Lysander

Yes I may be doing too much, though the sharp drop in performance I experienced was around the time I was doing only 3 workouts a week, my endurance tanked and indeed it hasn't gotten any better since I tried to 'up my game'! I am recovering pretty well from my workouts, and eating a lot. That saturday is a rare aberration by the way I have not touched pizza for months, or soft drinks for years. As a rule I drink -only- coffee and water. In general I am not trying to necessarily cut my carb intake much, but indeed after adjusting the types of foods I eat I have seriously struggled to replace stuff like oatmeal/muesli for that slow release energy. My approach to food has mostly been with a mind to my health rather than to fitness, and when I say I don't want to load up on stuff that is bad for me I am mostly referring to sugar, salt, the crap in pre packaged meals etc but I am also being wary of not eating the same thing too often, for example I vaguely remember something about mercury and canned fish. I am eating a lot of nuts and bananas, mostly because workout time will approach, I feel wiped and suddenly eating a pound of raw broccoli doesn't seem like it will take me the distance. Again I come from a place of absolute ignorance when it comes to diet and fitness, I am for the most part taking nuggets of information I have read or heard about and trying to mash it all together until I find a balance that works for me. With the running I have been having serious problems, I would put it squarely down to the smoking if not for the fact that a couple months ago I was running 10ks on back to back days and 5ks on 'rest days' while smoking heavily before and after sessions! But yes, I do many things wrong, I don't stretch (trying to stretch as much as possible now though), I probably don't rest enough, the only time I find myself drinking water is when I am actually in the gym otherwise I drink only coffee, I sometimes get to lunchtime before I eat breakfast, my sleep is all over the place at times, I could go on. I think in the end, with regards to diet, regardless of how much I research or log my food I am not getting much of an idea of how different foods affect my output. When I look at a tomato or a steak or an egg I don't know what it's going to do for me energy wise, I am feeling pretty wiped in general and I don't know how to give my body what it needs to smash through it's limitations. A little about my goals, I want to be fit and healthy, I want running, lifting and climbing etc to become natural activities for my body, I want to be agile, flexible and strong. I want to get to a better place than I am and I want to be able to maintain it permanently. I have had problems with dizziness, fainting, circulation etc and while I was always stronger than average for my build before I started going to the gym a couple years ago I have never been anything close to what you could call fit. Things are a lot better now but I am a long way off the lifestyle that I want, and it bears saying this: While I have goals to motivate me, the important thing for me really is the journey. Trying to improve an area of my life gives me motivation to improve all areas of my life, taking care of what I eat gives me further motivation to work out, and vice versa, trying to get fit gives me motivation to achieve other things not related to fitness. I have become kind of addicted to self improvement and as a result I find obstacles or conundrums to be particularly vexing. This is both why I am putting probably way too much thought into diet and also why I am incredibly prone to fixating on something (like diet) until it becomes a source of distraction or procrastination. I have come to realize that I have rather an obsessive personality, I have learned a great many lessons in the need for channeling my mental energy into positive outcomes rather than negative, circular thinking. While part of me enjoys tangling with this subject matter but I fear I've now become truly tangled Most of my obstacles are mental, I am trying to work around them as much as possible and have had some success, but ultimately I will have to approach some things head on. I can't keep smoking but the idea of quitting is one of the most truly terrifying things I can conceive of, for example. I am trying to give myself a reason, give myself more to lose, and the more effort and focus I put in improving my health and fitness the more I see smoking as a destructive force in my life. I feel I have gone somewhat off subject, needless to say I have probably put way too much thought into the subject of diet. Eventually I will simply calm down and this will all come naturally to me. I can no longer ignore smoking, bad sleeping habits, lack of hydration etc and these are things I will work on, in the meantime getting fitter and eating better has an incredibly positive effect on my outlook and energy. I am taking all the responses on board and indeed welcome further advice!

