I'm a DO'ER!

DAY 1

So it begins! My first day in an actual gym and it wasn't the greatest I must admit but it'll get better. I decided to join pure gym Southampton Central and I chose the worst possible time to go 6:30pm right in the middle of the rush hour/post work gym sessions.

The first place I ventured to was of course the bench/free weights section.....I didn't even bother as it was well and truly packed. So I had a mission finding all the machines I needed to use as it was my chest/abs day but the chest machines for some reason unknown to me....are on completely different floors. But I eventually found everything I needed.

While doing abs, I couldn't hear my own headphones on full blast as there was a spin class going on directly to my right and it was absolutely booming out music. But I must admit I was impressed that my new gym wasn't just an absolute dude-fest. A few of my old players and team mates were in there too which is always nice, having something a bit familiar.

My abs workout was very varied but quite minimal as I haven't been to an actual gym for a proper workout in a very long time. I decided to do a fair bit on the mat in the end including my chest workout. With the aid of an upside down balance ball to rest my feet on, and a small-ish fitness ball to put under one hand while I did press ups. After about 40 normal followed by a ball on the right and left hand for another 20 I was well and truly on my way to dead.

So my plan from now on is to workout before lunch... or at least that's what my brain says....not so sure about my body tomorrow!

So I shall leave this post with one last dig at my gym or more the people who're in my gym. I mean seriously, who drinks coke in the gym?

Epic FAIL...

So a couple of days ago in my infinite wisdom, I decided to go on a bike ride with one of my friends just to keep my fitness levels up. I haven't really had a ride since my 200 mile around France back in April. To say I was a little rusty is an understatement.

Me and my friend Joe only intended on covering 8 miles. Unfortunately at mile 7 I decided to power through a hill to shorten the length of time I'd spend climbing and the pain/fatigue that comes with it. This was my undoing since I had intended to catch my breath once I reached the top, instead I was passing out with my head spinning at a hundred miles an hour.

For one reason or another my body decided to start the long process of an agonising shut down and restart. Something I've never actually experienced in the past, but at one point it felt like even the muscles in my face were shutting down or almost melting off, something I've only ever actually experienced in Amsterdam ;-) (those of you who have been will probably know what I mean)

Joe being the friend that he is kindly waited with me to be picked up by my dad by time which he arrived I was pretty much fine but I didn't want to risk any further episodes. Joe also took a picture of me...for my blog of course, so that the world may see the delightful state I was in.

Now what I learned from this is that no matter which way around you're getting fit. Each exercise has it's own method. When I was cycling for my France challenge, I found running a few miles the most difficult thing in the world. But then after having spent the past couple of week running and then going back to cycling I thought it would be a breeze....needless to say I was 100% proven wrong.

And just for the record, I completed 8 miles the next day just fine :)

Rest and recover

It wasn't one day ago I was speaking about injury and when to stop that my old hip injury has come back to haunt me. Although it never actually left me I just haven't aggravated it in such a long time like I did on my 6 mile run yesterday.

So I thought all about rest and recovery today while on a journey to London for a comedy show, and I thought how much my body has changed over the past 9 years.

When I first hit the gym I was hurting like hell and I still managed to carry on training pretty much solid with little to no rest. I could do biceps all day but I try that now and I'm probably classed as full disabled.

The truth is when you're in those younger years training you can do it and you should do it in my opinion. There's no better way to advance yourself and prepare yourself for your more senior years than building an amazing foundation. At least then when you start to hit the wall as I'm finding I am at 27, you have done your hard work and can rest up a little.

What I'm going through at the moment is something I wish I had done a lot earlier as it is TOUGH! Attempting to change my body drastically will most certainly take it's toll. So the length in my schedule will also have a knock on effect as I had to take a rest day today in order to heal up my hip.

