Quest Engine

Kevin Eubanks is the band leader on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I've only been on this board a short while, but a forum search only turned up his name once. He's lacto-ovo-pesco vegetarian, no not vegan, but he also huge. They used to do a skit on the Tonight Show call "Black Jack" and he'd be in a tank top or vest and you could see how big his arms were. Here's some more info: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/spotlighthealth/2002-11-04-eubanks-meatless_x.htm I used to watch the Tonight Show all the time in college, but got out of the habit after that. I tuned in again last night, and was reminded of this again, and thought I'd share it with anyone who might not know. He'd make an awesome interview for the site.

We have two produce stands in our town and the wife an I love going there. The first reason is the food is _at least_ 50% cheaper than what you'd get at a grocery store, that's an obvious advantage. But another nice thing is that the fruits and veggies aren't "grocery store perfect". You know when you're in food lion, and every apple is covered in shiny wax, and there's not any imperfections in the peel? Well its not that way at the produce stand. Some of the apples have small cuts or tiny bruises or show signs the there might have been, at one time, a real insect on the surface of it. I don't know if that sounds gross, but I mean that the apples (and other stuff), looks natural. I'd probably rather eat an insect than eat insect killing poison, I guess. Anyway, the place is like an old general store with wood floors, and no frills whatsoever. Its like reconnecting with a part of the past, getting great fruits and veggies, and saving a pile of money doing it. If you still get all your produce from the ultra-sterile supermarket, I'd encourage you to find a "mom and pop" produce stand in your area. They don't look like much, but its a great way to save some money and get some good food.

Yeah, this is true, but a fruit is the reproductive organ of the plant it came from. My 9th grade biology teacher, used to love to get us riled up by telling us that every time we eat a banana or an apple that we're eating the tree's ovaries. You can make anything "seem" gross or unappealing. I eat veggies because they're healthy, not because they are (or are not) any part of any reproductive system. Little known fact: most veggies are grown right out of the dirt on the ground! Yes, the very mud you rake off you feet is the birth place, the womb if you will, of your carrots and tomatoes. Nasty, I know.

My wife and I use our credit card almost exclusively. I hardly ever carry cash anymore except an "emergency $20" tucked in the back of the wallet. We don't carry a balance. We pay the credit card off every month!! We've never paid once cent of interest. There were a few times we were a day or so late with the CC payment due to some oversight, like 3-4 times in 6 years, and we just called an asked nicely, and they removed the $29 fine. If you've got credit card debt, I know the "pay it off every month" advice is useless, but for young folks who are thinking about getting credit cards, they are super convienient. I can't imagine having to walk into the service station to pay for gas with cash, especially if you've got little one's in car seats.. are you going to leave them alone in the car, nope, you'd have to drag them out of the car and into the store, ugh! Now just because you've got a $3K limit on the card, doesn't mean that all of a sudden you can afford that HDTV, that'll put you in debt, that would suck. We have a General Motors Mastercard, so when we bought our new vehicle last september, we cashed in $3200 in credit we'd built up on the card in the last 6 years (5% of purchases go to the cost of a new GM vehicle). Yup, I had the credit card company paying me. That rocks! But I know its tempting: The first credit card bill we got, we'd spend like $900 that month, and they only wanted to pay back $20. Yikes, that a really easy way to get into a bad situation.

I took a fencing class in college and one trick we used there went like this: When you do the "butterfly" (soles of feet together, pull heels to crotch), we were told to grab our ankles and push down on our knees with elbows. Then, while keeping your knees at the same position with downward force from your elbows, try and lift you knees up. So you're sitting there stretched out, pusing down with your elbows, and up with your knees and THEN, you STOP pushing up with your knees, and keep pushing with your elbows, and you'll get your knees closer to the floor. Its weird how you can fool you body to thinking its not stretched enough. There was a similar thing where you touch your toes, with your knees very slightly bent, and then instead of stretching farther, you just attempt to straighten out your knees to increase the intensity of the stretch. These had a cool scientific sounding name, and out fencing teacher had trained olympic fencers so I figured he knew what he was talking about. @Daywalker You said stretch "as often as possible". Do you mean that recovery time is not as big a deal as it is for muscle building? Can you stretch intensely every day or even twice a day?

Good thing we've got a resident Ninja here to feild questions like this! I wonder if anyone's done any serious stretching/flexibility training. I'm talking the crazy VanDamme stuff where you're doing a split with each of your feet on a chair and you're whole body is suspended between them. Yeah, the hardcore stuff. I know you don't bounce when you stretch, but what about training frequency, recovery time, and any special diet considerations. When I Googled this, I read that even when training to do a split, only stretch one leg at a time, so that you can get the most blood flowing to that leg, rather than stretching both at once and creating stress in both legs. But this is all I really found. Has anyone got any personal experience to share or a good link. Also, does anyone have any idea how quickly you can make progress training flexibility?

I never trust those mileage/calorie readouts on stationary bikes and treadmills. When we were members of the gym, we could do 20 miles on those bikes in about the same time it would have taken use to do just 2 miles on our bike at home. Mabey those gym operators pump up the stats to make you feel like you've really worked out hard.