Yes I am suffering from a crisis of imagination when it comes to what to eat, and indeed, cardiovascular function is something I am worried about due to my past habits. I think the main thing I am struggling with is what to eat before workouts, when I am planning to run I find myself loading up on nuts, fruit and sweet potatoes in an attempt to curb the massive drop in energy I have experienced in the last month or so. I have lost quite a lot of fat and improved my strength crazy amounts in the last couple of months, but I am finding it harder and harder to run any kind of distance. I used to use how far I could run as a measure of my level of fitness, and I was increasing the distance/pace all the time. A mere week after running 5 and 10ks every day I was struggling to run 3, this coincided with a sharp increase in the intensity of my strength workouts and somewhat shortly after cutting grains and beans out of my diet. It's now about a month after my last 10k and the only real running I do is a brief sprint on a treadmill before hitting weights. I have read a lot, and had a pretty comprehensive response in the running forums, but I still have no idea what to eat on days that I run!

I have glanced at some stuff on these forums about fish oil being used as a source of energy rather than a mere supplement. Does this refer to omega-3 oil and how much can you have of this? I think my main worry at the moment is loading up on cholesterol, I am a bit hazy on what foods contain cholesterol, but I keep hearing that it's a horrible idea to eat eggs every day, should I just eat the whites? In general is it better to eat a lot of fish than other meats on this type of diet? While I am mostly looking for things to -add- to my diet I am also acutely aware of the fact that if all I eat is red meat and fried bacon I am going to end up with heart problems! At the moment I am eating a lot of canned fish, I understand that this is linked to a build up of mercury in the body however and I am only doing it because I lack a go to food as my main source of protein.

After making a thread in the running forums which pretty much became about general fitness and diet, and subsequently starting a food log I was wondering if I could get some critique/thoughts on how I am eating. This is only a weeks worth of data but I want to adjust my diet swiftly, primarily to eliminate deficiencies and avoid overloading my system with things that are bad for my body. Apologies for the layout and the lack of standardization in how I have recorded my diet, I have also to the best of my memory briefly detailed my workouts but needless to say this was a particularly busy week. It also bears saying that I had a week off from work, when I am working unless I can get my act together and prepare lunches I have to resort to tescos which throws a bit of a wrench into my eating habits. My runs are typically around 3k unless otherwise stated, and my weightlifting primarily involves lifting heavy for low reps, building from a platform of squats, deadlifts, pullups and dips. I do a fair bit of dumbell work and every so often I will do a pure bodyweight workout at home. I try to keep the intensity high and perform a wide range of exercises. In the last month and a bit I have gone from being able to run 5k easily, and 10k with some willpower required, every day, to struggling to run 2k. That was the catalyst for trying to improve my diet and this is the result more or less. The saturday is typical of what my diet used to be like (many months ago) though I wouldn't partake so much in the soft drinks. I was with friends doing a mammoth gaming session and was struggling to stay awake! Monday> Running, weightlifting, bike intervals 3 eggs, 3 Bacon, 3 Mushrooms, 1 Raw Pepper, 2 Banana, Handfull Hazelnuts, Handful Brazil Nuts, Fistfull Almonds, 3 Garlic Cloves, Tin Sardines, Chicken Stir Fry, Tin Skippers Tuesday> very intense parkour conditioning 12:00: Banana, Avocado, Tin Tuna, Fistful Hazelnuts, Garlic Clove 17:15: 250g Borlotti Beans, Onion, 5 Cherry Tomatoes 18:15 Thumb Brazil Hazel Almonds, Banana, Tangerine 23:00 Small Portion minced beef with onions, tomato, mushroom, portion lettuce Wednesday> warmup, weightlifting, long run 00:15 3 Raw Carrots, 3 handfulls Raw Broccoli 10:00 Banana, coffee 12:00 Broccoli cooked 2 handfulls, 1 Leek cooked, 1 Pepper cooked, 2 portobello mushrooms, 6 cherry tomatoes. 1200Mg omega 3,6,9 15:00 3 poached eggs, tin tuna, kiwi, 5 almonds 20:00 Beef, obergine, bean sprouts 21:00 3 Mackerel, cupfull sweet potatoes, fistfull chicken Thursday> Boxing conditioning, light sparring. 10:00 Banana 12:00 Pumpkin soup, 2 cups chopped red broccoli 13:30 Spinach 1 cupfull 17:00 Berlotti beans, tin tuna, tspn honey, tspn peanut butter 20:30 2 Venison burgers 00:00 3 Cod fillets, cupfull spinach, cupfull pumpkin soup Friday> warmup, weightlifting 07:00 Banana 09:30 3 eggs, 4 bacon, 3 mushroom 12:00 Butter beans, sweet potato 12:40 Plum 16:00 2 Cod fillets, tin tuna, cup pumpkin soup 20:00 8 Slices roast lamb, cup pumpkin, 2 cups brussels 21:15 4 Hazelnuts, 10 Brazil nuts, 10 almonds Saturday> rest, video games! 6:30 Avocado, 3 poached eggs, Banana 16:00 2 Pizzas, chips, onion rings, 4 glasses of soft drink. Sunday> warmup, weightlifting, swimming 09:00 Banana 12:30 Roast parsnip, pumpkin, bacon, onion, garlic, rosemary, tomato, carrot. 17:25 3 Pieces fried white fish 19:00 Spoonfull nutella, honey, Banana 22:00 Chicken drumstick, wing, Pumpkin, cucumber, carrot, purple cabbage I typically workout of monday, wednesday and friday, however with the recent addition of parkour and boxing conditioning I have switched that to sunday, wednesday, friday. Yeah so I have given quite a lot of vague information, without too much about my goals. I want to improve my diet and I think I have done in a huge way, but I am also coming from a place of ignorance. I put all of this into an online nutrition calculator but I don't really know what I'm looking at, for example I was 900% RDA of selenium by wednesday and despite doing some googling I pretty much had to shrug at what that means. Primarily I am looking for things that I should be eating more of, rather than cutting more and more things out of my diet. On a final note I briefly re introduced beans into my diet following a massive energy drop going into last week, but in general I am trying to follow something like a paleo diet. edit> Also I drink 2-4 strong cups of coffee a day with about an inch of lacose free milk each. also not sure how important it is but I have been taking 1200mg omega 3,6,9 fish oil mostly every day when I remember to.

