shoryuujo

I agree a bit on the pacing, but I also intentionally set my goals a bit higher, so that if I do fall into the 80% of my goals range, I'm still really happy. If I made 100%, that's like making my goals+a stretch goal or two. Round up for the challenge, I feel like I fell solidly in the 80-85% range in all categories. I was just on vacation so calorie tracking for a week or so got dropped. On the other hand, I have a good handle on how I eat for the most part and my normal habits are pretty good. While vacationing I did some hiking and tried out white water rafting for the first time (class 2-4). There was definitely some DOMS going on for a few days after and I felt great about successfully being at the head of the raft and leading the group. I'd say considering all this, I successfully completed my goals. They kept me on track and working at them responsibly, I never wanted to give up on them and I feel good about continuing forward.

Just checking in and updating, I'd say I'm maintaining about an 85-90% score in my goals. Some of it's really close, but I could put in more time on the basic body weight workout. What's holding my back there is muscle pain/soreness and just common sense that I probably don't want to push it past the sore point and into an injury range. I'd rather play it a bit safe than sorry, since injury could put me down longer. My biking trips have been awesome though. My first trip was 15km and a top speed of 48km/h, time about 1 hr. My second trip was also about 1 hr, but my distance was 24km and my top speed was about 52km/h. on health/diet goals, I think I'm on track, it's not perfect perfect, but it's in a 90% range, getting calories nailed down exactly takes too much work and effort and planning for a non-professional, so I give myself about a +/-300 calorie from my diet of 1470 calories daily, that allows for a some days to be low and some days to be high and keeps me from being low one week and trying to fix it and ending up going over the next week. Overall, I think for a person's happiness and maintaining these goals in the long run, there needs to be that bit of flexibility there. Even though we're about halfway done the challenge, I'd say I'm doing a pretty good job completing it. I think for my next challenge, I'll probably not use weight as a tool for measuring progress, the reason being is that I can according to my scale change +/-4 lbs over the course of a day or two. That seems like a bit much to me and may mean that the scale is not giving information representative of my work.

been doing a bit less gym in favor of late of gearing a bit more into bodyweight stuff at home, because of comfort and near-equal output. I find i'm more comfortable with my body than a lot of gym equipment even if a lot of it is neat. But when I am feeling like hitting the gym for a program, being social, and wanting to soak in the hot tub for about 30 min, I'll definitely still be hitting the gym. I've been doing circuits of the NF Beginner Body Weight Workout without resting between sets and trying to improve on PR numbers a bit. I'm currently at +1 BBWW pushups, +15 sec on the plank. Regarding measurements of progress via body, stomach, waist, hips, breast measurements might be good, but I'm curious if these are any more reliable. I'm most likely to do a weight recording 1/week, maybe take measurements once a month, but if I'm seeing changes in some areas but not others I hope I don't get too discouraged.Body fat would be the best, but it sounds like a -real- pain to try and be measuring as well as usually pretty inaccurate unless you're willing to throw down cash.

Hm, I agree a bit with using weight as being inaccurate, but I'm not sure how much better using size measurements is as a substitute. And I'd have to guesstimate what my goal for a size decrease would be as well. The weight itself is less the goal, and more that it's X amount of fat. Reducing fat will get me closer to a point where I'm ready to run, hit a goal that's more body image than anything, and have me in better shape for tackling other challenges.

I think the ones at my gym range 8-12 lbs, so nothing really heavy, but great for a beginner I think, and also able to use it in different sorts of non standard exercises.

Reformatted and posted the challenge for June-July in the Challenge forum, linked from here at the top. That likely makes more sense for laying out content for me.

For the lifting portion, I've been working with a piece of equipment called vipr. I'll go from a floor to waist lift, curl from there, and press it up, hold, and bring it back down in reverse. It's a light weight, but I also figure it may be a really good tool until I feel like I've nailed form down. I've also been using a weighted ball and done sets of bouncing it off a small trampoline and catching it from the side on each return, keeping my feet planted so it also gives me some hip rotation.

