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Oh bother...
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03-03-2011 3:41pm#1Well, if herself indoors can do this, I guess I can try it as well
So first off, the why and the what:So the belly has to go, that much is a given. It’s putting my balance off and the low cardio fitness isn’t helping either. So a while back I joined the gym in the National Aquatic Centre (it’s on the way to work) and I’ve been trying to get there every morning since. For various reasons, my routine didn’t really take hold until recently, but for the last fortnight or so, I’ve been keeping the routine up reasonably well. It’s a simple enough gym programme – I come in, I stretch the quads a bit until I feel the muscles around the knees straighten out and hear my left hip pop (yeah, it feels as wierd as it sounds…)
then do 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer at 60-70rpm,
Pulse fitness 280G Fusion 'X-Train' elliptical trainer
then sit seiza for a few minutes to let my heartrate come down,
then do a yoga stretch (the cobra, for anyone who’s interested, though I keep my toes pointed forwards and push my hips forward in the stretch to get right at the small of the back) for my back
Author may not look anywhere near as dignified as this while doing this pose...
and some basic warmup stretches from the aikido days.
Yes, you look odd doing this. But it's the best stretch for the hips and quads that I know of.
All told, takes about an hour from walking in the front door to walking out the front door (you have to remember to shower and change or your workmates will kill you…). And here’s the fun bit – all the machines in the gym are rigged with smartcards and sensors (and I wear a heartbeat sensor strap while training) and they collate all the data for you and give you these lovely reports so you can tell if you’ve made progress or not…
(There are odd data points there from the introductory session and two sessions where I forgot the heartrate sensor strap).
It’s a bit clearer over the last month or so:
After the routine finally kicked in, the max heartrate in the sessions has fallen steadily, as has the average heartrate (ie. I’ve increased my cardiovascular fitness).
Who says graphs can’t motivate you?
Yesterday saw a heartrate spike of 200 on the graph (I don't remember seeing it at the time!) and for the first time since the aikido days, I was resting my elbows on the ground during the leg stretches while stretching forward, so that was nice.
Weight remaining static at 267 though, which isn't so encouraging
This is the weight graph from the last five years, all values measured at the same time of day, the same way, the same point in my daily routine:
The low point was while on Atkins (as was the nosedive just before it); the rebound was... well, not fun
As to the goal, I have to buy a new shooting jacket this year.
I have to be at a sensible weight for that to happen - the jackets can't really be adjusted for size as they're made of synthetic material (or canvas for the older ones); so I need a weight and body shape that will let me shoot and won't stop me cooking dishes from the cooking club
I would love to be down around 220lb; I'll settle for the 230-240lb range to buy the jacket (can't buy one now and one later, these things are €600 a pop). So there's basic calorie counting going on at the moment (according to g'em, I can eat 2860 calories a day and lose weight, so I keep a rough eye on what I'm eating (I'm not going nuts on it, I don't keep a food diary for example, but I've kept within that limit for the last week or two easily enough).
The other requirements from the gym are possibly a bit odd - shooting is a sport where balance and fine muscle control is far more important than speed or strength or even endurance. I need good flexibility and could use good cardio fitness for the shooting; I don't need big muscles in the same way that I don't need broken fingers (though g'em tells me I'm being silly and should lift some weights anyways, so that'll wind up in the programme soon enough).
Now, if I can just keep on waking up early enough to get to the gym and keep on avoiding the grande vanilla latte's at work....1
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Naw, it's become a habit, part of the daily routine. And I'm an engineer, we love data. And I ignore daily spikes and look at week-long trends instead (regression/rolling average curves being easy to set up in a spreadsheet). Still, images like this in the weight graph are kindof encouraging0
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Naw, it's become a habit, part of the daily routine. And I'm an engineer, we love data. And I ignore daily spikes and look at week-long trends instead (regression/rolling average curves being easy to set up in a spreadsheet). Still, images like this in the weight graph are kindof encouraging
IMHO weighing yourself every day can be counter productive. I found that there was no better motivation than weighing myself once a week. It smooths out any anomolies that can be caused by hydration levels, bowel movements etc. As a fellow engineer I would agree data is great, but there is nothing worse than a noisy trend chart, it leads to a tendancy to over analyse the data and come up with inaccurate conclusions.
I see in your earlier posts some days you were up by 0.2 of a pound one day, that kind of data point should be ignored I reckon. If I were you I would pick a day, say Monday and use that to plot your chart.
To give you a frame of reference, around 2005 I went from 18stone to 14st 6 in 12 months. I found the weekly weigh ins great motivation.
