Sink or Swing: The Complete Experience: Home Gym Strong

By Chad V. Holtkamp

Have you tried and failed to make your healthy routines stick? Discover tested solutions that will fulfill your personal fitness breakthrough. 

Are you struggling to find time in your busy schedule for healthy habits? Are you worried that there simply isn't an exercise plan that fits your family, your career, and your life? After years of research, author Chad V. Holtkamp built his ideal workout plan. But when everyday life interfered with his vision, he devised methods for overcoming the roadblocks on his path to a better body. Now, he'll show you how to achieve your goals too! 

Sink or Swing: The Complete Experience is a two-book box set that gives you an in-depth look at Chad's year-long journey to the best shape of his life. Despite daily temptations and his father's lung cancer diagnosis, the author developed the tools and attitude to stay on track. Through his methods of diet routines, kettlebell training, and building perseverance, you'll learn how to reach your ideal body no matter what life throws your way. 

In Sink or Swing: The Complete Experience, you'll discover:

• A behind-the-scenes look at a real-world fitness success story
• How to stay committed to your fitness plan even in the face of personal tragedy
• A step-by-step examination of the 40 Days + 10,000 Swings workout plan
• How to find a balance between your professional, personal, and fitness challenges
• What steps you can take to safeguard your plan against life's everyday distractions and much, much more!

This two-book fitness memoir contains both the second volume and its companion guide from the Home Gym Strong series. If you like funny and earnest fitness tales, step-by-step workout programs, and methods for overcoming difficulties, then you'll love Chad V. Holtkamp's life-changing guide. 

Buy the box set today for the means and mindset you need for a healthy lifestyle!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Briefcase Media Group
• Release date: Feb 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780996688567

Book preview

Sink or Swing

Sink or Swing

The Complete Experience

Chad V. Holtkamp

Briefcase Media Group

Contents

Sink or Swing

40 Days + 10,000 Swings

Also by Chad V. Holtkamp

About the Author

Sink or Swing Cover

To My Family

Sink or Swing is the follow-up to Work Out, Pig Out in the Home Gym Strong series. While I’m busy cranking out the next installments, you can find out right away when they’re set for release.

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Visit chadvholtkamp.com to stay in the know.

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You can also visit HomeGymStrong.com and follow my workout adventures on a more frequent basis.

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Successful book publishing is all about reviews, and I’d love it if you would head over to your favorite online bookseller and leave a review.

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Review Page

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 could have just doubled up on the heavy cream and gotten the same effect since unsalted butter is basically cream that’s been churned.

The early stages of a keto-type diet are a drain on your energy levels as your body adapts to the lack of carbs. To fend off the keto flu, I was also on a quest for the perfect cup of coffee, or more accurately, the perfect caffeine delivery method. I scoured the Home-Barista.com forum for the best brew method with the biggest caffeine kick. Espresso was popular but actually pretty low on the caffeine scale. Plus, a decent home espresso machine was beyond what I wanted to spend. Making quality espresso not only requires a great machine but more importantly, a great grinder. One of those can often cost more than the machine itself.

I learned that drip coffee had the highest dose of caffeine per cup, which was enough for me. I was still doing pour-over with my Hario V60, so I read up on the idea of the Bunnzilla! Buy a Bunn grinder, add in some expensive Ditting burrs, and then you have the best home grinder of all. Then the only thing I’d need would be a coffeemaker. Moccamaster seemed pretty good, but pricey, though there were some others in the mix.

Tuesday, I was back in the mode of revising the draft of what was to become Work Out, Pig Out, even though by that point I was a bit sick of it. I made it through and started polishing up some chapters, adding bits and cleaning it up.

The rest of the week was the same, revising, revising, revising.

Thursday night I ended up at Reckless Records downtown on Madison picking up vintage 45s for my wife’s friend’s 45th birthday party that upcoming Saturday. Glory of Love (the #1 song of 1986), Mony, Mony (my wife was in the crowd for the Billy Idol video shoot), Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer (a favorite of my wife’s family), and That’ll Be the Day (who doesn’t love Buddy Holly?).

On Friday night, I finally mustered up the courage to show my wife the first chapter. I was nervous as hell because she was a writer for a living at her advertising job. I was just somebody who had the talent but hadn’t put it to use for a while.

