I hit the weights last night, man has my muscle density gone down.  I was struggling pretty good to get what used to be my mid range sets.  Think I pushed a little too hard…have this crazy kink in my neck.  I weighed myself today and I’m about 10lbs over my last recorded weigh in, which isn’t too bad considering how hard I’ve fallen off the wagon.

We’re back at it though, I’m still shooting for 100lbs over all by October…but am hoping for a bit more than that.

week 31 – 342 (with shoes and other gear on)

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I am pretty much done doing the modifications I can afford to the bike right now and she is purring like a kitten.  I’ve adjusted the smoker a bit and should be ready for a propane run this weekend.  Without these things to tinker with I am hoping to be able to find more motivation to get solid workouts in.  I have a few other things that need to be done around the house…but I can work that in around my working out.

I have maintained my weight through this dry spell, which is a bonus…but it’s not what I was hoping for coming in to this month.  I’ve set a high goal for myself for the end of May, and with hard work I believe it to be reachable.  I have a trip to the farm coming up…so that’s going to be a few days off from the normal routine, but I should be able to walk/run a bit out there to make up for it.  I’m going to try a little on the country road and see how that treats me.  If I can run a mile I’ll be pretty happy.

week 26 – 330

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This morning I hit the elliptical pretty hard and lifted afterward.  My arms haven’t lost anything, but my shoulders went down a little.  I’m going to work the weight training back in and see how that works out for me.  Not much else going on…need to find motivation.

Since I’ve stayed level for so long, it’s going to take a bit to get the body burning things the way it’s suppose to again.  I expect things to actually go up next week.  We’ll see I guess.

week 25 – 329

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This week I’m down 4lbs.  I hit 2x 3 days this week and missed 1 day (friday), the other days I went 1 time.  I have been just doing cardio and scaled back my lifting quite a bit.  I still need to hit it at least 1 time a week though.  I don’t want to lose what I’ve gained, but I’m content to just maintain for a little while until I’m ready to focus on the superhero workout.

Week 21 – 335

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I called them around mid feb to see what was up.  Apparently the issue was I had not submitted my health risk assessment on “time”.  Apparently the paperwork for the health club comes through between the 1st and 10th of the month and it’s processed on the 10th.  One of the checks is if that assessment is done…if it’s not the payment fails.  The only problem is…I’m not informed on failure…from anyone.  the health club doesn’t tell me, the company administering the kick back doesn’t tell me…no one communicates the information.

I go to the website to find some information…there is none.  I find a number and decide to give them a call…not like I’ve got work to do or anything huh!  They refer me to the people that administer the payments the Nation independent Healthclub Association, 866-484-9173.  I give them a call and the fun begins…

From what I gather, the office is run by 1 person…or that’s how it seems anyway.  The woman takes my information and tells me she will need to call me back…fine I get that.  She calls me back and basically tells me I suck.  She said I didn’t do the paperwork on time and would need to have the health club resubmit.  I ask her where the information is available to me to know I need to have certain things done by certain dates…I get told I need to have the health club resubmit my dates of visit…/me sighs.  I tell her this is way too much bullshit to deal with for 20 bucks and hang up.  I’m not very delicate dealing with people that piss me off.  Beyond that, I figure the next month things will work themselves out.  As it happens the Friday before we take off for the cities we are working out later in the morning and some blonde chic walks in to Snap and starts doing employee work.  I asked her if she was the manager, she was so I asked if she could resubmit for some date…she said it wasn’t a problem.

In the mean time I’d gotten a call back from the website people asking me about my customer experience.  I told them it sucked and told them why it sucked.  She was pretty customer service oriented and wanted to get the other place on the phone so we could have a 3-way call to figure things out.  I thanked her but said I don’t really have any more time during the business day to waste on this crap.  She reiterated that next month things should go through fine, payment should be through between the 20th and 25th.