Anyway tis up to yourself, just though I would throw in my 2c.they/them/theirs
And so on, and so on …. - Slavoj Žižek
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Yup, that's how it gets done. All the data points on the graph going back to 2006 were/are measured in the same clothing - boxers, for those sick folks wonderingbriankeating wrote: »I would say though, if you are going to weigh yourself every day then eliminate as many variable as you can. Pick a time of day, preferably one where you are going to be naked and weigh yourself then. This takes out the variable of clothing and reduces the impact of hydration level. - at the same time in the morning, at the same point in my daily routine when my hydration levels are at approximately the same level (and let's not translate that for the sake of those trying to eat lunch).
I just didn't want to inflict the mental image on everyone
Funny thing is, this isn't me over-analysing. I've seen that. It wasn't prettyI only replyed to this post as I thought you might be over analysing this, but look what I've done! I mean, I'm in a sport that's so amenable to statistical analysis that we've become a go-to sport for biomedical research...
(I have a graph somewhere round here of every shot I fired in every match for a two-year period...)0 -
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264.2lb. I know this pattern. Gym was damn hard this morning too. I’d contest that 366 calories the gym machines reported!
The overall week’s report shows that I’m doing okay, but I need to stop missing days in the gym. Need to stop oversleeping which means going to bed earlier which means getting home earlier which means leaving training earlier which means getting to WTSC earlier which means leaving IBM earlier which means getting to IBM earlier which means waking up earlier….. this is a nasty little vicious circle, this…
Heartbeat & Summary report, Week 10
Calories burnt report, Week 10
Distance report, Week 10
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Missed posting here yesterday:263.6lb. Another day without gym, thanks to an alarm clock that's too polite to make any noise Have to fix that...
And today...
263lb. Back to the gym for the first time this week. Was surprisingly easy. Lowest average heartrate in a while (164). Nice. 0 -
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263.8lb. Weight loss has stalled, but then I’ve not been near the gym in five or six days as well for various reasons. Not worried… yet.
Annoyed at yesterday though - weighed myself a dozen or more times, and didn't get the same value twice so gave up trying to measure it. Noisy sensor fail.0 -
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2011-03-25 261.8
2011-03-26 262.4
2011-03-27 262
265.6lb. Wierdest day in the gym yet.
I mean, a spike of several pounds is bad enough (and usually causes me to wonder if the scales is accurate unless there’s a reason for it), but I went to the gym this morning, got on the elliptical and failed to work up a sweat. Same time, same distance, same pace, same calories burned, but my heartrate didn’t get up to 150 for the first ten minutes and didn’t break 160 until the last five minutes. This is one session after one of the hardest sessions in a long while, when the heartrate made it back into the 180s for the first time in months.
And then to get even odder, stretches I normally do with ease were hard to do today, and the ones that I usually feel the stretch from were damn near impossible to hold at all.
It’s very odd.0 -
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2011-03-31 261.4
2011-04-01 262.8
2011-04-02 263.8
2011-04-03 262.4
2011-04-04 263.6
2011-04-05 262
2011-04-06 262.2
262.0lb For various reasons, there’s been no gymwork at all in nearly ten days and weightloss has stagnated as a result. Herself Indoors is now poking at me with a stick to ‘help’. This may hurt somewhat…0 -
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No, that's Jan (less 12 days), Feb and March (plus 7 days), so just the three (it's UK date format, not US, that's probably the source of the confusion)
I'm not fainting with pleasure at the progress, but I'm not worried about it either, it seems reasonably consistent and sustainable to me - I remember the atkins diet and not being able to walk to the back of tesco while shopping because of the smell of the fresh baked bread; this is nowhere near as difficult to maintain; I'm also monitoring my blood sugar levels, blood pressure, and resting heartrate as well as the weight, just to be sure that this isn't doing anything weird and everything is just consistently improving from where I was, which was borderline diabetic (and a family history of diabetes), elevated blood pressure levels (and a family history of that too) and definitely obese (and, you guessed it, a family history of that as well). That's all gotten better - normal blood sugar, lower than normal blood pressure, and okay still obese, but getting better.
Not to mention that the shooting has markedly improved at the fundamental level (the last match was a disaster but that was mental, not physical).
And I don't mind honest criticism either btw, I prefer honest evaluations to pep talks 0 -
2011-04-14 263
2011-04-13 263
2011-04-12 263.2
2011-04-11 262.8
2011-04-10 262.8
2011-04-09 261
263.0lb and back the the gym for the first time in two weeks. Learnt that I’m not as weak as I think, the machine actually was broken
Didn't figure this out though until at six minutes in at what was meant to be my usual routine, my heartrate was gone past 180 and I had to stop. Took a few seconds, thought about giving up and heading off to work early and then thought "might as well try the other machine, I can't have degraded that much in two weeks". And of course that one's set at the normal resistance level. Seems the first one said level 8 but was actually set to about level 20. The bastard. Finished out the 35 minutes, heartrate was all over the shop but was about 175ish at the end, which isn't horrible for me, and a good sweat worked up.0 -
264lb. An odd uptick, but probably just noise in the signal. Gym again today, this time with a working machine. Excellent. Further and higher than ever before too
The flexibility, on the other hand has taken a blow – I’ve managed to tweak a hamstring at some point, probably during the Nationals on the weekend when I tweaked my back. So stretching the right leg is grand, but the left leg is just ever so precious about extensions.
