Workout Info

If you want your weight training efforts to be efficient and productive, your workout routine should focus on your particular goals. For the beginers or those coming back after a long layoff, general conditioning with a variety of weights and equipment will probably be your first step.

If you are just trying to "get in shape" you might stay with this first step for a few months or a year - as long as you are making progress. As you continue to handle higher weights with lower reps - while adjusting your diet - you can expect your body to shift from efficient fat storage to effective fat burning and muscle building.
Some will move on to bodybuilding, powerlifting or training for a specific sport. But for most of us, we just want to look and feel better without making it a full time job. Some extra power and strength - perhaps some sense of slowing down the age clock - that would be OK too.

Aerobics or Weightlifting?
Aerobics burn up oxygen and some calories only while you are exercising. Weight lifting quickly exceeds your oxygen capacity, then turns to glycogen [stored carbohydrate] in your muscles, then to breaking down fat for energy while your are working out.
After your weightlifting workout, your body consumes an enormous amount of energy constructing new muscle tissue and maintaining it. As you acquire more muscle, you will continually require more energy which should come from your own stored fat if you have properly adjusted your diet.

How much exercise and how often?
Fitness authors Bill Phillips and A. Scott Connelly M.D. both tell us that too much exercise can bring poor results while not doing enough will be ineffective. Weightlifting, unlike aerobics, will overstress your muscles causing microscopic tears in the tissue. With proper nutrition and rest, your muscle will repair and rebuild over the next few days becoming bigger and stronger.
If your muscles are not stressed enough, there will be nothing to repair, and thus no growth. If they are continually overworked, particularly with insufficient rest, nutrition and protein between workouts, the repair process will never catch up with the challenge.
Phillips and Connelly both recommend high-intensity weight training with under 10 reps per exercise set, and only brief rest periods between exercises. They both suggest that you do this only 3-4 times a week for less than an hour each workout.

Does weightlifting make women "bulky" or shapely?
Don't worry! Lifters, male & female, spend years trying to add muscle. Due to estrogen, few women can actually "bulk up" without hormone supplementation. But most women can get much stronger and many women lifters find that adding muscle tissue makes them look toned and shapely. You can increase the mass, strength, endurance and balance of your muscle tissue while improving your posture and bone desnity.

Weightlifting for Older People
It helps to minimize the natural loss of bone density and to prevent osteoporosis. Weight training is the only exercise that can save and repair your muscles and build bone.
A study conducted by the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University showed that a high-intensity, lower-body strength-training program more than doubled muscle strength in frail older people ages 86 to 90.

DISCLAIMER: The information contained in this website is for educational and recreational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to replace the advice or attention of healthcare professionals. Consult your physician before beginning or making changes in your diet, supplements or exercise program, for diagnosis and treatment of illness and injuries, and for advice regarding medications.
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Vince's Workout
In 2003 I began taking about 200 grams of protein a day and got back into working out - usually 3 days a week. I did most of the workout on a cable machine - lats, pull-downs and seated rows with about 150 to 180. Also dead lifts, curls, and squats.
For the next 3 years I also jogged and mowed the lawn with a 40 pound vest and 10 pound ankle weights. As I got conditioned, I moved up to 15 pounds on each ankle and 25 to 50 pounds in a back-pack over the 40 pound vest. This helped get me ready for the "strongman" work out that I have been doing since then and which I think is the best overall strength conditioning that you can do. After lifting stones at home for a few years I started lifting with a group of local strongman competitors in September 2008. When I do these heavy workouts I only lift one day a week.

I have tried to stay in shape over the last 40 years, since my first encounter with weightlifting as a growing 145 pound high school junior. I would occasionally join a gym or work out at home for 6 months at a time, until something else became a priority. My strength would rise and drop a bit through the years. As I got older my weight would usually peak around 195 following the annual Thanksgiving through Christmas feasting, then drop to 175 in the panic preceding the annual summer return to the Jersey Shore.
My father taught me that there was nothing wrong with hard work, and he was quite active and strong well into his eighties. Over the years, the self-satisfaction from working hard kept leading me back to physically demanding jobs such as building houses. It is the reason that at 58, I can still deadlift 370 and still can carry heavy weights.
If you do not see hard work as a noble and worthwhile pursuit, you will not do well with weight training. It will not seem right to you. You will keep thinking that you should be paying someone else to do it for you. If you now hire someone to mow your lawn, shovel your snow covered sidewalk, or change your flat tire - you know what I am talking about.
Hard work is not a curse and disciplined eating is not a punishment! It is a means to an end, or at its best - an end in itself. The good news is that if you do succeed in shaping up - that hard work and discipline will likely carry over to other aspects of your life.

A few calories burned calculators: Calories per hour.com [click Activities Calculator] NutriStrategy.com and calories to maintain current body weight Scientific Psychic diet calculator Use this for an aproximate starting point, but also track your current daily calories to see what actually has been keeping you at your current bodyfat level. If you then start cutting junk carbs and saturated fat to reduce your daily calories - while boosting protein, you should start to lose body fat. Exercise will then help the process along.
Here is another exercise/calorie chart from Harvard School of Public Health using MET's - metabolic equivalants.