I waited until March 2nd and via the prodding of a buddy who likes to see me get riled up…called to see why I hadn’t received any reimbursement yet.  I called the website people who referred me to the NIHCA people.  A lady there took my information and said they would have to call me back.  She said she would get with me in 20min.  3hrs later some other lady calls me back, no apology for the wait, and tells me that someone else would have to call me tomorrow morning…no apology for the delay.  10min later she calls me back, apparently she had miraculously found some information, and tells me the health club had been paid directly for my visits and that I need to talk to them….wtf?  She said they should charge me 20 bucks less for the following month, and asks me what date I pay them.  I told her “hell if I know, it’s all automatic on my CC”  “most people know when they pay their dues”  Clearly this woman has wonderful C.S. skills.  She told me that since they paid the health club I would need to contact the health club about all this if there was a problem….

The problem with all this is I’m expected to monitor my CC statement and look for a charge that isn’t right.  If it appears I’m suppose to contact someone to verify a payment was made from one place to another on my behalf…this makes no sense at all.  I can maybe/kinda/sorta /not really see why they wouldn’t want to send the money to the user directly….but there should be some way for me to monitor that my information has been sent out.  I set this crap up every day at work.  An automated email to a users address saying “XX visits recorded (dates), $XX sent to (health club) (date)”.  I would still be in the position of having to look at my CC occasionally for this one specific charge…but at least I’d have some sort of record to go back to…right now I’ve nothing.

At this point I’m pretty pissed about this setup.  There is no reason something like this needs to be so complicated.  I fired off a complaint via the website form…but I doubt anything will come of it…

I have been going around and around trying to get the health club reimbursement setup.  I contacted 866-300-6949 and they tell me to contact 866-484-9173 who says they will call me back in 20min…3hrs later they call me back to tell me some administrator will call me back in the morning.  10min later they call me back to tell me that they pay the health club directly and did so on the 25th of Feb.  They inform me that it then becomes my responsibility to make sure the health club doesn’t “double charge” me as that money that was given to them is “mine” in a sense.  It has now become my responsibility to monitor if the health club is charging me correctly.  The problem with this is I have no way to verify if they have received this 20 buck reimbersement on my behalf.

I’ve setup my membership to the health club to be as non-invasive to me as possible.  I signed up for a year at 20 bucks a month…good deal if I get the 20 buck credit right?  The monthly dues are auto-drawn from my credit card.  Now I have to monitor for that charge.  If it gets charged I then have to go back up the chain to see who screwed up…

Is this seriously the best system we could come up with?  The lack of information provided to the user is almost comical.  We’re only talking about 20/mo here, but for something that is suppose to be an incentive to work out and stay fit this has turned into something disgusting.

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The weekend was rough, in 4 days I got 2 workouts in for 40min each…I just had no motivation.  I think a lot of it comes from not seeing the drastic results now like I was before.  My clothes have fit pretty much the same for quite a while now, the scale went up (actually went down…but the psychological effect was “up”), and I’m getting irritated about not being able to eat whatever I want.  My knee is also turning into a larger problem.  It pops and snaps now anytime I straighten it out.  I wouldn’t call it painful yet, but there is a sensation from the pop.  It’s very similar to when you pop your knuckles, only it happens all the time.  It is a bit concerning.  I am holding out hope that I can drop weight and rehab it a bit, but more and more that seems like it’s only delaying the inevitable.  Surgery is seeming more and more like a foregone conclusion.  I think there’s been too much weight on it for too long.  Hopefully I can drop weight and build strength back in the knee quickly enough that it doesn’t impact the other one.  I’m hoping to have a doc look at it the beginning of next year and if something needs to be done to it have it worked on in the spring.  I don’t want to struggle with crutches on the ice, and I want to make sure I have a solid healthy foundation to try and work through the down time.

