not but I remember the last time I moved, my legs were sore for three days so I was excited to try out this alternative form of exercise.

The agreement was that she would pack up everything so it was ready to go when I came over after work and that I would help physically move it to her new house. In an attempt to get my heart rate pumping and to do the move as fast as possible I ran up and down the stairs carrying boxes, suitcases, and other random odds and ends. I worked up a good sweat but I was continually trying to get my heart rate higher. It stayed pretty low around 110 for most of the time despite sprinting a flight of stairs. Once we got a van loaded up I decided to run the quarter mile to her new apartment while she drove the van. I did this two minute run pretty hard and raised my heart rate up to a max of 153 so by the time we were ready to unload the stuff into her new place I was in a full out sweat.

Successfully helped move apartments, this is me organizing some boxes in the basement.

No one really likes moving, quite frankly it sucks a lot. However, I found that by turning it into a fitness game it was actually kind of fun AND it only took an hour to do it. If I hadn’t been hustling so hard it might have taken double that time and we certainly would have been complaining throughout most of it.

All in all it was a 65 minute “workout” with an average heart rate of 109. I was certainly sweating but it didn’t feel like much of a workout because I wasn’t too tired at the end of it, I definitely could have still gone to the gym or gone for a run afterward. Therefore, it was pretty clear that I wasn’t performing at a high level athletically or aerobically. So while I wouldn’t use this workout to train for a half marathon or a mountainous expedition, I totally recommend trying to turn what is usually a negative experience into an exercise or a game; it helped to pass the time, it put us in good moods, and we ended up getting a good sweat out of it which is always a positive thing.

May – One New Type of Exercise per Day

Posted on May 2, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

As a young urban professional I find it hard to make time for workouts when I’m occupied for at least 10 hours/day. By the time I get home from work, make dinner, and get ready for work the next day, it’s almost time to call it a night. So typically I do a few workouts during the week but I primarily live for the weekends, ending up sore, tired, and happy on Monday mornings. I typically hobble into work sunburned/windburned/or something similar and unsuccessfully try to describe to my coworkers how awesome my weekend was. I would prefer to be outside all of the time but at the moment, that wont exactly pay back my student loans so I have to make the best of what I have: a decent job, an apartment in the city, and a group of awesome, outgoing, and athletic friends.

Throughout the course of my young and urban blogging experience, I’ve experimented with many aspects of my lifestyle: my work commute, my eating habits, my drinking habits, my consumption/consumerism behavior, and others, all in an attempt to branch out to try new things and to improve the quality of my lifestyle. However, I have yet to do a 30 day lifestyle experiment involving physical fitness. This is probably because I already I feel that I lead a pretty active lifestyle, at least on the weekends. However, the concept of “weekend warrior” doesn’t really sit well with me. The typically weekend warrior is what nutritionist Nancy Clark calls the “sedentary athlete”, someone who sits down all day but works out a bunch. Even though you work out daily or almost daily, nothing replaces the fact that the majority of your time (i.e. during work) is spent sitting down in front of a computer. I consider myself lucky that my social calendar, more often than not, involves athletic events. Many of my friends are super fit and are always down for an adventure so it’s easy to maintain my active lifestyle despite being a yuppie in Boston. Still it’s all usually limited to the weekends.

Annual snowshoe race in Pittsfield, VT. They do a 6-miler, 13-miler, 26-miler, and 100-miler (yikes!). This is the 3rd year I've done this race (two half marathons and a marathon) but a group of my friends have been going 5 years strong, awesome. For similarly punishing events check out http://peakraces.com/

21 mile Presidential Traverse "summer" 2011 (summer read: 50 degrees, 40 mph winds, and 100% humidity). This is typically what fun looks like on the weekends, hiking for 16 hours also happens to be good exercise.

During the week I try to work out as much as I can 1.) because I like physical activity 2.) because otherwise I’d go insane at a desk job and 3.) because I want to stay in shape for my weekend adventures. I love lifting weights and going for runs as much as anybody else, but I also get really bored with them. Often I feel like in order to “work out” I need to be in a gym (climbing gym or others) or go for a run. I can’t really afford the $100+/month gym memberships in downtown Boston, nor do I like the introverted nature of gym workouts. In the gym the only sounds are people breathing and machines running. This is because everyone has their iPods in and general they’re there to pound out a daily workout and leave. I prefer the social nature of exercise where you’re either exercising with someone or competing against someone. You can’t exactly compete with someone next to you at the gym, well, maybe you can but it’s certainly not the same as playing soccer or going hiking where you’re sure to have more fun and to burn more calories anyway.

Many of my friends and coworkers have gym memberships but living downtown, all the traditional gyms are way too expensive for my budget ($100+/month) so I generally have to find other cheaper ways to work out. So the ultimate goal of this 30 day lifestyle experiment is to find different, alternative, low cost, and fun ways to work out. I’ll hopefully be able to accomplish this by doing one different style of exercise each day, everything from trail/road running, to acro-yoga, to table tennis, and many others. I’ll be tracking my heart rate in terms of minimum, maximum, and average as well as the tracking the duration of my exercises. I’m interested to see if certain non-traditional workouts like kayaking or broomball are actually just as beneficial cardiovascularly as more traditional ways to exercise like running or crossfit. I’m not necessarily only concerned with cardiovascular fitness (fun, balance, and power are also factors I’m interested in) but heart rate is certainly one easy metric to consider.

If you come up with any cool ideas for alternative exercises and/or you want to challenge me to do something athletically (i.e. you have to do it too), send me a message on Twitter @youngandurban, comment on my blog, or shoot me an email at theyoungurbanunprofessional@gmail.com