feel the burn Archives

Energy Systems and You: A Guide For Athletes

David Nix Food Jul 22, 2015

Hellooooo athletes!

Yes, you. You are an athlete. Some of you already have one or more athletic endeavors that you enjoy. Others of you may just have not found (or chosen) your activity yet. Some of you just have a body. So many of us are told that we aren’t athletic, and that we can’t be athletic. Society, friends, authority figures, media – there are lots of people and institutions that try to act as gatekeepers of who gets to be called an athlete. Well, I don’t care. As far as I am concerned, you and I are athletes.

Members of the Houston Heights Ladies’ Lifting Club. Every single person here is a competitive powerlifter who won their weight class at a local meet. Before this meet, many of them had never competed in an athletic event before in their lives. (note: the beer steins are our trophies!)

OK, now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about some athlete stuff. No worries, this is not the point at which this article devolves into one of those “Blast your abs with these intense crunch exercises!” listicles. Although I have some strong opinions about which athletic endeavors are the coolest, those are just that: opinions. I am not here to tell anyone else what to do or not do. You are an athlete, and you can choose for yourself! Instead, I want to talk about an athlete’s view on nutrition as it impacts athletic endeavors.

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Woman Lifts Weights, Continues Being a Woman

Hieu Truong Fitness Jun 11, 2015

Hieu Truong’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Most women her age are usually doing weak things, like hugging family members, cooking for large groups of small children, or spending much of their waking hours trying to support themselves financially. This woman is different. She lifts heavy weights. Maybe she lifts more weights than you, presumably male reader of undetermined size and athletic ability. Isn’t that crazy, a mere woman lifting more than you? She must be cheating. Maybe you should make derogatory remarks in the comments section, or speculate whether or not she is using steroids.

*

“Strong is the new pretty,” she says, as she chalks her hands for her 120lb log clean and press. “However, I have to make sure I’m the old pretty as well or I won’t get any sponsorships or any significant financial support to continue in any sport I love.”

*

This female lifter is completely unlike the kind of woman you tend to think of when you think of female lifters, because she loves the color pink. She loves the color pink so much that she has painted herself entirely in neon pink prior to a meet, in order to blind the other lifters. Once, she painted the referees in the middle of introductions and was stopped by a weight loader before she got to the meet director.

*

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If Cobie Smulders Were Your Ostensibly Platonic Gym Buddy For Whom You Have Conflicted Feelings

Nicole Cliffe Beauty May 11, 2015

Previously in this series: If Carrie Brownstein Were Your Girlfriend.

If Cobie Smulders were your ostensibly platonic gym buddy for whom you have conflicted feelings, she would always have one stubborn lock of hair that escaped her ponytail. “Let me get that for you,” you would say, and then you would use your calloused hands to slip it back under the elastic, with a curiously delicate touch. “Thanks, man,” Cobie would say. “One of these days I’ll get it right.”

If Cobie Smulders were your ostensibly platonic gym buddy for whom you have conflicted feelings, she would occasionally speak disparagingly of her thighs. “Cobie,” you would say, “you’re out of your mind. These [you squeeze her adductor muscles] are magnificent.” “You really think so?” she would say doubtfully. “Trust me,” you would say. “Every person, literally EVERY PERSON in this gym has thought about kissing them gently.” “You’re the best, Nicole,” she would say gratefully. “Let’s do some deadlifts.”

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Feel the Burn: The Double Kimmy Schmidt Workout

Nicole Cliffe Fitness Apr 30, 2015

Previous installments of Feel the Burn can be found here.

I have been enjoying posting my daily workouts for you in the link roundup, but your demands for a more formal Feel the Burn have not fallen on deaf ears! There is nothing I love more than telling you about exercise.

As you probably know, I have been doing a group boot camp four mornings a week, baby in tow, in an attempt to return to my preferred physical status as a lethal movie villainess. The thirty minute format perfectly dovetails with my son’s limited willingness to sit and watch me hop around, I get my clock THOROUGHLY cleaned, and then I go home and mine the internet for links to amuse and educate you.

About halfway into the workout I am about to take you through, I faceplanted on my mat and thought “all my progressive librarians with their sexy, sexy glasses would really love this. There’s ZERO equipment, you need only enough space to lie down, it works your whole body, pushes your heart rate, has lots of modifications for physical limitations, and it goes by REALLY QUICKLY.”

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“Why is this called The Double Kimmy Schmidt, Nicole?”

“Because it works on the theory that you can withstand anything for TWENTY seconds.”

*

Let us begin.

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Feel the Burn: Working Out in Your Third Trimester

Nicole Cliffe Fitness Nov 18, 2014

Previous installments of Feel the Burn can be found here. “Working Out in Your First Trimester” is here and “Working Out in Your Second Trimester” is here.

I quit the gym today.