My Dad - Guido Gazzara-
This is probably around 1959 when I was 7 and he was 42. He worked where everyone's father worked in Paulsboro, NJ - at the Mobil Oil Refinery. He was a lab tech conducting tests on oil furnaces until he "retired" early at 55 on his doctor's advice after he had a heart attack.
He got tired of being "retired" and started doing service calls and furnace repairs for a local oil delivery business. He did this into his mid-seventies driving out through rural South Jersey on the coldest winter nights because someone was without heat.
When he was 85 he was still riding his bike on most mornings, usually to the next town so he could walk with an old friend who was recovering from a heart attack.
At 88 he had a stroke and could not walk. I called him from Ohio to ask how he was doing and he said he felt great. I said that I heard he could not walk. He answered, "No I can't walk, but other than that I feel fine" So there was a man who knew when to be happy - a lesson most of us never quite get.
He was usually busy with something and always helped friends and others with real work like plumbing, electric, and of course heating. When I, my brother, and my sister grew up and got married he came over to help each of us with our home projects. When he was 73 he flew out here to Ohio with a small carry-on bag and a tool box to help me install a gas furnace in the house I was building.
He spent his last year in a nursing home and died in 2005 at age 89. I drove back there often to visit. He always said that he liked the place and was glad that he lived so long.

So here was a man who knew what life was really about. Be willing to work hard, do what you know you should do, go to church, be happy with what you have, don't chase after things you don't need, stand up for what you know is right, take care of yourself and your family, and help people who need it.

Life is really much less complicated than many people think it is.

Where it all began...
As always when I go back to NJ I visit my old buddy Timmy. He is still living on an old farm that he bought 30 years ago. When I went there in at the end of 2007, Timmy had been clearing some of the accumulated junk stored in the old building, so he brought me in there to check it out. As soon as we stepped into the porch I spotted the old Saint James High Scool squat rack & vertical leg press. Then under a few boxes was the bench, and leaning against the wall was the sit-up board. We took the antique equipment outside for some photos.
I remember going to our prinicpal when we were juniors and requesting about $100 to build some equipment and start a weight lifting club. I did the basic set up and Timmy welded it together at his father's service station. That was 1969. Sometime around 1982 the school closed down. I don't know how the equipment ended up at Timmy's farm, but there it was.

So that is me sitting on the bench. Timmy is behind me, and Mr McNulty is leaning on the bar set in the very same rack. Next to them are Tom, Bill, Mike and Mike - and on the bench Dennis and Ed. We all broght in our 110 pound weight sets and a few 25's, and carried the weights and equipment straight up the wall ladder rungs to the weight lifting loft next to the stage. It was a great place to work out - and a great group of guys to lift with. I really liked high school.

**Calories Burned / 60 minutes - 175 pounds**
Accordian Playing	143	...	Competitive Soccer	794
Lawn Darts	198		Skiing or ice skating	556
Surfing	238		Aerobics	516
Ping Pong	318		Shoveling snow	476
Irish Step Dancing	357		Weight Lifting	457
			Walking - 15 min. miles	397

September 2007 at the Xenia Strongman -
Back again for the fall contest in Xenia, this time in the new 50 plus "Masters Major League" class. So I guess I am getting old, and as in all my competitions I was the oldest guy there. I was in a contest in May and another masters-only contest in July, but really did not get to train much for either.
We finally had time to do some training and I got back up to the 230 pound stone at this September contest and got 255 in practice. Deadlift is stuck at 400 off the blocks, but I did get 345 off the floor on June 9th when I turned 55.
In the 50+ class I only had 150 pounds on the new X-carry, but I was able to hustle for 285 feet in the 60 second time limit.
If I can continue to train consistently I will probably still get new max weights on the stones and deadlifts. The real goal is to still be able to do these weights five years from now.

There were still more treasures to be found at Timmy's. After looking over the old Saint James equipment, we walked around the rest of the farm where several old wrecked trucks were filled with more scrap metal. That's when I came upon my old original home gym. I remember having this rack set up around 1982. Apparently when I moved out of that place I brought it to Timmy's.
I built this when I was 15 and just starting to lift weights. Like everything else in our basement, including the original bench, it was made with uni-strut steel channels. My father worked at the Mobil refinery where they used a lot of this and scrapped it for a penny a pound.
The struts bolted directly into the concrete floor of out basement and into the joist above. the ceiling height was only about 5'-10". The leg press is 1" iron pipe inside 1-1/4" iron pipe. The short horizontal pipe welded to the top is split in half and hinged so the bar could be lifted out for squats, etc. The original valve springs are still in the bottom of the 1-1/4" pipe. A lat machine was a single pully bolted between 2 joists.
A padded slant board went directly under the bar and you had to push straight up. I think I used to push over 250 on this and there is no cheating. It was not a "relative" weight like a modern leg sled. I remember being dizzy when I stood up, from all the blood rushing to my head during the vertical leg press.
Looking back I guess I was quite industrious for a teenager. I stilll like to make things, and I still like to lift.