a month of workouts, i hope

I live in the eternal belief that tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year, I’m going to wake up an entirely different person and actually do the (insert great thing) here that I intend to do. I never actually do this, of course, but I live in eternal hope.

However, having just come off two weeks of slovenly gluttony during which I blew out the thigh of my last pair of jeans, forcing me to go participate in the horrendous activity of clothes shopping, I’m…not exactly seized. More like wearily or grimly staring at. The urge to act on the above belief and wake up and start acting like I’m a different person.

To that end, this morning I re-found Arnie’s Body Weight Workout, opened the calorie count aspect of the Fitbit system, and am starting this blog post.

I’m setting this to auto-post on June 12 in the hopes that the potential embarassment of having only one entry in it will cause me to actually follow through on this. Historically I’m not particularly pressured or inspired by, er, peer pressure, so there’s not much point in posting daily, but I’m also afraid if I don’t try to keep some kind of visible record I’ll definitely fail anyway. So this is my compromise.

Cut for the uninterested.

May 12: Last time I tried Arnie’s BWW, I 1. crippled myself for two days and 2. got sick after a week and quit. So this time, a, uh, year and a half, or possibly 2.5 years, later, I’m starting out more slowly. Today I have done one round of the beginner level workout (and can feel it. Tomorrow I may be a leetle stiff).
calories nommed: ~1700 (goal)
miles walked: 2.4 (totally not goal)

May 13: I am, yes, a leetle stiff. Not cripplingly, just a vague “I wonder what I did yesterday to make me sore…oh” kind of stiff. This morning I did my pre-beginners Pilates workout (anybody can do Pilates, says my sister’s friend who teaches it, but first you have to get STRONG!) and my tummy is now going “wtf, dude?” Oogh.

(mid-afternoon: omg. *laughs* my belly and bum are both going “uh, what hit us? what’s happened?” *laughs* omg. not quite *sore*, but all of the muscles are Aware Of Being Used. :))
calories nommed: ~2200 (over goal but right at the fitbit-allowed #)
miles walked: 5.5 (goal)

May 14: omg. *laughs* the exercise (arnie’s body workout again) isn’t so bad; in fact, it feels silly to only do one round, it’s so quick. but ten minutes later, kneeling by the tub to wash my son’s hair, my tummy and thighs were so quivery I could hardly kneel up.

also, i was watching myself in the mirror this morning. jesus christ, a booby woman doing jumping jacks sure looks…bouncy.
calories nommed: ~1600 (under goal)
miles walked: 5.5 (goal)

May 15: It’s a lot easier to exercise without the assistance of a small child. :p Did the pilates this morning anyway, with less enthusiasm than the first time. Up too early, full of not giving a damn, but wanted to be able to at least post to say I’d exercised. I might take tomorrow (and will take Sunday, which is my sleep-in day) off.
calories nommed: ~2100 (over goal, under fitbit-allowed)
miles walked: 7.5 (over goal)

May 16: If this post wasn’t sitting around on my dashboard I’d have just forgotten to do the exercises today, so that’s something, I guess. Did the Arnie workout. I…yeah. Good thing I start doing 2 rounds of it on Monday, because one is tiring and yet kind of lame.
calories nommed: all of them

May 17 turned out to be my day off.

May 18: Pilates workout. It’s easier than it was a week ago, altho I feel it in my tummy right now.

May 19: 2 rounds of Arnie’s bodyweight workout this morning. One isn’t enough to make me sweat; two is. *pantpantpant* I wonder if I’ll be super sore tomorrow.

Calorie counting went off the rails from Friday. This is normally what happens with me: I manage for about four days and then pfffsssht, it all goes to hell. So I guess maybe this week’s calorie counting goal will be manage *five* days.
calories nommed: 1600ish (under goal)
miles walked: 4ish (under goal)

May 20: I did 1/4th of a pilates workout, due partly to grumpy “if i do this i will see no instant results and i want some instant gratification god damn it” and mostly to a helpful four year old. :p
calories nommed: 1900ish (over goal, under fitbit-allowed)
miles walked: 8.2 (ooooover goal)

May 21: I made up for not doing Pilates yesterday by walking 8 miles. o.O Did my 2 rounds of body weight workout this morning. I was, incidentally, noticeably stiff, if not exactly sore, yesterday, from Monday’s uptick in the body weight workout, and it’s possible I’m slightly stiffer today. I am also bloody starving.
calories nommed: 1900ish (over goal, but way under fitbit-allowed)
miles walked: 8.2

May 22: I am bored with the Pilates workout. I thought that would take more than, er, 5 or 6 goes at it. I’m stronger than I was, so I guess I’ll move on to the Beginner’s Workout even though I’d been thinking 6 weeks of prebeginners. OTOH, I’m too bored to do it more, so hey.
calories nommed: 1800ish (over goal, but barely)
miles walked: 6.2

