Walking: there's natural, and there's efficient

I'm finding out that many of the skills that come naturally are not optimal.  Walking is one.  Joanna Hall's technique is way more efficient than merely putting one foot in front of the other.  The follow-through with the ankle is a bit awkward when wearing work boots, as they (by design) support the top of it to prevent straining, and I admit to feeling a tad self-conscious swinging my arms like a child going choo-choo; but the technique works.  I hadn't realised how lax my 'natural' style had become.

Nasty factoid

"Every extra 10kg of body fat a man puts on will require 29km (18 miles) of blood vessels to serve the extra tissue..."

from page 85 of The Rough Guide to Men's Health.

Ways of knowing you are losing weight

Having your trousers fall down when sneezing.

Thankfully I was alone :-)

Sounds right to me

"With input from tablet computers, cameraphones, and walls of dancing video, and with much of your memory outsourced to Google and your social relations to FaceBook, you now embody the accelerating charge of the Five Horseman of converging technology - nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology, and applied cognitive science..."

Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz in The Big Idea, New Scientist No 2812.

Six weeks in

Not a good fortnight, as the numbers show:

• weight: 100.2kg (no change)
• BMI: 29.3 (no change)
• body fat: 28.9 (30.6) %
• muscle: 32.0 (31.0) %
• visceral fat: 13% (no change)
• blood pressure: 125/80 @ 66 (122/83 @ 68)

Disappointing though the weight figure is, the raw number hides an interesting fact.  1.7% fat mass <=> 1% muscle mass.  Thus I'm still heading in the right direction; albeit rather slowly.

Probiotics seem to work.

Penicillin doesn't just kill the bad bugs.  Gut flora is clobbered too.  My bowels usually get unruly when I'm taking antibiotics.  This occasion was all too average in that respect.

At the end of the course I added a probiotic supplement to my daily regime.  Probiotic 10 from Holland and Barrett to be exact. 

I have a happy gut again :-)

Exercise: going green

This evening I moved up from the entry-level yellow resistance band to the next one up, in green.

I'm as knackered (and happy) as a month ago, after first using the yellow one. Progress :-)

Caution: politics looms

I've been silent here for several days.  Ideas aplenty have been drafted; and will stay that way until I've decided something.

Longevity will one day (soon, hopefully) get political.  It's already controversial.  The baby boomers are beginning to retire, threatening to overwhelm a social system established when people, on average, both bred faster and died younger. 

If ageing is cured when most of us are infirm, the politics could get nasty.  Hence I'm trying to work out whether anything I post might one day be used against me.

Exercise: variation

I'm finding it important to vary my routine. 

A "full set" (which I must admit to not quite having completed, though I've come close a couple of times) takes 4+ hours.  There aren't many days I can afford that much time.  More critically, it can get boring.  Very boring.  Like, realise during a set I've forgotten how many reps I'm up to boring!  Doing shorter stints of sub-sets avoids this.

The pattern I've fallen into is to do upper body + core + flexibility one day, long walk + flexibility the next, then lower body + core + flexibility, followed by a day off. (In practice it's often another walking day, but I don't feel guilty if it isn't).  Core exercises are done more often, as I discovered mine is particularly weak.

Gardening, decorating, and shopping, make excellent workouts too.  My wife thinks I'm mad shearing the lawn rather than using the electric mower, but it's an excellent upper body workout.  Likewise the sanding of paintwork.  Treating each stroke of the sanding block as a rep means I get fitter, and the prep' is way more thorough than I used to do.  Shopping makes an excellent lower body session, both from the walk and the avoidance of prams, toddlers, mobile using cyclists, and the like.

Initially it felt odd going against the labour-saving ethos of our age, instead trying to find innovative ways of expending more time and energy, but I'm feeling better for it, both physically and mentally.

Third metrics: one month done!

One calendar month on, how am I doing?

• weight: 100.2 (101.4) kg
• BMI: 29.3 (29.6)
• body fat: 30.6 (30.6) %
• muscle: 31.0 (31.1) %
• visceral fat: 13 (14) %
• blood pressure: 122/83 @ 68

Given that my exercise schedule has gone to pot since my last post thanks to a chest infection, those numbers aren't too bad at all.