Challenge [June 9-July 20, 2014] -------------------------------------------- Main quest --------------- Get into a better physically fit shape, so that I can take part in other fun physical activities such as archery, lifting,volleyball, etc.Ensure that I am on my way to being in good health for Sept, in order to cope with the physically demanding occupation and education of nursing.Feel better about my body image by slimming down my figure. Diet quest -------------- Continue tracking calories until July 21, in order to get a good overall look at my daily and weekly eating habits, inspect where I need to improve upon my diet and consider what tweaks I may need to make for the next challenge.Reduce pepsi/soda intake to 2L/week, to reduce the sugar in my diet, replace with water, tea and other 0 or low calorie drinks. Life Quest -------------- Visit fitness instructor at the gym, developing a plan for fitness to improve my overall health, prime myself for lifting, and get everything rolling (Completed 2 sessions with fitness coach over the last two weeks)Get lifting instruction from a trainer at the gym for an hour to improve and ensure good form for when I'm exercising on my own with weights. Smart Goals ----------------- Track my Calorie intake during this challenge using myfitnesspal app on my phone to input everything I eat and drink. Excluding water, because water has no calories, sucka. Doing this will give me 1) a better idea of how to keep my calories and weight in check, and 2) will give me more insight into the nutritional breakdown of my diet to see where I can make improvements.Exercise 1 hour, twice a week. This can be 1 hour of cycling, going to the gym and doing my gym routine there (5 min climbing warm up, 50 min TRX exercises, 5 min cooldown on treadmill). This will assist in my goal of trimming down my stomach and losing weight.Decrease in weight every week, by not only tracking my diet but managing it nutritionally and with portion control, adding in the above exercise to capitalize upon the likelihood of achieving this goal.

yay book love! I tried reading some other ender's series books, Speaker of the Dead I think it was, but it became too tiresome, with excessive foreign language use, which was flavourful, but becomes a bit of a task to translate, and then remember/retranslate and deal with while reading the book.

Hey everyone, My name is Amy and I've joined up with NF, I've found the chat room to be a great place to chat with people daily, get input, feedback, share stories and challenges. I've decided that I'm serious about weight loss and fitness in general starting in the winter, when I was thinking, "I need to get in shape for nursing!" and told myself that I would start in the spring. Well, it looks like spring is finally here in Alberta, and I've pretty much quit soda, started drinking tons of water (not literally ), eating lots of fruit and veggies and limiting unhealthy meals and treats to a very small number (once or twice a week, on average). My over reaching goal here is fitness for nursing, but I thought I could also have a lot of fun on the way, setting other goals until I'm in nursing, general fitness goals, being able to get active in small group activities, getting out to enjoy nice days while being active, either at the gym, cycling, or something else fun. Making getting active a fun thing and a challenging goal has been something which is also a driving force. Some of my interests in physical fitness, at varying levels of interest are: Crossfit (curious), Adventure Race (Curious), Rock Climbing (Interested), Cycling (Interested), Lifting (interested), Volleyball (Interested) Some of my favorite video games: Final Fantasy VI, Lufia (SNES), Breath of Fire, Dark Souls II, League of Legends, Earthbound, Final Fantasy Tactics, Legend of Zelda, and more. Some of my favorite books/series: George RR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Glen Cook's Black Company, Tolkein's Silmarillion and Hobbit, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series, Brom's The Child Thief, many Mercedes Lackey books, and many more. Other things I've enjoyed is anime and manga in a broad sense.

Challenge [June 2-July 21, 2014] -------------------------------------------- Main quest --------------- Work days: Stair climb (3x night, 7 floors) Work days: Beginner bodyweight workout (3x week) Days off: 2x visit to gym a week Diet quest -------------- Continue tracking calories for a month total from May 15-June 15 Reduce pepsi/soda intake to 2L/week Life Quest -------------- Visit fitness instructor Get lifting instruction

Edmonton, Alberta here.

Main Quest ---------------------------------------------- Join the main party for the volleyball team (Defense) -> reset from university to intramural club Complete the Challenges until September tryouts -> Different tryout dates, co-ed, not announced yet Main Quest Goals -------------------------------------------------------------- Challenge [April 14-may 25] Challenge [June 9-July 20] Challenge [July 6-Aug 17] Challenge [April 14-May 25] (partial) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reduce soda intake by half (7L or less a week) [may 15-25] Make a plan for June 2-July 21 Challenge Work on a nutrition plan for May 25-July 6 Challenge Sidequests --------------------------------------------------------------- Track Calories for a week [May 15 at 8am- May 22 at 8am] Track exercise for a week [May 15 at 8am- May 22 at 8am] Lifequest ---------------------------------------- Visit Japan with my friend, Sen. Learn another language fluently re-learn to play piano