Project Sexification (Seck-si-fi-ka-shun) Update

Seeing as how today is Monday, I thought I would put up a little somethin somethin relating to fitness. The big news here is that in Alberta it’s a long weekend and today is technically a holiday. That being said, I made an executive decision to take today completely off from work in order to have some fun in the sun, maybe do a little yard work, and quite possibly have an epic light saber fight with the neighbors.

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Sine I’ve been busting my butt lately trying to get slim and trim for the tux this coming weekend (Sweet baby Jeebus it’s already here!!), I wanted to show everyone out there that I’m a man of my word and can actually keep myself on point when I set a goal.

This was me in Mid January of this year. Body weight of 246 pound.

And this was me on Friday, body weight of 230 pounds.

Still a few more to pull off before my Men’s Health cover model shoot, but hey, it’s getting there!

SO I’m sure you’re asking what I had to do to get these kinds of changes. Endless hours of cardio in the “fat burning zone?” High rep resistance training to keep my heart rate elevated? No-carb dieting? Sorry, all wrong. I did three simple things that can work for pretty much everyone.

I started biking to and from work each day when the weather turned good enough to do so, and began running outside training sessions twice a week through the river valley.

I started to prioritize my workouts each day, which focused on high resistance and low reps for strength gain. Each workout was about 30 minutes, and I managed to get 4 each week, whether I felt like it or not.

I cut back on sweets and started eating snap peas like they were going out of style.

Does this sound like a life-changing and high-commitment alteration in the way I lived my life? Hell no, but they were enough to spur some beginning changes and got the ball rolling in the right direction. Plus, it led to Lindsay giving me a sideways head look that could only mean one word was going through her mind at the time.

Dayum!!!!

Now I’ll be the first to admit that losing weight isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it can be done by anyone who has a shred of self-control and dedication to seeing the end result. While admittedly 16 pounds of weight isn’t a huge number, it helped to give a visible change in my appearance, and I’ve had a lot of people comment that they’ve noticed a difference as well.

What’s really cool is that a few months ago I hit a PR in the deadlift with a 405 pull, then managed to hit 425 a few weeks later. I stopped doing some of the really heavy pulls for a few weeks. On Friday I was feeling a little amped up after reading Tony Gentilcore’s article about intimidating the weights HERE, and decided to go for a max pull again. I managed to get 425 again, which means that even though the number hasn’t increased, it also hasn’t decreased either. This means that my deadlift relative to my body mass has gone from 1.73 times my body weight at a weight of 246 up to 1.85 times my body weight at a weight of 230. This means while I didn’t actually lift more weight, technically I actually got stronger.

So here’s hoping that married life doesn’t turn me into a Les Grossman wannabe after a few years.

So how about you? Have you had any big change in weight loss or gain in muscle over the past few years? If so, drop a comment below and let me know how you did it.