Unleashing The Beast :: FitBob

Weight: 213, 4pm

60m walk

Weight: 210

30m walk

Weight: 213, 4pm

Warmup: 10m elliptical

Intro to Pilates: 60m

Misc chest/shoulder work + stretching

Soak: 10m
Steam: 10m

Pilates rock. Great for conditioning core, aligning bod, getting straight.
Didn’t eat most of the day, challenging work day, fatigued. Gotta stay positive!

Weight: 216, 12pm

36m walk

After two days off the bod still needs to recover. Ah, the joys of aging. Fortunately, experience has shown that recovery times will improve as training becomes more regular. Active recovery day.

Food intake is up, weight is up and slept ten hours last night. Blood work scheduled in a few days, started backing off of supplements to help ensure an accurate baseline test.

Weight: 209, 7:15pm

Soak: 15m
Steam: 15m
Soak: 10m

The nice thing about SSS days is they don’t feel like workouts. But HR is elevated to the LI aerobic zone whether in the hot tub, steam room or sauna. And it sure feels good on achy muscles!

:30 min, rotate Soak, Steam, Sauna

Nice day, hope to ride outside later!

Weight: 208.2
11:00 am

Don’t want to overcook the bod this early into training, so today I rotated sessions in the steam room and hot tub with cool off dips in the pool for about 30 minutes, then got a much-needed massage.

Total calories: -600ish

After taking a month off for the holidays and dealing with a pinched nerve, (annoying as hell) I finally made it back to the gym today for a light workout. Call it a sign from the universe or whatever, but there was an extended citywide power outage today. No internet, so I couldn’t work. No television, so I couldn’t distract myself. The result? More productivitiy!

I cleaned up a pile of bills, made some calls I had been putting off, and went to hop in the shower only to discover/realize that tankless water heaters require electricity to run their temperature control… doh! Since I was beginning to smell a bit ripe, I figured I would go take a shower at the gym. I called them to see if they were affected by the power outage and happily they weren’t.

I had let my training fall off long enough that, as happens to many I suppose, I wasn’t overly eager to jump back in. I had replaced the habit of training with the habit of not training. Work seemed more important. Holidays seemed more important. I had let the workout priority slide.

Since I was powerless (all pun intended) to use any of my usual distractions as excuses and really needed that shower, I knew it was time. And there was no way I could justify paying the gym for a shower. So off I went.

I did the usual 10 minute warmup on the spin bike and some light stretching before moving on to the weights. My hand is still tingly so I wanted to take it easy, plus I wasn’t feeling particularly energetic, so I rotated through some high-repetition/low weight upper body exercises: cable rows, pulldowns, barbell shrugs, incline bench press, dumbell shrugs – my own little “mini-circuit”.

Next it was off to the pool. The rec center has several pools for aquatic therapy, one of which is essentially a small indoor waterpark ride. It’s fun to float around with the current, but I turned against it – using the water pressure as gentle resistance against my pseudo swim strokes. By changing the angle of my hands I could control how much resistance they were getting while letting my legs and core work a little harder.

After 10 minutes of that, I went to soak in the outdoor hot tub for another 10 minutes. Those few steps from the door to the tub, dripping wet, in the winter mountain air… that’s BRISK baby!

As luck would have it, one of my fellow soakers happened to be a physical therapist. I explained I was doing some light rehab work on my pinched nerve, he asked me a few questions and showed me the location of the cubital tunnel on the elbow, which is where the ulnar nerve passes through the bone. We chatted for a few minutes and he said he thought my self-diagnosis of a pinched nerve coupled with carpal tunnel was spot on.