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--REBOOTED CHALLENGE-- UPDATE PAGE 5 --ORIGINAL CHALLENGE (LEAN AND STRONG 2.1)-- Alright, my warm-up challenge for the year is done and now I'm ready to get serious. I did reasonably okay with the previous challenge, and I made a little progress toward one of my objectives for 2018; but a mid-challenge skid kept me from losing much in the way of body fat and waist size. For the sake of reminder, my 2018 objectives are the following: Wear size 30W jeans; Weigh less than 200 lbs; and Be able to do 18 consecutive strict pull-ups in a single set. I'm having to rebuild all of the muscles in my pull-ups chain since abandoning them late in 2015 for rote barbells over the last couple years. It's pretty sad how weak they've gotten. So to continue making myself Lean and Strong to get those pull-ups I'm going to crush this challenge with my usual four goals. 1. Wake. Good days start on time, so I'm going to persist in pushing myself to get up at the appropriate hour. A pass requires me to get out of bed after no more than one snooze press and get moving before 6:45 am. If I oversleep (or snooze too much) but still make it to work on time then that's worth a 1/2 point. 2. Eat. I'm going to continue tracking my daily food intake and macro splits via MFP, but I'm abandoning the 5:2 schedule of fasting that I attempted (and bailed) in the last challenge. Instead I'll just manage my daily intake in a sustainable way that keeps me fueled up without any hints of a starve-binge pattern (to which I've been susceptible in the past). Target for this challenge is 2100 kcal per day, which should help me burn at a rate of around 1.5 lb. per week. I'm going to keep an eye on macros just to make sure I'm getting plenty of good fats and not overdoing it with sugars. Good carbs will be planned for recovery meals after workouts, which leads me to... 3. Move. I'll continue to work on the Recommended Routine from /r/bodyweightfitness on Reddit, including the barbell variation for Squat work that will allow me to lift lower body fairly heavy twice per week. The rest of the work is bodyweight strength with increasingly difficult progressions. I've got a solid foundation with the program to build on now, so that will be my Tue & Fri gym days. On Mon & Thu I'll walk for 1/2 an hour, either outdoors or on the treadmill at home; and Wed will be a mid-week rest day. Weekends are off, at least insofar as a suburban dad is allowed to rest on a typical weekend. 4. Sleep. In bed on work nights by 10:30 pm with lights out and ready for proper sleep. Full point requires all devices to be turned off--no ebook, tablet, phone, laptop, PC, or TV is permitted to break the darkness after 10:30. I'm going to continue trying to read The Once and Future King by T.H. White--I barely got two chapters last time. I'm also going to keep doing 1/2 hour of practice at Rocket League since I'm seeing the benefit in my playing, but I'm only going to allow myself to turn on the PS4 if I've already satisfied my Move goal for the day. The usual spreadsheets are fabricated and ready to go for tracking my progress. Standard weekly check-ins will consist of scale weight, belt notch reports, and progress photos. The fancy shorts may make an appearance if I feel my performance has been up to snuff. I'm not taking a Week Zero this time around. I allowed a big variance day for Super Bowl, and now I'm right back in the groove. Time to make the doughnuts. I'll leave the chimichangas for Wolfpool.

Alright, I'm finally back home and getting an early start on this challenge since I ended the last one early due to unplanned travels. I'm going 5 weeks as hard as I can to get ready for the holidays. The final week will actually be the first week of my Thanksgiving vacation wherein we will again be traveling, so I'm going to have to modify my goals to finish out the challenge strong while out of my routine again. This time I'm going in with a battle plan for the road, but we'll be staying at my mom's house for the first time ever, and I can't possibly know what to expect. All I can do is give my best. And if I'm able to wrangle the Dad Bod into decent shape for SoCal adventuring then I'll have a little more motivation to maintain mindfulness during the off-week when the holidays get going in full and I'm surrounded by dangerous eats 24/7. I'm going to rock with the same four goals: 1. Sleep. In bed on work nights by 10:30 pm with lights out and ready for proper sleep. This time of year brings new challenges with football and hockey games that sometimes run late, but I'm just going to exercise my good judgment and impose the discipline of prioritizing my sleep to turn off the TV and go to bed as planned. I'm still limiting my night-time Netflix viewing to a max of 1 hour, which is helping greatly. 2. Wake. Good days also start on time, so I'm going to continue to push myself to get up at the appropriate hour. I still haven't managed to establish a sustainable morning routine, so I'll continue to try and build one around rolling out of bed, doing a few minutes of warm-up stretching, reading a quick Bible passage, and getting ready for work. 3. Eat. Still pushing with calorie counting via MFP. I'm not adjusting daily targets for this challenge since I'm already losing at the max rate I think is sustainable for me. As usual I'll take a break on Sunday to eat a little higher and looser. Macros aren't super important, but food quality is. I'm aiming for 80% Paleo/Primal on program days. Free days need to be mindful without being restrictive. And again I'm abstaining from ice cream for the duration. 4. Move. I'm sticking with my new Power Cardio regimen (semi-heavy powerlifts at higher-than-usual volume with shorter rest periods to keep my heart rate up) without adjusting any of the weights. I completely failed to inject afternoon yoga on non-gym days like I intended, so I'm going to take another run at making it work this time around. In Week 5 I'll be completely off my routine, so the current battle plan is to sub in a bunch of bodyweight work for those Move days and still try to do yoga on the tweeners. The usual spreadsheets are fabricated and ready to go for tracking my progress. Standard weekly check-ins will consist of belt notch reports and progress photos. There's still a long way to go in returning to non-Dad-Bod glory, so let's get under way.

