Sink or Swing: Working Out When Life Isn't Working Out: Home Gym Strong, #2

By Chad V. Holtkamp

Are you struggling to stay on track with your diet and exercise routine? Do work and family obligations interfere with your gym time?

In Sink or Swing: Working Out When Life Isn't Working Out, author Chad V. Holtkamp spent a year experimenting to develop the perfect exercise plan. After achieving success, he struggled with the interruptions of life and his father's lung cancer diagnosis. By applying his methods of kettlebell training and working out in the face of hardship, you'll find exactly the tools you need to power through any obstacle.

In Sink or Swing, you'll discover: 

• How to stop jumping from one fitness program to the next and commit to your plan
• The methods behind the 40 Days + 10,000 swings workout program
• The steps you can take to evaluate and overcome life's roadblocks
• How to keep fitness a priority when you're working through an injury
• How to stay true to your health commitment even in the face of personal tragedy, and much, much more! 

This inspirational fitness memoir is the second volume of the Home Gym Strong series, which teaches you how to tackle the biggest threats to your healthy lifestyle. If you like humorous accounts of fitness journeys, proven action steps, and tips for coping with challenges, then you'll love Chad V. Holtkamp's guide to workout perseverance. 

Buy Sink or Swing to gain the courage you need to get in awesome shape today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Briefcase Media Group
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9780996688536

Book preview

Introduction

In case you missed my first book, Work Out, Pig Out , I like to work out. I also like to eat.

I’m a married 40-something living in Chicago with a day job in recruiting. I spend a massive amount of free time working out and eating a lot of food. I’m 6’4" and usually weigh around 225 pounds, so I have a lot of space to fill.

My wife is a successful advertising creative, and we didn’t meet cute in college, but as 30-somethings at a goth bar, of all places. Wearing a black suit and purple dress-shirt at 2:30 A.M., I was staring at her, so she had to come talk to me to find out why. A shared love of music sparked a romance that grew each day.

Meeting so late in life meant that fate wasn’t going to grace us with children, so we have a lot of free time on our hands. We put it to use with exotic Caribbean beach vacations and, in my case, working out as much as possible. My wife likes to work out too, though not as obsessively as I do. It helps that we only have to walk downstairs to our fully equipped home gym: squat rack, barbells, bumper plates, kettlebells, resistance bands, treadmill, yoga mat. Oh, and an ab wheel — thanks, Dan John!

After playing baseball and basketball through junior high school, and working in a bicycle shop in high school and college, I quit sports until I started going to the gym as a 25-year-old in January 1998. In 2007, I discovered Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength and picked up barbell lifting: squats, bench, deadlift, press. From then on, working out became an obsession, reading about and practicing the finer parts of each lift, trying to get stronger and in better shape. It wasn’t just vanity though. I’ve had high blood pressure most of my life, passed down from my mom. She died of a heart attack at the age of 65 in 2008, so part of my obsession is to avoid that fate, get off those meds, and live to see 100.

In other health-related woes, in late 2012, my dad was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer and given six months to live. After untold rounds of chemo, he had beaten the disease well into 2014 and beyond.

As I detailed in Work Out, Pig Out, I spent 2014 following countless crazy diets and exercise programs. Some were awesome, while others were awesome failures.

I tried so many things — crash diets, low carb, high carb, high-fat keto, 40-hour fasts — all followed by gargantuan feasts of breads, cookies and ice cream. I worked out with barbells, kettlebells, wore out the belt on our home treadmill with all the walking I did, went through successful highs and severe depression, and the gamut of emotions in between.

But I tracked and studied and kept moving forward, finally finding success by sticking to one plan and letting other goals fall by the wayside. I resolved to follow the same path in 2015. I thought I’d found a way forward, away from the shiny object syndrome of chasing the diet du jour. But I’m always on the lookout for new ideas. Would I be able to resist for a whole year and continue to keep my weight in check, and finally achieve the best shape of my life? Or would I fall back into old habits and have another roller-coaster year?

Chapter One: January 2015

Week 1 – January 1-3 : New Year, Food for a King, Down with a Cold

I need to stop going on vacation.

Or just boycott the holidays altogether.

Then I might be able to keep myself in shape and my body fat in check.

Yes, I did it again, same as every year. We went to Florida to visit family over the holidays, same as every year. I ate and drank way too much good food and wine, same as every year.

