Tag: home gym

Bulletproof

We all age, but there are ways to age gracefully. To be “bulletproof” is to work to improve your health in ways that will offer you protection from illness and injury, while at the same time extending your ability to do the things you love.

Week 3

Am I a little ready for a beer? I’m not even waiting until tomorrow to publish this week’s results. I think I can be excused under the circumstances. How many times is there an insurrection in the halls of congress during a pandemic the week before a new president is inaugurated?

I titled this week bulletproof precisely because that is so exactly what I am not! Oh sure, vanity plays a role in my motivation to carry on this experiment, but if I’m honest, it pales in comparison to my desire to eliminate as much weakness from my system as is possible. I don’t necessarily mean I need to be strong, I mean I need system wide protection. I am starting to have quite a collection of what I call, “nicks and dings.” I like to tell others that the engine is running fine, it’s the tires that continue to need fixing. Take a look:

Inguinal hernia repair both right(2020) and left(2008)
Torn cartilage micro-fracture repair left knee(2014)(no walking 3 months, crutches 3 months)
Torn right bicep repair(2015)
Torn right rotator cuff repair(2015)(no use of arm for months)
CIV(Chronic Venous Insufficiency) repair-complete with leg ulcers(2018-19)repair
Chronic back issues(in my view chronic back weakness)-(2008-2018)

When taking in that list it would be fair to assume I probably look a bit like Frankenstein and played professional hockey with no equipment. I don’t and I didn’t. What I find interesting is that it wasn’t until I was 42, in 2008, that I ever had any problems whatsoever.

Here’s the thing, I was indoctrinated into extreme exercise at age 6. That’s when I started competitive swimming. Five nights of two hour practices followed by meets on weekends, year round. By the time I “retired” to play basketball in high school I was doing two-a-days with weight training and light swimming in the mornings, and full on practice in the afternoons. I have never been able to let that go. Make no mistake I’m no athlete, but I am athletic.

My wife likes to joke that everyone should lay down on the floor every day and get back up to a standing position because you don’t ever want to lose that. We say the same thing about stairs. If you buy a house without stairs then you run the risk of losing the ability to climb and descend them. I know this from experience. I have already lost running. With the cartilage injury and repair I could risk running, but why? I’ve replaced my love of running with the lower impact joys of cycling, skating, and swimming. My attempt at making myself bulletproof is just another version of getting up off the floor.

If you look at the literature that is out there the best way to make yourself bulletproof is to maintain a healthy weight by eating in a healthy manner(I did not use the word DIET-that’s a 4 letter word!), to exercise in ways that maintains and improves strength, flexibility, and cardio-vascular health, to limit your intake of naughty stuff(you don’t need me to tell you what that naughty stuff is!), to sleep, to laugh, to have good friends, and to find joy in what you do. There are probably others, but you get the gist. Knowing this, here’s my progress for week 3:

January 1-217.6 pounds January 21-210.4 pounds=7.2 pounds lost total(2.2 pounds this past week)

1/17 was a big night. It was our dog Sadie’s 5th birthday. Of course I’m eating cupcakes!

The weather was not conducive to skating this week. The extremes ruined the ice. Better temps ahead!

As I write this I’m chuckling to myself because my right knee hurts-not the bad one. I’ve taken to wearing a compression sleeve when I workout or skate. Just another ding. Maybe in 10 days when I crack that first beer, I’ll put it up and relax, but not today.

Photo Credit:

Featured Image Free for commercial use. No attribution required.

Tags bulletproof, Health and Fitness, home gym

Check In

In this post I will get you up to speed on how I’m doing in this, the second week of my fitness challenge.

Weight:

UPDATE!: I decided that the math just wasn’t working out. How could such a drastic change in my diet and lifestyle not have more dramatic results? So I decided to weigh myself again today. This time I moved the scale a few times to make sure it was sitting flat on our stone tile floor, the result was three measures all at the same 212 pounds- a significant difference from the previous day.

Turns out dropping 500-800 calories of craft beer per day does have an effect!

