60 to Sexy

The next 60 days are going to be awesome.

Many of you are new, many of you are veterans of our little group. For those who have done this before: welcome back, and I hope you’ll get as much out of it this time as you have before. For those of you who are new to our program: I hope you’re able to make the kind of progress that will help cement new habits in your fitness life.

Each of you has something to offer everyone else here: experience, motivation, support, a challenge - it’s why we succeed better together than separately. Each of us has personal goals - both realistic and…less so - for what we’ll get out of this, but ideally you’ll see this season as a springboard to making new goals.

For the next 60 days we will help keep each other honest. We will help advise and motivate each other. We will celebrate the victories and spur each other on past the defeats. We will be honest with ourselves and with each other, and with a little luck and some hard work we will each find ourselves better at the end of the program than we were at the beginning. None of us is going to become a bodybuilder or a supermodel in 60 days, but it’s certainly enough time to see a significant difference.

By way of introduction, I’m Barrett Garese; along with Rudy Jahchan, I sort of run this thing. I’m three years into my personal fitness project(s) and progressions, and I’m proud to be able to say that I’ve come a long way in those three years. Like everyone else, at times I’ve stumbled in both willpower and hubris, but my overall progress has continued to move in the right direction.

My goals this year are twofold: recover the consistency in working out that I’ve lost over the past three months, and to work on improving my overall diet. As someone who loves food, beer, wine, coffee, and dessert, eating healthy can often feel like I’m going against my instincts. I have a huge sweet tooth and a penchant for seconds. In fact, I would say that my diet is the number one thing holding me back from achieving my overall fitness goals. I’m taking this 60 day period to really consider what I eat and how I work out. It’s a different sort of goal than I’ve had in the past, but I’ve often found that those goals of lifting X number of pounds or reaching Y body composition has led to me pushing myself to the point of injury (wrist, shoulder, ankle, herniated spinal disc, etc.)

So this time around, my goal is just to get back in the groove, fix what I know needs fixing, and focus on overall improvement. I’ll be posting blog entries and articles here and there about food, diet, etc. for the group, and of course logging my workouts in fitocracy. If anyone has any specific questions I’d be happy to answer them as well. If you’re not already where you’d like to be in terms of body fat percentage and/or body type, I’d highly recommend spending a couple days tracking everything you eat on fitday.com - you’d be surprised how much insight can be gleamed from that 30,000 foot view of your diet.

So in closing, welcome to the new season. I’d encourage everyone to introduce yourselves and let us know what your goals will be. Also, make sure to officially join the season 6 challenge in our fitocracy group if you haven’t already (email me if you need an invite.) We’ve got just over two months on this particular road, and I’m hoping this will be the first season with zero dropouts. As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, or concerns, or just ask the group.

You’ve got 60 days to make yourself proud - let’s see what you do with it.