Retxab

More than ready for this.

I use a tape measure (specifically the Navy method). I'm aware it's probably wrong for me since I'm outside the demographic used to develop the bf% estimate, but I figure so long as I'm consistent in my measurements it can give me a good idea of whether everything's moving in the right direction.

Chance favours the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur. Or possibly more relevant here, "The victory is in the preparation" - Bruce Wayne. Though I don't think we've ever seen him say it directly, the quote comes to us from people he's trained - directly from Wingman and Damian Wayne, indirectly from Dick Grayson and Tim Drake.

... and here's my first time talking about strength training in a challenge with no strength training goal: had a great session today, yet still felt weirdly weak. Not at all sure how both of those happened at the same time, but there you go. I'm clearly a complicated guy. More on topic, today is my one all-to-myself day off this week, so I got some prep work in for the official challenge launch: bike tires are now inflated, chain oiled, gears checked, ready to go. First window for a bike commute is next Wednesday, weather permitting - long range forecast looks good, but Vancouver's weather often laughs at puny long range predictions so could go either way. Also went grocery shopping, and am currently pre-cooking lunches and dinners until about next Tuesday or so (will be mostly turkey, veggies, and rice, with a variety of different spice mixes to stave off boredom). All is in readiness.

Sounds cool. I played a lot of soccer when I was a kid - three decades and more ago - and one of my half-baked motivational thoughts is "If I lose the weight, I can join a league and play again." Will follow your journey with interest.

The good news is a lot of the same ideas still apply - figure out what it means to eat at maintenance, adjust that to suit your desired weight, adjust the composition of what you eat to change your weight in a healthy way, exercise appropriately. In your case, the exercise is more important than for somebody like me - I can lose weight by simply not eating as much, while you can only gain muscle by both eating appropriately and strength training. You may want to consider sorting out your training routine first, and addressing your diet once you're happy with your workout. Regardless, welcome to Nerd Fitness, enjoy yourself - it's a cool place.

At the carnival, the big tents are usually the best tents. I consider myself a huge (pen and paper) RPG nerd - there's three shelves of rulebooks* in the bookcase behind me, and a few dozen more in PDF form on my computer and Google Drive, but I'm not really that interested in the Nerd Fitness character thing - seems like a lot of work. So that kind of dichotomy could be in play, too. * one of them just being about six different editions of D&D. Still kinda sad I gave away all my 2e stuff about ten years ago, or it'd be seven.

And my axe! Hi, I'm Scott, my challenge thread is here. My challenge goals are a little different this time around as I am arrogantly assuming I have my diet and strength workouts sufficiently dialed in that they don't need to be goals, instead I've got other activities I'm trying to develop. I believe they're all fairly sensible nonetheless. I struggle somewhat at fighting inertia, so having some folks keep an eye on me will help in changing my habits. Any team is fine by me.

I don't really grade in any specific way, more just "did great" "did OK" "oh no the wheels fell off" kind of summaries. I will keep track of the numbers I listed, and if I miss them there will be stern consequences. Meetings will be held, letters may well be written. This particular challenge is sort of new for me because I don't have a goal related to calorie counting or my main form of exercise (strength training). Calorie counting in particular is the cornerstone of my journey out of obesity - down a bit more than 25kg so far, a bit less than 30kg to go until I hit the goal I set for myself last July, and then maybe more after that depending on how things look. I'm doing both, and will probably talk about both in this thread, but they're not part of my goals because they're now just my lifestyle. All the goals are things I'd like to be part of my lifestyle, so this challenge is really about adding them. More gadgets for my utility belt.

