Tagged: basketball

Project Lean, Part Three: CAN white men jump?

The thing is that white men maybe could have jumped but every white man that was born after that movie that was young enough and impressionable enough was like, “I give up on jumping…”

- Paul Ritchey

If you missed Part One and Part Two of this story, I can sum it up for you in two sentences – I challenged myself, with the help of Maximuscle, to bulk up and learn to dunk by Christmas. Then I got injured.

As you might expect, over two weeks out of the gym put a major dent in the whole thing…not to mention that I came home for Christmas and ate ALL of the food. Seriously, I think my mother might actually be the witch from Hansel and Gretel. But still, there remains a silver lining in this cloudy sky…

Until recently, no-one has ever told me that I look like I’ve been working out. Well, not without laughing or picking me up or throwing a peanut butter sandwich at my head afterwards. However, in the past couple of weeks, not one but TWO people have told me I’m looking bulkier. And I’m like 90% positive they weren’t just messing with me.

white men can't jump woody wesley
I guess I’m Woody Harrelson.

Can I dunk yet? Not even close. I can scrape the rim when I jump, which means I still have to add a few inches to my vertical before I can dunk. I’m better than I used to be, but not where I wanted to be by now. But that doesn’t mean the dream is over – my Hyperaggressors are still going strong and I still have plenty of protein shake fixin’s left over. Maybe I’ll be able to dunk by next Christmas…

In terms of gains, these are my new measurements:

Chest – 39″ (vs 38″ in October)
Biceps (untensed) – 10.5″ (vs 10″ in Oct)
Waist (at hips) – 35″ (vs 34″ in Oct)
Shoulders – 46″ (vs 43″ in Oct)
Thighs – 21″ (vs 20.5″ in Oct)

I have no idea how this would stack up against a professional weightlifter, or how badly a couple of weeks off affected my progress, but I’m still pretty happy with the results. Three inches on my shoulders and half an inch on my arms in two and a half months seems pretty good to me. Keen to improve even more in 2013, though I’m not looking forward to how busy my gym will be in January…

Think you could do better? Rude. But if you want to put your money where your mouth is (and potentially win £5,000…), you might like to check out this video about The Protein Project. I’ll be registering shortly. Game on.

Project Lean, Part Two: How to lose an ankle for ten days

There’s an old saying about not being able to keep a good man down. If it’s true, I must be a terrible man. A few weeks into my Maximuscle challenge, I managed to fall down a flight of stairs and sprain my right ankle. Rather than being sensible and resting it, I continued to walk around on it for a couple of days before admitting defeat and doing the whole RICE thing (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation). However, the damage was done – by placing more strain on my left foot when limping I managed to give myself a case of plantar fasciitis, c.f. the Batman style POW in the diagram above.

I received little sympathy from a female colleague, who had the following to say when I told her the main symptom is heel pain – ‘Heel pain? Big deal. I get that after wearing heels on a night out!’ Not to put too fine a point on it, but this isn’t even close to being a reasonable comparison. Plantar fasciitis occurs primarily in athletes and seems to have a predilection for baseball and basketball players, with Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant among pro ballplayers who have been sidelined by it. In a truly sobering article (especially when you’re dealing with the diagnosis), Sports Illustrated calls the injury the ‘most difficult in sports’ and outlines the way in which it has all but ended MLB player Scott Podsednik’s career.

Fortunately, my story does not seem destined to have such a bleak ending – a quick and painless (well, except for the hobble there) visit to Guy’s Hospital revealed that the source of the injury was almost certainly placing additional stress on muscles that I don’t usually use after spraining my ankle. ‘Just keep taking ibuprofen, rest it and try these exercises, and it should ease up in time,’ the nurse said. ‘How much time?’ I asked, eager to get back to my new fitness regime. ‘Time,’ she replied with a knowing and sympathetic smile. ‘It varies from person to person.’

