“A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
– Napoleon Hill
I like that quote. It has nothing to do with what I am about to talk about, but I still like it.
Somewhat less inspiring.
Have you ever woken up from a dream and just gone WTF? I mean really, WTF? I had one recently, which I will get to in a moment.
Dreams can be down right weird. I rarely remember my dreams, which I understand is fairly common. By the time the toilet flushes the memories of my nocturnal escapades have swirled away.
I also have a tendency to walk and talk in my sleep, something I have done since about the age of 2. My mother tells the tale of waking up to the sound of me crying, but I was not in my bed. After frantically searching the house without success, she finally found me sobbing in our sand box in the back yard. I’m pretty sure she checked to make sure the doors were locked after that.
It’s different now, less walking- more talking, and unfortunately some screaming. I have been told I often insist there is someone in the house- which must be a little unsettling for the misses. I also have been known to scream in a high falsetto – oh so manly.
Recently I had some sort of “Braveheart” moment where I sat up and yelled “ATTACK!!!”.
“My dreams are really weird!!!”
Good times, good times.
The only real comfort I can take from my bizarre nighttime adventures is that I rarely remember any of it (although my dear wife is there to always remind me what a dork I am).
Then there was this particularly curious dream the other night. A dream of my blog, working out and the letter “K” (and thankfully no little girl-like screams).
“K” is for Kangaroo
So here is what I can remember – I wasn’t quite sleeping right, drifting in and out of sleep. Dreams seemed to have mixed with what I was thinking about when going to sleep and what came out was just funky. But let me backup for a second and give you some background…
My 2 year old Nate seems to be fairly advanced for his age, certainly linguistically. He knows all the letters and even which ones are vowels. He is even starting to spell. What this means to me is that a large part of my interaction with him revolves around learning about letters and words. That is background piece number one.
Nate’s fun box
Background piece number two is that I went to sleep thinking I needed to write an article for my blog but could not come up with a topic- and that bugged me a little. Like many of you if I start thinking when I go to sleep I have a hard time letting it go.
So there I was in my half-sleep bizzaro dream world. It occurred to me that I could write an article on how we all need to simplify our lives and I could tie that in with how I have been structuring my workout programs. I further thought we can start the simplification by doing away with the letter “K”.
As far as I know I have no problem with the letter “K”, but in my dream this made perfect sense. You see the letter “C” can do everything the “K” does. We can just use the “C” in place of the “K” and all would be well. Then we would only have 25 letters, which is a much better number than 26.
Perfect sense right?
I know that the likelihood that the whole world would nix the “K” from the standard alphabet is as likely as the US ever adopting the metric system. Actually I think Bill Gates himself would probably rip out the “K” from every keyboard in existence (except for the ones on Macs) before the US would go for that silly metric system. But in a dream it all made sense.
What actually makes real sense awake or asleep is un-complicating your life. I may not be an expert at everything, but I am an expert in the art of fitness and fat loss. There is no reason to un-necessarily complicate your workout program. It can be simple and brief yet extremely effective.
My current workouts use about 4 moves per workout, and take me about 30 minutes. Here are 2 recent workouts:
Hip Dominant / Horz. Push / Pull
Repeat 3 times:
A1: Walking Lunges (80 yards w/ 2-45lb plates)
A2: Plyo Push Ups (failure, usually 15-20)
Repeat 3 times:
B1: KB Snatch (24kg, 6 reps per arm)
B2: Inverted Row (bodyweight until failure)
Quad Dominant / Vert. Push / Pull
Repeat 3 times:
A1: KB Front Squat
A2: KB Decline Pullover Sit-up
Repeat 3 times:
B1: BB Thruster
B2: Atomic Sit-up
Both not fancy but both kicked the crap out of me.
Whether it comes to you in a dream or in the clear light of day, a good workout is a good workout. The take home message is that you do not need to use fancy machines or know thousands of exercises to get the job done- you just need a few good ones and do them the hardest you can. The same is true of nutrition, it does not need to be complicated- it just has to work.
You can still feel free to use the letter “K to your heart’s content.
That’s it.
ATTACK!!!!
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Joshua Carter, CPT |