As mentioned in my last challenge, I'm going to be losing weight for most of 2015 (at least, maybe longer). So the focus of this challenge is the same as the focus of the last one, and the focus of the next one: drop some mass. Still, there's always room to do things a little differently, so my challenge goals this time around will be somewhat different while still pointing at the same long term goal. As before, the overall goal is to drop about 4 kg over the course of the challenge - as of this morning my seven-day rolling average weight is 124.8 kg, so if all goes well in six weeks and a couple days it'll be no higher than 120.8 kg. I have my calorie counting and strength training pretty well dialed in by this point - I'll be doing both, but they aren't the subject of specific goals. Instead, this is what I'm going to focus on: Goal 1 - cooking at home. I work as a cook and am enrolled in a professional cooking program through work, but despite that I have traditionally been fairly lazy about cooking my own food. I need to get much less so, in no small part because it'll save me money for important things, like getting a picture with Carrie Fisher at Vancouver FanExpo in April. I'm aiming for at least 12 home-cooked meals a week (I rarely eat lunch on days when I work, so that's about 2/3rds of my meals) or 72 such meals over the course of the challenge. Goal 2 - become a bicycle commuter. My commute is about 5 km, traditionally I bus it during the rainy season and walk when the weather gets nicer. This year the plan is to bike instead of walk - it'll get me there and back faster, and if I invest in decent rain gear next fall I might even keep doing it year round. The plan is to make that commute at least 18 times over the course of the challenge, an average of three days a week. I will allow some leeway if a major rain system moves in. Goal 3 - add cardio. So one weakness in my fitness regimen is that I really hate cardio for its own sake, and as such I don't do regular cardio exercise (as opposed to strength, mobility, and flexibility, all of which are part of my routine). I don't mind walking or biking to go somewhere, but there's not a lot that's less appealing to me than getting on a treadmill or stationary bike. So, I've been trying to find a cardio-focused routine that I can stomach, and I think I've got one - the Fighter's Codex from Neila Rey, a 30 day program of martial arts drills. I'll be starting that on March 1. If successful, I can keep coming back to the same website for cardio circuits. Side Quest - professional improvement. As noted, I'm enrolled in a professional cooking program that will ultimately lead to an official culinary designation. My performance hasn't been as consistent as I'd like it to be, and part of that is because I have a lot of demands on my time at work, where I'm basically fulfilling a managerial role although I'm not actually a manager. This is because we currently have no Kitchen Manager and I'm filling in for some of the duties; this was supposed to be a short-term thing, but it's now looking like we won't get anybody for the forseeable future. Making things a little more difficult is the fact that we kind of have a cobbled-together patchwork of systems for the things I'm now in charge of, like inventory costing or forecasting prep levels. So, my side quest is to set aside an hour a day to work on either my course, or to improve the systems I'm now more or less in charge of. It'll cut into my Netflix time, but it's a small price to pay. And that is more or less the plan.

The conflicting messages happen because losing fat and gaining muscle are mostly opposed processes. The prevailing wisdom in strength training is to figure out which of the two is more important, do that now, and then once that's handled do the other one. So either eat at a caloric deficit and accept that you're not going to see much if any muscle growth while you lose fat (exception noted below), or eat at a caloric surplus to build muscle and accept that you will likely gain fat as well (exception noted below). To get around this, many lifters/bodybuilders/etc. use bulk/cut cycles - they spend a period of time eating at a caloric surplus and training hard, gaining both muscle and fat. Then they go on a caloric deficit, adjusting their training but still training hard to preserve the muscle as they lose the fat. There's also the idea of a "recomp," staying at about the same weight while losing fat and gaining muscle, but that's usually a much slower process. It's still a useful idea if you're not wild about gaining fat and/or switching between eating a ton and not eating much, and OK with a longer timeframe to see results. Exception for muscle gain on caloric deficit: various studies have shown that obese novice lifters can sustain a period of muscle growth as they lose fat. Generally this period doesn't last for the full time they're losing weight. Obese here is the medical definition - high BMI, high body fat percentage. Exception for fat loss on caloric surplus: various performance enhancing drugs do allow for some fat loss on a surplus, but given the illegality in many places and the various side effects the risk/reward payoff probably isn't worth it for the vast majority of people.