There you have it. The world’s most boring graph. I don’t see the value in weighing myself everyday, hence the flatline with a drop at the end. I have to admit that I’m surprised at the relatively slow rate that I’m losing weight. Think about it, I dropped all alcohol, all sugar(not something I ate much of anyway) and most all processed food. The loss of alcohol alone should be having a much bigger impact. It is even more surprising when you add in the next piece of evidence.

Exercise:

As you can see on my RunGap Chart, the addition of ice skating has really upped my game. I chose to call it High Intensity Interval Training because that is how I used it. After reacquainting myself with ice skating, I used the 30-40 minutes I typically can endure skating(it is way harder than I remember!) to skate laps in groups of four at my local rink. I’m not sprinting or anything but I don’t have to either. My heart rate jumped from about a 100 to 150 and above in that short time. It’s hard to differentiate the skating from the P90X workouts above, but I always skate in the afternoon so skating is always listed as the second HIIT workout on each day.

Here’s a peek at a typical skating day as seen by a heart rate chart:

I think you can see from the chart why I choose to label it high intensity interval training, lot’s of peaks and valleys. In effect, I’m doing two workouts a day. However, the weather has not cooperated lately, it’s actually raining outside, more like a freezing rain on top of snow. I didn’t think to use the iwatch to gauge it, but in the last three days I’ve probably shoveled for a total of 2 hours. I’m usually bathed in sweat when I’m done, so there’s definitely work being done. Also, when I cycle the iwatch asks when I’m done-it can tell when my heart rate drops. It doesn’t do that when on the HIIT setting. So on January 13th’s morning P90 I forgot to turn it off, to make up for it I only counted a few minutes of the afternoon skate.

Diet, Sleep, and Miscellaneous

Last night we had burgers and fries from a local restaurant. It was an impossible burger, but I’d have to say it was my first real cheat. For two solid weeks I’ve eaten completely vegetarian, non processed, no sugar, heavily fresh fruit and vegetable meals. I have stayed beneath the 2660 calorie ceiling that My Fitness Pal has calculated for me to reach my goal. However, as I stated in an earlier post, I’m not necessarily looking to lose weight. I’d rather gain lean mass, or at my age, not lose anymore.

Sleep has been better than when I was drinking, but I still wake up. I get at least 8 hours every night now, but there is often a one or two hour gap in the very middle of the night that I have chosen to use for writing in my journal. Nobody is better at mentally regurgitating a day or a problem like I can. I have found that rather than worrying about not sleeping I’m in a better place if I accomplish something that I would otherwise need to do when I woke up. This way, if I sleep later than I normally do I’ve merely juggled when things are done rather than fallen behind.

The Home Gym

So, you are welcome to go back and read in depth about how I have set up my home gym, and also the problems I’m having with it. I think I have found some tweaks that work. I’m leaving the attic steps down completely to give the water vapor that accumulates on the windows and doors an “escape hatch.” I’ve also gotten smart about lifting the insulated moving blankets off the floor when I’m not exercising. This has kept them damp at most. Finally, I have become king of the squeegee. I have found that if I vacuum the absorbent mat, and squeegee the bare floor when the cars are out, it stays pretty darn dry. We have had very mild temperatures lately so stay tuned to see if these are truly workable solutions.

Photo Credit

Featured Image: Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

Tags Health and Fitness, home gym, workout

Health and Fitness

Data Analysis

Observations After Week 1

Data

Man, I feel like this is some kind of super scientific approach to my well being. For one thing, I have never used so many apps and extensions to chart my progress. Some of them are necessary just for the ability to consolidate data in a way that I can share, RunGap for example. Others are just an easier way to track things, like MyfitnessPal and Strava. I will attempt to explain as I go along…

Week 1

A few days before launch I tweaked my back really good. I was spinning and felt a twinge. I’ve had enough experience with myself to know that the best way to lose 3 weeks of training is to continue doing whatever it is I am doing at the time. So, I got off the bike, laid on the floor, stretched, took some ibuprofen, iced, and proceeded to lose the ability to lift my leg high enough to put on my underwear. Two trips to Dr. Bob(Avenues of Health Chiropractic) and some rest, and I was able to launch the physical part of my plan on Monday, the 4th(Diet changes started on the 1st as planned).

