Week 12: Clear and Unclear on the Concept
Sep. 27th, 2010 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI'm a couple days late in adding to this more-or-less weekly side blog, focusing on my fitness journey (mainly so as not to bore readers of the regular blog;). For any who are new to the neighborhood: I began both this journaling and the underlying fitness activity over the summer, at the height of my weight and after my longest recent stint away from any regular exercise beyond, maybe, a half-hour of cardio a couple of times a week. That's now up to five times a week, minimum, and more like 40 minutes on the elliptical itself each time, putting 4 miles and 700 calories on the displays. To that, I've added twice-weekly group training sessions with a damn determined instructor, who has helped immeasurably with everything from form to motivation. She mentioned, on her Facebook fitness page this morning, that her typical cardio session on a similar elliptical is for 5.3 miles and burns just over 530 calories (an appropriate figure for her, being barely half my current weight, but I'm un-catching up to her, dammit;). It's plenty motivating that her daily "run" isn't that much longer than mine is. The burn will be coming down as I come down, since the calorie count comes down in direct proportion to the weight being lost, but still. I'll take it.
I'll also take her advice on some common misconceptions about how all this working out is working out. One: pain, in moderation, is part of the process, and isn't necessarily instantaneous. Twice this past week, after a pretty intense lower-body workout with her class Wednesday night and an equal upper-body burner Friday (I practically had to wring out my t-shirt before washing it after that one), the pain didn't arrive the next morning but the morning after that. In each case, manageable, partially on account of it not being unexpected. Friday night made me sore by Sunday morning, but not too sore to (a) spend a full day out with my wife celebrating our anniversary and (b) get my usual session of cardio in, even though I probably could have begged out of it on account of the soreness and the occasion.
Two: that diet is just as important to the process as the exercise is. I seem stuck in a range of late, going up a pound one week, down the same or a half-pound more the next, and I suspect a lot of the lack of negative is the amount of eating I can do when left to long days of work, big stacks of work-stress and occasional stretches of travel thrown in. I don't think I'll ever get to the point of measuring out a cup of brown rice and a breakfast of just egg whites, but I've eliminated a LOT of the in-between junk, and try whenever possible to balance out bad days with better ones.
Somewhat surprisingly, not all fitness programs have gotten this message. For now, at least, I still do my cardio at the nearby Name Brand Gym that signed us both up for 10 bucks a month, ages ago, and at which you pretty much get exactly what you pay for. It's just clean enough, has just enough open machines, fixes the broken ones just soon enough, but isn't going to win any customer service awards any time soon for either their overall attitude about its members or their awareness of what is and isn't good for us.
Even when they try, it comes out kinda weird. Case in point was today: Donate Life is running a blood drive there next week, and they had posters and handouts for it all about the place. It's a great cause- I never needed an organ, but came close to needing one when I was a teenager, and I deeply respect their mission. Yet something's just a lit-tle askew in how they're trying to motivate their membership:
I'll still show up and offer to donate, but I think I'll pass on the 'za. I suspect that Sally and Victor would probably tie in with something like free training classes rather than something like empty carbs.
I'll also take her advice on some common misconceptions about how all this working out is working out. One: pain, in moderation, is part of the process, and isn't necessarily instantaneous. Twice this past week, after a pretty intense lower-body workout with her class Wednesday night and an equal upper-body burner Friday (I practically had to wring out my t-shirt before washing it after that one), the pain didn't arrive the next morning but the morning after that. In each case, manageable, partially on account of it not being unexpected. Friday night made me sore by Sunday morning, but not too sore to (a) spend a full day out with my wife celebrating our anniversary and (b) get my usual session of cardio in, even though I probably could have begged out of it on account of the soreness and the occasion.
Two: that diet is just as important to the process as the exercise is. I seem stuck in a range of late, going up a pound one week, down the same or a half-pound more the next, and I suspect a lot of the lack of negative is the amount of eating I can do when left to long days of work, big stacks of work-stress and occasional stretches of travel thrown in. I don't think I'll ever get to the point of measuring out a cup of brown rice and a breakfast of just egg whites, but I've eliminated a LOT of the in-between junk, and try whenever possible to balance out bad days with better ones.
Somewhat surprisingly, not all fitness programs have gotten this message. For now, at least, I still do my cardio at the nearby Name Brand Gym that signed us both up for 10 bucks a month, ages ago, and at which you pretty much get exactly what you pay for. It's just clean enough, has just enough open machines, fixes the broken ones just soon enough, but isn't going to win any customer service awards any time soon for either their overall attitude about its members or their awareness of what is and isn't good for us.
Even when they try, it comes out kinda weird. Case in point was today: Donate Life is running a blood drive there next week, and they had posters and handouts for it all about the place. It's a great cause- I never needed an organ, but came close to needing one when I was a teenager, and I deeply respect their mission. Yet something's just a lit-tle askew in how they're trying to motivate their membership:
I'll still show up and offer to donate, but I think I'll pass on the 'za. I suspect that Sally and Victor would probably tie in with something like free training classes rather than something like empty carbs.