I’ve restarted my health and fitness journey after a long period of injury which I’m about 90% out of now. I had plantar fasciitis, which also caused some knee, hip and lower back pain. Fortunately a lot of this has subsided, and now in the process of restarting some of the client work I’d had to give up. One client has offered a limited schedule for a couple of weeks to see how I transition, which is super kind of them. I’m still keeping my weekends clear as I think overwork and exhaustion (even with limited scheduling on the weekends) caused me to have almost zero proper recovery time.
It was quite the shock to find I’d regained the weight since my last go at this a couple of years ago. I started the journey at 16st and managed to lose 3st before I got super discouraged. However I’ve learned from that experience. The cause was really looking too hard at other people’s growth and not using that as inspiration for my own goals. So I’ve got my new goals, and even though I still look at other people and their transformations, my goals override that. It’s good to be inspired, but not to compare, and that’s the distinction I’m now making.
So what are my goals? Well, I’m keeping some close to my chest, but overall –
- To lose body fat to around 15-20%.
This is actually quite a lot of bulk for me as I’m around 44% currently and going to be the toughest challenge.
- To lose some actual weight.
Given the body fat excess, this is where the loss should occur.
- Increase overall body strength
I have some smaller silly goals – like doing a pull up, something I’ve never been able to do.
- Increase flexibility.
Having plantar fasciitis helped me start stretching more regularly, and I’ve expanded to a simple complete routine before I start to look at doing more specific ones. A small goal here is to be able to touch my toes (again, something I’ve not been able to do to my knowledge – I’ve been close in the past).
So with this in mind, here’s my charts and progress notes for the week.
Workouts
I’ve restarted a modified Push, Pull Legs program I used to do. Fortunately, despite losing my notebook with my previous logs, I’ve found an Excel spreadsheet I’d made quite early on the last time I tried this. This has some reasonable low starting weights/sets and I was just below the expectations of that sheet.
Push was a tough set of exercises, which I felt sore for a few days with. I didn’t want to feel too sore starting these up, really just wanted to get back into the form, range of motion and what my expectations could be with each exercise.
Pull was a decent set – although I had to rearrange my home setup because I hadn’t realised the space constraints of some of the exercises. But having sorted this out, I was able to do all but one exercise. However, skipping that particular exercise wasn’t a problem as this was exactly what I’d done in my last attempt – doing any form of pull up with an overweight body is not an ideal by a long shot in my opinion. So this is an exercise I’ll be adding later, probably assisted with a resistance band and progressing that way.
Legs are just the killer part. I’m also recovering here with a hip muscle injury (fortunately this is almost at the end of recovery so wasn’t too worried about it). I took this one easy, actually skipping a couple of exercises and sets because I felt it stressing the joints and I wanted to ease back into this particular focus much more slowly than upper body strength.
Overall, a great start getting back into things. With the worst part of the injuries I’ve had behind me, I’m looking to increase my workload (which involves a LOT of walking) to supplement the resistance training with more cardio-based activity.
Food, Nutrition & Weight Loss
My weight loss and body fat comparison. I like to know that the body fat is going down in parallel to the weight, although at some point that will stabilise with muscle growth.
For those used to working in pounds or even stone – I’m currently 15st 8.4lbs or 218lbs. Not bad, losing around a pound every 2-3 days at my current rates. My personal goal is probably around the 190lb mark and then work on regaining muscle.
My macros have changed over the course of the last week, looking at a 40:40:20 split or thereabouts. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but focusing more on getting good protein and carb sources whilst minimising fat intakes should help in the weight loss and muscular growth areas.
Other things: Restarted a protein powder (review coming soon) as well as creatine – which I’ve found in a finer powder form so not as foul and easily put into drinks.
NOTES:
I use Cronometer (https://cronometer.com/) for logging all my nutrient intakes. This is then shared with Apple Health which coordinates other data such as weight, body fat, blood pressure etc to help give an overall picture. I use the HeartWatch App (https://heartwatch.tantsissa.com) to log heart rate and it gives me great data for the workouts specifically. I also use their Autosleep App (https://autosleepapp.tantsissa.com) for logging my sleep patterns – although this isn’t as accurate as it used to be for some reason which I have been looking into.