Getting Fit by First Principles – Part 7 – Lessons from Covid

Victor (00:00) Hello, welcome back to Getting Fit by First Principles. This is part seven. In this part of the series, I am going over the lessons that I learned throughout my personal training history. where I have developed my own principles regarding my own health and fitness, and on top of that, how I've applied a lot of the lessons I've learned in my real life, as well as some observations along the way. Victor (00:32) So in the previous edition, I talked about my journey through powerlifting, which was in the latter half of my undergraduate career at UC San Diego. And then when I finally graduated UCSD and moved to LA, I was still powerlifting throughout my master's program. And I graduated from my master's program around 2019. I was still powerlifting at the time and I had just started jujitsu in late 2019. But That is when, as we all have experienced, COVID happened. Victor (01:08) To put it lightly, COVID was a big wrench in many people's fitness journeys. Victor (01:16) With the massive shutdowns, a lot of gyms closed, and with that a lot of people definitely had fallen off of their fitness journeys. I mean, most people I know during COVID ended up doing a lot of indoorsy activities. You know, it was mostly things like video games, baking, and just a lot of other online activities. Victor (01:44) And as I've emphasized before in my previous editions, you can imagine somebody that sits at home and bakes sourdough all day probably doesn't look like a particularly fit individual. Victor (02:04) As you can all recall, it was not an uncommon sight to see people gain 10, 15, 20 pounds post-COVID. Me personally, I managed to get through all of COVID actually losing weight. I think when COVID first started, I was weighing in around 217 pounds, and then by the time COVID ended, I was 210 pounds. Victor (02:29) Even now, as I record this, I weighed in at 192.6 this morning, but I digress. Victor (02:39) So one thing that I do want to highlight about my particular COVID story is how d because of the principles I had developed through my time in powerlifting, I was able to more or less stay on track with my own fitness goals. Victor (03:00) Obviously I had to make adjustments, but the point still stands that even if I changed the target, I already had the discipline from powerlifting to at least create some sort of plan that could lead me to those goals. Victor (03:18) And now if there's one thing that I would like to take away from my time in COVID, it definitely is how to deal with life circumstances that just throw a wrench in your training. Victor (03:37) While I did have some setbacks during grad school that may have pushed my training down in priority, I would say that COVID was the biggest stress test of my personal systems and my principles. Victor (03:52) I think the biggest lesson I learned from COVID that most people can take away from this episode is the ability to change or pivot your goals relative to what life gives you. Because life isn't perfect. As we all know, COVID was a very big disruptor. Victor (04:13) At the time I had started jujitsu and I still had aspirations in powerlifting. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to qualify for nationals by getting a high enough total. However, I had no access to the necessary gym equipment to even run the programs that I needed to run in order to get strong enough to lift the weights I needed to lift to qualify for nationals. Victor (04:42) One could say that maintaining that dream would have been an exercise in futility. Victor (04:52) Bad puns aside, when I looked at my circumstances, you know, I realized that, okay, going to Raw Nationals is just simply not in the cards for me. Right? USA powerlifting obviously put a lot of the events on hold because of the COVID restrictions, and I had no access to a gym and also with My financial situation being a little bit up in the air at the time, I had difficulties a j or justifying a purchase of thousands of dollars of equipment. Especially at that time during COVID. a lot of fitness equipment was being price gouged. Victor (05:35) This point, it would have been easy for me to just give up on fitness altogether. I could have just thrown my hands up in the air and said, Screw it, I can't train the way I want, so I'm just going to focus on playing video games and baking bread all day. Victor (05:53) So starting from square zero again and just following my personal value in my physical fitness, I just decided that okay if I could not power lift, I was still going to try to find a way to work out. Victor (06:11) So for a time I scrounged up whatever equipment I could find and I just improvised workouts. A lot of it was just based on push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and inverted row variations, as well as just walking whenever I could. Victor (06:29) Also at the time I did have the luxury of having super secret underground jujitsu training sessions where I would train jujitsu with two or three other people and no but and no one else. But Victor (06:46) simply had to shift my goals. I was no longer looking to excel in powerlifting because well life had blocked that option away from me. But rather than having this all or nothing mentality, I just decided, okay, I guess the path forward now is for me to improvise whatever workouts I can because something is better than nothing. I may not be able to achieve this focused goal. But simply keeping my body active was a benefit. Victor (07:20) I still imposed some level of structure onto these improvised workouts. Week by week I would log how many pushups and pull ups I was doing multiple times per week and then Each week I would try to push those numbers up. And then if I were to hit a wall on any of these exercises, I'd then just change up the variations and then repeated the cycle over and over. And throughout the time in COVID, I found that there were no noticeable regressions in my physique. People still said I had a good-looking upper body. Victor (07:58) Now moving on to the second lesson of COVID, which could very well be viewed as an extension of the first lesson, is to look for solutions whenever you are encountering a problem, rather than focusing on the problem itself. Right? If you have a wall