I was fat again when my wife and I returned to the brutally cold arctic tundra that is Chicago after the holidays. I didn’t really care. I was just happy to have been around family for a while as neither of us have any in the city. It was great that my dad could join us in the warm Florida sun too, leaving his home in Iowa after two long years fighting lung cancer.

I was happy about celebrating the holiday with my wife’s family and her sister’s home-brewed beer. And her mom’s endless supply of chips and queso, eggnog and Courvoisier, Bell’s ice cream, ribs, and Cuban sandwiches, all washed down with decadent bottles of Justin and Decoy Cabernet Sauvignon.

I was also happy about the excellent progress with my workouts — before the holidays. Having put myself through the ringer with all my diet and exercise programs throughout 2014, I was sick of dieting. I’d learned a lot of what to do and what not to do though, useful knowledge for the future. I’d spent the last three months of the year working up to a deadlift goal, eating steak and potatoes, eggs and heavy cream. I wasn’t as lean as I was the preceding summer, but I actually looked like I lifted instead of just looking skinny.

After achieving my deadlift goal on Christmas Eve in Florida, I should have taken a week off to recover. Deadlifts take a toll on your body in a good way, and personal record deadlifts take an even greater toll. I was proud of my accomplishment and spent the rest of the day chowing down on all the food my mother-in-law made for the Christmas Eve feast.

To make up for the gluttony, I went overboard on Christmas morning with an hour-long session of loaded carries, walking up and down the street in front of my in-laws’ house with 24 kg kettlebells in each hand. After that, I finally took time off, which wisely continued when we got back to Chicago. The change from 70-degree warmth to single-digit cold was an even greater shock to my body. Mixed with some less than ideal food and drink leading up to the New Year, I started coming down with sniffles on New Year’s Eve.

We kept our reservations at Art Tango, only a year later than planned due to the New Year’s Eve snowstorm that kept us away in 2013. Since it was only brutally cold and not a blizzard of snow, we joined a couple of friends for a multi-course prix fixe BYOB affair. Great steak, great wine, topped off with the usual party hats, noisemakers, and cheap champagne at midnight. After a cab ride home, my wife and I faced New Year’s Day alone.

Since I had a feeling I was coming down with something and we needed food for the weekend, we decided to order the biggest pizza possible from Al’s Pizza — THE PIZZA KING! That was putting it lightly. The sucker was 24" across and dwarfed my iPad Air in a comparison snapshot. My wife and I couldn't agree on toppings, so we split it up: my half of Canadian bacon, pineapple and green pepper and hers with green pepper and pepperoni. Not content with just pizza — it was a three-day weekend after all, and leftovers are half the fun — we ordered onion rings, calamari, mozzarella sticks, and a dozen BBQ chicken wings as sides. We thought we were set for the rest of that day, at least. Then we hunkered down and watched T.V. as I slowly developed the worst chest cold of my life.

My cold got progressively worse on Saturday morning. I’d always avoided over-the-counter meds since they only really ever masked the symptoms. I picked up a variety of herbal teas while out grocery shopping for the next week. I figured getting in some good tea with raw honey and lemon would do the trick.

While drinking as much tea as I could that afternoon and trying to get a nap in, I spent my time on homegrown tech support for our collection of Macs. I had my first inkling that my previous data backup plans were running on borrowed time. It wasn’t the most exciting way to spend the first days of the New Year, but with being sick and bored of watching T.V., it was something to do.

Despite all the honey and lemon and herbal remedies, my cold was knocking me down hard. I’ve had countless sinus infections over the years but this was something different, centered directly in my chest. I was coughing up so much disgusting green phlegm; I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen that shade in nature before. Not good. I needed sleep and pronto. Never one to argue with going to bed early, I was asleep by 9:00 P.M. on a Saturday night, hoping that the extra sleep would help me feel better. Never one to go to bed early unless we’re flying to the beach the next day, my wife stayed up and watched T.V.

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Week 2 – January 4-10: Herbal Teas and Writing Frenzy

The extra sleep seemed to help a bit, and the noxious green phlegm slowly became less disgusting. While the cold was slowly going away, my gut was steadily expanding. I faced my first choice of the new year as to what diet and exercise plan I’d start once I got better. Lyle McDonald’s Rapid Fat Loss program of high protein, minimal fat, and almost zero carbs was my usual New Year’s go-to. After all the ups and downs with it throughout 2014, I wanted to try something less drastic, something more sensible. I also had the idea of writing my first book, Work Out, Pig Out, based on everything I’d learned the year before.