May 23: Young Indiana is starting to do several of the bodyweight sets with me. It’s pretty cute. :)

May 24: Pilates. Same workout I’ve been doing because I haven’t dut the beginner book out yet.
calories: didn’t count
miles walked: 5ish

May 26: Had not told me to on Twitter, I would not have exercised this morning. But he did and I did. 3 rounds of the bodyweight workout, which is definitely enough to work up a sweat. *pantpantpant*

May 29: I’ve been doing a bad job of keeping up on my post-keeping, but I’ve been exercising. Yesterday, in fact, I didn’t get to exercise in the morning and felt so grumpy that I actually did two sets of the bodyweight stuff in the afternoon (wearing jeans, no less) and feel reasonably pleased with myself. I’ve totally fallen off the wagon regarding calorie counting, though. Nothing’s perfect. :p

May 30: Arnie’s workout today. It felt pretty good. Also, I think in the future I might do these blog posts every 2 weeks instead of monthly because I’m losing interest in a post this long and I can’t imagine anybody else wants to read it either. :)

June 2: I took the weekend off, not necessarily through design. OTOH, I felt stronger today by a considerable margin–the first two rounds of plank, particularly, in the Arnie workout, were a lot easier, and I didn’t become a trembling mess during it until the final round. I’m up to 4 rounds now, which is the Beginner’s Workout.

I’ve been doing knee push-ups, so I think my next way to improve will be to start doing real push-ups. Realistically I’ll probably add them one set at a time, so it’ll be another 4 weeks (after this week) of adding them. I’ll probably have to find some way to change the rest of it up a little too, so I don’t get bored, but realistically just adding a couple more reps of some of the exercise might do the trick. My dance-trained brain has a hard time doing sets of 10 anyway; I am inclined to want to do either 8 or 16. Maybe I’ll work toward 16 on some of the stuff I’ve been doing 10 on.

Also, Ted wants to do this core workout thing that’s been going around, so I did the first day of that this morning, which made FIVE sets of plank! Crunches are no problem, but I already feel the leg lifts in my lower abs. *laughs*

June 3 oh god *whimpers* between the ab challenge and the first day of the new pilates workout, i’m ready to go back to bed and laugh pathetically at myself until i fall asleep. owugh. i was okay until i discovered the abs workout includes situps as well as crunches and leg lifts. #dies :)

June 4 oh god *whimpers*
felt really wimpy this morning, honestly. I did the Arnie workout, but I couldn’t then finish the entire 3rd day of the core workout on top of that. I did most of it, but ended up doing only half the situps, my abs were just like ‘no’. It may be too much to add on, but having started I want to see it through.

June 6: Yesterday was a rest day for the abs workout so I just took it off entirely. I actually felt pretty twitchy about that, like I needed to be doing pushups and stretches at the very least. But man, this abs thing is kind of killing my willingness to do a whole round of the other stuff, whichever of the other stuff I’m supposed to do. Today it was Arnie’s workout, but I had to have Young Indiana tell me to finish the last set. Bleh.

June 7: pilates today. then i did the abs workout. i will die now.

June 10: uh, let’s see. Sunday was my day off so I didn’t exercise. Yesterday I was too tired to do Arnie’s workout, so I did pilates and abs again and wasn’t quite dead. Today I was so tired after 10 hours of solid sleep that I went to sleep on the couch for another 90 minutes after getting up, so screw it. I’ll do my workout tomorrow.

June 11: I did 2 sets of the Arnie workout. Maybe I’ll do the other two later today. I’m out of give-a-shits for exercising, which is probably about 95% because I fell off the calorie count wagon so I haven’t lost any particular weight. It could also be that I get bored really easily and I need to do something else for a while. But this posts tomorrow and I’m not going to go out with a “wow, no workouts, I suck” bang, dammit. :p

June 12: One month later. I did my Pilates workout and fell back to about day 5 of the abs workout, which is frankly enough to kill me. I’m pretty confident right now that the problem with the Arnie workout is boredom, because this is a different (maybe day 5?) pilates workout and I’m much more willing to do it than the Arnie thing.

My abs are a lot stronger than they were a month ago. I can do 20 seconds of plank post-workout without dying. I notice it’s easier/more natural to keep my gut tight when I’m walking around, which is good for my posture overall. I don’t feel stronger in terms of lifting strength, but it’s not like I started out by doing a dead lift to see what I could do a month later, either.

You’d think I’d be pretty cheerful about managing a month of workouts, but I’m not actually feeling particularly accomplished at all. This is no doubt due to no weight loss whatsoever, which, please do not feed me platitudes about muscle and fat, because it is frankly due to failing to calorie count and by certainly making up for whatever miniscule extra calories burned by eating too many in replacement. Exercising is a lot easier for me than cutting calories.

Tagged fitness