Fitness/Diet Accountability Thread

[BPPLEE]

Just did over 1,000 reps with the Mace
Warm Up 7lb x various swings
30 lb Alternating Curl pass 30 x 10, One Arm Swing 30 x 10, 10
It’s unreal how heavy the 30lb Mace feels

15 lb Mace
Overhead Swings X 20
Alternating One Arm Swings x40
Reverse Swings X 20R, 20L
Right to Left X 20
Left to Right X 20
Side to Side X 60. 200 reps
Repeat with 10lb Mace
Repeat with 10lb Mace
Repeat with 10 lb Mace
Repeat with 10 lb Mace. 800 reps
1,000 reps after warm up
No rest between sets

After resting;
30lb Mace
Overhead Swings x 10
Alternating Swings x 40
Rev Grip Swings 10R, 10L
Right to Left x 10
Left to Right x 10
Side to Side x 20
110 reps

rest
30lb Mace
Overhead Swings x 10
Curl Catch x 10
Right to Left x 5
Left to Right x 5
One Arm Swings x 10R, 10L
50 reps

 

[BPPLEE]

I took a morning nap of 2 hours and managed to get my body battery up to 75, which is a big improvement.

I did 3 sets of 10 reps of kettlebell deadlifts and squats, 8 lb. weight. Then I did some static stretches and yoga core exercises. That's about all I did today. 8 lbs. is almost too light, but I'm hesitant to go up to 12 lbs until I feel I've perfected my form.

I have 2 20s, a 25, 30 and 2 35s. I have a 50 and 60lb on the way. I’m only using them for swings right now
Typically I do
35 x 50
30 x 17
25 x 17
20 x 16
100 reps
I have to be careful not to hurt my back but I feel that strengthening the muscles will help make my back feel better . You use a lot of stabilizing muscles when doing swings I’m still having some nerve pain in my leg but it’s better than it was.

 

[FireDragon76]

Morning workout:

10 minute warmup on Sci-Fit ergometer, forwards and backwards
10 minute threshold interval session (2 sets, 3 minutes each, 1 minute rest, around 75 percent intensity). I tracked it with FatMaxxer to make sure I was getting in the right zone. I was aiming to go right below the anaerobic threshold.

Then I did a 10 minute ramp with Fatmaxxer on an exercise bike to get more up to date data. The spreadsheet trend line puts the maximum heart rate around 174 bpm, aerobic threshold at 135, and anaerobic threshold at 148.

Afterwards I did 2 sets of 8 reps of 40 lb chest presses and 2x8x40 rows, and a 3 minute cooldown on the exercise bike.

Late morning workout at Avery Place fitness park:

5 minute warmup on air walker
10 minutes of swinging Indian clubs and Aeroblade
5 minute cooldown on air walker.

The Aeroblade is more intense than it looks. My heart rate got up to about 60 percent intensity. It also does a good job exercising the forearms. Since I started using it, I've regained mass there.

Runalyze says the overall workload for the week is good. Not too intense and not too light. Tomorrow is a rest day. The threshold intervals are a new workout routine I have learned about, it's based on what Norwegian athletes use- it gives you some of the VO2Max benefits of HIT, but without the huge fatigue load. I'm looking forward to seeing how that goes long term.

 

[timewerx]

Some update from me.

I'm probably doing only half the volume of exercise I do now compared to January and the whole of 2023.

Yet, interesting to note, my weight have stayed the same even if I'm still eating the same kind of food and same amount as before. I still did all my exercises in fasted state.

My workouts have remained mostly similar since December last year. Skating and climbing stairs for cardio and resistance training. I injured both my knees last month in a skating maneuver that over-twisted my knees (poor flexibility). Thank God, I healed up quickly and was still able to practice skating despite the injury, No medical intervention was necessary since I can still walk without issues but can cause pain in the wrong sleeping position. Fully healed now. Feels better and stronger than before the injury.

 

[FireDragon76]

I have 2 20s, a 25, 30 and 2 35s. I have a 50 and 60lb on the way. I’m only using them for swings right now
Typically I do
35 x 50
30 x 17
25 x 17
20 x 16
100 reps
I have to be careful not to hurt my back but I feel that strengthening the muscles will help make my back feel better . You use a lot of stabilizing muscles when doing swings I’m still having some nerve pain in my leg but it’s better than it was.

