Expert Profile: Geoff Girvitz
Reading about Type A, high-achievement folks can be inspiring. Successful people have all kinds of tips and tricks for keeping one’s life organized and running smoothly. But sometimes, as a reader, you wonder: Do they really get up at 4 am, make healthy sandwiches for hungry children, save the world’s problems, give a violin concerto, and then climb Mount Everest before turning in? Well, maybe they do. (Note to self: Buy climbing shoes, sprouted bread, and a better day planner.)
But what if that lifestyle doesn’t suit you perfectly? What if you like to sleep in a little and eat a cookie now and then? Can you still be fit and healthy… or even help others get fit and healthy?
Geoff Girvitz runs Bang Fitness, a private strength and conditioning studio in Toronto. In his record of his average day, he serves up his achievements and his very successful advice… along with a generous helping of average-guy realism.
A day in the life
8:00 Wake up, decide to sleep for another 15.
8:15 Confirm that stolen sleep is the very best kind, get out of bed and down about a litre of water.
You’re probably wondering why, as a fitness guy, I’m not up at the crack of dawn. There are certainly many typical fitness guy things that I do. However, getting up early isn’t one of them. Wearing microfibre isn’t on the list either.
8:25 Make a breakfast smoothie with whey protein, creatine, peanut butter, yogurt, mixed berries and some psyllium husk. I take some greens and fish oil first so the taste of my smoothie remains unsullied. I down half of what I’ve made and stick the rest in the fridge.
8:45 Make a list of what I want to get done today. Temper it with the stuff I didn’t get done yesterday and the things I want to get done before I die.
Today’s list, in addition to the standard e-mail stuff, includes writing a new program for one of our professional fighters; continuing to work on a new set of assessment protocols for our trainers; taking a look at the nutrition logs for a couple of clients and reviewing applicants for a combat athlete scholarship program we’re offering.
There’s more to do, but I’ve learned to be realistic about what’s actually going to get done. Sadly, some boring administrative stuff bumps more creative endeavours from the list.
I need some music to replace the insipid song with which I woke up. I eschew my go-to soul tracks for a Nine Inch Nails MP3. I feel sufficiently pumped up to go ahead and write some totally bad-ass e-mails.
8:55 E-mails ensue. The heavens weep.
9:15 Remember that I was too lazy to cook last night and throw some beef in a bowl to marinate (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, dried chili and black pepper).
9:00 Work on assessment protocols.
Our trainers all have their own approach to assessing posture and movement, but I want to have a standardized template. This will, at the very least, facilitate some good discussions within the group. I still like to use as many standard movements as possible. As trainers, these are the things we spent the greatest amount of time examining and correcting; it’s only natural that this is where a critical eye will be best utilized. I’ve been kind of fixated on transverse plane hip movement lately (i.e. the breaking down of symmetry through different parts of the squat) and focus on this.
9:30 Stir-fry that beef.
I remember to e-mail our nutritionist, Kyle Byron, about a couple of shared clients, as well as my own eating (I’m working off of his template now and finding it easier than expected).
9:40 Back to assessment stuff.
I find that I’m mentally drifting a bit, so I finish up what I’m doing, downing the remains of my breakfast smoothie as I do so.
I’m not quite ADD, but staying focused can be a bit of a challenge for me. If I have tasks that involve creative thinking, I try to get those done in the morning, when I’m still fresh and rested. Things have gone well, but it’s time to occupy my brain with something different (and ideally easy).
10:00 Rinse the blender so it doesn’t become a tower of caked-on gunk. Make some oatmeal with some protein, raspberries and milk added. This is all done while watching South Park.
10:30 Bike down to Bang Fitness (where I do that stuff I do). I live close and this makes life far easier.
10:45 Five minutes of mobility work (not happy with hip flexor tightness) followed by me jotting down a few vestigial ideas for future articles, including a rant about the over-use of tire flips et al. for general conditioning (in my opinion, over-done).
Geoff working with a client. The gym floor is Astroturf!
11:00-ish I manage to get our books up to date before getting distracted by a discussion on television themes with Steve, one of our trainers. I call up videos of the collected works of Mike Post and Jan Hammer. I then get roped into helping my Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach, Mark Stables of MECCA MMA, do some stuff in Photoshop. If you think I’m merely a fitness geek, you’re wrong. I’m all kinds of geek.
I’d like to tell you that every moment of my day is a juggernaut of productivity, but the truth is that all sorts of things mess with the process. Budgeting an hour or two for lost time – either by my own folly or that of others — is pretty much mandatory.
Salad with marinated beef
12:00 Eat a whole bunch of mixed greens (broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, mushrooms and sundried tomatoes with olive oil) and some of my beef. I won’t be winning any culinary awards soon, but it’s not bad. Remind myself to try to get out to the hippie market (aka the fantastic farmer’s market that just happens to be frequented by hippies and their arrhythmic drumming) on Thursday, where I can buy some organic produce, including meat, eggs, cheese and chocolate. Yes, chocolate. You heard me.