Cardio

I typically use Strava to track my progress on outdoor bicycle rides. It is an absolute video game for biking and will get it’s own page here in the future. It maps your rides, allows you to compare yourself with others who have ridden any part of the route, and let’s you know how you did against your greatest rival, you. Unfortunately, it is not ideal for stationary bikes. So, when I spin in the winter, because it’s so much harder to wipe out on a 150 pound spin bike, traffic is always light in the garage, and I know exactly when I’m going to get home-when I swing my leg back over the seat- I use my apple watch and my Garmin to track my levels. I use the Garmin, as mentioned in my “Forward to the Past” to track my effort while spinning. I use the Apple watch for the data after spinning. Why, you ask? Simple…I lost the cord to attach the Garmin to my computer, duh.

Anyway, Apple doesn’t have a way to view aggregate data so I found RunGap, which takes all the data from my apple account and puts it in one place.

On RunGap you can also look at an individual workout:

You can even view it graphically-Nice intervals!

You can see that I have gotten two cardio workouts this week. I would add that Covid has made me stir crazy, so I have also added ice skating to my repertoire because if I don’t get outside I will go insane. Turns out I miss it, and love it, and it’s just about twice as hard as I remember. I’m not removing anything, I’m just adding 30 minutes of skating when I can.

P90X

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my garage is my gym. This has presented many issues, not the least of which is a lack of real resistance equipment. I have secured a set of Powerblock adjustable dumbbells to go with the bands I had been using.

Assessment:

First of all, let me just say that in my opinion elasticity is a mediocre substitute for gravity. So, in terms of the workout rendered, the blocks delivered! In addition, with bands I felt like I was continually adjusting something to get the right “feel” for each exercise, not to mention, the right tug. By this I mean that decreasing the amount of band available (by stepping on it, or creating a loop to step on) tension is increased. There is a real lack of precision in that method. What exactly is the tension delivered if I have a 40 pound resistance band with a loop of a 3”diameter under my foot? The blocks are quick to adjust and precise. I think the only real drawback is aesthetics. I feel like I have a couple of steampunk bear traps attached to my arms when I use them. I also have dainty XX large hands. When I wear gloves, because that garage takes a little time to warm up, it is tricky getting my hands inside them.

Diet

With the paid version of MyfitnessPal you have even more options for data.

So I’m down to 216 pounds from 217.6. I’m actually surprised it is not more. I knew going into this that dropping alcohol was going to have a major impact, both in terms of difficulty in not having it, the subsequent drop in caloric intake. What I was not prepared for was how difficult eating zero prepared food has been. I do great in the morning with my shakes, or do I? Does protein powder count as a prepared food? What about tofu? I’ve decided that if the thing I’m adding is not a meal in and of itself I’m ok. Store bought spaghetti sauce and peanut butter- okey dokey. Vegetarian chicken patties and burritos-no go.

Final Observations

I’m sleeping much differently already. Not necessarily any more, just more soundly. Extra water intake may have supplanted beer as my reason for getting up in the middle of the night, but I’m getting up just the same. However, the quality of sleep I do get is noticeably better as I haven’t felt the need to sneak naps in this week. I’m averaging pretty close to 8 hours per night too.

Stay tuned for week 2.

Image Credits:

Featured Image: Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

“Free Workout Data Manager for IOS.” RunGap, http://www.rungap.com/.

“PowerBlock Sport Dumbbells: Dumbbells For Home.” PowerBlock, 13 Oct. 2020, powerblock.com/product/sport-series/.

“Fitness Starts with What You Eat.” Myfitnesspal, http://www.myfitnesspal.com/.

Tags Health and Fitness, home gym, resolutions

Health and Fitness

The Hydra

Thinking of converting your garage into a home gym? Live in a cold climate? Learn from me! In this post I will take you on a short tour of the trials and tribulation of my unheated garage gym.

I’m not one who knows much about Greek Mythology, but I did watch the Disney Hercules cartoon. In a particularly relevant part of the movie our hero, Hercules, cuts the three heads off of the hydra. Apparently this isn’t the way to kill a hydra because two heads grew back in each place there was one, and each additional beheading produced a similar result. That’s my garage gym in a nutshell.