I eventually want to work up to an 18-20 lb kettlebell.

I've been listening to a few podcasts by Pavel Tsatsouline, the man who brought kettlebell training to the masses in the US. All he does now days is just two kettlebell exercises for fitness. Just swinging and dips. He even put together a beginner minimalist strength workout that's just deadlifts and overhead presses. Pavel's advice for beginners is just to do single progression: stay with a weight until it becomes too easy, then move on to the next one. His advice about fitness in general seems to be excellent, without alot of the nonsense of American fitness influencers. He was trained in the old Soviet approach, which was strictly empirical, but he also has alot of knowledge about old time strongmen and their training methods.

 

[BPPLEE]

I eventually want to work up to an 18-20 lb kettlebell.

I've been listening to a few podcasts by Pavel Tsatsouline, the man who brought kettlebell training to the masses in the US. All he does now days is just two kettlebell exercises for fitness. Just swinging and dips. He even put together a beginner minimalist strength workout that's just kettlebell deadlifts and overhead presses. Pavel's advice for beginners is just to do single progression: stay with a weight until it becomes too easy, then move on to the next one. His advice about fitness in general seems to be excellent, without alot of the nonsense of American fitness influencers. He was trained in the old Soviet approach, which was strictly empirical.

Yeah he recommended a weight lifting program of Squats, Deadlifts and Military Presses. I’ve read Simple and Sinister and Enter the Kettlebell by him.
He also recommends anti glycolytic training

Understanding Why "Less Is More" with Anti-Glycolytic Training | StrongFirst

Anti-glycolytic training protocols are training approaches that avoid relying on the glycolytic system, and it can be helpful to understand the science.

www.strongfirst.com

 

[BPPLEE]

Yeah he recommended a weight lifting program of Squats, Deadlifts and Military Presses. I’ve read Simple and Sinister and Enter the Kettlebell by him.
He also recommends anti glycolytic training

Understanding Why "Less Is More" with Anti-Glycolytic Training | StrongFirst

Anti-glycolytic training protocols are training approaches that avoid relying on the glycolytic system, and it can be helpful to understand the science.

www.strongfirst.com

For instance he recommends doing 10 kettlebell swings in a minute, resting the rest of the minute and repeating it for 10 minutes. The goal in AGT is to avoid the burn.. He says that high intensity training produces a lot of waste products that the body has to deal with and AGT doesn’t.

 

[FireDragon76]

For instance he recommends doing 10 kettlebell swings in a minute, resting the rest of the minute and repeating it for 10 minutes. The goal in AGT is to avoid the burn.. He says that high intensity training produces a lot of waste products that the body has to deal with and AGT doesn’t.

He talked about something like that during one Joe Rogan podcast. It is based on Soviet-era research that is vaguely similar to the logic behind Norwegian threshold training.

Anaerobic exercise is very messy from a metabolic and hormonal perspective. It produces alot of free radicals, epinephrine, and cortisol. Sometimes you want to train the anaerobic system to be more efficient at producing power (as in HIT), but the bulk of training should probably not be at this intensity.

So far it seems like the stress response to the moderate intensity interval session is alot more favorable. The stress and HRV readings are alot better, and I don't feel like I am cooked. If I had pushed a sled with 45-60 lbs in it today a few times, on the other hand, I think I would be cooked. That gets my heart rate well over the anaerobic threshold.

 

[BPPLEE]

He talked about something like that during one Joe Rogan podcast. It is based on Soviet-era research that is vaguely similar to the logic behind Norwegian threshold training.

Anaerobic exercise is very messy from a metabolic and hormonal perspective. It produces alot of free radicals, epinephrine, and cortisol. Sometimes you want to train the anaerobic system to be more efficient at producing power (as in HIT), but the bulk of training should probably not be at this intensity.