12:30 First client of the day. Coming back after a vacation sandwiched between two business trips. His nutrition has been more on than off, but his conditioning has definitely suffered. We concentrate on mobility work and proper movement patterns. This is challenging enough for today, so I dump the energy system training I had planned for and serve up more low-intensity work.
1:30 Work on a program for one of our fighters. Victor is coming back from a canceled fight (his opponent was injured) and now we have to re-evaluate where we are in relation to his long-term gameplan. Since he’s far more rested than he really needs to be, we can get back to developing a sturdier base and the types of attributes that will help facilitate his next set of technical training goals.
1:50 Suprisingly hungry, I scarf down a handful of nuts and carrots. I’m ready to go to work on my beef and salad when a friend/colleague comes by. He wants to talk business and eat, so we head to a local restaurant.
I frequently tell people who travel a lot for business that pretty much any restaurant will throw some chicken on a garden salad for you — whether it’s on the menu or not. I take my own advice and eat some relatively healthy restaurant food (all things considered) and learn a little more about Google. I forget to take my scheduled creatine. Kyle will bust my balls about this, but — for the moment — life goes on.
2:30 Review applicants for our scholarship program for combat athletes. There are a few people who are actually willing to relocate to Toronto for the duration of the program. That’s pretty cool. Discuss options with a couple of our trainers. Get onto a side-discussion of upcoming classes. Pick some times and force myself to stop over-intellectualizing things and get on with my day.
3:00 Review some stuff on spinal health from Stuart McGill. Poke around on Mike Boyle’s site, www.strengthcoach.com, to see what’s cooking. Read the latest on core muscle activation through various exercises and gather up some ideas for program design. I buy an overpriced cup of caffeine and a cookie from an indie coffee joint around the corner. I drink the espresso and save the cookie (plenty of sugar, but no corn syrup, in case you’re wondering).
3:30 Time to work out. I hit the foam roller for some soft tissue work, target my glutes and back extensors for muscle activation, do some mobility work with a focus on ankles, hips and shoulders. After sipping some BCAAs, it’s time for Olympic lifts, starting with a light bar.
One of the things I love about the O-lifts is how honest they keep you. I’m on my way to a new personal best. I feel good. I’m throwing more and more weight on and getting ready to feel like a champ. And then I fail my lift. Repeatedly. I’m starting well, but really struggling to get under the bar. I realize that I’ve been fudging my movements and actually lifting the bar higher than I’ve needed to. My timing in getting down into position is delayed. Back to the drawing board for movement patterning. I am caught between feeling frustrated and loving the fact that adding weight is basically like truth serum.
I drain more of my BCAAs (in orange juice) and work on some lateral step-ups, superset with barbell roll-outs and then glute bridges superset with a plank to side-bridge transition. I down some the rest of my BCAAs, and then do a shot of protein with creatine in there. Oh yeah, and I eat my cookie (it’s double-chocolate, FYI).
4:30 My 4:30 client is a swimmer getting ready for a competition (400 metre). He’s been a recreational athlete for several years, but has decided that he wants to step things up. We’ve been working on increasing his strength base from the core to the extreme ends of his movements with a whole lot of reminding him to integrate this stuff into his in-pool work. So far so good. He was fatigued and showing decreased power when we came in, so we ditched plan A (maximal strength work) and focused on strength endurance and core stability. He left in good spirits and with some homework to do in terms of benchmarking his times.
5:30 Time to train Alaina Hardie, one of our sponsored athletes. Alaina’s getting ready for her first stab at the Abu Dhabi Fighting Championship, the world’s preeminent submission grappling competition. To make weight, she’s on a pretty rigorous schedule. John Berardi (you know, that nutrition guy) has been overseeing her eating, leaving me to focus on her strength and conditioning. she’s dropped over eight pounds in the past three weeks (and two days) with an apparent increase in lean muscle mass. She’s also making some excellent gains in terms of strength that I have seen (and felt) transition to her on-the-mat abilities. She’s got some hip tightness that is messing with our game a bit, so we ditch the lower body stuff and schedule her with a massage therapist. For someone as driven as Alaina, any kind of deviation from full-speed is frustrating, but there’s so much work to do at any given time, that we have to treat limitations as an opportunity to focus on other things.
You’ve probably noticed that I have to re-jig workouts pretty often. That’s life. Having a gameplan is essential if — for no other reason — to be clear on what Plan B should be. That’s why I always have my priorities for a client laid out on the sheet. Power development, for example, may be Plan A, but people often come in fatigued enough to negate the value of focusing a workout around it. It’s essential to be clear on how we can get the most out of our time. Occasionally, it even comes down to pure discussion and mental organization. Whatever works.