At the moment my goal is to get as strong as possible without putting on too much muscle mass. I want to be able to climb, jump, run, handstand etc. I am making great progress on the strength front, primarily by putting myself at the mercy of others, the only area where motivation is required is actually turning up to the classes. On top of classes (a very recent addition) I have been doing strength training 3 times a week for about 3 months (and on/off for about 2 years) and am stepping it up every week as much as my body can handle. Pretty much everything is getting easier (and I am therefore upping the intensity) but the running is the opposite. It does take a lot more willpower for me to run distance than to do 5 pullups for example, but given my ignorance I didn't want to discount the possibility that I was making some horrible mistake. Goals will certainly help me but I am not sure racing is for me. In the past achieving the 5k was my goal and looking back I think having that goal was enough to motivate me, I did it for the sake of doing it and because it was part of working towards my general fitness. Pushing myself to the 10k was the same. It was only when my goal became increasing the pace that I did not have an exact speed/distance in mind. Expecting it to get easier may have been my main downfall. In any case I have started running outdoors again, reducing rest periods, logging nutrition, stretching a little (whereas I seriously neglected any kind of stretching in the past). I have been prone to getting a little obsessive about getting fit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in the short term. Having something tangible to work towards/achieve rather than my slightly abstract general fitness target is going to be vital in the long run I expect. That's where I kind of draw a blank. I almost found myself asking for suggestions regarding what my goals should be, which I recognize is a little backwards ^^ I want to be able to run fast, and run often and for long distances. That is an intrinsic desire that I have but I struggle to break it down into manageable milestones (so to speak). Right now working my way back to 5k a day would be a good start I think. Eventually running 5k at a 10 minute mile pace seems like a good target to aim for, however again I find my ignorance is clouding my vision as to how to break this goal down into an effective training regiment. If it seems like I am putting way too much thought into this, that's because I probably am, but I tend to like it that way

