Of course, then, it’s all well and good to know what the good ingredients are, but then you’ve gotta know what to put em in.  There are plenty of recipes out there on the internet for all manner of high protein vegetarian dishes, but as far as I can see they typically tend to involve rushing out to buy a bunch of ingredients you don’t have, and spending ages getting it ready.  That’s all well and good for a special occasion or for when you’re trying to impress someone, but it’s extremely unrealistic stuff for people like me, who often have a towering pile of unwashed dishes on the sink, and/or a hangover.  So anyway, here are some of the meals and snacks that I actually eat.. things that aren’t just a nice idea, but are easy enough that you might even end up making them.

Vegetarian pita bread pizzas

These are awesome.  What I usually do is put a bit of aluminium foil down on a tray, then put a piece of pita down.  I put just a splash of olive oil on, then half a small avocado.  I then tear up half a small chilli and squeeze just a bit of lime juice in, then i mix it all together until it’s all one big spread.  Then I mix it in with some tomato paste and smoosh that all together.  On top of that I put some chopped up soy fillets, pitted olive halves, some artichoke hearts, fresh spinach, fresh basil, a tiny bit of coriander, and chopped up red capsicum.  I top it all off with cheese – the cheese and soy are where the protein comes from.  It goes in the oven at about 200 degrees and comes out when the cheese is bubbling and the edges.  Then I eat it and it’s sensational.

This is just how I made it the last time, the recipe changes depending on what’s in the fridge.  The main thing is to have the soy and the cheese, because that’s where the protein comes from.  The other stuff is not very proteinicious but it does have vitamins and minerals and fibre and all that boring crap – it’s also exceptionally flavourlicious (that’s a real word now)

Banana, honey and soy milk smoothie

This is exactly what it sounds like.  I put a banana and some honey in a large glass and then smoosh it together until it’s a paste.  Then I slowly stir in soy milk and drink that shit up like a motherfucker possessed.  Awesome.  For added victory I’ll sometimes add a scoop of vanilla protein powder.

Bean Salad

I’ve been eating this heaps lately because it has been so hot, and you don’t need to cook anything with this.  You get a tin of Cannelinni beans, and you strain the hell out of those delicious bitches. You then dice up a few cloves of garlic, and some fresh spinach, fresh basil and a dried chilli.  If  you’re feeling adventurous, you can chop up a small bit of raw brocolli, which if you don’t add a lot to it will just make it nice and crunchy – but I’m betting that most of you are probably gonna be too freaked out to do that.  Then put it all in a bowl and mix it all together, then top it off with a little bit of lemon juice, a bit of olive oil, some dried shallots if you have them, and go to town on it in front of the TV.  Fine dining at its best.

Peanut butter on Soy and Linseed toast

If the other things seem like to much work, just put some soy and linseed bread in the toaster, and then have it with peanut butter.  It seems way too simple to be any good, but there’s a little bit over 25 grams of protein in 2 pieces.

Enjoy.

Today I felt pretty good about how it all went, the last time I did this day of the program I mostly felt it in my upper back, particulaly in the rhomboids – I think, I’m never quite sure exactly where I’m feeling what when it comes to the back and all the stuff that’s going on there.  I hope I got my biceps much better this time.  My arms are getting bigger again but still a lot smaller than what they were about July last year, before I got the flu.  Everything I’m doing for biceps is pretty familiar, except for the reverse grip barbell curls, but even with the stuff I know, it’s kind of strange to do it in the order that I have been and after all the back exercises.  I am very used to doing just an arms day, alternating between bis and tris, and it seems that that way you can throw a whole lot more at them because they are less fatigued at the start, and because they have a rest every second exercise as you go to the other muscle.  I can probably do just as well out of having a back and bis and a shoulders and tris day, I just need to get used to it and find my weight.  It’s hard to know quite what to go to, with some of them I have been going to failure way too early, and then switching to a lighter weight to get the rest of my reps out, with others I probably need to just go harder.  My wrists/forearms seem to get much more of a go with doing back and bis together, I’ve noticed I’m still going fast on the guitar even after a workout like that so it’s all good but I want to make sure that I don’t do anything silly so that I end up not being able to play for 6 months like my buddy Steve.

I can’t get over just how much my new gym is a change of pace from my last one.  The dudes there are all pretty massive.  I’m not the smallest guy who trains there, but I must be close.  I think if it was the first place I’d ever trained then I would feel uncomfortable about just how out of place I am there.  Of course, now, I realise everyone’s there just to get some good sets out and nobody gives a fuck – and of course the fact that it’s closer, cheaper and open 24 hours makes it pretty easy to be happy with training there.  Today I noticed a couple of dudes standing right in front of the straight bar rack to do their curls.  It’s pretty obnoxious.  The whole point of going to the gym is to not be some kinda lazy prick.. so just GTFO out of the way so that other dudes can pick up and put down their barbells.  FFS, it should be outlawed.