If my garage were in a warm climate I would be bragging about my ingenious use of unused space. Unfortunately, I live about as far as one can get from a warm climate without having a Canadian passport.

To review: Because Covid has closed the gyms, and wanting to err on the careful side any way, and because my house is only a step up from a tiny home, I chose to turn my unheated, detached garage into a workout space. I insulated the walls and ceiling, putting a vapor barrier over both. I bought insulated moving blankets and punched grommets into them so I could hang them from the ceiling on hooks, the idea being I could move them to reduce the size of the space to be used. I bought absorbent mats for the floor to catch all the snow melt that would inevitably drop off the cars I still had to park there at night. And I bought a small heater. This process is all detailed in full on my “The Set Up” post.

From the day I started using it in September to just before Christmas I couldn’t have been happier with the space. I had my music on as loud as I wanted, I never had to wait for a piece of equipment, and the only time I got self-conscious was when my wife, not knowing I was in there, opened the garage door to park the car.

Then…it snowed.

Turns out, cars and trucks tend to pick up more snow than a person would think. Then that snow melts. Then the mats on the floor hold on to that moisture. Then it evaporates. Then the highly effective vapor barrier holds it in the garage. Then it congregates on anything cold, like garage doors and windows, for example.(see images below)

Not even this seasoned sailor can see out these windows.

You should stand under these doors after they heat up in the sun = rain bath

To summarize:

The really ingenious blankets I designed with the help of my wife, the ones we made extra long so they would drape to the floor to keep the heat in, well they have become pancake shaped sponges that need to be clamped to the shelves to keep them off the floor. In addition, they are easily rolled over by truck tires which are popping the grommets out left and right.
The garage mats are amazing right up until there is a significant amount of liquid in them. It’s not that they don’t perform as advertised, they hold even more water than I think is advertised. That’s the problem. Once soaked they are extremely hard to dry. When I attempt to use a wet/dry vac on them it counts as my workout!
Now that I’ve turned my garage into, what amounts to, a huge ziplock bag with nowhere for water vapor to go I’ve had to rethink my plan. I have a trap attic door that I have tried keeping propped open, I have even used a fan in that opening to suck air up and out the attic vents, but either my fan is too small, or the vapor isn’t interested in leaving because there was no noticeable improvement. I have rolled up one of the mats and used a squeegee on that half of the garage in the hopes that less trapped water will equal less vapor. The jury is still out on this idea.

Though it’s hard to see my Yoga block works overtime keeping the attic propped open.

I’m not ready to give up yet, but I did find myself kneeling on a rubber glove today to keep my knees dry. I never had to do that at the Y. If you have a suggestion for me spill it. As you can see I’m willing to try just about anything.

Tags garage gym, home gym, vapor barrier issues

Health and Fitness

Forward To The Past

In this post I will attempt to explain how I use my 2nd generation Apple watch, an ancient Garmin Edge 705 bike computer, equally ancient videos from Sufferfest, and a Star Trac spinning bike to make my garage into a cardio wonderland. This is my way of avoiding the extravagant cost of the new home workout systems that are out there. (This is a work around, and I understand not everyone has this kind of stuff laying around, but covid forces us to think outside the box, and this is old tech-cheaply found used on the web, or freely streamed.)

Before we begin, a commercial came on the other day for some medicine, I don’t remember which, and the list of side effects was at least ten times longer and twice as terrifying as the medical condition itself. However, it did remind me that before I say another thing about health I better put out a disclaimer. So here it is:

Disclaimer: I am just some guy. You are welcome to my advice, but it’s up to you to decide for yourself if I’m full of crap. By acting on any of the suggestions I make here you are accepting responsibility for any and all consequences.

Let’s talk about cardio today. According to the Mayo Clinic:

You can calculate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. For example, if you’re 45 years old, subtract 45 from 220 to get a maximum heart rate of 175. This is the average maximum number of times your heart should beat per minute during exercise.