Yeah if I'm honest I have begun to feel the same on the treadmill, believe it or not I used to love it, and yet I can't shake the feeling that I am doing something horribly wrong. I wouldn't have far to look what with being a smoker, and I'm wrestling with myself constantly on that one. It's possible a combination of boredom and a natural desire to avoid discomfort are to blame for the frankly sharp performance hit when it comes to running. I suppose when I look back at the distances I ran not all that long ago I easily forget how hard it was and how much I had to push myself, I remember every 5k as being a cakewalk and the handful of 10ks I did as being fun rather than uncomfortable, but the truth is I had to push myself a lot. I have started logging everything I eat, infact this lead me to blow about 6 hours yesterday trying to make openoffice calc do what I wanted xD I have read some stuff at precision nutrition and following a link from there to a nutrition calculator, started on the path to being mindful of deficiencies. As a direct result of this, last night I ate 3 carrots and a bunch of raw broccoli! I have also begun to relax on the paleo thing, the fact is I wasn't doing it right and until I have a better idea of nutrition I should err on the side of caution before cutting out so much. This has taken the form of reintroducing canned beans into my diet on workout days. Last night I did my first parkour conditioning session, it reminded me what effort and profound discomfort felt like. I'm going to try to take advantage of as many classes as I can at my gym. I used to love the boxing and I don't know why I haven't reenlisted since re-joining my gym, last night reminded me how much further I can push myself when someone is shouting at me

Ok so I have given a lot of scrutiny to my eating habits, I have since making this post upped my carbs (sweet potatoes mostly) and om top of that I am having at least a banana and an apple before I go to the gym. I have been eating a lot of protein and fat, and a huge amount of vegetables since originally lowering my carb intake. I am certain I must be doing something wrong though because the running is still getting harder and harder. I took the pressure off myself for a while, and preceded my workouts with brief sprints for a few weeks and have since attempted running distance again. I am struggling to make 2km at 13km/h, to the point where I have to really push myself to make it that far. A month and a bit ago I was running 10km a day at this pace and had begun to run intervals to work on upping said pace. My workouts have gotten a little bit aimless, I have been using machines for months now. The plan is to get a session at the gym with a fitness instructor to show me how to use free weights, but until I get around to it It's machines. I have been adding weight to my sets pretty successfully but I am aware that I may be making things harder for myself as a result of the types of exercise I am doing. I am also not stretching properly. I had been planning to run a tough mudder in april and do the 3 peak challenge at some point but despite the work I am doing towards these goals they are getting further and further away. I have re read all the advice given in this thread and am going to try to start from scratch with my running, I started my fitness journey with bike intervals and running at much slower pace and I did see fast progress, so I am going to go back there. I think I am also going to enroll in some classes which will at the very least force me to stretch properly a few times a week I used to do boxing classes once a week and used this as a measure of my progress and indeed an indicator of whether I was getting enough energy from my food. I recently screwed my back up using a leg press (I have been adding 10kg per week to all the machines I use) and am now feeling a lot better but determined to move away from machines. I want to move to freeweight/bodyweight workouts and enroll in a parkour conditioning class and boxing class within the next 3 weeks. Work just got a lot less busy and it seems I have at least all next week to dedicate to fitness and relaxation (when work is busy I have to dial down the workouts or suffer ^^) so I am going to try to re approach my fitness regime.

I may be underestimating boredom as a factor, certainly my experience with intensity in the past (with all kinds of training) is that I am less able to deal with it the more I train. Competence is an indicator of progress and when I start to feel wrecked on an interval program I have done several times before I it's possible I psych myself out a bit. With regards to the food, the more I see results, the more I get serious about getting fit, the less carbs I eat. When I am doing nothing towards my fitness I happily eat tonnes of carbs, when I am putting serious time, blood and sweat into losing fat and conditioning my body I start to treat carbs like poison. I am aware this is a mistake, but I remain ignorant of when and how much carbs I should be eating and just abstain. I eat fruit and I'm sure I get a decent amount, but I completely avoid bread, pastries, grains, sugar, pasta, potatoes etc As for calories, I have absolutely no idea. I will eat a decent amount of protein fat and vegetables, I am probably taking in more calories than I burn but the way I eat is partly geared towards not storing fat. I am probably carrying a lot of conflicting nutrition advice around with me and am happy to admit ignorance.