She laughed twice in the first page, so I knew I was okay. She ended up learning a lot of things about me that I hadn’t bothered to mention the year before, but it was all okay. I ended up sending it to her via PDF so she could read it on her Kindle. She was happy with it, though she did have some good suggestions. We stood around the kitchen kicking around title ideas. I had thought of On Track and Off the Rails: A Year of Losing Fat, Gaining Muscle, and Eating Lots of Ice Cream — especially the ice cream bit.

Though, oddly enough, I didn’t eat any ice cream for the first month of 2015, unlike the gallons upon gallons I’d eaten the year before.

I couldn’t sleep that night, but wasn’t sure if it was the carb withdrawal or just anxious thoughts of writing ideas. I woke up and must have cranked through a dozen variations of things that I could write about. I was obsessed. I’d minored in writing in college, so my long dormant writing muscle was beginning to flex and grow.

At the 45th birthday party Saturday night, we let it slip that I was working on a book, and it was a kind of neat thing. No one in our group had ever thought of doing that before, so it was definitely a novel idea. My wife’s friend also had his usual nuclear spicy chili, and my wife had baked up a giant Guinness cake with Bailey’s buttercream frosting. He’s Irish, so it was a good mix, and it was really good. Of course, I was too tired and full to eat most of it by that time. I’d been snacking all night, picking at the food piled high on the table, downing glass after glass of wine.

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Week 4 – January 18-24: Simple & Sinister, Egg Shakes & Pork, Pizza Pizza Pizza

Monday was Martin Luther King Day, so a holiday for my wife and I took the day off too. Finally, fully recovered from my chest cold, I jumped back into working out that morning and got on Pavel Tsatsouline’s Simple & Sinister kick again, kettlebell swings mixed with Turkish getups. Two weeks into the New Year, I felt healthy again. My previous shoulder injuries from early 2014 were mostly healed, so I thought I’d give Simple & Sinister another shot.

The rest of the day we just sat around watching the latest version of King Kong and whatever else popped up on T.V. We pulled the taco meat out the freezer and spiced it up with some guacamole, sour cream and SAAS hot sauce, all scooped up with tortilla chips. We still had some Guinness buttercream cake left over, so I downed that with some actual Guinness. I’d pretty much abandoned the Two-Week Test at that point so was scarfing down carbs to make up for it.

The rest of the week I continued with the Simple & Sinister routine first thing in the morning. I was still doing the egg shakes for lunch with pork chops at night, dousing them with a bit of grape jelly to make them more palatable. I was a little bored by Friday, and the dreariness of Chicago in January was in full force.

My wife worked late, so I wasted time looking up ideas for workouts on Dan John’s fitness blog. I liked the idea of the 40-day workout that I’d done the previous spring — five lifts done almost daily for 40 workouts — but I wanted to kick it up a notch. The same squat, bench, chin-up, deadlift, loaded carry got pretty monotonous after a couple of weeks.

There was a lot of talk about his 10,000 swing challenge, basically doing 500 swings per day until you rack up a total of 10,000. I figured I could do something like that and add it on top of the 40-day workout, which would be one hell of a challenge. Would it be the best idea? Probably not, but I certainly wouldn’t be bored.

Saturday was our weekly day to spend running around town. I had been trying to get my wife hooked on Roots Pizza, which is a variation on my hometown Quad-City style pizza. I succeeded as we ended up getting the most amazing cheese sticks and a half-taco/half-BLT pizza. Sufficiently stuffed, we headed off to another friend’s birthday party, bringing along some awesome Justin and Decoy cab to share. My wife’s sister turned us on to both of those over the holidays. Someone else brought along fresh hot tamales, and we were set for the night.

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Week 5 – January 25-31: Pizza Again, 40 Days + 10,000 Swings, Moccamaster

I hadn’t gotten enough of pizza with the trip to Roots on Saturday, so we ordered Al’s again on Sunday, this time my favorite Canadian bacon and pineapple. My sweet tooth was still raging, so I tore into a box of organic Oreos. I also had some cherry almond jam left over from a farmer’s market the previous fall I’d never opened, so that went well with French bread. I bumped up the swings to 200 per day and was ready to kick it off the next day. I’d abandoned my diet attempt, but convinced myself I was just fueling up for my upcoming workout plan.

On Monday night, I started off my 40 Days + 10,000 Swings challenge. This kettlebell