Oh, and top tip – if you’re going to put deep heat on a sore hamstring, wear briefs, not boxers. Don’t ask for details, just trust me on this one.0 -
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2011-04-16 263.8
2011-04-17 263.2
2011-04-18 263.8
2011-04-19 264.2
262lb and back to the gym and while the time's the same, upped the resistance for the last five minutes.
Still went further than ever before. Tomorrow, the resistance goes up a notch for the whole 35 minutes to see if I can take it - if I can, it gets moved up a notch permanently.
Left hamstring is still giving me grief though. Right leg is fine, can easily hold my foot in a basic leg stretch, but I can barely tip my toes on the left hand side:
And that's after resting the hamstring for a few days over the weekend and Monday and Tuesday. It's really starting to bug me now.0 -
261.8lb Cranked up the resistance a notch on the elliptical this morning, then another notch for the last seven or eight minutes. Further and faster than before again.
It's not a bad feeling this, I have to admit - about five minutes in, bodyrockers playing away in the headphones, heartrate not yet up to the 160s (155-170 seems to be where my heartrate goes when doing aerobic exercise for some reason), I was feeling pretty good actually.
In fact, between progress in the gym and progress on the range, it's starting to feel a bit like the first time I did a high ukemi from kotegaeshi:
The first time you do that you're thinking "Can'tDoThisCan'tDoThisOhCrapGonnaGetHurt---hooooooollllllyyyyyycrrraaaaappppp--THUD--HeyI'mStillAliveAndThatWasFunCanIDoItAgain?"
Same story with the gymwork and the training - lots of ICantDoThis leading up to discovering that you actually can and it doesn't feel horrible, and then actually enjoying it.
Plus, the graphs look nice
Heartrate report, this week
Heartrate report, this quarter
So obviously next week I have to hike the resistance on the elliptical up another notch and then go through the "Next Morning" phase of all that, which goes something along the lines of "OwowowowowowowwhatthehellwasIthinkingowowowowow..." 0 -
260.0lb Back to the gym for the first time in 3 weeks (hamstring is finally happy again). Not as far as the last time, but burnt more calories. Haven’t started on the weight training yet though – today’s average heartrate was 172 and it ran up to 184 at the end. Weights on tuesday I think (monday’s an early start at work – ah, the glorious life of the sysadmin…).0 -
Back at the gym again. No, the hamstring was not happy the last day - it was fine for two days in the gym and then declared that it had had enough of that nonsense and I wasn't to do it again. A few days rest and it seems ready to try again. It's seriously annoying, this, I dislike looking like a whiny sod who won't train, but if you can't even pick stuff up off the floor without feeling like someone stabbed you in the groin with an icepick, I figure you have to back off a little.
Today at least some of the stretches were doable. The elliptical was a mental test though – not going in regularly is letting my cardio fall off again, and getting past the little voice saying that 30 minutes is just as good as 35 is getting hard. Just have to start going back more regularly, that’s all. Still managed the 35min at level 10 on the machine (even if the heartrate hit 184 in the last few minutes). And started on the swiss ball back exercises again. Have to start working those back into the gym routine, and I’m told by literally everyone that I need to add weights as well, though how I’m to find the time is usually not mentioned (seriously folks, I think IBM will notice if I never get into work before 1300h…).
Weight's at 258.6. Been bouncing up and down a bit, the last few days. Still, overall trend is downwards.
Thing is, there’s a plan here. The new shooting jacket has to be broken in before late November, which means latest delivery is the end of October. I had thought that the time from measurement and ordering to delivery would be like Kurt Thune’s three months, but I’m told that three to four weeks is possible, so if I leave six to seven weeks, that means that measurement and ordering has to happen in late August/early September (don't forget, these things are made to measure and are not very adustable after the fact, and cost too much to buy more than one a year). The original goal was 220lb. I don’t think I’ll make it there in that timeframe at this current rate of weight loss, and past experience has said that something crazy like Atkins would get me there easily,but the rebound weight gain would take me right past where I started.
So basicly, it’s keep going until the start of August (with more gym time than I've had since the hamstring fun) and reevaluate then.0 -
260.2lb WTF? Down, darn it, downwards! Gym again this morning. Easier than before. And more back exercises added to teh routine. On we go…
So a ways to go to get back to reasonable cardio health again. Still, keeping it at 35min on level 10, so that’s good. The back exercises though… I mean, I know that the swiss ball is the most effective way to do them, but…
…does it really have to be so dodgy-looking?0 -
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