It was the first time I did this day of the new program, and I eased into it like the guy who wrote it for me suggested.  A lot of the machines are very different to the ones in my old gym, in that for a lot of them you load the weights on yourself rather than just pick a number on the stack.  So I was kind of just trying to find my weight with most of it.  I managed to get all of the reps out, and didn’t feel completely destroyed by the end, which makes me feel like I could have gone heavier.  That said, I can recall last thursday that I didn’t feel like I’d gone extremely hard on my legs, and then for the next 4 days I could barely walk.  So I will see what I feel like in the morning to judge how hard I’d gone.  My triceps felt pretty pumped at the end of the workout, but my traps and delts somewhat less so.  I tend to get a pretty good recovery on the tris, especially with the WMS I’ve been on, but from what I understand it’s the shoulders that will really make the difference to my posture, particularly the posterior deltoid.  I first heard about WMS from my friend Julian (who has his own fitness and training blog) also is a naturally skinny dude who has trouble putting on weight, and I’m still loving what it does.

It was interesting while I was there that someone pointed out to me one of the dudes training there was one of the professional bodybuilders in town for a competition this week.  He was there with some old woman with short white hair, wearing a t-shirt saying “trainer from hell” – I was informed that she was his grandmother.  To look at him at first glance I wouldn’t have picked him for a competing bodybuilder, he kinda just looked fat actually.  He was training in a sweatshirt, which is something that I’ve noticed a lot of the big dudes doing, though I’ve no idea how anyone copes with it because I tend to get pretty warm even just training in a tank top.  Who knows, but maybe things work a little differently when you have a physique like that.  When I was finishing my workout, doing the tricep pushdowns which were the last thing on my program before I went home, I ended up on the cable machine next to him.  Being about a metre away I could actually well believe that the guy was a professional bodybuilder because I could make out his muscles even through the sweatshirt, which was pretty freakish.  I tend to think that some of these super huge guys look really bizarre and misshapen, but I respect anyone who dedicates every last thing they’ve got to being the best in any field of human endeavour so it was still pretty cool.  But what really blew my mind was seeing the dude struggling with cable curls with 20 kilos selected on the stack.  20 kilos is about what I would do for that exercise.  Now I know that this dude had probably done a lot to fatigue his biceps up to that point, and was probably doing some sort of pre-competition low weight blood volume exercise or something, but it made me think of something my friend Dave often says about how the sorts of weights you might use to satisfy your ego are often not the ones that will actually make you stronger.  What he says makes an incredible amount of sense to me, and makes me feel a lot better about struggling with the lightest setting on the stack at the end of a dropset.  But there’s a difference between just understanding a concept intellectually, and having living proof of it there right in front of you.  Anyway, time to reply to some emails and eat like a motherfucker – catch you all soon.

Day 2 of the new program is legs and abs – these are two things I haven’t really trained properly in a long, long time.  Having stronger legs is good for my posture, and apparently it releases lots of hormones like HGH and testosterone when you train them,  When I first started training and had sessions from a personal trainer at Fitness First, he was really big on getting me to do stuff that would help me with my posture, so there was a big focus on legs then.  There was a lot of stretching them too.  From what I gather from talking to my personal trainer friends Dan and Dave, they also seem to think that having big legs should be a goal in and of itself, though to be honest when I see photos of the bodybuilders who have really gone to town on them I think it looks kind of retarded.  Anyway, I did the legs day anyway, because even though I have been avoiding it I have kind of known at the back of my mind that I should really be doing something to train them.  Because it was my first time on the new legs day, I tried to just ease into it with the weights and so on.  I thought I got the balance right, but when I woke up the next day I was in no doubt that I’d actually hit them really hard.

I trained them on thursday, and then on friday I went around walking like a cripple, like you do the day after training legs.  I had intended to go in on saturday morning, and even held off on drinking a lot of booze on friday night, which is quite of character for me.  But waking up on saturday, I felt like I’ve been hit by a truck.  It’s now sunday evening and they are still really sore.. as in sore enough to make me want to avoid any unnecessary walking, let alone actually go in to the gym.  I understand that it’s the recovery that makes you stronger, not just the actual working out, but this has been a weekend where I have wanted to go out to clubs, bars and hang out with friends, and having legs in such bad shape has really been fucking with my shit.

I’ve heard a few people use the masochistic that “if you enjoy legs day, you’re not doing it right” – but I actually really enjoyed the training, so far it’s just after that is too over-the-top.  I am going to keep training them, because I’m kind of a stubborn bastard and way too determined to give up on what I know is a good idea just because it doesn’t work out that well to start with, and hopefully I will start recovering faster.  My abs, which have probably gotten a lot of work just as a support muscle for all of the free weights work I’ve done the past couple of years, recovered pretty good, and I remember reading somewhere that your recovery can improve just because your body gets to used to you training.  So I hope that the next one is a little easier just because of that.  If it’s not, I might have to look at what I can do with diet and/or supplements.  And just to be safe, I am going to try to shift things around so that I end up doing day 2 of the program some time between Sunday and Tuesday, so that when it comes time to party on the weekends I won’t be showing up to my favourite Rock Clubs and then just sit at the sides or hobble around like a cripple.  Still, I’m feeling pretty encouraged that I was able to hit them as hard as I obviously did, because it will definitely make me stronger, and I can build on that for sure.

