Scott McLaughlin

191.2 weigh in on Friday. My new goal is 182. I think its gonna be a little harder to get to that one, but I’m working at it. It’ll be really great to break 190 though. Last night was our monthly Dinner Club and of course the automated system drew Ruth Chris, so the diet was definitely off. LOL. Dinner was fantastic, albeit expensive but I don’t mind blowing the diet once a month for the club and having a good time and enjoying good food.

Several people have asked me what I do for my workout routine, so I figured in todays post I’d write up some stuff on that and tell those people to come out and read it! Hope you enjoy the read and find it useful.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that a lot of benefit in losing weight and working out comes from not being repetitive. This is the main reason I didn’t buy a machine for home (I debated that for awhile). You really need to mix it up when working cardio or the body falls into a routine. Imagine your body doing the same thing everyday, at some point it says to itself “What the hell, this is just the norm, so I’m gonna relax and run the motions”. The key to losing weight on cardio is to get your heart rate up and keep it there (not to high!). When you workout on the same machine every time eventually you’ll never get the heart rate up as fast as you should or even high enough at all.

So based on that, I have 4 machines at the Gym i really like and think I do well with that are cardio based. The elliptical , stair-master, rowing machine and the upright bike. (I don’t prefer treadmills, for some reason unless i go to a full run I can’t get my heart rate up on them, and if I’m gonna run, i’m gonna enjoy it by doing it on the elliptical). I’ve had a motto for a long time and that is “I only run when the cops are chasing me.” My favorite 2 machines are that elliptical and the rowing machine, i can crank on those.

I also have several different weight machines I like. Lately I’ve mostly been working my abs (burn that gut!), legs and chest press which hits upper arms and chest muscles.

Basically when I arrive I pick a machine out of my 4 (randomly) and use it to get my heart rate up to 140+ (I try to keep my heart rate between 140-150 when doing cardio, your mileage varies, so figure it out or ask a trainer in your Gym what it should be).

Getting my heart rate up takes 8-12 minutes depending on the machine I’m on and how hard I work it. Once I hit that rate, I then finish up the machine I’m on by doing 15-20 minutes on it. (remember when doing cardio, the time used to get your heart rate up doesn’t count! So if you do 20 minutes but it took 10 to get your heart rate up, you only did 10 minutes).

After that I pick another cardio machine and hit it for 10-15 minutes. I then move over to weight machines and work on the leg press (now doing 160ish pounds with both legs and 90ish per individual leg). On the leg presses I do 3 sets of 10. One set is 10 with both legs, 10 with just right leg and then 10 with just left leg. Rinse repeat for 3 sets. Since I’m working on Abs I then move over to the “Crunch” Ab machine. Basically it allows you to do sit ups while sitting vertically with banded weights. I run that at about 60 pounds (ouch on the abs) and do 15, pause for 10 seconds and do another 15. I then usually fall over. Lastly I’ll hit the chest press machine and do 3 sets of 10 on it as well (I don’t remember ATM what weight i’m using on that)

Lastly as my cool down/final cardio I’ll hit one other machine for 10 minutes or so.

Now to really keep it mixed up sometimes I alternate cardio and weight machines each turn. Just keep it different, try new things and make sure to keep the heart rate up when doing cardio.

I’m sure there’s trainers out there who will read this and say “you are totally full of crap” but I’ve built all of this off of knowledge gained from mine and my wife’s trainers, as well as personal experience and research online. And hey between my wife and I almost 80 pounds in 2.5 months…argue with me now bitch! LOL

Well thats it, your mileage will vary and if I can give you one word of advice…switch it up! Don’t do the same thing all the time, you aren’t doing yourself justice and are wasting a lot of hard cycles on not burning weight.

Recently I was reading that Sony has announced the ability to buy or rent HD movies via your Playstation 3. Hey that seems pretty cool. Especially because the prices to buy are $9.99 – $14.99. Holy shit thats way cheaper then a stinking $39.99 blu-ray disc. Especially for movies I don’t really like enough to own on blu-ray for the price or lame special features it might have.

Then I started thinking…well I guess the 40GB drive in my PS3 suddenly seemed inadequate or would be in a short order of time. So I ventured into the world of upgrading my PS3 hard drive. Now lots of people have done this successfully but most people did it on older units and older firmware. So I figured I’d write up my experience here since I have a fairly new unit on the latest firmware release.

For starters you need a drive. First off I research the type of drive, it requires a SATA 3.0GB interface drive, standard IDE drives won’t work. Secondly it appears that the PS3 will accept any size up to 500GB. There aren’t any available bigger then that right now, so who knows what its maximum is.

Thirdly I looked into speed. There’s a lot of work people have already done to determine if 7200 RPM is any better or workable then the 5400 RPM that comes in the PS3. Apart from about a 2s faster boot time there’s no advantage to the 7200 RPM, a bit more heat but nothing the PS3 can’t handle. I was unable to find any 7200 RPM 500GB laptop drives made by a manufacturer that I trust that were actually in stock. On top of that they were almost 30% more cost. Since there’s no real upside to the 7200 i said screw it, stuck with my favorite drive manufacturer Hitatchi and picked up a 320GB 5400 RPM drive.

