Fitness

Fitness February 2017

My search for fitness continues - body is permanently tired from my gym sessions - sort of feeling fitter - but at present not seeing any improvement of fitness in the areas that I want - primarily lower legs - to improve my balance and general ability to cope in everyday life - and cardiovascular to improve my ability to ride a bike all day

The latter i'm not surprised about - apart from some gentle cardiovascular exercise every day ive not really been concentrating my effort there - the former i'm still concerned about - all my life lower leg strength has been a struggle for me - in my early years I spent a lot of time in physio therapy sessions doing exercises to improve my lower leg strength - in midlife I kept the balance on the positive side by being active - playing a lot of racquet sports and cycling - following my period of inactivity due to illness the thing that i've really noticed where I have lost fitness is in my lower legs - simply walking the 1km to the shops has been quite difficult - poor balance plus the calf and small muscles in my legs getting fatigued quite quickly. So in addition to my gym work i've got a little routine using a balance board, a plank and an old bicycle inner tube - balance exercises - calf raises and ankle rotations - another 30 minutes a day load on my poor body!

On the plus side for January I lost 3kg - I wasn't really trying to lose any weight - but more to just keep it under control - I've never been into calorie counting - over the years Ive monitored my weight on a weekly basis - however last month I started calories counting - not so much to lose weight but to install some discipline into what i was eating - I had recently got into a tendency to - see it - eat it - favorite crisps and buns - as a basis I used the calorie count from my Polar V800 as my "daily target" (tests ive read indicate Garmin and Polar despite using different algorithms/methods to calculate calories are probably the best but tend to indicate around a 12% over estimate of Calorie consumption) and as a guide to consumption the values given for foods off the net and on packaging plus when required my scales - As an Engineer I like data so compiled a spreadsheet to record weekly food consumption

and another one to record calorie and weight balance since i started

Ive lost around 3kg in the last month without dieting per.se. - daily estimates of my calorie requirement from the V800 are in the range 2100 to 2900 depending on how much "activity" I undertake - on average 43 minutes a day in the gym (From another spreadsheet :rolleyes:

) doing mainly resistance training and average just over 2500 which for a geezer is around the recommended daily intake - calorie consumption has varied a lot more - good days and bad days - but has averaged around a deficit of just 200 calories/day

Doing the arithmetic it would seem that calorie counting for me has attributed to a weight loss of 3kg without much hardship - notwithstanding this there does seem to be a glaring disparity between the amount of weight i've lost and my calorie deficit as calculated by the Polar.

One thing I have found quite interesting is how closely my daily weight - don't normally weigh myself more than once a week but since I started the calorie counting I've been weighing myself every day at the same time - is a seemingly close correlation between my daily weight balance (loss/gain) and my cumulative calorie balance

Using an average trendline to smooth out the scatter it is obvious that my weight and calorie consumption are closely related - should be a no brainer of course - eat more - gain weight - eat less - lose weight - however, I didnt expect itself to be so closely related almost on a daily basis

The other thing i noticed was that the amount of weight i've lost does not correlate with the simple 1kg of fat equals 9000kCal - my calorie deficit for a month is only just over 5000kCal - but ive lost 3kg - so where is it going - my first thought was that it must be muscle i'm losing - a quick modification to the food spreadsheet confirmed that i was probably not eating enough protein - averaging around 0.6g/body kg/day - less than the recommended 1g/body kg/day - I upped the amount of protein I was eating to average around 1.3g/body kg/day - still losing weight at the same rate - no matter - being lighter will be good for me - I can live without knowing where it is going.