If you already know what I'm writing at least part of this blog about...neat! How'd you do that? Anyway, yesterday marked my assessment after the 40th week of this fitness trip. During it, which by the way is simply a combination of standing on a scale then having electrodes taped to you for maybe 20 seconds, I learned a few things that I frankly did not like. First, though, I was 2.5 lbs from my goal weight, which is a record low (I'm still heading to overtime to finish). But that pretty much ended the good part of the experience.
Let's start with the accuracy of the machine. It has a +/- 5% margin of error. That's rather huge. Rather than consider where this machine is, I'm just going to take the information at face value. So, the previous readings had me sitting at 17.8% body fat and having lost 4 pounds of muscle in the six months since my initial assessment. Also, I was 20 pounds lighter. This time I was only 10 lbs lighter than I was 4 months ago, but I assumed, wrongly, it was because I was bottoming out on reasonable fat loss. Instead, now my body fat percentage is down to, drum roll please, 17.2%. Yes, a 0.6% reduction. I found that result troubling. Because with a 10 pound drop and only a 0.6% reduction in body fat meant I lost mostly muscle. In fact, roughly 8 out of the lost 10 pounds were muscle. So I quickly turned the discussion to why.
The readers of the blog and several web crawling bots for search engines know that my workouts recently have been more gymnastic in nature, doing exercises with body-weight resistance. These are great exercises to get stronger and trim down. Essentially, the body will adapt to doing such movements and exercises by making them easier over time. This can happen by making you stronger and/or lighter. Seems my body picked "and." Of course, I think even with the lack of muscle I'm stronger now. In retrying some previous workouts, I've done better in every case. One in particular, I beat my previous time by nearly 8 minutes.
With the end of the weight portion of my goals coming very close to an end, it's time to pick a new goal. Mine is now to get to 10-12% body fat while maintain my weight. That means lifting heavy again and keeping my protein intake up. But before I end this post, I'll put in one last workout that caused a considerable amount of sweat to drip onto my glasses.
This one is called "Dumbbell Hell," and each exercise you will have a dumbbell in each hand. Four rounds for time of the following: 8 manmakers, 10 shoulder raises, 15 lying down leg raises, and 20 push presses. There are two that need a little explanation. A manmaker is accomplished by getting into a pushup position dumb bells in hand and on the floor. Adjust the position by spreading your feet about shoulder width apart. From that position, do a pushup, then a one-armed row with each arm. That's one manmaker (though there are many variations of this move). The leg raises are accomplished by first laying flat on your back, arms extended like you're making an 'I' on the floor, dumbbells in hand. Keeping your feet together and legs straight, raise your legs until they're just past perpendicular with your body, then lower them back to within a few inches of the ground. That's a single lying-down leg raise.
This was a toughy. I used 20 lb dumbbells for this one. The manmakers are actually kinda fun. It kinda feels like you're training for some sort of MMA fight. The shoulder raises were too heavy to do completely correctly. That's more weight than I'm used to, so I had to add a bit of a kip to it to complete them. The leg raises...had to learn the hard way pull a bit with those hands under the dumbbell. It really helped. Finally, the push press. Take an easy move and do 20 of them for time and suddenly they get hard. I finished in 22:23. The relaxing collapse to the floor afterward was well-deserved.
