The stresses of living at home, not working and producing journalistic artistry every 28 days (much like a menstrual cycle) have begun to take a toll on my health and wellness. This is why Gretzpo and I have decided to take a heterosexual vacation for two to the Caribbean.
For those of you who are interested, and I’m sure no one really is, we are going to Cuba. In preparation for our excursion to the Communist paradise, we have spent the last 4 months ensuring that our bodies are sufficiently beach ready. Firstly, for Gretzpo, that involves taking a weed whacker to his chest and back, and for me it involves applying liberal amounts of bronzer to my pasty skin.
Second, our preparations led us to search for an exercise and training regime that would turn our lumpy physiques into rippling cords of sinewy muscle.
We have both dabbled in typical bodybuilding workouts over the years; the ones where you just do bicep curls and bench press, spend hours at the gym socializing and never actually break a sweat. Not surprisingly, these so-called mainstream workouts never produced results and led to a general apathy towards physical fitness.
All this changed in January when we stumbled upon a revolutionary fitness program: Crossfit.
What is Crossfit? I’m not a good enough writer to accurately capture the program’s exercise philosophy; therefore, I egregiously plagiarized the following from http://www.crossfit.com/:
How to Achieve World Class Fitness
Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and NO sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.
Practice and train major lifts: deadlift, clean, squat, presses, Clean & Jerk, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstands, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast.
Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. ROUTINE IS THE ENEMY. Keep workouts short and intense.
Regularly learn and play new sports!
Crossfit is more than a workout program; it’s a lifestyle. The first thing one learns when attempting a Crossfit Workout of the Day (WOD) is just how fucking hard the program is. The intensity required to complete the majority of the WODs is unparalleled. At the end of each workout, I find myself in a sweat-soaked incoherent daze; it takes 20 minutes to remember where I parked my parent’s car.
Crossfit is the preferred training program of law enforcement and the US military; if it’s good enough to prepare a Navy Seal for life-threatening combat, it’s good enough to prepare me for a week of sand, surf and coitus interruptus.
A quick perusal of the website can answer all of your fitness related questions and concerns. There is information on proper nutrition, exercise demos and video clips of some of the most popular workouts.
Another unique aspect of Crossfit is the sense of community fostered among the adherents to the program. Every day hundreds of people flock to the message boards to post their workout times and weights lifted, and give advice on fitness and general health and wellness.
Crossfit has been accused of adopting an elitist, ultra conservative ideology. Actually, both of those accusations are true. The website is exceedingly pro-military and right-leaning in tone. Immigrants and poor people need not apply.
Our lifting numbers in exercises such as the squat, deadlift and press have increased exponentially; now we are almost as strong as a moderately athletic woman. If any socialist ninnies try to mess with us on this trip we will . . . well we still can’t fight, but we can challenge them to a good old-fashioned man-lift.
This will be the last column posted until our vacation is over. If you readers play your cards right, a trip summary may be in your near future, unless neither of us get laid. In that case, I’m handing in my badge and my penis; I won’t need them anymore.
Tewks writes one column a month for Gretzpo’s Sports Blog
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