Starting in primary school, we always had both a Physical Education (PE) and a sport class, which were both compulsory.  With my deep seated and entirely justified contempt for people who could stay interested by the team sports I had a terrible time with it all, and spent much of the time devising ways to not participate.  I could feign illness or injury to get out of it.  More than once, when I did participate, I broke a finger because I didn’t know how to catch a ball properly.  This was a particularly shitty thing to happen, because it stopped me from playing piano and guitar, my two favourite pastimes.  When I was a little older and in high school, I figured out that having no capacity for sport at all had quite a few benefits.. like being put in the remedial sports skills class, where I could hang out with girls while all the other dudes were getting sweaty on a boys-only team, and I could sleep in on saturdays while the other kids had to face the cold early mornings to play a match.  Some seasons I couldn’t avail myself of the sports skills class, and would end up on the soccer team, where I learnt to be anywhere on the ground but where the ball would be, and that way nobody would step on my toes, run into me, or yell at me for getting it wrong.

Once school was over I was free of all that, and quite glad of it.  The only exercise I got was walking, which I actually did quite a lot of.. on nice days and when I had the time I would walk the hour that it took me to get to Melbourne Uni from my house, and I would walk the dog a lot, and I never had a car and it could be hard to catch a taxi late on friday and saturday nights when you’re a young dude, so often I would walk home from the CBD.

About when I was nineteen I went to the doctor for some sleeping problems, and she noticed that one side of my back came out more than the other.  I was referred to a specialist and then sent around various hospitals and doctor’s offices for X-rays and boring conversation.  At the end of it all, I was diagnosed with “moderately severe” scoliosis, and also told that it would never get better and that I would need to get surgery or I might be in a wheelchair by the time I’m thirty.  I was also told, in a spasm of completely unprompted and incredibly gratuitous professional rivalry, that going to a chiropractor or anything of that nature would be entirely useless, and that while going swimming might help with fleixibility there was nothing that would actually help me stand straighter.  Upon hearing this news, I nodded, thanked the abrupt weirdo for his attention, and walked out without attending to the medicare paperwork, never to bother with these people again.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally against the idea of being cut open and augmented with metal scaffolding  – when I was a kid I actually wanted to become a robot, and I don’t know that I’ve entirely abandoned the ambition.  But the sheer fact that these people could be prepared to describe anything with such a nondescriptive and transparently cretinous phrase as “moderately severe” made it very clear to me that they’re just not very bright and should be best ignored.

After that, I did actually try swimming.. umm, once.  Swimming kinda sucks.  It would be good if there was a way to do it without all the chlorine or salt, and ideally without all the water too, but there isn’t.  So then I tried Iyengar Yoga, and that was great.. amazing actually.  There were a lot of asanas that I couldn’t do due to limited flexibility, but the instructor gave me a lot of assistance and particular attention, and I got a lot better at it after just a few weeks.  This was the first real exercise that I’d actually consistently done by my own choice, and to my surprise I quite enjoyed it.  After a short while, and I was definitely standing straighter – you could see it just by measuring my height.  I can’t remember why I stopped doing it, I think maybe having to do it at a particular time every week got a little bit hard to keep up with or something.  At that age I didn’t have a car, and I also was out drinking a lot, so committing to being at any particular place every week was kinda hard, a cause of chagrin to my employers as much as my yoga instructors

Some time later, a few years later, I ended up going to an NSA practitioner.  NSA, or network spinal analysis, is kind of like chiropractic, except that instead of having really harsh adjustments, the practitioner does a few gentle touches on precise points and your spine and muscles end up adjusting themselves.  One of my NSA practitioners told me that if I really wanted to get the most out of the work then I would really need to build strength on my back.  So, she suggested I go swimming.. haha.  When I didn’t like that I ended up trying Karate, but after showing up 20 minutes too late to my free introductory session, I didn’t bother again.

Some time around about 2007 I ended up hanging around a dude called Dave who I knew from the melbourne music scene.  We ended up getting on the turps pretty regularly, as we were brothers of metal and lived pretty close to each other.  By that stage I think he’d been serious about weight training quite a long time.  At one stage when we were out somewhere, drinking booze and watching some metal bands, I mentioned once that I was wanting to get stronger in my back and shoulders, and he offered to take me along to his next time training at the gym.  We trained arms, and it was awesome fun.  I got a good pump and my biceps and triceps were pretty sore for the next couple of days.  Even better, I got that real “satisfied” feeling you get from the endorphins that pump when you work out.  I signed up for a gym membership just a couple of days later.

With my gym membership, I got 3 free sessions with one of the personal trainers there, a guy called Shane, and I ended up taking him on for another 20 sessions, 1 per week.  That was pretty cool, because I didn’t really understand the machines, or for that matter how best to use the free weights.  Shane really knew a lot about the stretches I needed to do, and the muscle areas I needed to avoid training, in order to improve my posture.  I have also still been training with Dave, both at the gym and at his Outdoor Personal Training sessions.