DON'T do what I did. Probably my first or second post and I will re-iterate it throughout that you MUST train your legs. Incorporate your core!!! You have to think of the link between your torso and your legs as a gateway or a bridge. If you don't strengthen everything around that bridge, then the weights on either side will cause it to break like I have and it is a long way to recovery when you've done it for as long as I have, almost irreversible but I'm going to try my hardest to fix myself as the NHS wont do anything for me!

Pre-training-training

So I'm at a stage where I'm pre-training...for my training. Yes that sounds ridiculous and yes I am simply just training. But pre-training is what I tell myself I'm doing because I know what I will be doing in a few weeks time is going to be so much harder than what I'm currently doing in both physical and mental terms.

So at the moment I am just going for runs making them a bit longer each day through town and the countryside (as I live in the woods), and it is painful! Both the fact that well..it hurts...and that I'm so painfully unfit in terms of stamina. Which means there's a lot of walking involved in these runs too.

Last week I had to push through a pain barrier in the my right leg just felt dead after a couple hill runs and it haunted me all the way until the end of the week when I went out on quite a long run for a couple of hours. By the end of the run I felt numb which is probably why the dead leg sensation had disappeared but it's something that needs to be done. I remember in my american football days of coaches telling me to carry on pushing through the pain....basically its BS in those cases. I was injured and I was being told to injure myself further which is why I have such bad pains at the moment.

Only you know when your body is injured and when it is simply fatigued. So please be careful you don't mix the head, which knows its hurt and that this can further damage your training, with your heart that simply wants to have all of the results and all of the gains, strength and stamina NOW. There is no short cut to your perfect body so chill out and give it time. Otherwise you will never achieve so called "perfection" which I have talked about previously being what YOU see yourself as. Not what you compare yourself too.

If you have any questions, give me a shout. But for now I'm back off for another pre-training-training run.  

So it's all ended...

Everything's over. Uni, football, partying! It all ended and I'm left with a body that most would be satisfied with.

Most would be but I'm not. Since I don't play a sport any more I've decided to start my second ever body transformation. Some people call it beast mode, I call it God mode. 

That's right I want to transform what I do have into something altogether completely different. Over the coming months I will be training 5/6 days a week in order to achieve a "cover model" look. 

This attitude and transformation requires something else which I've never actually come across. Not something physically but much more mentally to drive me and as such I'll be venturing into the unknown depths of my mind so I will try and share my experience as I go along. 

My prediction....pain. My body has taken all the abuse possible over the years so this type of training will be much more advanced in terms of things like my diet. Actually having to sleep and wake up at proper times incorporating my diet. The addition of cardio pretty much 5 days a week....but first I need a gym! 

So far I've been just getting back into the swing of things to help make the proper training a little easier but I've been doing it outside of the gym and in the park using only gravity! Something I won't be able to continue past a couple of weeks! 

I will try to document it as best as I can with picture etc and as always if you have any questions/enquiries. Soheil.maleki@hotmail.co.uk

A lot has happened...

So it turns out I'm awful at keeping blogs up to date. But a lot has happened and only the talk of blogging last night made me actually thing about starting it back up again so here we go again I guess.

I left off moving onto my second season of american football. I came back to the team in a different position, ready to learn again from scratch. Turns out I was pretty much a natural at it although to be honest I didn't think I was actually doing much. What I do know now is that a good corner  back is like gold dust in the NFL and a position that does get a lot of the stress and blame from being scored on.

This was something that never actually happened to me in my entire British career (my Italian one is a different story) so I think I'm pretty lucky to have had such a decent time playing that position even if it did mean I fell apart after my 7th successive season. Only 4 more seasons on from there and I have actually retired from all American football related activities. I thought about blogging about that too but it was a sad, sad day and not much at all to talk about.

We played that season at Stags going undefeated. 12-0 smashing every record along the way. The culmination of pure athletes amongst great coaches and tactics, I have the best seat in the house to watch some incredible football. I don't think I've seen it replicated since!