I went into my office in the Loop on Monday, freezing my butt off with the rest of the bleary-eyed zombie commuters. Not much happened that first day back from the holidays, so I was able to make it home by 6:00 P.M. and get straight to work on writing. I was religious with it, spending an hour each night while waiting for my wife to get home from work. I’d plop down on the couch and grind out a chapter of about 2000 words describing how I’d spent each month last year. It was fun looking back on all the stupid things I’d done. Once I got started, I wanted to finish it as quickly as I could.

The rest of my nights were spent thinking about what diet to start after I got over the chest cold. I was fatter than I wanted to be, but rushing and killing myself to strip it off my gut wasn’t what I wanted to do. I thought maybe I’d try out those sensible diets, you know, the ones I’d always heard about but had passed over in favor of something more extreme. Our annual Caribbean beach trips were coming up in the spring, but it was only January. I told myself I still had time and didn’t need to hurry.

I’d been reading up on Scott Abel over the holidays, and he’d recently written about how a client of his was a pro bodybuilder and had gotten pretty lean doing keto. It had been the rage since at least the late ’90s with the umpteenth resurrection of the Atkins Diet. The only problem was true keto was a high-fat diet with minimal protein and very low carbs. Most people seemed to miss the high-fat portion of the equation. They ended up eating way too little fat and way too much protein.

I love eating fat: heavy whipping cream, full-fat cheeses, milk, cottage cheese, rib-eyes, eggs, avocados, coconut and olive oil by the spoonful. I’d never had a problem eating a ton of fat.

I’d tried and abandoned the diet after Thanksgiving in 2014 when it made me too weak to deadlift, but now I needed to lose all the fat I’d gained from my 2014 quest and the holidays. I opted to mix keto with Phil Maffetone’s Two-Week Test — nothing but fat and protein for two solid weeks before assessing the results. Then I could slowly add carbs back into the mix, again assessing how my body reacted.

I ended up eating a lot of cheese and drinking a lot of heavy cream and raw eggs. I ate no carbs. I was also drinking a lot of different herbal teas to try to get over my cold. It was still pretty nasty and kept me from working out. Once you overwork your body, it will quickly get your attention one way or another and bring you to a stop. I needed to start listening to my body rather than ignoring the warning signs.

On Saturday, I forced myself to write more chapters and just work through them at a wicked pace. I used a few different apps for the Pomodoro time management technique where you do something for 25 minutes, take a short break, and then repeat. I’d set the 30/30 app for 25 minutes and then write like crazy before taking a five-minute break. Rinse and repeat all afternoon.

Writing about everything I’d done was pretty easy as I’d kept a detailed food and workout log via the Notes app over the course of 2014. I had no idea what was going to become of the book once I finished, but I just wanted to get that one out of my head and on the page, and then move on.

My writing obsession made for a boring Saturday day for my wife, but I was getting it done. We ended up making tacos at home that night, but since I was on the keto diet, I ditched the shells and just dug into a plate of greasy ground beef. We ended up watching Diners, Drive-ins and Dives with Guy Fieri all night. It maybe wasn’t the best choice while I was trying to be good with eating, but I kept to my keto plan.

Sunday was another boring day for her as I was obsessed with cranking through my thoughts and getting the words on the page. I finally finished the first draft late that afternoon and settled in for the evening with my wife.

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Week 3 – January 11-17: Keto Attempt, Bulletproof Coffee, Party Time

After having written nearly 25,000 words over the course of the week, I was so tired of writing I had to take a break. My next mission was to figure out what I could actually eat on the Two-Week Test. What not to eat is pretty easy — pre-packaged carbs, and bread, etc. What was allowed is a different story, and Phil Maffetone’s site was a great resource of approved foods.

My wife loves cheese so she was in heaven: habanero cheddar, garlic cheddar, lots of different options. The egg shakes were still my main source of sustenance for lunch with some steak or pork for dinner. I also picked up a few avocados and discovered how easy it was to make guacamole from scratch. I threw in some avocados, added some salt, lime juice, and a bit (or a lot) of garlic. Yum! It was awesome, even just straight from the plate without any chips.

I was even doing the bulletproof coffee thing again, dousing my home-brewed coffee with unsalted Kerrygold and heavy cream. I