<p>Walking a round of golf is a great workout. That’s a 3 to 4 mile walk, carrying a weight on your back, plus the golf swing is a good core exercise. And I always burned up at least 100 calories cussin’.</p>
<p>I’m celebrating. Forget that plateau talk from earlier in the week. I’ve had a big weight loss week, over 3 pounds in the last seven days. It really is just a series of drops alternating with steady weeks. I’m starting to think there’s a lag effect, such that my week of no exercise showed up on the scale a week or two later and now my hard exercise weeks are starting to show up. The “eat less” part has been good. I’ve pretty much ended the snacking thing, down to one snack in the evening – a bowl of fruit or some reasonable portion. I no longer have to stop in front of the Pringles or candy aisle in the grocery store and stare wistfully.</p>
<p>It’s so motivating. I’m now back to my weight before I quit smoking, but in 100% better shape and fitness. I’m at a level where I can push myself a little harder – longer walks, more challenging iPod exercise circuits and feel the progress. I’m just going to keep riding the wave and see where it takes me.</p>
<p>Our nice cool summer weather ends tomorrow with the return of heat, so I’ll do something outside today – walk or bike – and then take tomorrow off.</p>
<p>I think the biggest challenge is finding (or stumbling into) a way to get started. Once you start to see some progress, it becomes self-motivating and self-perpetuating. It’s the intitial transition to “eat less, move more” that is the barrier, because those first weeks are pretty daunting.</p>
<p>I think it really helped me to be able to laugh at the old fat guy panting through an iPod nazi workout.</p>
<p>I’ve also been lucky. Eating less and moving more has shown steady results on the scale, which makes me want to keep going. The patience has been required with the fitness, endurance, and aerobic level. That’s been a slow building process that also has required sticking with it until enough weight had come off. It’s always been a slowly rising fitness curve waiting to intersect with a slowing falling weight curve. The luck has been having genes/metabolism that allowed the eat less/move more philosophy to show text book results without having to starve myself or kill myself working out in the gym. I mean, I’m still putting half n’ half in my coffee, eating pizza once a week, and enjoying a steak or grilled pork chop. I just try to be sensible about it and cut out the junk food, which was where I was packing on the weight. 200 calories a day in Pringles or sour gummy worms or cheese and crackers or cereal or peanuts or pretzels or soft drinks is 20 pounds a year. A couple of years and you are looking at some real weight, just from being a little out of balance.</p>
<p>They also say that nicotine increases metabolism by about 200 calories a day (it’s a stimulant that causes a spike in adreniline and a release of stored sugar into the bloodstream, which is why smokers can skip meals and not feel hungry). So I had to make some changes. Snacking at my old rate was no longer going to work. I now believe that exercise is the only way to maintain a lower calorie intake. There’s something synergistic about it.</p>
<p>MOfWC, great job on that 5K! 9 min miles is blazing speed for an injured runner. I’m on the sidelines as well. Doc gave me a steroid pack and prescribed no running for a month. He is positive that my lower back ache is due to a small tear in one of the discs. He says it should heal on its own if I do not do any crazy stuff. Grrrr, cats! So for now, some light free weights and fast walking. I think racewalking might become a more popular sport in the near future. :)</p>
<p>Don’t mess around with that. If the doc says “no running”, no running.</p>
<p>I talked my wife into a little hike to the state park today. She’s always ribbing me about how I don’t walk far enough and those hills are nothing and why do I come back tired, telling me she walks two miles every day, goes to the gym all the time, yadda yadda. I keep tellin’ her I’m just an old fat guy trying to get a little fresh air.</p>
<p>So I took her on the long scenic route. Absolutely beautiful. Sunny and hot. Bright blue sky. Not a cloud. An hour and fifty-two minutes, up and and down, up and down. I averaged 81% heartrate. She was dragging on the way home, mentioning how steep the hills are. I think I’ve finally heard the end of “yadda yadda”.</p>
<p>Of course, I might have to take a stool to sit on next to the bar-b-que grill to cook dinner.</p>
<p>My race picture from today is actually pretty decent. Fortunately, the finish clock is NOT in the picture. I put it up on facebook. I am supposed to put it up on the Brooks pro site since I’m in the uniform, which is neon yellow, by the way. No fading into the background.