In my case, ‘time’ seems to translate two just shy of two weeks. After dinner on Friday night I went to the gym. I avoided the treadmill, but otherwise worked out pretty much as usual with no unpleasant after effects. My conditioning and stamina, however, are pretty much shot. Nor have I ventured back onto the basketball court yet. I think it’s going to take a Christmas miracle for me to be dunking by the end of the month…

Despite my time off, I have still seen some gains from my efforts thus far. Here’s hoping with a concerted effort in the run-up to Christmas that I’ll see even more improvement…

Measurements (and previous):
Chest – 38.5″ (38″)
Biceps (untensed) – 10.25″ (10″)
Waist (at hips) – 34.5″ (34″)
Shoulders – 45″ (43″)
Thighs – 20.75″ (20.5″)

Project Lean, Part One: How to lose a pie in ten days

Looking like a One Direction cast-off, circa 2008

It will probably come as a surprise to no-one that I’ve never been much of an athlete. While I have no-one to blame for this but myself (and maybe one or two bad genes) I can’t help but feel that in this respect, among others, I was born on the wrong continent – as a youngster, the only sports I showed any promise in were baseball and basketball. Typical me. Of course I would be good at two sports that the British school system showed (at the time) almost zero regard for. So sports slipped off my radar, leaving me to spend all my free periods listening to Dashboard Confessional and Thrice CDs and thinking about growing a flicky fringe rather than spending them in the gym or on the court.

My failure to make a mark on the world of sports is one of my biggest regrets. But now, it seems I have a second chance. A Maximuscle project challenging guys to get stacked in three months was recently brought to my attention by the lovely Amy, of Wolf Whistle, and I signed up. First step was to take all my measurements, which are posted at the end of this post if you’re interested (I have no secrets now…), so I could measure growth at the end of each month. Never did figure out how to measure my cup size though.

I also wrote a food diary for my nutritionist (that’s right, I have a nutritionist! Eat your heart out, Patrick Bateman), Gareth, who talked me through some diet choices and workout tips. So, I pledged to ditch a lot of the junk food in my diet and am now eating chicken, lentils, eggs and spinach like they’re going out of fashion.

My body goal has been the same since I was about 16 – look less like Edward Norton in Fight Club and more like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. With a renewed commitment to making it happen, not to mention a BOATLOAD of Maximuscle products…

…I felt like maybe I could finally make it a reality. But somehow, it still didn’t feel like quite enough. The gym is a place of performative masculinity – how much you can lift is equated to how much of a man you are, and you’re never ‘done’ with increasing how much you can benchpress. Hence bodybuilders devoting years of their life to lifting more and more weight…While there’s no doubt I’ll be benchpressing more at the end of three months, setting a particular weight target to hit didn’t feel quite right – it felt like too arbitrary a measure by which to define success or failure.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about my youth a lot (my 25th birthday is this month and I’m having a mid-twenties crisis…) or maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too many One Tree Hill reruns, but I’ve been playing a lot of basketball recently. I think I’m still as good at it as I used to be…though I’m not sure you’ll see me in the NBA anytime soon. But there’s one thing I could never do on the court as a kid that I always wanted to. Despite my height, I never came close to being able to dunk. There’s something incredibly powerful and majestic about watching someone tear through the air and smash a ball through a metal ring. It’s practically poetry in motion. I had found my target – to be able to dunk by Christmas.

For now, these Hyperaggressors are my weapon of choice on the court.

Two weeks in and things are going well – I’m lifting more, and more often, jumping higher and eating better. Well, except for that Nando’s yesterday. But even that failed to give me a food baby or make me feel sluggish, so I’m hoping that I’ve supercharged my metabolism enough to be able to cope with an occasional treat. I even have a bit of a sore arm from hitting a punchbag awkwardly yesterday. Imagine that…me with a sports injury. ME. My dad would be so proud. Well, not my dad; he bakes and drinks pink Prosecco. But someone’s dad.

As for what posts come next? Well, that’s kinda up for grabs. I may have sweet-talked the beautiful people at Nike into sending me some Hyperdunk+ shoes, which I’d be using to measure my jump progress, but they’ve yet to arrive. If there’s anything you guys want to see me write about on the journey (diet tips, what exercises I’m focusing on…), let me know in comments or on Twitter. That’s it until next time, wish me luck…

Measurements:
Chest – 38″
Biceps (untensed) – 10″
Waist (at hips) – 34″
Shoulders – 43″
Thighs – 20.5″