In my local area of Greenwich, I am becoming more recognizable as a fitness person more. Thanks for facebook, for making that happen. In my personal facebook page, I would post daily fitness tips, giving people advice locally on health & fitness. I just see all the things that goes on at the Greenwich Y and then I’ll talk about it in facebook. Well my Greenwich YMCA discussions in facebook has grabbed the attention of the staff that works at the Greenwich Y. I was just told today that somebody that works there at the Greenwich Y has been showing the rest of the staff members there my facebook postings on fitness and all that stuff. I’ve heard they’ve been loving what I do.

That made me proud. I had no idea they were paying attention, so I walked out of the Y today after my workout in a good mood after hearing that. The better shape you become and the smarter you get in “health & fitness”, you’ll get a lot more respect from people around you.

So that’s a pretty good chance that I could get a job at the Greenwich Y if I am lucky enough. I sent an application there not too long ago but never heard anything back, but maybe they will contact me soon, after this. Hopefully.

I’m not looking to be a full time fitness guru for the online world or anything like that, I just want to pass along the things I learned in fitness. Hoping to inspire other people to change their lifestyles and get into fitness full time to get in good shape.

Kev

Ya know. I just love it when I post fitness progress pics of myself in this blog, the pics gets posted in other forums and other people’s facebook pages, making fun of my physique and appearance. I’m okay with that. Negative criticism on my body doesn’t offend me. If people truly thought my body was that bad, then they wouldn’t post my pics and wouldn’t comment on it. This just kind of proves that people know that I have a successful ripped physique. My pics gets passed around at other places online because jealousy is a small part of that.

I know, my body isn’t perfectly straight. There’s nothing I can do about that, because I have to live my life like this. What I have is scoliosis. I had back surgery when I was a kid, they put a metal rod in me. Back then I wasn’t allowed to do physical things and wasn’t allowed to do heavy lifting after surgery for a while, but now I’m all good and healthy to do all the physical things I want to do.

There are many fitness people and bodybuilders who had major surgeries in their lives, but they continue to do fitness anyway. There are professional bodybuilders who have gone through major heart surgeries, but even though they shouldn’t be working out in a gym, they do it anyway.

People just don’t want to admit that what I do is pretty inspiring to everybody.

Anybody can get into fitness & bodybuilding. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like or how your body is. Anybody can get into it. You don’t have to be a perfect pretty boy to get into the bodybuilding world.

I like people giving me feedback on my physique whether it’s good or bad. I don’t post progress pics for my own ego or for attention. I post progress pics to get honest feedback on my work. I can’t tell how good I look, so I post pics to get honest criticism. Plus, posting progress pics publicly, keeps me motivated and keeps me going in fitness.

I know some people are going to mention my curvy back when I post the pics, but like I said, you have to admit that I what I do is impressive. Make fun of it all you want. This is how I am. People are a little jealous that I’m able to get a fit physique even with the surgery.

Nobody’s perfect and don’t need to be. I’m proud of my fitness physique. I may need improvement on the pecs, obliques and need to lower body fat some, but I’m working on it, and not rushing things.

Kev

So I decided to do progress pics outside, just to see what my physique looks like outdoors being shirtless. Is that a summer ready physique? I believe it is.

Feel free to comment and you be the judge.

Kev

Yeah, the summer is here. Everyone obsesses with wanting a perfect body. Everyone dreams of having a supermodel like body you see in the magazines. It’s a nice dream, but to be honest, people can keep dreaming. Everyone wants the perfect celebrity look. The muscular physique with great abs and tanned skin. Everyone keeps working out too hard trying to achieve that dream after years of hard work, but it never happens.

Most professional fitness models you see in the magazines are all fake anyhow. The muscle magazines and the swimsuit stuff. All fake, fake, fake. Those people don’t look like that in real life.

It would be fun to have that hot body look, but with regular people like us, we should be proud of what we have now. We should worry about getting stronger and being healthy. Not worry about how we look.

I’m proud of how I look now. I came a long way. Working out for a couple of years and already in decent shape. My body maybe critical to some but that’s because some people think you need to have a perfect look when it’s not going to happen. Look natural and be happy the way you are.

