Welcome to the Health and Fitness Blog: An Introduction

Introduction

Thanks to my dad, I grew up with being surrounded by the love of fitness, exercise, and an active life. It would be something that was constantly talked about and thought well of in my house, and it provided me with a foundation of knowledge, exposure, and familiarity with the fields of health and fitness that I am very appreciative of.

Family Background

When we lived in upstate New York my parents would do a make shift workout in our small apartment as us four young kids would just watch and learn from them.

My dad took all of us to the gym with him several times, where we would sit off to the side and watch these incredibly fit people working out in this hole-in-the-wall gym.

When we lived in an apartment with access to the attic my dad would set up a wrestling mat, a punching bag, and some gymnastics equipment up for all of us to play around with.

When we did a less than stellar job in school our discipline would be performing a set of pushups depending on how young we were and how bad our grades were. I still have trauma about it to this very day…

However, a fond memory I still have is doing hill sprints with my dad and siblings up to a reservoir close by our house in Syracuse, New York. I was always the fastest of us kids, humble 7-year old brag, but always lost to my dad.

We watched Strongman competitions, UFC shows, professional wrestling, several different sports, American Gladiator, and things like this together on our couch.

Our great Uncle Larry lived a couple hours from us and had around 400 acres of farmland that we would occasionally help “manage”. Well…as much as a group of pre-pubescent kids could do. We would climb inside the barn, help move hay bales around, and do other “free child labor”… I mean… creative manual labor tasks that we thought were fun at the time.

When we moved down to the Atlanta, Georgia area and had a house with a basement my dad would blast Metallica, Rob Zombie, ACDC, and similar groups throughout the house while he worked out downstairs. We had our George Forman grill to make sure and get all the “unhealthy fats” out of the meat, and we ate all of our eggs without the yolk, that is until “Men’s Health” published an article saying that they were actually good for you. We didn’t know until then that meat and eggs actually had flavor to them!

College and Young-Adult Life

From the day I was born I wanted to play football for the Buffalo Bills American football team, and in college God allowed me to walk onto the Arkansas State University football team as a wide receiver. I had a great Strength and Conditioning Coach who taught us so much about solid form on Olympic lifts, how to properly program your workouts, and made sure our conditioning was worthy of a Division 1A football program.

In my college years I didn’t have a car, so I rode a bicycle everywhere. Biking to a friend’s house, which was 5 miles away, to do a P90-X workout with him in his garage was an everyday occurrence, as were mountain bike rides throughout the beautiful north Georgia State Parks.

Post College, my wife and I always had friends who wanted to go hiking, camping, kayaking, or be active with other forms of outdoor activities, and we would always be excited to join them.

Starting our Own Family Habits

When we lived overseas in Florence and Rome, Italy for a couple of years we would walk or bike everywhere. 10 miles per day was a minimal amount for travel, even though we still frequented their public transportation. We even had gym memberships in Rome before we found our apartment!

My wife and I met in high school, and even though she didn’t play sports she still had fun being active, so we decided early on that our future family plans were to have active kids and a lifestyle where we would try our best to treat our physical bodies as a gift that God had given us.

I will admit that it’s been very difficult to keep this discipline since having kids and living in a state, Texas, where it’s always hot outside, the food is delicious, and everything is so far away from the next thing. It’s so easy to just get in the car for short distance travels and eat deliciousness from a Chick fil A or a Shipley’s Donuts drive through.

So in an effort to get our health back Wife and I got a home gym, equipment from Rogue, Academy Sports and Outdoors, and Rep Fitness. We always had the teens from the youth group over for group workouts, and so it was easier to stay active. Our boys would see us being active, and they were even gifted their own kid’s workout equipment from the teens! We put our five-year-old on a soccer team in the Fall, a baseball team in the Spring, and Jujitsu and swimming lessons in the Summer. Wife and I would both be asked to write workout routines for people, I had a part-time job at Movement Rock Climbing Gym in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and we were asked by others for health advice, all while we were the most inactive we had ever been.

Learning and Growing Together

To make sure I remembered what I grew up learning from my dad, coaches, and various health articles from books or online resources I decided to pursue a Personal Training Certification. In 2022 I passed my certification test from the American Council on Exercise (ACE for short), and now had some validation that I hadn’t forgotten too much.

All of this to say, it’s tough to stay as healthy as you want to be, even with all the information and accessibility at your fingertips. This is why so many people call it “a journey”. You do your meal prepping and healthy eating during the day or week, and wonder if the “cheat day” you have every once in a while is going to ruin it all. You pay attention to your fancy technology that tracks your steps, macros, and heartrate, but you wonder if the stress and raised cortisol levels in your system from tracking it all is doing more damage than if you didn’t always have this stuff in front of you. You get your groceries from all the healthy food stores to buy the organic, grass-fed, keto or paleo diet approved products, but wonder what financial stress it’s going to cause you later and if you want to come across as “that person” in your social settings.

I get it. There’s so much information out there, and you can freeze or be overwhelmed from it all. You don’t have all of that time to sort through products or workout plans. You don’t want to add stress and shame onto yourself while you are trying your best. And you don’t have the land or permission from your HOA to buy your own chickens and start your own home garden.

Not sure the HOA would allow this.

How’s this?

You continue to do your best.

Try to buy the food that you feel the least bad about.

Try to stay consistent with your home workouts or meeting your daily step count.

Try to get good enough sleep, after getting your much deserved decompression time at the end of the day.

Try to get back to your New Year’s resolution, if you decided to make one this year.

Try to be that example to your kids and maybe break the cycle that you grew up in.

And what I’ll try to do through the “Health and Fitness” section of the blog is to aim to simplify things for you. I will try to post consistently enough and offer you some encouragement and inspiration to keep trying. I will try to post short and simple workouts or routines to follow that you could do from your home, a playground, or from a gym. While staying true to my “Not a Certified Nutritionist” title, I will try to offer you helpful nutrition tips that I have learned along the way.

If you are anything like me then you are your own worst critic, and so you don’t need someone to shame you for taking an extra cheat day, missing a workout (or 5), or even trying to push you to get back to the shape of your “glory days”.

For whatever reason you read these posts for, I hope you stick around.