TauCan62's 12th House

The last few years at school has taken a toll on my body-as it would anyone, but now that it’s over, my next goal is to get back into shape. The question is, what is the best way to do that?

Back in the day I had a gym membership, and was able to keep in reasonable shape; I lifted weights and ran some 5k races. I was in pretty good shape, but never quite got the body I was looking for. The weights bulked me up. I still remember the day I put on my loose fit jeans and while the waist was fine, my thighs were just too big for the pants to accomodate. Running helped alleviate that problem to a certain degree, but still…

Then came the school years, and the regular exercise fell off until I was hardly even sleeping, much less getting regular exercise. Looking in the mirror now is a shock. The weight gain was pretty substantial for me. When I was working out, my frame could handle 190 pounds with no problem, but suddenly seeing an out of shape 215 was very distressing. I was getting old and fat.

The search was on for the cure for a pot belly and a slow metabolism. I scoured the internet-and found plenty of free info, as well as actually paying attention to the latest exercise equipment, gadgets, and most likely scams in the late night infomercials.

I was browsing YouTube one day and found something called high intensity interval training. It involved very high intensity exercise for a brief period, followed by a brief period of rest. The idea being to shock the body’s metabolism into revving up. Searching the Web, there were various opinions on how long these intervals were supposed to be. I got the idea, and made my own program, and here it is:

First, I start off with 50 jumping jacks to warm up (after a little stretching-maybe too little), then after a 15 or 20 second rest I go into the exercise phase. There is an exercise that we used to call burpees, but I’ve heard them called other things as well. Start standing up straight, down to a crouch, out to a pushup position, back to the crouch, and back up. 10 of those. After a 20 to 30 second rest, 10 to 20 pushups (depending on my energy that day). Another rest. Then dive bomber pushups, which is a hard to describe pushup variation. After those three, I take a break for a couple of minutes. I’ll repeat that series again, and take another break. Then I go to the boxing phase. 50 straight punches, then a 20 second rest. 50 uppercuts, then a 20 second rest. Then 50 elbow throws, and an break. I top it all off the the basic 24 Tai Chi moves I learned in a class, which takes about 5 minutes, add 10 minutes of treadmill or stationary bike on the end and that’s my workout.

It’s been a few months, and I haven’t really lost any weight, but I have noticed that my pants are a little looser. That must mean fat loss. I’m encouraged. My diet still leaves something to be desired, and there’s still that abnormal sleep pattern (not much) that I got during the school years. I’m working on those. I do feel better though, even without the weight loss I was looking for. I figure what I’ve done the last few years, combined with a sedentary office job has slowed my metabolism to a crawl. It’s probably going to take some time to get it back to normal. I’ll make some tweaks and adjustments and let you know how it goes…

Technorati Tags: exercise, fitness, weight, high intensity training