Curt's Bod

With my new adventure into physical fitness, I am finding that I need/want some new tools for working on my body.

1. 5lbs rubber coated hex dubbells – needed for exercised above the head and such, where a heavier weight might be dangerous for now
2. 20lbs (10# each) leg weights – the current 5lbs weights are great, but they are a little light
3. Stepper – I will be doing leg exercises and a stepper seems to be a key thing that a lot of people have that I don’t.
4. Mat – the floor is kind of dirty sometimes, plus a floor doesn’t have even traction
5. Grip – I would like to get stronger hand muscles, and think it could be a start.

I probably don’t need half of this stuff, but it seems like most of it would encourage me to work out more often and also give me a more uniform experience doing so, but hey, I’m easily impressed by marketing babble.

I have been started on my plan for working out for several days now, becoming most serious about it last Monday. I have been approaching this slowly, since last time I dove head first into this type of thing I gave up after only a few days. This time I feel more comfortable with myself and with my abilities, but at the same time I am not going at it in the same way I used to. My old approach was just a general disliking of my body, or being really disappointed with my abs, and basically working from just that. Well, that doesn’t work so well. This time I am selecting areas to target and going for it. I am trying to do an overall body tone, but I am doing it in targeted ways, not trying to do it all at once or anything like that. I select a general area or two to work each day, and I focus on that area. Once I know what I am doing each day I pay a little closer attention to the general muscle areas and try to work one at a time. I do not have a great about of fitness knowledge, even though I have approached this type of thing numerous times, so for the present time I have a somewhat distracted approach to working out. I will decide what muscles I will work and if I know the exercise I want to do, I do it, otherwise, I have a large collection of books and of course Google to help me out. When I find a new exercise, I enter it into GITI and log when I do it. I suppose at the moment with the way I am approaching things, I am teaching myself how to workout (and how to deal with pain, stress, etc), and at the same time I am teaching my body the correct movements for things. I am not working with large amounts of resistance yet. Most of my resistance comes from 10lbs dumbbells. Not a lot of weight, but enough to help me know if I am doing things correctly or not. The one other thing that I believe I need to do is work on learning how to stretch properly. I am staying sore for way too long for the amount of exercise I am doing.

Yesterday during my leg workout I missed one huge component, my calves. It doesn’t seem to be a highly critical thing at this point, as I don’t think that I could handle any more pain in my legs today, but it is something I would preferred to have gotten done. The key reason I was unable to work my calves yesterday was a lack of known exercises for the muscles. I have now found a few that I like and I will try integrating them for my next leg workout on Tuesday, although I must remember to get a basic exercise block, or else I am going to hurt myself on my step-ladder (which I used for step-ups, seemed to fit).

On another note, the muscles in my upper back are sore today, right beside the shoulder blades. This has me a little concerned, since I didn’t intentionally do anything to work that particular area. Since that area is sore and my triceps are not, I believe it’s possible that I was doing tricep dips incorrectly, so I will need to review and make adjustments to the way I do those.

I worked my legs pretty hard today, and my abs got a fair bit of work too. I can barely walk up or down stairs at the moment because of all of the tension in the muscles in my legs. Overall I think it was a very successful workout. I’m a little concerned that I have injured by left bicep, since it is still causing pain when it becomes tense, whereas the right feels back to normal now. I’m hoping it will be all better by Monday so that I can do an intense upper body workout involving arms and back. I think I will allow the abs to rest that day. I have decided that I am going to take tomorrow as a rest day and try to use the time I would workout in as a time to plan the workouts for the week and enter them into the schedule.

On a geek note, GITI needs a CSV output for workouts, because this picture stuff just kinda sucks and Word doesn’t seem to get the table.

After only 2 days of working out, my arms, abs, and legs are sore. The only thing I have done to my legs is walk, but I think I was walking more seriously than normal because of the soreness in my abs. So far I am enjoying waking up and having something to do that makes me actually feel good for the rest of the day. I am looking forward to working out in the morning so that I can try the Iron Gym and see what all I can do with it. I am really easily amused. Today I had to workout through the pain, which bothered me a little, but at the same time made me feel pretty good since I am this dedicated to it.

I tried this last year and it went no where, absolutely no where. I don’t want to do that again. I can’t let myself do that again. I have been on a very much day-light waking pattern lately, and I kind of like it. As a result of this pattern, I have more control over my body and what I do during my day. Over the past several weeks I have lost weight, a considerable weight by the feel of it. I am making a point of not using scales this time as that really seems to do nothing more than discourage me and make me do the wrong thing. So, instead I am going to be doing this a little bit blind. I am going to be using GITI to track my actual workout information, but I will be avoiding doing any quantitative measures on myself for a while. I have been losing weight due to a change in diet primarily, but also due to a little more increased physical activity. Today is February 14, 2010, Valentine’s day. This is the day reserved for things related to love, and to the planting of the love apple (tomato). At this point there is about 6-8 weeks before planting season begins, which also gives me 6-8 weeks to work on my body, and I intend to do so. I will make it a crucial part of my wake up routine to exercise. While the weather remains cold I will concentrate on doing my workouts indoors, but once the weather warms up a bit I will likely add running to my activities and try to in general exercise outdoors away from distraction and annoyance. For hot weather, my only option will be to exercise before the sun comes up completely.

I have managed to collect a large amount of supplies for this particular activity from previous attempts or just times that I thought I wanted to do something about the way things had become with me. For this particular attempt though, I do have one more piece of equipment on the way, an iron gym, for pull ups, dips and assisting with ground exercises. Other than that, I believe I am set and ready to get started immediately. Initially my goal is to exercise about 5 times per week, Monday through Friday roughly. I intend to define my schedule starting this week so that I have a set routine.

Things failed last time because I managed to let my sleep and everything else slip about the time I was starting. I can’t allow myself to do that again. I want to be my ideal body image. I want to get there, and stay there.