Admittedly, this is not the most precise way to measure your maximum heart rate, but then I’m not trying out for the olympic bobsled team either. It is important, however, to have at least a ballpark idea of your max heart rate for some key reasons. First of all, in order to know if you are working out with intensity your workouts will need to be based off of this number. Secondly, for safety’s sake you need to keep yourself in your zones. This is especially important for aging farts like myself who like to pretend we still have all the vim and vigor of the young whippersnappers. Thirdly, you need this number to set up your devices if you’re interested in using a modicum of precision in your training. Let me explain.

As I stated in earlier, the Covid pandemic has forced me to find new and interesting ways to challenge my body. No, that’s not exactly right. It has actually forced me to dust off some old technology that was pretty cutting edge a decade or so ago and combine it with some newer tech, like my Apple watch, to get a more complete picture. Speaking of “edge”, one of those pieces of technology is the Garmin Edge 705 bike computer.

(I can’t find a Creative Commons image for this elderly piece of technology. Hopefully, because I’m so positive about it, Garmin will be ok with my using this image!)

Now, you could simply use any heart rate monitor to make sure you are staying in your zones, but that requires thinking, which I don’t know about you, but is not my favorite thing to do while working out. I kind of like my workouts to be the time I don’t have to think!

Let me explain what I mean. You can see from the photo above that a rider can have up to 8 data windows on a single screen. Most of these are irrelevant for a person riding a stationary bike in a garage, especially since many activity trackers have an activity function that will track a bunch of statistics like workout time, intensity, etc. It’s the heart rate window that I use this for. Using the Mayo formula above I can set up zones for intensity.

You can see in the photo above that I have set my max heart rate based on the Mayo formula. I then set five zones, with trial and error, to fit how hard I like to spin(initially, I set them to end at 100% of max, but never felt like I was pushing it- that’s why my zone five goes above 100%). Once your device is set you’re ready for the next step. (Incidentally, there are apps for this that you can put on your phone, but then you would need a different device for the next step, I used to use my laptop set on a table in front of me.)

Sufferfest is a company that I guess was recently acquired by Wahoo, the fitness trainer manufacturer. Back in the day sufferfest made cycling videos with footage from actual tour events. That’s what I have saved in a google drive folder and use for my training. (Sufferfest is currently offering a streaming app. It’s free for 14 days so you can get a taste.)

The older videos look like this(use your imagination-this is a still from streaming video!):

All the work done setting up your zones has been for this! The text in the middle of the screen appears only periodically, but the numbers in the upper right corner are always visible. The newer videos have even more information like watts, or work, or power, but my old spinner bike doesn’t have a way to track those anyway. Besides, I have found that cadence and heart rate are all I need to get destroyed. 8.0 / 10 – that means 80% of my max heart rate. At a cadence of 80 rpm’s I need to peddle at a resistance level that raises my heart rate to 80% of max. It takes a little practice to find those levels, but it’s doable.

To make it more realistic the videos will change the numbers to match terrain, or race conditions. For example, another rider might attack, and you will be instructed to peddle at level 10 for a bit, or to stand. That’s why having your zones planned out ahead and on the computer one the handlebars in front of you makes life so much easier. No trying to determine what 8.25% of 166 is. No having to look at your wrist while peddling from a standing position.

I found a six dollar phone clamp at the hardware store that attaches to my spin bike handle. I use it to watch my Sufferfest videos that are all uploaded to a google drive folder. I use wireless headphones to further streamline the process.

That’s it. There you have it, the poor man’s workaround to the super expensive training hardware/software “solutions” that are out there. Incidentally, there are some free videos on Youtube that use much of the same type of content as Sufferfest. The Vegan Cyclist, and CTXC Videos are two that come to mind, but there are others.

A final benefit to think about is that if you stream the video portion to say a laptop or TV, then multiple people can train at once. My friend Tim and I used to train together, even though he was ten years younger. Because his max heart rate was ten points higher than mine, and he personalized his workouts to his zones on his own device, we could ride at different levels and get workouts tailored to ourselves.

Tags home gym, spinning, workout

Health and Fitness

The Set Up

Covid has certainly forced us to get creative. The YMCA four blocks away is now a distant dream. For the first time in more than a decade I don’t have a membership. My old weight set has been gone even longer than that. So, what does one do when the house one lives in is smaller than most apartments? Answer? Go after the garage.

Tags cold weather home gym, garage gym, home gym