I do all of my running on treadmills partly because I can set them up for intervals partly because I have very little experience running outdoors. I suppose part of me is worried that I will find myself far less competent doing real running I change it up a lot, at the moment I am changing everything about my workouts every month, with regards to the treadmill this meant going for intervals and working on pace last month. After gradually getting weaker and weaker at performing the 5km intervals I stuck with it this month to try to push myself back up. I have a constant battle to motivate myself though I imagine no more than the next person, and indeed running has been rewarding for me, when I can switch off and just run it's incredibly relaxing. That said I don't know if running on a treadmill is something I consistently enjoy. I have accounted for boredom affecting my motivation, but I am really feeling a physical difference then and now. I ran 30km over the course of 4 gym sessions in September and was getting faster and faster, since upping the wieght in my workouts and moving to intervals I appear to be making my body less good at running I suppose? It's also worth noting that while I don't 'live paleo' I have been somewhat infuenced by stuff I have read on it, and as a result find my carb intake has taken a huge hit. I did tend to stay away from the carbs as much as possible in the past, except for porridge/muesli in the morning which I now avoid.

My problem is summed up simply, I am getting worse and worse at running, I am aware of many possible factors but am also aware that I don't know it all and can't really zero in on what the problem is, or if there is even a problem at all. To describe what I am experiencing in more detail, I will briefly describe my recent history with running and fitness.I am 29, a smoker, this time 2 and a bit years ago I was overweight and horribly unfit. I have been active at various points in my life but always overwieght and unfit to varying degrees. When I was about 13 I started lifting, a -lot-, with no real clue. I grew huge shoulders, biceps and pecs, did 100 situps a day, wrecked my posture and ultimately let it all turn to fat. In the last 3 years of my life I started dieting, then went to a gym and started running on treadmills amongst other things. I 'ran' 5k every day at about 10-11kph, did some intervals on the bikes, swimming and used machines a bit. I experienced an improvement in my quality of life that I had never dreamed possible, but work and life ended up getting in the way of me having any kind of regular routine. My job was extremely physical so I quit the gym with a mind to pick it up again when I had more time. After almost a year of not going to the gym I started back around 3 months ago, with a much better idea of what to do to lose bodyfat. I cut my sessions down from 7 to 3 a week with some core work on rest days. At the gym I would skip the bikes and warmup by running intevals on the treadmill. This would involve 1 minute at 10kmph and 1 minute at 15kmp for 5k or ~24 min, then I would hit the machines and do a far more intensive and structured workout than I previously did. I am aware of some of the issues and limitations with machines and am trying to move away from them, but for now I am afaik working all my large muscles. I am at the point again where I can say I look 'fit', but I still have too much flab around my pecs waist and belly. Appearance is not my main motivator but I consider it a good indicator. I want to be strong, agile, flexible and healthy, I really want to work on cardiovascular function and posture. So, I am getting smarter about how I work out, eat rest etc but I am experiencing something odd, or maybe not all that odd. It is getting impossible to run those 5k intervals, I managed it 3 days a week for 2 weeks, then started struggling, and now I can run about 2.5k. Since my arms have gotten (slightly) bigger it feels like I have fire extinguishers strapped to my shoulders and my running is getting extremely laboured and rigid. Being able to run less is making me want to run more, but I am hitting walls that my willpower cannot overcome during my sessions. I have tried to be thorough in describing my state of fitness, and there are some things I do need to change, which I am working on, but what I am struggling with is the fact that I seem to be getting worse at running. This is something I really want to sort out and I have some ideas, but ultimately I would be piecing together a lot of half understood information. I am here looking for some wisdom, maybe some of this rings a bell, maybe I'm missing something or maybe I'm just going about it all wrong. Also I know the smoking has to go, but I have been smoking for 16 years and trying to quit for 10. It's proving a tough nut to crack and I am trying to approach change in my life 1 step at a time. Packing in the habit would be the ultimate end goal right now.