That perfect look you see in magazines, the pin-up calendars, and fitness DVD’s like P90x, it’s just an advertising trick just to get you to throw your money at them. The Fitness world is a billion dollar business now, it’s sad.

I’m not saying that you’ll never look hot & sexy in bodybuilding, of course you can. The point of this post is that you’ll look hot & sexy naturally. That “perfect” look is a turn off for me anyway. I like the natural and normal looking women more, that to me is hot.

If you don’t get the look you want this summer. Don’t worry about it. Have fun showing off your physique and show everyone what you got anyways. I plan on going summer clothes shopping this week and buy more sleeveless shirts. Why hide what you got, right? If you hide your physique it’ll make you feel like you did all that hard work for nothing.

Kev

There’s a lot of online fitness trainers that are pretty popular like Scooby and many others. Getting advice from fitness people online, people you don’t even know, you’re doomed for failure. I don’t know why these people do it. They look after these online fitness trainers like if they’re a hero or something. When you want to learn fitness and get healthy, this is the last thing you want to do. Go online and take advice from people you don’t know.

How did I learn fitness? When I signed up to my other local gym (not the Y), I had the gym owner teach me some things, and the fitness adventures went from there. I learned the workouts from Arnold’s “Bodybuilding Encyclopedia” which is the bodybuilding holy grail. I also watch how other people do things at the gym. I got all my bodybuilding information from Arnold’s book, thanks to longtime blog reader, bone75, who recommended it to me. I actually took his recommendation and the book became very helpful to me.

I didn’t learn from Scooby or Tony Horton or Scott Herman. I learned a lot from Arnold. Arnold is the real deal.

While I know a lot about health & fitness, I still have a lot to learn. I’m not a pro yet. I still have lots of work to do. I’m just not getting ahead of myself and not rushing things, ya know? Taking my time. I need bigger pecs, I need more obliques, and I need the abs to be in better shape too. It’s all being worked on. I’m trying to find workouts on obliques and found a few of them. I’m still researching some more oblique workouts.

Don’t trust any fitness information online because most of it’s a joke. I learned it all from Arnie’s book, dude. It’s better than most information out there and Arnold’s bodybuilding book is old school. I try to do my shit the Arnold way. Following his path.

I will never do a bodybuilding competition or anything like that, but my dream to transform myself and become the best shape of my life. Live longer and get healthier. I want to be like Sylvester Stallone where I am able to still workout in the gym at 60 years old.

I may have a nice start with my physique, but it’ll get better when I get older.

Kev

It’s easy to change your eating lifestyle from junky to healthy eating but the only tough part about clean eating is getting other people to accept it. When you start eating healthy to get lean and muscular, people are definitely going to find your eating ways weird. When you start avoiding a lot of stuff, people who give you food will become defensive. People will also criticize you about eating healthy all the time. It happens to me all the time.

The reason this happens is that a lot of people don’t really fully understand the nutrition part of fitness. People mistakenly think you can eat whatever you want while working out. Fitness doesn’t work that way. Like I always say, clean eating is key to getting a good body. It’s really simple to understand. If you eat junk, you’re going to look like junk. If you eat good, you’ll look good. That’s how it goes.

If other people start questioning your clean eating, don’t care what other people think. If your dream is to get lean and muscular, you gotta do what you gotta do. I miss eating junk food. I still do eat junk food once in a while as a cheat meal on the weekends but that’s about it. I just can’t obsess with eating junk food like I used to.

I feel fantastic eating more healthier. When I was younger, I used to hate eating vegetables but now I eat vegetables like crazy. I used to eat junky breakfast cereals in the morning but now it’s egg whites. I also eat a lot of fast food in the past but I don’t eat fast food too much anymore. I used to drink a lot of soda, but now it’s either green tea or water. The only bad snack I’ll have once in a while is ice cream ’cause I love ice cream. The summer is around the corner, so I’ll be having ice cream a little more often but I won’t over do it, don’t worry.

If your family & friends start serving your dinner that you don’t agree with, feel free to avoid it and eat something more healthier. You need to do what ever it takes to stay fit even if other people don’t agree with it. I try my best to get other people to understand my goals, but give it time, they’ll get the hint soon enough that it’s the right thing to do is to eat clean while being fit.

