{"id":7413,"date":"2018-10-15T18:23:24","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T01:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=7413"},"modified":"2018-10-15T11:37:56","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T18:37:56","slug":"guitars-and-workouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/guitars-and-workouts\/","title":{"rendered":"Guitars And Workouts…"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was getting up close to my 45th birthday and pushing 215 pounds… I knew I had to make some changes…<\/p>\n

I used to be an avid cyclist, riding usually close to 200 miles a week, and that kept me down between 175 and 185, but it had been a few years since I’d ridden regularly, and it showed.<\/p>\n

I actually like exercising, and I’d tried a few of the usual gym chains and tried to get into a routine but it really wasn’t working out. I also tried a couple of Crossfit gyms because I liked the idea of combining weight training with endurance training and the variety on a day to day basis.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, after a few shaky starts, I started to get into a groove (which means I found the right coach\/teacher), and can now tell you that not only am I back around 180 or less, I feel better than I have in years… but that’s not really the point (I just didn’t want to leave you hanging with that.)<\/p>\n

You see, one of the main things about Crossfit is that every WOD (Workout Of the Day) is scalable<\/em> – and that’s a really important concept.<\/p>\n

If the workout involves doing 10 bench presses at bodyweight, and you can’t do even 1 at your bodyweight, 2 bad things will happen:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You will fail the workout, and feel like this is too hard and likely quit.<\/li>\n
  2. No matter how hard you try, you won’t get a very good workout or make much progress getting fitter because you won’t actually do anything. Pushing on a bar that’s not going to move isn’t doing much for you in the long run.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    On the other hand, let’s say that you are realistic with yourself and say, “There’s no way I can do that, but maybe I could do 10 at half my body weight?”<\/p>\n

    When you do that, 2 GOOD things will happen:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. You will probably succeed at the workout, and feel better on the other side. That good feeling leads to more workouts and more progress!<\/li>\n
    2. You will get a good workout because you will actually do work. Your muscles will work, go through their range of motion, and you will get your heart rate up and enjoy al of the benefits of your exercise session.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      But… you might think, what if you can’t even do half your body weight?<\/p>\n

      No problem, do an empty bar if you have to, but scale to what is difficult and not impossible.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

      When you play guitar, you can scale what you play in a few different ways:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. If the rhythm figure (strum pattern, riff, etc.) is too hard to you to do while changing chords, just play quarter note down strums on the down beats and worry about changing the chords.<\/li>\n
      2. If the lick is too fast, slow it down. If it’s still too fast, slow it down more. If it’s still too fast, slow it down more (get the idea?)<\/li>\n
      3. If you feel like you can’t count out loud while you play, slow down and put the counting first and make the notes match, not the other way around.<\/li>\n
      4. If playing a full barre chord is too hard, play just the lowest 2 or 3 notes and let your first finger mute the rest of the strings out.<\/li>\n
      5. If there is a certain chord that is too hard, try substituting a similar chord that might sound just as good (E7 in place of E9, for example.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        And there are probably dozens of other little ways you can make certain songs or lessons easier as you need to. Later on, you can scale them up, but you’ll actually improve faster by keeping things reasonable now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        When I was getting up close to my 45th birthday and pushing 215 pounds… I knew I had to make some changes… I used to be an avid cyclist, riding usually close to 200 miles a week, and that kept me down between 175 and 185, but it had been a few years since I’d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7414,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413\/revisions\/7414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}