The knee issue is really a downer.  To come to terms with the idea that allowing myself to get this/that large and now when I’m working to get down to a reasonable shape only to be hampered by an “injury” that I caused to myself because of the weight is quite depressing (follow all that?).  I’ve always been a firm believer that it’s a weak mind that allows a person to be overcome by depression.  Certainly it will hit you from time to time and you will feel down, but I think you can work through it and deal with the feelings in a reasonable logical manner.  Lets not turn this into a discussion on depression, I’m not talking about some clinically diagnosed chemical imbalance type depression here…I’m talking about the “poor me, my life sucks, I’m ugly” type pussy depression. In an effort to work through this “pussy depression” I decided to spend a couple hours at the gym last night and horse through whatever mental blocks I might have going on.  I also drug myself out of bed this morning and made it to the gym (where I was punished by the talky-talkertons) for an hour worth of elliptical.  I feel much better about the day when I get up and work out…but the bed is so warm and comfortable.  I’m not going to declare victory yet…I still have a long ways to go…but I think this “push through it pussy” mentality will help in the long run.

I’ve decided to adjust my weight lifting routine yet again.  The Monday/Wednesday/Friday thing isn’t working out very well for me.  I think I’m lifting more on the two power days, but I’m not seeing where the “cardio lifting” is helping at all.  I might as well spend that time on the elliptical.  Also, I noticed that lifting less has actually increased my strength better than when I was going every other day.  This makes no sense to me, but it’s supported by my observations.  I’ve also been doing some research online and listening to “David” on the Lex & Terry show Monday mornings.  He’s a former running back for the Rams who is now a personal trainer.  I’m a L&T disciple so my opinion is a bit shaded, but this guy had a 3.x% body fat measurement all through college so it seems like he knows what he’s doing.  Also, something that caused me to give him some more credit, when asked on the show about what to eat he gives general advise but always refers people to a nutritionist or Dr.  That to me says he’s on the up and up instead of trying to come off like someone who knows everything that’s best for you.  This past Monday he said on there that it’s not a good idea to do triceps and biceps on days you do chest…which makes sense.  The routine they had us on in high school (if you want to call it that) did all upper body except triceps and biceps on “upper” days with those muscles on “lower” days…along with legs ect.  So what I’ve decided to do is chest, back and shoulders Monday and Thursday with Triceps and Biceps on Tuesday and Friday.  This should speed up the lifting portion, giving me more time for cardio, and also get a better workout on each of the muscle groups.

I’ve said before that I’ve only been focusing on the upper body during my weight routine because of this damn knee.  I’ve noticed over the past couple of weeks that the elliptical seems to be doing a fairly decent job of building some muscle on my legs.  I’m doing 20min interval followed by 40min weight loss, no break between and both at level 10.  I sweat like a pig during this session so it must be doing something.  I’m drinking tons of water and pissing constantly so it should be working it’s way through my system.  There is a strength training routine on there that I might look at sometime this summer.  We’ll have to see how it goes.

I’ve mentioned before that I am using both the livestrong.com and mobile fitness sites to track workouts, consumption and progression.  I ended up paying for a year subscription to both sites.  The livestrong site is good and if it allowed me to track individual workout stats that would be the only one I would need…but it doesn’t.  Mobile Fitness is O.K., originally I picked it up because of the blackberry app but that didn’t work out so well.  I was a bit too lazy to try to find something better and ended up sticking with it.  As I was adjusting my workouts today I came across a section of suggested workouts.  I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff other than what I have just accepted as true in high school and college.  Most of the workouts I’ve seen hit one muscle group per day per week.  There are usually days off as well which has always seemed counter intuitive to me.  Several of the workouts I looked at were for only 3 days a week.  Naturally different workouts have different goals, and if you don’t want to bulk up I could see how 3 days would be decent, but I want to build muscle not just tone.  One workout I saw which immediately seemed pretty lame was the “superhero body routine”.  It’s a pretty stupid name but after looking it over it seems pretty intense.  It’s an 8 week routine that is designed to give you that superhero body.  I’m going to look at doing this workout when I’m more satisfied with my weight.  If I get down to 270 or so before the end of my year of working out I’ll probably kick this in to gear.  It would work out best in my sched over Sept/Oct as I don’t have a whole lot of travel planned for that time.  During the other months a guy might head to the farm for a few days or something and screw up the routine.  I still think cardio is going to be key, and will have to implement 30-60 min worth of elliptical/treadmill a day.  Hopefully by the time I’m more satisfied with my bulk I’ll be able to do the leg portion of the workout.  I’ll paste the workout at the end of this entry so you can see for yourself what it contains.  It seems really interesting to me that it focuses on one muscle group per day per week and it also gives you two days off from weight training.