So far it seems like the stress response to the moderate intensity interval session is alot more favorable. The stress and HRV readings are alot better, and I don't feel like I am cooked. If I had pushed a sled with 45-60 lbs in it today a few times, on the other hand, I think I would be cooked. That gets my heart rate well over the anaerobic threshold.

I favor higher intensity, lower volume training. I have started doing high reps with the Mace but I just got the 30 lb and found that after I managed 110 reps on the first set, I could only do half that on the second set and even less on the third. I’ll be doing drop sets next time from 30, 20, 15, 10 and 7, and I will shoot for 800 to 1,000 reps

 

[FireDragon76]

I did a few more kettlebell dealifts this evening, after watching some instructional videos. I think I am going to focus on glute bridges and squats as preliminaries. I'm not convinced my core is up to doing alot of deadlifts yet, especially because deadlifts seem to be a more technical type of lift, as compared to a squat. I need to do more "prehab". I've had a weak lower back ever since a spinal tap in my late 30's.

 

[timewerx]

Anaerobic exercise is very messy from a metabolic and hormonal perspective. It produces alot of free radicals, epinephrine, and cortisol. Sometimes you want to train the anaerobic system to be more efficient at producing power (as in HIT), but the bulk of training should probably not be at this intensity.

Anaerobic training conditions the body differently. If done right, it can also improve your aerobic performance.

True. It needs to be done sparingly. My anaerobic training for example only maxes out to 10% of my total weekly workout. The rest is aerobic.

If I have to do both aerobic and anaerobic intervals in the same session, especially a long session. All anaerobic intervals are done near the end of the session followed by a short cooldown before end of session.

 

[FireDragon76]

This morning the data conflicts: EliteHRV morning readiness was 8/10 with slight parasympathetic dominance (good). The rMSSD itself is 61, which is otherwise good to have for my age range. My Body Battery says 45/100, on the other hand, which doesn't represent good recovery, as I only gained about 30 points overnight. Workload ratio is exactly 1, with zero anticipated rest days. Subjectively, I feel like I need more rest, even though I slept seven hours, with a full number of sleep cycles.

 

[BPPLEE]

After doing over 1,000 reps with the 15lb and 10lb Mace,
close to 200 reps with the 30lb Mace and KB Swings with a 60lb Kettlebell just to try it out yesterday , my lower back is fine today and I’m not feeling any nerve pain in my left leg.
I’m excited about this, hopefully this means I can train heavy without making the leg pain worse.

 

[FireDragon76]

I went to the gym before church and I did some low intensity cycling because my left knee was feeling stiff, and I have found sometimes low intensity exercises helps with that. Nothing hard, I did'nt even sweat, just pedalling at a recovery intensity of about 35 - 40 percent intensity). I also did some glute leg presses on a machine with light weight, just to practice using the machine and to get in a bit of extra volume (I'm not sure the Sci-Fit machines are engaging my glutes enough, even pedalling backwards, it just feels lacking). I also performed a few deadlifts with a 12 lb kettlebell, just to feel what that was like. Being somewhat active felt alot better than just being stiff on a rest day.

I also did some reading and some experimentation using Garmin's Body Battery and a spreadsheet, to discern the relationship between heart rate and stress score, and how Body Battery works. I wanted to understand why I got such radically different scores from HRV morning readings with EliteHRV.

Usually, Heart Rate Variability works like a snapshot and requires an ECG chest strap or a really good optical sensor and a noise filter, and there's just too much noise in a wrist-worn watch's optical sensor to make a real time reading moment to moment: all of that extra processing takes time, too- minutes or seconds. So what the Garmin watch does is to only see heart rate variability trends, but not discrete heart rate intervals and it works off a trend or rolling average, feeding into a non-linear stress model that's also partly based on heart rate. This kind of system is a kind of gamified, really crude metric of stress or fatigue. It's meant to encourage exercise pacing and better lifestyle choices, but it's a very crude metric as far as actually assessing the physiological effects of exercise on readiness.

HRV, on the other hand, is less gamified and is used by athletes to gauge readiness or recovery, by creating daily, rather than moment-to-moment, trends. It's meant to augment or replace older tests, like orthostatic pulse tests that athletes used to do (some, such as Polar's Orthostatic Test combine both HRV and an orthostatic test).