Where I live (Vancouver, BC), every place I know of where competitive swimmers train has an attached strength training center. I'd imagine that the PTs at that sort of place wouldn't look down on swimming - might be an option if you want to be sure you get a PT who'll respect your training choices. Really, though, you're well within your rights to talk to any prospective personal trainer and figure out if they'll be right for you. I kind of suspect you'd only run into the kind of trainer you're worried about if you were seeking out training for competitive powerlifting or strongman events, and even then the current vogue seems to be tending towards mixing in cardio/endurance work in support of the strength goals. Heck, if anything I hear more bad trainer stories from the other point of view - PTs who steer people away from free weights and lifting heavy in favour of cardio and exercise machines. So long as you take a bit of time to find somebody whose methods match your goals, I'm sure you'll do fine.

So, here at the end, or close enough to see it at least. I've just made my challenge results post in my own thread. To summarize, it went pretty well, even if I didn't ping the scale quite as low as I wanted to. I've updated the spreadsheet with my final results. I hope everybody else had a great challenge, this was my first time in one of these groups and it made for a pretty cool experience. Thanks for having me!

So, last day of the challenge. How'd it all go? Main goal: weight loss. At the start of the challenge, I weighed in at 127.6 kg. Today, I'm 124.5, just over 3 kg down. That is great, it's the lowest weight I've measured myself at in at least 20 years. OTOH, my pace up until now has been .7 kg/week, where over this challenge I've done .5 kg/week. That is puzzling, since my caloric deficit is designed to hit the .7 kg/week level, and I'd prefer to hit that level since it means I get to my goal weight in 2015 instead of 2016. I'm still figuring out what exactly to do about that, but from some reading there's basically two paths forward that I need to choose from: 1) Maintain my current approach of eating about the same every day, and try to figure out whether my problem is on the measurement side (not correctly counting calories, and thus eating 100-200/day more than I think I am) or on the TDEE side (if my TDEE is simply lower than I think it is, then my deficit isn't as big as it needs to be in order to hit the pace I want, so I'd need to lower my caloric budget). 2) There's a fairly prominent school of thought that says it's better to look at calories on a multiday scale - weekly seems common - and over that time have one or two days where you eat close to maintenance. This would mean I'd eat more on those days and a little less on the other days in order to maintain the weekly deficit. So instead of eating at my current 2300/day (based on a TDEE of about 3000), I'd eat around 2100/day six days a week and then at 3000-3300 one day a week. Or even 2000/day on 5 days, and then around 2500ish on each of the other two. Currently I'm leaning towards option 2, as it fits well with my weekly schedule. But still ruminating. Goal 1: Track calories, lift weights. Both good. My MFP streak is up to 234 days, and this morning I completed "test day" on my program to see if I should bump up the weights for the next cycle. The test consists of completing two sets of ten reps for each exercise at the "heavy" weight, and I passed it for all exercises except for OHP, where I failed on rep 9 of set 2. So, weights go up next week for everything except OHP, where they stay the same. I guess I just started a little too high in OHP - in my defense, it is my favourite lift, so I think I can be forgiven for being a little overexuberant. Otherwise, this goal was a slam dunk. Goal 2: Krav Maga. Last class is this week. I like it a little better than when I first started, but not enough to continue with it. At best, it's put the idea in my head that some kind of combat thing might be a form of cardio I could stick with. So, made the goal, but not a success in adding a new thing to my routine. Goal 3: Yoga. Finished my 30 day challenge around a week ago, and really enjoyed it. I've integrated some of the moves and stretches into other parts of my routine, and it may be my imagination but I think my squat form has improved from the hip mobility and core work. Class this one as an unadulterated success. I'm not really inclined to run out and join a yoga studio - if nothing else, it's not in the budget right now - but I'm a lot closer to feeling ready to do so in the fall, when I shift back to preferring indoor activities. Side quest: savings. Hit this goal early, and am now comfortably over my target. I even have my finances sufficiently well structured that I was able to pay for some moderately big ticket items without hitting savings - a Kano computer kit for my oldest nephew's birthday, and a VIP pass to FanExpo Vancouver in April. Next evolution here is to build my savings up to a full month's worth of expenses, and then ultimately to two month's worth, which is a prudent amount to have accessible in the event of unforeseen setbacks in other areas of life. So overall, I'm declaring the challenge a success - I tried some new things, learned a bit, and kept on making progress towards my various long-term goals. Even the less-than-stellar weight loss number still represents progress along the path. It's been a good start to 2015, thanks for all the good wishes and advice. Be sure and be excellent to each other.