Some words of advice. This drive change completely wipes out the PS3 and everything on it. It comes up stupid as bag of hammers and wants you to reload the OS from an external source (USB drives work awesome). So plan on a bit of work to recover. The PS3 can be backed up to USB memory cards/drives and so can your saved games, so do that step. Also plan on having to re-download from the Sony Store anything you previously downloaded, including games, add-ons, demos, videos, etc…

My drive arrived and with much excitement and the kids out of my hair (down at grandmas) i dove into the Pain. I used this set of instructions which for the latest PS3 on the newest firmware works perfectly.

I grabbed a 1GB SDMini card and shoved it into my USB fob and backed up the PS3 as well as my saved games. (if you have multiple profiles make sure to get the saved data off those too). I then logged into Sony’s site and found the latest PS3 OS load and put it onto the same SD card. Be SURE to put the Firmware file into the exact directory name listed in the instructions (/PS3/UPDATE). The file is called PS3UPDAT.PUP. (didn’t 8.3 filenames die like 10 years ago?)

I removed the old drive, jammed in the new one and booted it up. I got the big ugly message saying “You suck I have no operating system” press these keys on the controller to format the drive and reload from USB. It also needed the USB Controller cables since it completely forgets where its controllers are.

The format took about 15 minutes, the OS reload took another 5-10. Once the OS was installed, no patching was necessary because the download from Sony was the latest version.

Checking the systems information option in settings, I see that the drive (320GB) formatted out at about 296GB and the OS sucked that down to about 285GB free. Kick ass.

The unit comes up in default mode, so after restoring your backup and saved game files you have to do some tweaking. I then re-setup my Sony online profile, logged in and sucked down the previously downloaded items I have (which was only a couple).

Lastly, now that I’m up and working I figured lets check out the online store for movies! To my suprise there was over 50 HD movies (some are SD which is 720p) but thats okay. There was a crap load of additional stuff not in HD. Including tons of TV series, documentaries, films, etc…

I hadn’t watched “Meet the Spartans” all the way through and what I had watched was hilarious so i figured that’d be my test movie. It was available for rent at $4.99 or purchase at $14.99 and was the Unrated version… So I just bought it (I haven’t tried out rental yet, but I will and post my results). The download was 1.6GB and took about 20 minutes on my 8Meg cable modem. It was peg’d.

The movie shows up in the Video menu option ready to play. I’m watching it now in 1080 and its fabulous.

So do it now, you know you want to.

Well off to camping! But my work change was announced this morning, so I figured I’d drop that out here since I won’t be updating whilst on vacation.

I was recently promoted to Director Infrastructure Operations for New Edge Networks, reporting to the Earthlink CIO. Seems like a pretty sweet position although there’s a ton of work to be done on the data and reporting side of the house. I’m now over Systems Engineering, Database Administration, Data Reporting and Client Support Services.

Anyway we’ll see how it goes and who can turn down more money and new opportunities right?

Have a great weekend, I’ll have plenty of pictures of our weekend when I get back I’m sure.

And any of you criminals who read my blog don’t worry about hitting my house, its now under video surveillance, new alarm system and a few other surprises I ain’t gonna mention here. Oh and all 5 of my neighbors know I’m gone and are watching for moving vans and landscaper trucks. (Ya i watch too much “It takes a Thief”). Anyways, I took everything worth stealing with me on my trip!

Howdy. Well its been awhile since I’ve posted, but have been keeping up on everyone else’s blogs. I’ve just been really lazy, thats all i can say. Had a couple weeks after my surgery where I couldn’t get to the gym, but I still continued to lose weight just a bit slower. The hard part is getting back on the pattern/habit of going to the gym regularly. I got that all ramped back up this week.

I am happy to say I hit 193.8 pounds today, thats 30 pounds of weight loss in about 7 weeks. If I hadn’t missed those 2.5 or so weeks of workouts I’m confident I’d have dropped to 190 or lower, but thats okay, just gotta stay ramped up.

Its hard to miss multiple days in a row and keep motivated. My wife hit an amazing 125 today and is still working with her trainer, she looks and feels great.

Once again changing positions at my job again. This time they came to me rather then me asking for change. It gets announced tomorrow I think so I can’t really mention details here yet, but I’ll be sure to update you all when that happens. I’m pretty excited for it and I think it will be good for the company as well.

Heading out to the in-laws annual family reunion camping trip, should be a fun. The kids love it down there and Ethan and I get to burn around in the mountains on the 4 Wheeler, bhooya! Too bad its not hunting season at the same time…bear opens Aug 1st, is July 16th close enough? Ethan and I are heading to Idaho in August for a week long trip. Probably head up to yellowstone, he’s really into Geysers right now so he’s pretty excited about that. Plus his first airplane ride. Good excuse to buy a Nintendo DS me thinks!

Well time to head to the gym, I like going after 8pm because there’s not many people there, crank on some Jay-Z w/ Linkin Park or Godsmack and hammer the place. My official goal was 192 by mid July which I would have hit if I hadn’t had to take the break, but I’m thinking close enough…time to set a new goal, wonder what that should be?