Something else that I’ve known but has really come to light since I’ve been using livestrong is how much of a nose dive my eating habits take on Friday’s and Saturday’s.  Sunday usually isn’t too bad, but you can bet that a guy will go out on either Fri or Sat (if not both) and get carried away.  That might be O.K. when I’m down to where I want to be, but as I’m working to get there it’s really unacceptable.  I’ll need to focus a bit more on these days and see what I can do to bring them more in line with every other day.  It’s all about will power and understanding that the reward will come later.  Thinking that you “had a good week” and can attack the Chinese food or pizza with reckless abandon is not helping anything.  Working the plan is key.

Superhero Body Routine

Day 1: Shoulders and Traps

• Shoulder: Behind neck overhead press
• Shoulder: Dumbbell Standing Upright Row
• Shoulder: Dumbbell Lateral Raise
• Shoulder: Dumbbell Lying Rear Lateral Raise
• Tricep: Barbell Shrug
• Tricep: Dumbbell Shrug

Day 2: Legs and Calves

• Quads: Barbell Full Squat
• Quads: Machine Leg Extension
• Hamstrings: Barbell – Romanian Deadlift
• Hamstrings: Machine – Lying Leg Curl
• Calves: Standing Calf Raise
• Calves: Seated Calf Raise

Day 3: Back

• Pull Ups Front
• Wide-Grip Bent Over Row
• Wide Grip Front PullDown
• Cable Seated Row
• Straight Arm Pulldown

Day 4: Chest and Abs

• Chest: Barbell Incline Bench Press
• Chest: Dumbbell decline bench press
• Chest: Dumbbell Flyes Incline
• Chest: Machine Pec Dec
• Chest: Barbell Bench Press
• Abs: Reverse Crunches
• Abs: Oblique crunch
• Abs: Cable Crunch

Day 5: Triceps, Biceps, Forearms

• Tricep: Barbell – Close Grip Bench Press
• Tricep: Cable Tricep Pushdown
• Tricep: Barbell – Close Grip Bench Skull Crusher
• Bicep: Barbell Curl
• Bicep: Dumbbell Incline Curls
• Bicep: Preacher Curl Close Grip
• Forearm: Dumbbells Palm UP Wrist Curl
• Forearm: Dumbbells Palm Down Wrist Curl

Day 6 and Day 7: – Relax and Eat Healthy!

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The weekend didn’t work out so hot for me.  I had a good time, but I consumed a bit too much and didn’t work out as much as I would have liked to.  I got 30min in on Saturday, but the elliptical was quite a bit different than the one I’m used to.  The one’s at snap seem to simulate a cross country skiing type motion but the ones at the hotel simulate a running motion.  I couldn’t get the motion down and didn’t really get the work out I would have liked.  I also credit this new motion for putting stress on my knee that I wasn’t used to.  That along with the plethora of steps at the sporting events really fubar’d my knee.  I didn’t work out on Sunday, I was lazy…all my fault.  Can’t blame anyone or anything else.

I posted on fb about the couple of nagging “hurts” (I can’t classify them as injuries yet), my wrist and my knee.  I can’t do much about my knee, but I can help my wrist a bit.  I blogged a little bit ago about those lifting gloves I bought with the wrist straps.  Before I started lifting I tightened up the straps and made sure it came across the part of my wrist area where my hand would rest on the straps while I’m working out.  To my surprise, this helped immensely.  I didn’t even notice any twinges at all.  I pushed 275 for 8 reps this morning.

I need to rededicate myself to this workout routine.  I’ve been getting a solid work out in each day, but my two a days are not happening.  My goal this week is to hit 2 a day every day.  We’ll see how it goes.