I cook for a living, so portioning is something I do at my job, and I've often done various checks to get an idea what particular amounts of food look like. Just wondering if maybe I'm slipping up on my estimation recently, since a month of lower than expected weight loss is starting to be significant. Wouldn't hurt to do a refresher. Yoga-wise, for quite a while now I've started almost every day with mobility exercises, and done stretching after each workout (and often after getting home from work, when I'm sometimes a bit stiff). I've incorporated some of the yoga into both of those - added some hip mobility to my routine, and replaced some of my stretches with harder versions. Improving flexibility and range of motion is a slow process, but worthwhile.

Sunday update time. I lost half a kilo this week, which is a "yay," but all this month I've been running under my average weight loss for the last six months. So either I have to re-evaluate my calorie budget, or I'm not recording things properly. I do have a fair few meals each week where I'm unable to weigh everything precisely, I estimate those as best I can and that's generally worked out OK since I started counting calories last summer, but maybe I'm undercounting them. Then again, Vancouver's seen a fair bit of rain so far this year, so it may just be that my general activity level is down a bit - more taking transit, less walking, generally staying indoors more - and that's the difference. I'll have to keep a closer eye on things until I figure it out. Otherwise, just got back from heavy day at the gym. Everything went great, made 9 reps in all the working sets. The way my program works is next week I try 10 reps in each working set, and every exercise where I make that I bump the weight by 10% or so and go back to 6-rep sets, starting the cycle over. Any exercises where I fail I keep the weight the same and reset the reps. Today, the only exercise where I felt I might not have had an extra rep in me was OHP, so I'm in good shape for test day next Sunday. Here's hoping everything's going fine for everybody else, and remember: Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.

Another half-kilo down this week, which is cool. But I'd have to more than double that in the last week to make my target for this challenge. As I'm not planning to make any drastic changes, that's unlikely to happen. I'm going to have to review my calorie tracking and targets, figure out whether I've got my calories set too high for the weight loss rate I'd like to maintain or it's a matter of not recording things properly. I'm otherwise pretty happy with the way 2015 is going so far. Let's all end this challenge on a high note!

Some random updates: I finished the 30-day yoga course. It was pretty good, I enjoyed it and learned a fair bit. If nothing else, it's helped a lot with my regular stretching and mobility work. Strength training: my workout week has been out of sync with the calendar week since late December. Yesterday would've been my heavy day - day 1 of my workout week - but I decided to let it slide to Sunday, which will move things more into alignment with the calendar week and make it a little easier for me to keep track of where I am in my program. So now it'll be heavy day on Sunday, medium day on Tuesday, light day on Thursday, with the ability to shift the latter two to Wednesday/Friday if my work schedule interferes. Looking ahead: it's been a goal of mine for a while to switch to bike commuting during the not-so-rainy part of the year - usually roughly April to October or so in these parts. I can never really seem to put it all together and make it happen. I'm thinking during the next challenge one of my goals is going to be to make sure my bike is ready to go, and get out riding regularly on non-rainy days. We have a new manager at work who has the same first name as me, leading to the usual sitcom hijinks. Seems like a nice guy. While chatting with him I found out that he does crossfit, and it sounds like his lifts are better than mine. So now I have a new long term goal: to become the strongest Scott at our restaurant. Should be fun.

