Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Workout Progress - Aug '07

August was a good workout month for me. Knowing that the gym that I signed up with will finally open at the end of the month motivated me to stay with my workout schedule. I guess partly that I wanted to be better conditioned when I do start to work with the gym equipment and, if I am to be brutally honest as well, to look half way in decent shape so I won’t suffer from locker room anxiety. I know … that’s just shallow but being a person with my body issues, every little I can do to make me feel less self conscious about myself helps. In hind sight, I should have not made too big of a big deal about it after all since in reality not everyone who joined the gym I go to looked like they have just walked out from a fitness magazine page.

Since the gym opened, I have clocked in about 5 hrs of work out time in 2 visit and planning to clock in another 2 hours tonight. I admit that it does seem a bit excessive considering that I’ve never been in a gym before and that I have only done 1 hour work outs previously. I totally blame the novelty factor for the fact that I simply cannot keep track of the time when I’m in the gym. Everything is still new and exciting for me which makes it the more easy to overdo things. I really have to watch myself so I don’t go and do something stupid like pushing myself until I hurt something.

Since I have not started my sessions with PT, my current workout routine is 10 minutes stretching, 20 minutes of stationary bike, 20 minutes on treadmill, 50 minutes on weight stack machines, 10 minutes on treadmill again as cardio cool down before ending with 10 minutes of stretching. I try to work out different groups of muscles in the 50 minutes that I use the weight stack machines per workout. To simplify things I divide my workout into upper and lower body groups and work them in alternate gym visits. The only exception to the rule is that abs gets a workout every visit since that is the thing that I want to improve most. Of course the extended gym time on Sunday means that I do a full body workout instead of just the target muscle group.
Diet plan in Aug :

Breakfast (8 am)
- 1 banana
- 1 cup fat free yogurt
Brunch (10 am)
- 1/2 serving of plan fried rice with tempeh goreng or greens
- 1 hardboiled egg (alternate working days – 2 whole eggs total per week)
- 1 serving of fruits
Lunch (12 pm)
- 1 Spirulina cereal 3 in 1 mix.
Snacks (4 pm)
- 1 Nature Valley Roasted Almond Granola bar
- Japanese Green Tea
Dinner (7 pm) – non workout days (Tues/Sat)
- buy something roughly less than 300kcal (usually either 3 pieces of kuih, plain tosai, bread or the like)

Workout Days (M/W/Thurs/F: 8 – 10 pm, Sun: 10am – 4 pm)
Pre workout
- Balance Liquid L-Carnitine – 10ml
- EAS Creatine Powder – 10mg
- 1 Banana
Post workout
- tomato juice immediately after workout
- EAS Myoplex Deluxe Protein Shake 1 hr after workout as dinner
- something roughly less than 300kcal

Supplements :
Balance Liquid L-Carnitine – 10ml per day
EAS Creatine Powder – 10mg per day
EAS Myoplex Deluxe Protein Shake – ½ serving post workout
21st Century’s HerbalLipo Tea – 1 serving per week day
GNC L-Lysine – 1 tablet per day
GNC MegaMen Dietary Supplement – 1 tablet per day

I’ve dropped bread from my daily breakfast list to reduce the amount of carbohydrates that I’m consuming. It took me a while to get used to just having fruit and yogurt for breakfast but I’m dealing with it. One thing that I have noticed from following this diet plan since Jan is that I am feeling perpetually hungry. It is worse after each workout where I come out of the gym feeling like I can eat a whole horse. It takes all my will power to stay on the plan and not over consume. Thankfully, if I ever think of gorging myself on something, I just need to remind myself that I need to walk briskly on the treadmill at speeds of 5 km/hr for 20 minutes to burn off just 176 calories. That would surely scare me back to my diet plan.
Did another InBody Check on my first gym visit to compare against the last one that I did back in March and to get a baseline reading to compare against future checks after I started using the gym. Every thing looks good and I did shed 6.3% of body fat since I started this journey so that is encouraging as I strive to shed an additional 10% from the Jan ’07 baseline. I just to tell myself that this is a journey that I started myself to see how far I can go and this is only beginning.

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