Yesterday and today became day one and two of my weight loss and fitness pursuit as I am getting started on what is likely a long journey. Together, Natalie and I will tackle this challenge head on and without pills, powders or gimmicks – just good old fashioned hard work and smarter eating. As I mentioned on Sunday, we’re not weighing in this week or doing anything critical, we are simply getting started and making sure we strongly build what we view as the most important habit in our quest – being active on a continual basis. This weeks goal is 5 days of activity before seeing where we stand. The workout schedule is simple – jog parts of the neighborhood, come back and hit some sit-ups and push-ups, then head to the basement to work the arms and shoulders with weights. Eventually, we’ll add to that mix but these exercises hit the majority of the muscles that we need to wake up.
Yesterday (Monday), we jogged for about half a mile… walked a bit and then jogged another half a mile or so. While some muscles were sore, it was mostly our cardiovascular weakness that limited us on day one. We were simply out of gas and breathing very hard. My allergy and exercise induced asthma was held in check, but I simply needed to slow it down to a walk to catch my breath. We broke a pretty good sweat, too. We waited until the evening after Natalie got home from work but it was still very humid and about 80 degrees.
After we ran we went inside for some sit-ups and push-ups and quickly found that we lacked the ability to do very many of either exercise. We each managed a couple of sets of just 15 sit ups/crunches (yikes!) and, similarly, completed fewer push-ups than I thought as well. I did two sets of push-ups – one at 15 and one at 10. That’s just embarrassing, but that’s what it is. Natalie did 1 set of 15 from her knees but felt she could maybe do a few more.
Downstairs, Natalie used small free weights (10 lb I think) for arm curls and lateral arm raises, while I used our short olympic lifting bar to curl with. Yes, that’s right, we own a weight bench… one that has obviously not been used much of late. We had it in our apartment and so purchased the short bar (some call this a women’s bar, I guess?) because of a lack of space for the standard bar. These bars weigh about 33 pounds. I curled with 12.5 pounds on each side of the bar, so I was lifting 58 lbs. That’s not a ton but I think that’s the only weight lifting amount that I could work right now that is remotely respectable. I finished up by using 25 pound free weights to do one-arm shoulder presses with.
We repeated the same exercise schedule, today (Tuesday), only we jogged a bit further than we did yesterday. While Natalie was working, I grabbed a couple of pedometer apps for my iPhone and went walking to see what type of courses we were going to be looking at in our neighborhood. The streets we utilized on Monday ended up being almost exactly a mile. I added a short section that leads away from our development and that short section adds almost exactly a quarter mile and that was the path we jogged, today. We ended up jogging about two-thirds of a mile before taking a break to walk and catch our breath. We then finished by jogging the remaining quarter mile stretch back to the house.
We’re a little sore, but not really as sore as we thought we would be. This is encouraging because we had hoped to have some muscle beneath the extra insulation we’ve both added over the past bit. We figure it will be easier to get quicker gains in cardio and muscle endurance than it will be to get our muscle strength or power up.
So far so good. Two days up and two days down. Looking forward to the rest of the week to see where this heads.
Take care all.