The prizes today were a YMCA running hat (may have had the race name on it, too) and the standard pair of Swiftwick socks. I don’t feel terrible about missing out.</p>
<p>To be honest, I’ve never heard of a runner at my age that isn’t injured or scheduling hip replacement. I’m sure I want anything to do with running.</p>
<p>I’m back into running. Didn’t run very much for the first half of this year due to family schedules. Ran two miles the week before last and then ran 15 this past week. Muscles were pretty sore for about five days. There’s a 5K in August that I’d like to run and it looks manageable. I play tennis several days a week so my joints are in very good shape. Yesterday I played 90 minutes of singles and then ran at night. So hopefully the aches are gone and the injuries stay at bay. The big difference is that our son is away on his internship for the summer. I just have to do driving lessons with our daughter - that’s somewhat stressful but I can now workout every day.</p>
<p>I have a number of older running friends. One guy in town just turned 70 and broke all the state records for 69 years old. He’s incredible and never seems to be injured. Of course, he weighs about 120 or so!</p>
<p>I’m sitting on the iPod nazi’s absolute beginner running workout – a walk/jog interval affair. Who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll pop it on my iPod and give it a whirl.</p>
<p>The good thing about running (or jogging, which is how we all must begin (and end,probably) is that it is a VERY efficient form of exercise. Most people who claim to “hate” it or “can’t do it” have tried to go too fast. You should be at little more than a fast walk to begin. A true conversational pace. Lots of walking breaks. It’s a way to make walking go faster or to fit more into the time you have. A minute here and there is good.</p>
<p>That’s where consistently using a heart rate monitor is useful. I can envision a point on the fitness curve where walking simply doesn’t drive the heartrate high enough. At least with the hills in all directions where I live, I’m in no danger reaching that point anytime soon. I’m getting there on level and downhill stretches where my heart rate stays in the mid 60% range, but then I hit the hills. It’s kind of good because the first quarter mile from my house is downhill so it makes it easy to get through the initial warmup and get moving.</p>
<p>I’m a little surprised at the impact of heat on heart rate. I did essentially the same walk last Sunday on an overcast day in the mid 70s and yesterday on a sunny 88 degree day. If anything, I did yesterday’s walk slower because my wife and I took some "sit and enjoy the view for a few minutes) breaks. My average heartrate on the cool day was 73%. Yesterday, it averaged 81%. I saw it on the very first hill. I wasn’t breathing hard, just a higher heart rate than I’ve been seeing.</p>
<p>Heat and humidity do have a big impact on your workouts. Good to stay hydrated. Some of the people at the office do runs in a forested park a few miles away. The shade is nice for running in.</p>
<p>Explain how the heart rate montitor works?
I am totally at a loss as to how to check my heart rate and where it should be. I just walk my hills. I can tell when my heart rate gets higher by my rate of breathing and getting out of breath.
I am in relatively good health but I had over the years slowly put on weight and found myself getting out of breath while walking uphill. It really hit me this Christmas when our hotel in Costa Rica was an uphill walk from the boat dock and I about died each time I had to go up the hill. Same with the walk to the beach.
I live in a hilly area and I have been discovering all the different routes I can take. All of them containing some long substained hill climbing. I have become faster and I can do most of the hills without stopping halfway up. I try to walk about 45 minutes briskly. I find I am faster and I have to go further to get in the same about of time.
I have also started doing some light weights at home along with some work on the stability ball and stretching on the foam roller. Have also added the plank. So far I have found that I don’t need a gym.
This thread gave me the strength and support to start taking better care of myself. I am exercising more, eating better and have lost weight and it hasn’t been that hard.</p>
<p>There is an strap that goes around your chest that senses your heart rate and transmits a signal which is picked up by the wrist watch (or by any Polar-compatible exercise equipment).</p>
<p>The watch shows your current heartrate, displayed in either beats per minute (BPM) or as a percentage of your max heart rate (programmed into the watch). Unlike the absolute cheapest Timex, this one also displays the data from your workout (time, average heart rate, peak heart rate, a worthless display of calories burned) and has a recovery feature (press a button and it counts down 60 seconds and shows how many BPM your heart rate has come down). It doesn’t have memory to store multiple workouts or graphs and stuff (you can use Excel if you want to track your workouts). It has an alarm feature that beeps if your heart rate goes above or below the zones you’ve programmed in. I think I set up my zones for 60% to 90% of max heart rate. I turn that alarm off because it’s annoying.</p>
<p>I bought this one because I wanted an analog unencoded signal that can be picked up by by Schwinn exercise bikes and other gym equipment. The fancy Timexes are digital so they won’t be displayed by exercise equipment). As it turns out, I wear the watch anyway to record my workout so it doesn’t matter if the exercise bike is displaying my heart rate, but I could give the transmitter strap to my wife to wear to her gym without the watch.</p>
<p>I didn’t buy the Polaris because they don’t have user replaceable batteries in the watch or chest strap transmitter. You have to buy a new transmitter when the battery dies or send the watch in for a replacement battery.</p>
<p>Is it necessary? No. I was so out of shape when I started working out that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t seeing insane heart rates. Since then, I’ve found it a good tool for tracking my workouts over time (I record each one as minutes times average heart rate). It’s also been very instructive on the impact of hills or faster intervals on the exercise bike. Usually, when I feel like a hill is kicking my butt, it really is kicking my butt in terms of heart rate.</p>
<p>BTW, a 45 minute brisk walk with hills that are making you breath hard is a very good workout. I don’t really know if there is anything better than that over all. It’s pushing you aerobically and it is a full bodyweight exercise that engages large muscles and burns a ton of calories.</p>
<p>A little bit of weights and core exercises along with walking hills is a pretty complete fitness program, at least until some point where your fitness is so high that the walking is no longer a challenge. I’m sure not at that point. I routinely see peak heart rates of 85% to 93% of my “max” on hills around here. It’s cumulative. As long as you are walking, you never completely recover from a hill, so each hill tends to also increase the sustained heart rate. So, I might recover to 70% after the first hill, but only 75% after the second hill, and maybe even only down to 80% after the third or fourth hill.</p>