Training continued as expected. MONDAY light lifting, TUESDAY practice, WEDNESDAY lift & classroom sessions, THURSDAY practice, FRIDAY lift and SUNDAY game-day/practice. Saturday would be our day off. Usually consisting of chickenland, youtube videos and generally chilling out. My boy Chevy Green was at my flat every Saturday pre-gameday night for this ritual and we still say sleeping at 5am for a 8am wakeup was the key to our success (except for that Reading game where we all watched the Mayweather fight and conceded one score in the very first drive, then hammered them by about 40 points)

Personally while I trained I did a lot of quick powerful movements. People told me I was cheating while I was benching 100kg for 10 x 3 sets cause I was doing them so quick. But I still saw no problem with it when I was levelling receivers off the line, and I don't think many of our receivers enjoyed playing up close against me.

It wasn't until I played receiver where being able to lift a heavy set in more slow movements, that it would come in handy to slow it down. Picking up a defensive linemen twice your size who doesn't gym was always a great feeling. (running into a 6"6 linemen who actually trains on the other hand.....brain damage)

Only recently have I attempted to diet properly for weight loss and it sucks. I still have incredible will power when I want to achieve a certain goal but i'm not sure how much longer I can last. My diet while I was at University was simple. EAT LOADS. Whether it was pizza, pasta, fried chicken or whatever junk or healthy foods it was I just ate as much as I possibly could and it was always a much happier time. (right now I'm salivating over the thought of some Dominos)

As long as you have your goal of what you want to look like in your own head I believe you can achieve it. But only if you really want it. My family constantly ask me why they aren't getting any smaller and how to train etc but all they seem to do is eat as if they have the metabolism of a 12 year old anorexic child. Even I can't do that any more which is why this bout of proper dieting has become so difficult.

I play sport possibly once every two weeks IF my body allows me. But otherwise I try to keep in cardio in my training programme at the gym every other day or so. Otherwise my goals would simply not be achieved. What's the point in having a goal if you KNOW in your mind that what you're doing is detrimental or just isn't going to help you get to it. That how I know the difference between someone who has an end game and someone who doesn't. We work hard for something we know we want but never for something we don't that would just be silly. But if you want something that sort of is a dream type of situation, like a body like Schwarzenegger, then you have to actually want it, not just think you do. But have in your mind every day, that image of 'YOUR PERFECTION' so don't imagine your head on Arnies body but rather YOU on YOUR perfected body.

That's all I have to say for now and I most probably will leave it too long in between my next post. For anyone who does read this and wants to discuss anything with me, find me on either facebook. Soheil Maleki or email me at soheil_maleki@hotmail.co.uk

A new year, a new challenge.

So i'd completed my first year of university and I decided that joining the american football team was a good idea because I had gotten quite built up and always was a pretty fast and athletic person. I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into.

I started with the Southampton Stags and I was fasting for the first month of training with them which didn't help my body at all. In all honesty I wasn't really that good, barely stepped foot on the field and got injured halfway through which put me out of any kind of sport for about 10 months till the next season rolled around.

Something I started to learn though, was about in season and off season weight lifting. Putting that much stress on your body kills the will to train for bulk. We sure as hell tried but it is very difficult to achieve, which is why it's well known that the off-season is for bulking up (not known at all to me back in those days)

When we were in season, I could only really train anything that wasn't hurting (a feat easier said than done these days) so I would mostly train my upper body which wasn't a bad thing as I wasn't bulking and my legs were effectively being trained from all the running. As mentioned before, never neglect training your legs, my earlier blogs explain why.

As it turned out I was playing for the then, current national champions but we lost we in the southern final, which brought on the off season and probably the most amount of gym training i've ever done. Rain, shine, morning and night I would be in the gym. With team mates or alone I was building for a better season although my legs were still killed from injury, bulking was something that was to only later make it worse. But for the time being, what I was doing was actually just in time for what was to be an incredible season and year.

Peace!