We're winning! The battle to defeat the return of the dreaded Dad Bod has been waged on rocky ground for quite a while, but I'm finally finding my footing and marshaling my forces in the most economical way to make sustainable progress. In the last challenge we simplified the attack and adopted a few new weapons into the arsenal--intermittent fasting and yoga joined the team. IF was extremely beneficial, and I'm going to continue to use it in the exact same way. Yoga was tougher to implement because I haven't yet found the most effective method of deployment, but I've got an idea about how to use it better in this challenge to further my life quest of reaching a lean and strong body. I'm going to rock with the same four goals, slightly modified: 1. Sleep. In bed on work nights by 10:30 pm with lights out and ready for proper sleep. The two-episode limit I imposed on my TV viewing was very effective. This time of year brings new challenges with football and hockey games that sometimes run late, but I'm just going to exercise my good judgment and impose the discipline of prioritizing my sleep to turn off the TV and go to bed as planned. 2. Wake. Good days also start on time, so I'm going to continue to push myself to get up at the appropriate hour. Instead of trying for a morning yoga session (which failed spectacularly last time) I'm going to attempt a new morning routine of rolling out of bed, doing a few minutes of warm-up stretching, reading a quick Bible passage, and getting ready for work. 3. Eat. The return to calorie counting has paid off bigly--it's always been the best way for me to manage my intake. Since I lost a decent bit of weight last time around I've been able to recalculate my targets and adjust them downward slightly. Six days a week I'm aiming for 1860 kcal, then Sundays will be a relatively free day. Macros aren't important, but food quality is. I'm aiming for 80% Paleo/Primal on program days. Free days need to be mindful without being restrictive. I'm also going to impose another no-ice-cream challenge. 4. Move. In the last challenge I changed how I was lifting to focus on cutting weight, and it worked very well. I'm calling my new gym regimen Power Cardio since it's just semi-heavy powerlifts at higher-than-usual volume with shorter rest periods to keep my heart rate up. Each power lift also has a complementary accessory exercise. My body seems to appreciate how this program is working, so I'm going to run it exactly the way I ended last challenge with just a few small increases to certain exercises. Tues and Thursday are my gym days, but new to this challenge is that I'm going to add Yoga to M-W-F afternoons when I get home from work. At first it will just be simple beginner yoga videos on Youtube, but if it works well and sticks for the whole challenge then I'll look at moving up to something more deliberate like NF Yoga or Flexible Steel. The usual spreadsheets are fabricated and ready to go for tracking my progress. I'm hoping to hit 220 lbs. in this challenge, and at that point I'll start taking monthly body composition measurements again to aid in some finer tuning of my nutrition needs as I get closer to my goals. I'm also invoking the oh-so-scientific method of counting belt notches as I slim down, and as of this morning I'm starting on Notch 6 7 of the skinny-DFG belt. Each notch represents an inch of circumference, and I'd be thrilled to reduce by two or three over the rest of this year. Standard weekly check-ins will consist of metrics and photos, but I won't be entertaining specific photographic requests in this challenge. Still a couple of solid months before the holidays start to get in the way of things, so as I'm fond of saying, "Make hay while the sun is shining." The time is ripe for awesomeness!

Well, I'm bulky again. This year has been a serious yo-yo, and up here at the crest of this most recent "yo" I'm needing to re-focus on my continual stated goal of getting lean to start dropping again. Once again I'm going with four goals with some minor tweaks over last time: 1. Sleep. Still going to play it loosely, but I've recognized that I have a weakness for binge-watching TV late into the night. To address that I'm going to limit myself to two episodes of whatever I'm watching on Netflix. 2. Wake. In the previous challenge I attempted to get up and do a bodyweight circuit every weekday morning. I realize now that was super-ambitious. Plus, I kinda hated it so by the end of the challenge I had blown it off completely. This time around I'm going to throttle back and try something new to me: yoga. Three days per week I'm going to start my day with a 15-minute beginner's yoga routine I found somewhere on the webs. Hopefully this will be a more pleasant way to start my day so I'll actually look forward to doing it. 3. Eat. I'm going back to counting calories--it's always been the best way for me to manage my intake. Six days a week I'm aiming for 2000 kcal, then Sundays will be a relatively free day. Macros aren't important, but food quality is. I'm aiming for 80% Paleo/Primal during target days. Free days need to be mindful without being restrictive. I think I can drop 1 pound per week with this approach and keep it sustainable. 4. Lift. After getting back to lifting in the previous challenge I'm really enjoying being in the gym again, but I'm finding that I still need to be careful with my knee and that the 5/3/1 (modified) program I was using to build strength isn't necessarily optimal for fat burning. I'm going to go with a 3x10 program and count on the increased volume (with shorter rest periods) to keep my heart rate up while still preserving lean mass. Gym target is still just two days per week which makes for a pretty comfortable life balance right now. With school starting back up and nothing really on the horizon until Thanksgiving I think I'm primed for a good run over the next few months. A strong challenge would be the perfect way to kick that off. Time to get after it.