Weekly Thread (June 12-18, 2005)

[DinbinFanfoom]

Sunday: Not much. Hit the gazelle in the morning for 30 minutes, something I've been (successfully) trying to do every morning at 7am before breakfast.

I REALLY wanna lose the last bit of this gut!

[DinbinFanfoom]

Monday: 30 mins on the Gazelle to start the day. Then 32 mins @ 5.2mph on the treadmill this evening. Was feeling GOOD at the end of it, like I could have gone for much longer. Getting there...

[Zyzzyx]

Well, I'll toss in my comments for last week.

7 days of cycling, ~450 miles total. On the bike for 4-8 hours/day.

Lots of good food provided for breakfast, pit stops, lunch, more pit stops, and dinner.

Result: gained 4 pounds. 160lbs morning of Fri 6/3, 164lbs morning of Sun 6/12.

[DinbinFanfoom]

Thursday: Finally broke down and bought:

http://images.canadiantire.ca/media/images/SportsRecreation/Fitness/BenchesGyms/0840319_450_CC_109e9.jpg

Took it home and assembled it, leaving off the silly fly-arms. Got to use it a bit for bits of upper-body part uno (dumbell bench presses). Much better than lugging chairs into the spare room to make a bench, heh. The preacher curl pad/bar comes out and you can swap in the lat tower. Swapped my lateral raises (25lbs/arm) for forward raises (works more of the front of shoulder). Good burn!

Now I must buy a bar and weights for it. Wallymart has some nice polished iron weights for relatively cheap which I have my eye on.

[attriel]

got back to the gym yesterday. 10 minutes on the elliptical (115 cal .78 mi), then did the weight routine (Raised a bunch of the weights, effed up my knee b/c one of the machines has a broken setting and can't be set where I need it but I didn't realize that until I'd done a few reps; i put it there but it slipped a step so my legs were stretched too far doing curls :( )

then did 10 min on the rowing (102 cal, 1.95km). Yay me :o

Want to start going in the morning or evening for 15-20 of cardio. might even make that computational OR not conversational OR and do it before AND after :o

Gonna start doing 2 sets friday when we go, too, since i htink i've reached a good point on most of the weights and double 15's is probably better than a bonus 10lbs for 15 :o

--attriel

[DinbinFanfoom]

Want to start going in the morning or evening for 15-20 of cardio. might even make that computational OR not conversational OR and do it before AND after :oMost of what I've read indicates that cardio in the morning before breakfast is the best time to do it. Your body's conventional energy stores, IN the muscles are pretty low and so it must start hauling it out of the "backups" (IE: fat cells). Also, 25 minutes appears to be the start of the "fat burning" plateau. Get your heart rate up to the required % for that long and you can more safely assume to be pulling more energy from fat stores... the first 0-20 minutes and most people are still pulling it from "easy" storage. I stand to be corrected on that though. Mind you, 10 minutes of workout is still better than no workout (losing weight is all about net calorie loss, after all).
Gonna start doing 2 sets friday when we go, too, since i htink i've reached a good point on most of the weights and double 15's is probably better than a bonus 10lbs for 15 :oWeight lifting is actually a really good calorie burn too, even though it's often considered to be a "long term" weight loss tool. You burn about as much energy in a 30 minute weight training regimen as you do on a treadmill. In particular, I find alternating forward dumbell raises, or alternating bicep curls, or double-lateral raises actually have you work up a sweat, due to the straining and the range of motion involved. My current workouts have me doing 3 sets of 12 of most exercises... kind of the middle ground between short/heavy for size and long/light for endurance; the middle is often considered the "strength-building" zone... the area where you develop very useable muscle. Consider going to 3x10 instead of 1x20 or somesuch.

Dunno for sure though; a lot of the information on weight training and health in general is often contradictory and changes every few weeks. ("X is good for you! Y is bad! No wait... Y is OK for you, X is bad!")