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Working Out
May. 15th, 2011 02:04 pmI managed seven visits to the gym in seven days, mixing up personal trainer sessions (two), my own mainly strength training sessions (two) and mainly cardio/calorie-burn (three).
So I gave myself today off.
Progress is good, although not in the leaps and bounds that impatient people such as me would obviously like. Since I returned to the gym on Feb 1st I've dropped about nine pounds and maybe 2.5 inches off the wasteline. I reckon there's a good ten pounds to a stone still to go before I'd have a 'satisfactory' body-fat ratio (i.e, one where I can start to focus on putting the weight back on, rather than the current 'half-and'half' concept of trying to lose fat (requires fewer calories) and gain strength (requires bigger muscles, therefore requires more calories).
I never thought that I would turn into a food bore, but the more I read on things, the more convinced I am that the food manufacturers of the world are slowly trying to poison us in the name of "tasty snacks". I've now given up virtually anything "pre-processed" with the exception of some canned stuff that has fairly explicit content listing on the outside (e.g., canned kidney beans, canned fish). Combined with a cutting down on carbohydrate consumption, I feel about 10 times healthier, and 10 times less lethargic after eating a meal.
I'm no angel or ascetic when it comes to food (perhaps unfortunately). I often still succumb to a toasted cheese sandwuich of an evening. But at least it's good cheese and my own bread. I'm also making slow progress each week. Last week I moved from semi-skimmed milk to fully skimmed milk. This week I moved from margarine to butter. Just by keeping an eye on food balance intake (see below) I am getting better physical results.
One of the odd things that I have learnt in the past month or so is that there is a difference between strength-training and muscle-building training. Although the two are related, body-builders and weight-lifters have different training and dietary regimes. So, you can in quite a few cases build strength without a significant build-up in muscle mass (e.g., triceps). That's good for power-lifters, but bad for bodybuilders.
My personal trainer is from a bodybulding rather than power-lifting background, but my specific target at the beginning of this was "strength, with muscle-build-up as a consequence", rather than the other way round. Inevitably, as time has gone on, there have been compromises, and I'm now more in a half-way house of neither having priority.
One example where the two work in (slight) opposition is in cardio. There's actually an "interference effect" in muscle build-up if you do a fair bit of cardio at the same time. This is mainly because the cardio diverts any strength (i.e., endurance) build-up to the type 1 muscle fibres, which is no good for power lifting or body building, but is fine for, say 10-to-12 repetition lifts.
Anyhoo, my main areas of weakness are clearly abdomen (those external 'six-packs') core (the muscles that sit behind those six-packs which we use for simply staying upright when on our feet, and for nearly everything else), biceps (and its many front-arm-based friends), triceps, deltoids.
I'm coming along well on hamstrings, quadriceps, calves, gluteals (just above the bum on your back), and the various combination of back muscles which for convenience sake I'll call laterals, rhomboids and trapezium (trapezia?).
We've dropped off the single-rep dead lifts for a few weeks, so on Thursday I did three sets of 90kg 10-repetitions each.
+++++++++++
So I gave myself today off.
Progress is good, although not in the leaps and bounds that impatient people such as me would obviously like. Since I returned to the gym on Feb 1st I've dropped about nine pounds and maybe 2.5 inches off the wasteline. I reckon there's a good ten pounds to a stone still to go before I'd have a 'satisfactory' body-fat ratio (i.e, one where I can start to focus on putting the weight back on, rather than the current 'half-and'half' concept of trying to lose fat (requires fewer calories) and gain strength (requires bigger muscles, therefore requires more calories).
I never thought that I would turn into a food bore, but the more I read on things, the more convinced I am that the food manufacturers of the world are slowly trying to poison us in the name of "tasty snacks". I've now given up virtually anything "pre-processed" with the exception of some canned stuff that has fairly explicit content listing on the outside (e.g., canned kidney beans, canned fish). Combined with a cutting down on carbohydrate consumption, I feel about 10 times healthier, and 10 times less lethargic after eating a meal.
I'm no angel or ascetic when it comes to food (perhaps unfortunately). I often still succumb to a toasted cheese sandwuich of an evening. But at least it's good cheese and my own bread. I'm also making slow progress each week. Last week I moved from semi-skimmed milk to fully skimmed milk. This week I moved from margarine to butter. Just by keeping an eye on food balance intake (see below) I am getting better physical results.
One of the odd things that I have learnt in the past month or so is that there is a difference between strength-training and muscle-building training. Although the two are related, body-builders and weight-lifters have different training and dietary regimes. So, you can in quite a few cases build strength without a significant build-up in muscle mass (e.g., triceps). That's good for power-lifters, but bad for bodybuilders.
My personal trainer is from a bodybulding rather than power-lifting background, but my specific target at the beginning of this was "strength, with muscle-build-up as a consequence", rather than the other way round. Inevitably, as time has gone on, there have been compromises, and I'm now more in a half-way house of neither having priority.
One example where the two work in (slight) opposition is in cardio. There's actually an "interference effect" in muscle build-up if you do a fair bit of cardio at the same time. This is mainly because the cardio diverts any strength (i.e., endurance) build-up to the type 1 muscle fibres, which is no good for power lifting or body building, but is fine for, say 10-to-12 repetition lifts.
Anyhoo, my main areas of weakness are clearly abdomen (those external 'six-packs') core (the muscles that sit behind those six-packs which we use for simply staying upright when on our feet, and for nearly everything else), biceps (and its many front-arm-based friends), triceps, deltoids.
I'm coming along well on hamstrings, quadriceps, calves, gluteals (just above the bum on your back), and the various combination of back muscles which for convenience sake I'll call laterals, rhomboids and trapezium (trapezia?).
We've dropped off the single-rep dead lifts for a few weeks, so on Thursday I did three sets of 90kg 10-repetitions each.
+++++++++++