6:30 I’m starving and have another client in. I wolf down half a meal (this one is salmon, asparagus, salad with olive oil and some quinoa). My client knows what soft tissue work to do, so I leave him to it. The food is good, but I only get through half of it (and way too fast to boot). I wander over, eating my dessert pear early as Joe starts up his mobility work. Joe is someone I met at a friend’s birthday while he was drunk. After some mutually ridiculous/offensive back and forth, he found out what I did and asked me if I would, “save his life.” He was overweight, smoking and drinking excessively. He’s down below 200 for the first time since university, off the cancer sticks and drinking minimally. His exercise habits are good, but his day-to-day nutrition still needs a lot of cleaning up. Joe and I would have never, ever, ever hung out in university. Yet we get along famously now that we’re older. It’s a funny world.
Our workout is good, but Joe still has some work to do on the lifestyle front. The lack of planning exhibited by talented professionals who manage teams and basically organize for a living never fails to amaze me. I often ask them to visualize coaching a colleague who had to get the same group of tasks done. My anti-pep talk at the end went like this: “So you pretty much know most days will involve a last-minute dash toward whatever kind of lunch you can get your hands on. This no longer constitutes a surprise. Buy your shit on the way home, cook it fast, stick it in containers and tell me about how great you’ve been doing when I see you on Thursday. Don’t be a baby.” We’ll see how he does.
Some people's workplaces have annoying coworkers to distract them. I have people throwing each other on the floor.
7:40 Done. Officially, anyway. Our gym shares space with an MMA club, meaning that my hobby is about three feet away from where I work. This could, in theory be a bad thing, but it’s not. I finish my dinner watching a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class. I take a few minutes to digest and then get changed, catching the tail end of the class, catching the tail end of drilling techniques.
When this ends, I can see who’s already tired and who’s itching to roll (aka spar). I’m one of the latter, and I partner up with one of our younger guys. Eric is still in university, so he hasn’t had time to focus on jiu jitsu, but having incredible tenacity (he can’t be killed… he can barely be slowed down) and a head for the game have taken him a long way. Having nationally-ranked judo competitors for parents doesn’t hurt either. Eric assures me that — come graduation — he’s going to get more serious about training, extending to strength and conditioning. We’ll wait and see, but there’s no question he can go far.
Eric has more energy than the average bear, so he and I tend to get into epic sparring matches. Tonight’s goes for close to a half-hour. Toward the end, both of us are clearly fatigued, but no one is going to quit. I’m more experienced and heavier, but Eric makes me fight for everything I get. By the time we’re done, everyone else has cleared out. More variety in sparring partners would have been better, but I got some solid work in, nevertheless.
8:30 Down some water and protein. Shower, change and grab some juice from the convenience store downstairs. Remember that soft drink superpowers are pure evil and get mad at myself for not bringing enough juice. Since this is common enough to not count as a surprise, I tell myself not to be a baby and to get on that. And then I bike home.
8:45 There are pears and bananas in our kitchen, but I feel like frozen raspberries for some reason. I throw some in a bowl and let them cool a bit while I cut up part of an avocado. And then I eat all of the above. My roommate and I talk jiu-jitsu. And then we just wind up talking nonsense. We’re perfecting our banter, him and I.
9:10 I have work to do, but the odds of doing it after I get home are slim. Since there’s nothing pressing, I throw Mullholland Drive in my computer (don’t despair for me; a television projector has been ordered) and watch the weirdness unfold. I remember that there is (of course) something pressing, and — not wanting to get up — e-mail it to myself from my Blackberry so that I remember to do it first thing tomorrow.
10:10 I pause the movie to grab my uneaten lunch. I don’t have enough beef left over for all of tomorrow’s meals, so I throw some chicken in a marinade. This one is beer-based, but not so much so that I don’t have half a bottle to bring back to the movie. In case you’re curious, it’s Big Rock Ale from Alberta (I’m originally from Calgary). As luck has it, one of the few things I miss is portable. The Rocky Mountains, sadly, are not.
I remember to throw some laundry in the washing machine and then I eat and watch my movie. Everything else can wait.
11:00 The internet is alluring, no? I try to get to bed by midnight, which means that I’ve learned to ditch all electronic media by 11:00. It’s not always a battle that I win. Like tonight, for example.
I stir-fry my chicken, leave it to cool and hang my laundry. Then I return to the kitchen just long enough to throw everything I need into containers and toss the wok into the sink.
I’ve recently realized that the menial tasks that I tend to put off can be made oh so much more bearable with some entertainment playing in the background. I bring the laptop upstairs and start putting away the large pile of clean clothing (mostly T-shirts) that has exploded beyond the top of my laundry basket. In the process, I note about five books lying around. The David Sedaris book gets put away, the explosive lifting book gets perused. Mindless Eating gets put away, but Eats, Shoots & Leaves does not. The other one is academic and dirty at the same time. It’s also none of your beeswax. It gets shoved to the side, but not shelved.
11:30 I’ve probably done more perusing than tidying, but things are bearable. I shut off the computer despite the fact that the movie is still not over (it’s ok, I’ve seen it) and crawl into bed with Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I’m delighted with the author’s passion for punctuation. When I notice I’ve read the same paragraph three times, however, it’s clear that my day is over. My room is completely dark and all but silent. That makes for some good sleeping.