 

[FireDragon76]

After doing over 1,000 reps with the 15lb and 10lb Mace,
close to 200 reps with the 30lb Mace and KB Swings with a 60lb Kettlebell just to try it out yesterday , my lower back is fine today and I’m not feeling any nerve pain in my left leg.
I’m excited about this, hopefully this means I can train heavy without making the leg pain worse.

Just curious how you consider your routine "low volume"? What you are describing sounds like relatively high volume, albeit you're using unconventional/less common training tools, like maces or clubs. I'm not saying it's too high volume, though. It's all about what an individual can recover from: the more experienced and conditioned you are, the more volume you can handle.

FWIW, this was today's workout, after walking a half mile to the local fitness club:

-5 minutes each Sci-Fit recumbent cycle, stepper, and lateral stepper, isometric strength setting
-2 sets x 10 reps x 40 lbs glute press/kickbacks (rehab/prehab to get in better shape for jogging and running intervals)
-3x8x40 rows
-1x8x40 chest presses
-1x10x4 Arnold presses
-5 minute cooldown on upright bike.

Then I walked home. The workload ratio for that workout is good in terms of cardiovascular fitness, no rest days are incurred, though I won't be doing a full body strength workout like that again until Wednesday (I'll probably do the Blade and clubs tomorrow, since the upper body workout was relatively light today).

 

[FireDragon76]

BTW, my Body Battery this morning was 77 which is the best it has been in a while (HRV was good, too, at 7/10), that's an overnight charge of a whopping 72 points! I initially had trouble sleeping so I took a double dose of L-Theanine, put on a sleep mask and ear plugs and went back to bed. Setting the temperature down to 73 also seems to be helping, with less waking during the night and deeper sleep.

I don't know what I'll do in the summer here, sometimes it gets really hot. Maybe get a window AC unit. The cooler air really seems to help recovery. Running the AC at night really doesn't cost that much, depending on your energy plan you are on.

Theanine is good for sleep, so I recommend trying that if you need a sleep boost. It's been clinically proven to help sleep quality. Melatoning is really bad for me (and alot of other people), it can cause really bad moods.

 

[BPPLEE]

Just curious how you consider your routine "low volume"? What you are describing sounds like relatively high volume, albeit you're using unconventional/less common training tools, like maces or clubs. I'm not saying it's too high volume, though. It's all about what an individual can recover from: the more experienced and conditioned you are, the more volume you can handle.

FWIW, this was today's workout, after walking a half mile to the local fitness club:

-5 minutes each Sci-Fit recumbent cycle, stepper, and lateral stepper, isometric strength setting
-2 sets x 10 reps x 40 lbs glute press/kickbacks (rehab/prehab to get in better shape for jogging and running intervals)
-3x8x40 rows
-1x8x40 chest presses
-1x10x4 Arnold presses
-5 minute cooldown on upright bike.

Then I walked home. The workload ratio for that workout is good in terms of cardiovascular fitness, no rest days are incurred, though I won't be doing a full body strength workout like that again until Wednesday (I'll probably do the Blade and clubs tomorrow, since the upper body workout was relatively light today).

The workouts I do with dumbbells and bands are high intensity, low volume but what I do with the mace is kind of like jogging for the upper body. It’s continuous movement for 200 reps repeated 4 or 5 times without rest.
I feel that this works on strength and endurance.
I’m not able to do as many reps with the 30lb mace so I’m going to do it first then work down in weight .
It’s still not all that long. I haven’t timed it. Before I started working with the mace I did the battle rope and kettlebells in similar fashion.
Now I do 100 swings with the kettlebells, working down in weight.
I just got a 60lb kettlebell and I have a 50lb on the way and I will incorporate them into the routine.
So I try to work on size and strength with the weights and bands and on endurance and cardio (somewhat) with the mace

 

[BPPLEE]

BTW, my Body Battery this morning was 77 which is the best it has been in a while (HRV was good, too, at 7/10), that's an overnight charge of a whopping 72 points! I initially had trouble sleeping so I took a double dose of L-Theanine, put on a sleep mask and ear plugs and went back to bed. Setting the temperature down to 73 also seems to be helping, with less waking during the night and deeper sleep.