I had planned to go until next Tuesday, when I’d be 36 weeks pregnant and ready to slide blissfully into holiday-related indolence and two different kinds of stuffing, but I knew yesterday that I was done. Or rather, I knew yesterday that today would be my last day, and then back pain kept me awake most of the night so I said NOPE and bailed out.

You know, or you’re told, that your body will tell you when it’s over, and in my case, it definitely did. I was cruising, and then I was not. Things felt heavier, things felt lower, things felt tighter, things were not what they once were.

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“So You Want to Pick Up and Lift a Man Overhead”: A Fitness Roundtable

Hieu Truong Fitness Nov 13, 2014

I thought it was hilarious at first when Mallory declared in a comment thread that it was her fitness goal to be able to pick up and lift a grown man over her head. Afterwards, I started noticing that other Toasties were declaring this in a tongue-in-cheek way, and I started thinking, “well, why not?”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t any more ridiculous or unlikely than any headline or superlative you catch on a mainstream fitness magazine, like “Get Amazing Abs in 16 Minutes!” I figured any program written to help a woman pick up a man and lift him overhead was going to lead to better overall health and fitness than any program written to “reveal your abs” in short period of time.

Who was going to write this? Well, it’s a poorly hidden secret that lifters like trying to do things that seem foolhardy to normal people just to see if they can do it. That’s why many “CrossFit Fail” pictures exist: pictures of people doing overhead squats on kettlebells or playing drinking games involving a shot of beer and a pull-up on the minute, every minute, for 100 minutes. For example, Camille Brown (a weightlifter and high-level Crossfitter) has posted a video of herself doing a no-hand clean and jerk. We goof around.

To put this together, I asked four friends of mine who coach strength sports. Their expertise lies in some combination of weightlifting, powerlifting, or strongman events, with an emphasis on one of those sports. This scenario raised some eyebrows, but everyone took it very seriously. How heavy was the man? How big is the woman? Is the man resisting, or not? Is there a set way to lift the man off the ground? Are push presses okay?

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Feel the Burn: Working Out in Your Second Trimester

Nicole Cliffe Fitness Aug 25, 2014

Previous installments of Feel the Burn can be found here. “Working Out in Your First Trimester” is here.

Ah, the magical oasis of your second trimester. FOR SOME, right? If you’ve already been told to elevate your legs above your head and are on full pelvic rest and feel like garbage, please close this tab immediately and do whatever it is you’re doing to keep your sanity.

If, however, you’re having a pretty normal pregnancy, the second trimester is where it’s at. You (especially if you’re on round #2 or more) look Definitively Pregnant, your puking is ideally under control (YMMV, my cousin threw up literally every day of all three of her pregnancies), but you’re not yet beginning to experience the MASSIVE STRUCTURAL FAILURES that await many pregnant people in the third trimester. That thing where you need to pee, but when you sit to pee, the baby moves and blocks off your ability to pee, so you can’t pee? Let’s not borrow trouble, we’re not there yet. Let’s talk about exercise.

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Feel the Burn: Mailbag! Personal Trainers! Swoleness!

Nicole Cliffe Fitness Jun 26, 2014

I try to run sometimes. I do yoga pretty regularly. But, I’ve also started seeing a trainer. And it’s great. He’s awesome, pushes me to lift heavier things (which is what I told him my goal was) and he’s super supportive and encouraging. I feel super SWOLE BRO after my training sessions and love bragging about my 105lb bench for reps. Did I mention the Bulgarian split squats with 40 lbs? Getting there felt great.

But, my question: I can’t afford this trainer forever. Sigh. I can definitely stick with it for a while longer, and then probably go down to once a week or something for a little while (I go twice now) But, what tips do you have for both knowing when you can train unassisted (both mentally and physically, like spotting etc?) and for keeping with it without the nice young man saying “Nope, that didn’t count. Do it again.”

I recognize that I’m lucky to have this problem and that some of this is just suck it up, buttercup and go to the gym and do your sets and don’t cheat. But even with a good background in lifting, and not giving a shit about the dude bros in the gym, how should I handle the transition from trainer to self-guided training? How do we do it on our own?

Ah, trainers. I love them! I am very happy to have gotten this question. Let me begin with the exposure to personal trainers that is most common in our modern, workaday world, to make this accessible to everyone: you join a new gym you cannot quite afford, and with your membership you discover you get (depending on how horribly expensive your gym is) one to three complimentary sessions with a personal trainer. Or a pack of three or six sessions for a relatively nominal fee, which you choose to acquire. Good for you! FITNESS.

When you have a complimentary session with a personal trainer, it is similar to the experience of chewing happily on a free sample at a fancy grocery store. “Mmmm,” you say, “I will certainly consider purchasing this chicken hot dog/marinade/freeze-dried banana dipped in dark chocolate. Might I have a second to make up my mind?” Your mind is already made up. You will eat these two samples, and then come back if a new person takes over the shift for two more.

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