Kev

For a while now, I’ve been eating whole grain bagels along with my egg whites for breakfast every morning. I think starting tomorrow, I’m going to start avoiding whole grain bagels. I will have a bowl of oatmeal and have egg whites both everyday instead. I was looking online for a better substitute for bagels, and every fitness person recommended oatmeal. The healthy oatmeal, not the flavored oatmeal.

Whole grain bagels are healthy, nothing wrong with it, but they are high in calories. If you want to get lean and get lower bodyfat, oatmeal is recommended instead ’cause of lower calories.

I think I’m going to start having oatmeal and egg whites from now on.

Do I get tired of eating the same things all the time? Like egg whites for breakfast every morning, tuna/salmon for lunch, or chicken breast/fish/steak for dinner everyday? No. Those meals are the most important things you need for a fitness nutrition. You need your healthy carbs, fibers and proteins.

My bodyfat is pretty low, but I plan to try and get lower. I haven’t measured my bodyfat yet, I need to order one of those bodyfat calipers soon.

Edit to add: I’m not the best at fitness nutrition, but I’m still learning. You may make mistakes of eating the wrong things sometimes, but it’s called learning. I’m no nutritional expert so I have a lot to learn still. Trying to eat the right foods as careful as possible.

Kev

Why do people feel the need to bench when getting into bodybuilding & fitness? In my opinion, you don’t need to if you don’t want to. Benching is the most overrated workout. I don’t really do it too much. I enjoy most workouts, but one work out I can’t stand doing is the bench press. Every time I work out at the Greenwich Y a lot of guys and even some women want to bench. Why do people think bench press is the only chest work out there is? It’s because benching is easier to learn and people don’t like doing other chest workouts.

There are plenty of great chest work outs other than the overrated bench press. I prefer: dumb bell presses on a bench, dumb bell flies (on the floor or bench at the gym). I also like cable cross overs and push ups.

While benching is the king of all workouts, it’s also the most dangerous and evil workout. Sorry but it’s true, I’ve thought I explained this before? There are too many people that bench without spotters at the gyms, you see it all the time, it’s ridiculous. Only once in a while you see smart people benching “with” spotters, but it doesn’t happen often.

I plan to stay away from benching completely I think. The barbell benching I’m talking about.

When you’re doing a professional sport like bodybuilding competition, the Olympics or wrestling/boxing/mma, that makes benching okay to do. Benching is not for amatures, in my opinion.

There are plenty of other chest workouts people. There are other chest workouts that work your chest harder than the bench. I think dumb bell flies work the chest harder than the bench. Push ups also can work your chest hard.

I can’t do 100 pushups without stopping yet, for now I can do only 40 – 50, but that’s alright. The less reps you do, the more muscle definition you get. That’s one thing people fail to think, they think they can get more muscle definition by training to failure all the time. The bench is not cool. The bench will totally burn you out if you do that every week.

Kev

I got into fitness hoping to be in better shape for the performing stage when playing gigs. To look good when performing. Now that I’m in decent shape, I won’t hide my physique by wearing long sleeved shirts on the stage. I can tell you that. I’m probably going to be wearing more sleeveless shirts and wife beaters at my gigs a lot. In my past gigs, I used to wear fancy clothing. I used to wear all black on stage like Johnny Cash, you’ve seen all my past gig pictures. There will be a change of fashion this time around. My plan is to look like a rock n’ roll bad ass and not look like some country/folk singer. The Johnny Cash like image is long gone. Maybe my transformation will help draw more women to the audience at my gigs, who knows.

One thing to keep in mind though, being muscular for my music is not an ego trip, you see. I just wanted to look better when playing guitar. That is all.

Even though my two upcoming gigs, are bar rooms, I’m not going to drink. I don’t drink alcohol anymore, but I can still have fun and party though. I’ll still have fun meeting new people and enjoying the live music of other bands. I can’t drink because of my fitness. I know a lot of people drink alcohol while bodybuilding, but not me. You don’t need to drink to have a good time.

Kev