I don't know what I'll do in the summer here, sometimes it gets really hot. Maybe get a window AC unit. The cooler air really seems to help recovery. Running the AC at night really doesn't cost that much, depending on your energy plan you are on.

Theanine is good for sleep, so I recommend trying that if you need a sleep boost. It's been clinically proven to help sleep quality. Melatoning is really bad for me (and alot of other people), it can cause really bad moods.

When I was born my left foot was turned around backwards and they put it in a cast to straighten it. It’s a size smaller than the right and I have less flexibility on the left side.
Last night the covers were pushing down on the left foot and I can’t turn it like I do the right so I stuck it outside the covers but turning it that way made my leg hurt.
So I got up and got in the recliner.
I have sleep issues anyway but leg pain makes it worse.
I’m taking Somatomax and it helps but I have to be careful not to take too much because it causes sleepwalking at higher doses. I have found where I got up and did things in the kitchen I didn’t remember.
Hopefully one day I will get my sleep schedule straightened out

 

[FireDragon76]

When I was born my left foot was turned around backwards and they put it in a cast to straighten it. It’s a size smaller than the right and I have less flexibility on the left side.
Last night the covers were pushing down on the left foot and I can’t turn it like I do the right so I stuck it outside the covers but turning it that way made my leg hurt.
So I got up and got in the recliner.
I have sleep issues anyway but leg pain makes it worse.
I’m taking Somatomax and it helps but I have to be careful not to take too much because it causes sleepwalking at higher doses. I have found where I got up and did things in the kitchen I didn’t remember.
Hopefully one day I will get my sleep schedule straightened out

Phenibut is a fairly heavy sedative and GABA agonist, you have to be careful with it. It's like a drug like Ambien, which can also cause sleepwalking. But if you have trouble sleeping, the benefits might outweigh the risks. I used to take an all-night sedative when I had really bad fibromyalgia and it did help, though it did cause some rebound insomnia when I went off it.

I think theanine works on slightly different mechanisms, by manipulating serotonin and dopamine, in addition to GABA. It's found mostly in green tea in low amounts (I think less than 20mg per cup, matcha has more). It just promotes a calm feeling, and isn't as strong as the sleeping pills I used to take.

According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and fitness influencer, ten minutes of yoga nidra every day helps promote sleep at night. I didn't know what yoga nidra was, so I looked it up, and it turns out I've done it before in a yoga class. At an old yoga studio we used to go to, the class ended with ten minutes of a guided meditation in the corpse pose, flat on your back, with a body scan meditation.

I sort of stumbled recently onto something similar by working with the Garmin stress score on my watch. During the height of my post COVID experience, sometimes I would even lay on the floor in the narthex in church just to get in a few minutes rest doing this, to conserve energy. But it turns out this kind of thing can actually help you sleep at night, and it's better than taking a nap. It helps if you can focus on your breathing to turn off the monkey mind.

 

[FireDragon76]

Body Battery wasn't so great today. It barely went up and sleep quality was poor. Sometimes you can weigh the scales in your favor with recovery, but it doesn't always work out. I suspect the exercise load was just too much yesterday, even though I spent less time in the gym- resistance training seems to induce a fatigue that can't be accounted for very well on smart watches or fitness trackers.

Today I just did 15 minutes of using the Blade and doing club mills. I've learned the forward and reverse version of the Indian club mills now, so I have a complete workout. I used my plastic 1lb clubs, which actually feel somewhat heavier than my vintage clubs.

The Body Blade type exercises can be fairly intense for somebody like me. However, the intensity is very manageable. It seems like the best way to use it is vibrating it in different positions and doing each position (in front of you, to the side with one hand, behind your back with both hands, etc.) as a set until you feel some burn. Then take a brief rest to let lactate clear, and go on to another set. You get a decent workout doing this that actually isn't too fatiguing the next day. I see this kind of thing as a fun exercise that would be great for somebody new to fitness, who wants something easily managed. All that's missing is a lower body focus, which I think could be made up for by doing some squats.