A New Approach to the Ultimate Hard Body

I’ve lived my own version of the Ultimate Hard Body lifestyle for quite some time now, however I have to be honest and say that this lifestyle is predominately based on doing whatever I want and calling it UHB (Ultimate Hard Body).  Do I want a doughnut right now?  Hell yes, as long as it’s a UHB doughnut.  Do I want to eat three pounds of Thai food before a two-hour Biggest Loser cardio session?  Obviously, eating right before you workout makes you burn double calories, which is quintessential UHB.  I now recognize that this way of doing things will only get a person halfway to the Ultimate Hard Body, and I’m ready to go all the way.

It started back in August, when I met with my friend Niven, who had been working out a lot in the past year.  She told me about this trainer she was seeing, and how she was going to do a fitness competition.  I knew nothing about the world of fitness competitions, but I was intrigued, so I went to see the trainer.  When he asked if I would be competing I said I hadn’t thought about it.  But within a few weeks, I realized that if I was going to spend all this time lifting weights, I wanted to win at it.  My coach told me he could have me ready within a year.  That sounds like a long time, but what you all might not realize, is that I was actually starting out with very tiny muscles, so it made sense.

I’m about three months into this new kind of training, and it’s been pretty interesting.  People keep asking me why I haven’t blogged about it, and I tried to tell them that it was because the blog is called “Running and Then Blogging About It,” and this is NOT running.  But the truth is, this blog was inspired by the dream of attaining the UHB, and so I can’t justifiably omit this aspect of training.  In fact, the original URL of the blog is uhb-etc.blogspot.com, which stands for Ultimate Hard Body, etc.  It turned out to be a terrible URL to tell people about, which is why I’ve changed it.  However, I still have an obligation to blog about all UHB efforts.

The real reason I haven’t been blogging about it, is that I’m used to composing my blog posts during my workouts.  This works with running, and not with weight-lifting.  Especially when I was marathon training, I would literally have hours where I would actively search for things to think about to distract me from running, and my blogging was one of those things.  Getting the UHB in this style, I have to actually think about what I’m doing while I’m doing it, and it doesn’t take very long.  I can get a full workout in within 30-40 minutes, and the whole time is spent shuffling weight plates around and trying to avoid eye contact at the gym.  If you consider all the time it takes to make protein shakes and eat properly, I also have much less time to blog.

So there you have it: what I’m doing with my body now, and why I haven’t told you about it yet.  There’s way more to talk about in this regard, but I’ll break you in easy, and just leave you with a sneak peek at my progress:

If you follow me on instagram (colleenalicia), you’ve already seen this, but let me just re-emphasize how small my muscles were to start.  Really small.  This is like, at least five times their original size.