that's in front of you, then constantly pointing at the wall isn't going to make the wall go away. Rather having an open mind to the ways around the wall or possibly seeing cracks in the wall will get you much further than constantly giving the presence of the wall power. Victor (08:36) COVID and the restrictions it brought, that was always going to be a constraint. Complaining about not being able to access gym equipment due to COVID was not going to get me anywhere. So instead of focusing on that, I just simply redirected my energy to figuring out ways of building external resistance, right? Because all resistance training, all weight training, is a matter of moving weight from point A to point B. Machines just have a way of streamlining. This process. Victor (09:08) So with an open mind, I looked to one place nobody else was looking towards, and that was the local Home Depot. At the time of COVID, getting your hands on gym equipment was extremely difficult because people were purchasing from all sorts of outfitters and then marking them up on Facebook Marketplace for two, sometimes three times their market value. Victor (09:34) However, on perusing what was available at Home Depot, they had some very cheap pieces of what I called external resistance. You I could have metal plates, but Home Depot had concrete cinder blocks and 50-pound bags of sand and gravel. Victor (09:55) Before I got my personal collection of canvas sandbags, I improvised by using bags of gravel from Home Depot and a laundry bag from Target and I created my own set of makeshift heavy sandbags. Victor (10:14) My girlfriend at the time was not a fan of me having these sandbags inside our apartment, so I kept them outside near my carport where nobody would steal them. And that is how I added external resistance to my workouts. Now is a fifty to a one hundred pound sandbag the equivalent of a two to three hundred to four hundred pound barbell? No. However, Victor (10:40) given the circumstances at the time, I was not in a position to really nitpick how optimal my setup was. The fact of the matter is I needed a setup and that was all I had available. Victor (10:54) Now, on any fitness journey, the biggest setback, the biggest pitfall that most people fall into is an all or nothing mentality. They think that if they don't have access to the gym or access to their regular workout routine, then they may as well not work out whatsoever. But the reality is life will throw monkey wrenches your way. Victor (11:20) There was an old quote. It was something like man makes plans and God laughs, but that is what happens a lot. You may have the most optimal workout plan, but then a random Tuesday night happens and you do not have access to your normal gym. And what do you do then? Do you just simply not work out or do you just adjust and improvise? Victor (11:47) Now would my modified equipment and workout program have gotten me into raw nationals for powerlifting? Absolutely not. It was definitely not a quote unquote optimal program, but it was a program which is better than nothing. Victor (12:06) You can imagine that in this day and age, we have many efficient modes of transportation. If you want to travel from point A to point B the fastest way possible, right now it's probably via an airplane. However, if you do not have access to an airplane, chances are you'll get to where you want to go faster if you were riding a bicycle rather than doing nothing. is a bicycle a an efficient way to travel a long distance? Definitely not. However, it is better than walking and it's exponentially better than sitting where you are. Victor (12:50) when the COVID restrictions had finally ended, I didn't really find myself wanting to go back to a traditional gym as I had collected a number of pieces of workout equipment ranging from a pullet bar, multiple canvas sandbags, and then now my adjustable kettlebells. And it got to a point where I didn't really want to spend the time to travel to a commercial gym and I was much more focused on jujitsu. Victor (13:20) I think if I did have access to a barbell and normal gym equipment, it would be more optimal, I guess, for measurable strength development, but I'm currently having a lot more fun with my current stack of gym equipment, so I still don't see a good enough reason for me to return to traditional lifting. Victor (13:46) Now to summarize what COVID had taught me, the first lesson is to always have a way to pivot given any roadblock. COVID was a major roadblock in my personal fitness journey, so I had to find a way to pivot my goals so I can keep moving forward. The second one is to focus on solutions rather than the roadblocks themselves. Like I said, roadblocks will always make themselves clear. So you may as well point your time and attention towards solutions rather than acknowledging the roadblock. Because again, the roadblock will always make itself clear. Victor (14:30) And finally, right, the ability to pivot and to find solutions I found meshed nicely with the principles that I had already built through my time in powerlifting. I already knew how to structure a training plan and how to keep track of things and to progress even in a suboptimal plan. Victor (14:55) And again, this is where the first principles truly, truly come through. Because as someone who identifies as being fit and disciplined and a problem solver, I found that when COVID came, that those qualities of myself came through. I still worked out, I still valued my fitness and I solved the problems. Whereas people that those things slide, honestly, they probably did not value their fitness. Victor (15:28) Now aside from, you know, the more extreme circumstances like massive health issues due to COVID or people having to take care of sick family members during this time, most people do have choices. They do have more options than they are willing to open their eyes to. Victor (15:47) The people who came out of COVID in worse shape probably did not really care all that much about their health and fitness. And then on the flip side, the people who came out of COVID in better shape or at least maintaining their level of fitness had some sort of identity tied to their fitness. Victor (16:10) So again, strong systems and strong principles are what allow you to overcome obstacles such as this.