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This has also shown me just how important my two-a-day workouts are.  On the days where I only get one work out in I’m right up against the bar or just over.  And while I’ve been under the magic 2000 cal a day mark…I don’t think just being under that is going to drop the pounds I want to.  On the days where I have hit the two-a-day goal I have been well under the bar…two of the days I have burnt more calories than I have taken in.  As I’ve said previously, though I don’t think the numbers are accurate I think they give a good representation of what’s going on.  I believe carrying a negative balance for the day is a good thing for my body at this point.  I don’t think I’ll hit the starvation switch…and I think as long as I am eating and working hard it will cut in to the fat that permeates my physique.

I really like the comparison this site makes to your daily intake, the amount you burn doing specific work outs, and the number their “science” says you should hit to achieve your goals.  Last week I was doing a piss poor job of keeping my intake down and wasn’t getting in all the working out I need…and it showed when it came time to step on the scale.  I didn’t go up, but I only went down 2lbs.  While that is an acceptable number for sustained results, I do believe that if I more closely reign in my consumption and stay focused on working out I can easily hit the 5lbs a week mark.  I believe 5lbs a week is sustainable till sub 300, then I expect to drop back to 3lbs a week.

I also no longer think I need 2 work outs a day per se, but I need to have a “how hard I work” goal for those workouts.  I think if I burn 2-3k calories over the course of the day along with the carefully monitored intake I should be pretty much on track.  Right now I’m not at a point where I can reasonably burn 2k calories in a session…I’m doing around 1500 if I push really hard (which isn’t too tough honestly).  In another month or so I’m hoping I can get to 2k a session doing cardio.  I’m thinking that my calories burnt during a work out will go down as my weight goes down though.  I’m not sure that a guy at 250 can reasonably burn 1500/hr even if he appears to be busting his ass as much as a fat man is.

We’ll see, a lot of trial and error involved in this.

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I have been using the gymtechnik website to track workouts, and it’s pretty good overall.  I had tried their BB app, and it was slow and shitty.  I ended up subscribing to the site though so I could track my workouts the way I wanted to.  The free options only gave you the ability to track one work out a day, and with me doing multiple work outs with multiple exercises I needed the pay setup.

A guy at work turned me on to the livestrong.com website.  This site allows you to track your workouts to some extent, but the strength of this site is how it guides you along your path.  When you setup your profile you put in your height and weight, chose your activity level and then tell it what your goal is.  I said “lose 5lbs a week”.  The site told me I would be able to consume 1307 calories and lose 5lbs a week…

1307 calories sounds like a ridiculously low amount to eat during the day, and when I started adding up what I do eat it blows that number out of the water.  The other side of the site though is your workout routine.  You enter what you’ve done (bike, elliptical, treadmill, lifting…etc) the time and so forth and it figures out what kind of calories you would burn during your fitness routine or you can free form it.  From a simple equation using your calories consumed and your calories burnt it shows you your calorie balance for the day.

What sucks about the site is there is no way to track individual exercises.  On the gymtechnik site I am able to track how one session of lifting or cardio compares to another…there’s no real good way to do that (that I can see) on the livestrong site.  If it had that feature, I could see myself using it exclusively.  The way it stands though, I’ll be using both sites until my gymtechnik subscription expires.  At that point I’ll probably track my weight training in a spread sheet.

I don’t think this site is “accurate” as far as the numbers are concerned.  I do think it’s ball park…but there is really no way to measure with any amount of certainty what it is telling you.  What it is doing for me though is making me more aware of what I am consuming on a daily basis and how that relates to my goal and my workout routine.

We’ll see how it goes, free to try and it’ll keep 45days of data.  If it seems helpful to me I’ll pay for a year subscription.  It’s worth helping them out a bit with some scratch if it helps me out.

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The past two day’s I’ve been getting up…I need to get back into the December mindset.  I’ve dropped either 80 or 60 lbs.  The “bathroom” scale at snap says 80…but I have my doubts about the accuracy of a spring loaded scale.  I have nothing to back this up, but it seems reasonable to me that the more weight you put on them the less accurate they are going to be.  The balance scale at work says I lost 60lbs.  I assume that weight is accurate.

In either case, I’ve come down nicely…hopefully it’ll keep coming off.

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