The Dow Dominion

As much as I am interested in fitness-related information and material, I realize that there are people that can offer much more reliable and original information on the science behind working out, nutrition and other fitness topics than I am willing or able.  Thus, I have decided to turn my fitness blog into a gardening blog.  While I admit there are already a ton of experts with way more information about gardening than myself, I feel there is much more room for experimentation with gardening, allowing me to deliver original, engaging content without having to know the in's and out's of the scientific research ,or rip off someone else's content. So, without further ado, I present the new blog of nate2d.blogspot.com:  Asheville Amatuer Gardening .  My goal for this blog will be to help myself and others understand how to grow vegetables and fruit that yield the maximum amount of food possible per plant, to outline strategies that are simple, effective and cheap to grow

February is drawing to a close, and that means a lot of people are preparing to start leaning down as temperature increases.  I, on the other hand, have decided to bulk up as much as I can before July, which is three months before my wedding to my wonderful fiancee.  At that point, I will have 12 weeks to lean down, but for now my goal is to gain as much strength (and lean mass, hopefully) as possible. Since I haven't updated my workout routine on the blog since I was doing body weight circuits, I figured it was time that I laid it all out on the table for others to read about. Previously, I had trained at a commercial gym with loads of equipment and during that time I managed to get fairly strong.  However, my form on most exercises was atrocious and I didn't really understand how my training was affecting my body... other than the basic "train, eat, sleep, grow" philosophy.  After a long break from training, I decided to restart from the ground up, training as

It's been quite a while since my last update on this blog, and my training has progressed past the body weight program I was doing back then.  My fianceé bought me a barbell weight set for my birthday back in November, and I been researching the subject of resistance training as much as possible ever since then.  Today, I am going to share some of the most important findings of my research on resistance training.  It may be a bit long-winded, but I promise it'll be worth the read.  So without further ado...   • Use compound lifts Compound lifts are the best choice for beginners, and usually even more advanced trainees.  They are exercises that use the largest muscle groups simultaneously, which induce the greatest training effect from weight lifting.  Whether the goal is muscle gain or fat loss, compound lifts are the "go-to" exercises that should be the foundation of the routine.  Isolation lifts--exercises that target a specific muscle--have their place, but a w