>>How many hours a week do you devote to working out? Probably less than 3, but with the warm weather, comes biking season and that will will likely double >>What percentage of that time do you allocate to strength? cardio? stretching? Strength and cardio get equal time when its warm enough to get outside on the bike. >>Which type of workout do you like best? Any particular exercise or routine you like best? I love doing dumbell curls, but my biceps are never as big as most other guys, I blame it on genetics. On the contrary, I'm genetically blessed to have better pecs than most guys, so that's pretty cool. >>Do you like working out alone or with others? Alone. Too busy to meet/coordinate with others most of the time. >>When you get in a slump, how do you motivate yourself or do just apply sheer discipline to continue? I tell myself that I only have to do one rep. I'll just go downstairs and do one rep, and then I can quit for the night. Of course, that's what it takes to get over the hump, and I get a good complete workout out of it. If you think "I've got to go spend an hour in the gym", you'll never go. If you think, "I've only got to do one rep", you'll realize than anyone, no matter how lazy or busy, can spare 30 seconds to pick up the dumbells and do one rep. And as soon as you've done 1, might as well do 7 more as long as you're there.

Welcome theomen, You need to get a Vegan Bodybuilding and Fitness shirt. A Vegan lable on a physique like yours (from what I can tell from your avatar) is sure to send a good message.

Hi VirgoKitten, It won't be as hard as you might be expecting. You'll quickly find out how easy it is to do without eggs and dairy.

To accomodate a wife, 3 kids and 2 jobs, I've had to create a pretty flexible workout schedule. There's a million things to worry about to make the most efficient progress lifting weights: morning or evening workouts, eating before or after, training certain muscle groups on certain days, etc. When I try to stick to any of these restrictive theories, it just gets in the way of what's important... exercise! So've I've quit worrying about all the fine-tuning, and concentrated on just moving the iron. I can't plan to do certain exercises, certain days, because I never know if I'll have free time on those days, and then missing a day feels like failure. And in the past, the more closely I stick, to a routine, the more quickly I get bored with it. So here's what I do: I don't plan days or exercises, I just do what I can, when I can, and I summarise the result after every 10 workouts. I don't work out in 2 or 4 week blocks or 30/60 day blocks. I do 10 workouts, and try my best to take only one day off between workouts. For example, last session my 10 workouts took 23 days. So most times I did have just one day off, but a few times I had a 2 day break. It doesnt' matter when or why they happened. I never had to to squeeze another workout in by the end of the week or month, I just did what I had to do to get 10 workouts and then reviewed my results at the end of the session. Same thing with exercises. In my log book, I have about 9 different exercises that I might do, but I normally only do 5 or 6 per workout. I can pick and choose whatever I want, rather than feeling forced to do my not-so-favorite exercises every single time. I do curls and tricep press every time because I like them. But I probably only do rows and lat raises every other time. I track workout intensity by the number of sets I do. I keep workouts to 30-35 minutes (don't have too much time you know), and recently I've been able to get 15-18 sets done in that time. And I'm not too rigid in what constitues a set either. Anything over 8 reps is a set, some sets go to 14 or 16 though. The whole point of the thing is to not let the details get in the way of what really matters. The more rules, restrictions and peculiarities that work their way into a routine, the more likely I am to abandon the routine. I'll probably not see progress as quickly as someone who trains more religiously and tracks the more intimate details of their workouts. But for me that's not realistic. If I worry about all those bits and pieces I'd never get anything done. So that's what works for me. I'm curious to know what everyone else does to work around spouses, kids and jobs. How much effort to you go to record every rep, set, and weight used in a workout?

@finbarrio I'm really looking forward to the weight loss thing. I'm 210 at 6ft. Which isn't fat, but 36in pants fit me a lot better than 34's. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no reason I can't eventually fit a 32. I weighed feb 8, when I went vegan. I'm not weighing again until March 8. I actually started this vegan thing as a 30 day trial, thinking I might switch back if I was unsatisfied, it was just an experiment. But it made so much sense, and wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be, that I'm already preparing to keep it going. @sinisterkungfu Lexington, near Greensboro and Winston-Salem @Daywalker More of a fan of solitude than of Superman really. I lean toward the Marvel side of the super hero universe.

@kollison I know sodium causes you to retain water, but that's why I ask, mabey if you take in tremendous amounts of water, the sodium is flushed out more quickly, and there's practically no negative effect. I'm not personally worried about a high sodium diet, I'm just curious about how the body handles the chemistry of the whole thing.

Hey, what timing. After riding my wife's 15 year old rigid 10-speed (girly purple, of course) for the past 2 summers. I'm finally going to get a new mtn bike this week. Welcome, I'll be surfing your site soon I'm sure.

Thanks for the warm welcome. Giving up dairy got more challenging this weekend as we've had 2 birthday parties in the past 2 weeks, and I've not had any birthday cake at either one. It's getting to be time for me to explore some soy milk and vegan pastry options. I'll be checking the recipie boards this week. What's got me thru so far is learning that one of our southern culture delicacies are actually vegan: http://www.moonpie.com. As for my programming, I was did C++ in college http://www.unc.edu, but my 8-5 has me doing mostly VB. I also do some web development, and am pretty comfortable with PHP, so mabey I can help Robert get something done for the site sometime. I also programmed my own video game and I sell it here http://www.questengine.com. I'm a huge video game fan, and actually making one, was a huge life-long dream. It takes genetics (and probably drugs) to be Mr. Olympia big, but it only takes time and effort to make a video game!