I would be more tempted by pretend tuna if I hadn't eaten a bunch of ahi tuna at culinary class today. But as a general thing, I find that mashing up chickpeas and adding stuff to them quite often leads somewhere good. They're a pretty versatile legume.

No specific breed in mind, I'll almost surely get one from a shelter. I have a small apartment and live alone, so a smallish dog that won't go too crazy while I'm at work would be ideal.

You could just go the home made route, so you control how much you have available. It's really easy to make a basic hummus - chickpeas, garlic, olive oil, and tahini. I often omit the tahini since I always have the other three kicking around, the resulting paste isn't technically hummus but is perfectly serviceable.

Medium day today. Started off fine, but towards the end felt much harder than heavy day - I just ran out of gas. Got all the main lifts done, but cut some of the "vanity" moves - I only did one set of hammer curls, and skipped tricep extensions entirely. Breakfast afterwards was really good and I feel great now. I typically work out relatively fasted - either in the morning before I eat breakfast, or in the afternoon/evening before dinner - and haven't ever had this kind of issue before, but maybe I just didn't have enough in the tank to complete the workout. Will have to monitor and see if I need to move the schedule around a bit. May also tinker with the exercises a bit for the next cycle - I might drop the curls and tricep extensions entirely, I've been thinking I should have a weighted core exercise in my sequence (probably either prone or hanging leg raises) and just adding an exercise will start to make my gym sessions a little too long. I also have calf raises in my "vanity" moves, but I'd like to keep those because they seem to be good for ankle health, which for me is kind of a big deal - if I can't walk I can't work. Otherwise, things are good. The local movie theatre is in the midst of a digital film festival event, where they show older sf/fantasy/superhero movies that have been digitally remastered, so a couple of nights ago I saw Darkman and later this week I'm going to see the Rocketeer. Darkman was a hoot, one of Liam Neeson's early roles combined with Sam Raimi doing a superhero movie long before his Spider-Man days. I hope the Rocketeer has aged at least as well. I also think I'm ready to get a dog. My dog died two and a half years ago, just shy of his 18th birthday, and for a variety of reasons I haven't felt up to getting another one. A week ago, I figured out that a big part of that was because my planning horizon over the last few years had shrunk to about ten years - I'd been subconsciously avoiding commitments longer than that, out of the expectation that I wouldn't need to worry about any term much longer than that. Weight loss and improved fitness has changed that, I'm now making more long term plans, and the 15-20 year commitment that getting a dog represents seems much more reasonable to me now. There's a few things I need to sort out first, but I the plan right now is to have a new best friend by the end of 2015. And that's it for a rainy Sunday in Vancouver. May the Force be with you!

Had a good week, on track with my long-term average (.6 kg lost). It seems unlikely I'll hit my goal for the challenge unless I have a crazy downward spike to exceed the crazy upward spike in week 1, but that's OK. I'm happy with the way things are going, and found a new thing (yoga) to add to my routine. Also did some introspection and figured a few things out, which will help going forward. It's been a good challenge so far, here's hoping that continues. And now it's off to the gym for Medium Day. Have a good one, everyone.

My understanding is that an actual 5x5 at working weight is one of the new things StrongLifts brought to strength training, and it's not one that's met with universal approval. If you look up classic 5x5 programs (like Bill Starr's programs, still popular today in Madcow and similar routines), they're usually "ramp up" programs with only the last set at full weight. Effectively in the classic programs, 5x5 includes warmup sets. I can't sustain a per-session linear progression for anything longer than a couple of weeks anyway, but if I could I think I'd use a Starting Strength or Greyskull derivative rather than StrongLifts. 3x5 working sets makes more sense to me, and the guys behind those programs have a better training pedigree than Mehdi.

If we all followed that rule, what kind of world would we live in? Actually, pretty great, now that I think about it.