Financial Freedom Sloth

No overview table yet. I still haven’t gotten around to take the measurements. I keep my focus on my exercises and adding something to them every week. As explained last month, slow and steady progress is the name of the game.

So how did I do on the this front?

Let us see for the 3 catgories of exercises I do now.

Fitness

Once more I didn’t miss a single fitness day and continue to add some weight and some exercise repetitions. Even with this slow and steady approach the gains are significant over a one month period!

At the time of my last health report I lifted 14 375 kg. And in the week of 16/05 I lifted 15 504 kg! That is an extra 1 130 kg added! Remember, I started out around 5 000 kg.

I repeat once more that progress in weight lifted will be slower going forward as I am going to stick to my ‘adding a little bit every week approach’. I also have added kettlebell swings to my greasing the groove routine. This is an extra weight exercise but I am not tracking it in the fitness app so it doesn’t show up in the above overview.

Greasing the groove

This keeps being the part of my regime I enjoy the most. Believe me, I find it crazy too that I like this so much! But it seems to be working very well for me.

I have reached my interim goal of 25 reps so for the last two weeks I did 8 times x 25 reps x 6 days a week = 1 200 + the 50 sit ups I do on Sunday which brings me to 1 250 crunches in a week. As you can see having vague goals and not worrying when you reach them eventually does lead to some impressive results!

Honestely, I do not even care when I will reach my final goal of 50 reps. The goal is to keep doing this every day, every week and every month and eventually I will reach that goal.

Actually, progress on the crunches will also be slower since I now have added the kettlebell swing exercise to my routine as off this week. I did 8 reps x 6 days with a 4 kg weight. The 4 kg weight is definitely to low for me but it is what I have for the moment. I will first build these reps up to 25 also and once I reach that I will double the weight, drop the number of reps and then slowly build up the nr of reps once more.

And yes, I did do my sit ups at the office the one day I went. I just popped into an empty meeting room and got crunching. Add the kettlebell swings and I am going to be getting some strange looks once the working from home restrictions are lifted!

Cardio

A bit of some good and bad news on the cardio front.

On het bad front: I missed 1 rowing session! And I missed it on the one day I went to work at the office!! This has gotten me a bit worried that since I build up this exercise routine while working from home I will not be able to stick to it once I go back to the office. Our new work agreement does allow us to work from home 3 days a week. But I hope to be able to push this to 4 days (the days I do my fitness). I then just have to make sure I do my rowing on the day I do have to go to the office.

The good new is I did keep adding 1 minute to my rowing time every week. This week I reached 16 minutes. It is starting to get tough to keep it up. So I’ll probably hit a plateau in the coming month, but that is fine. 16 minutes of rowing is already pretty good. Every minute I can add to it is a win!

I am going to try to do these health reports on a monthly basis again. The old overview table will come back and will be updated again.

But I haven’t gotten around to retake the measurments so this will be for next month. I try to be less focussed on my weight and measurements and just add something extra to an exercise each week. This makes for slow progress but it should be a steady progress. In the past I had these very strict goals to achieve X by date Y. Which resulted in me either getting demotivated because I did not achieve the goal and stopping altogether. Or me getting injured, needing to rest for a couple of weeks, and that rest usually ended in me quitting completely…

Slow and steay progress is the name of the game now and every progress I now consider a WIN. It’s a lot more motivating than my old approach and for now it seems to keep me continuing.

Fitness

I didn’t miss a single fitness day since my last health report. And I have added a bit of weight to several exercises. The weight lifted chart tracks this increasy nicely.

I have no explication for the exceptionally high bars now and then. Best guess is that it are tracking anormalities, even though I try to log the exercises as correctely as possible.

This graph does show the benefits of the slow and steady approach. Where in the week of 16/08/2020 I only lifted a total of 5 436 kg. At the time of my previous update, the week of 28/03/2021 I had lifted 13 176 kg. And this week saw me lifting a total of 14 375 kg! It is already a certainty that by July 2021 I will have more than trippled the lifted weight (5000 kg I started with). Slow and steady progress over a longer period leads to impressive gains. Progress in weight lifted will be slower going forward as I am going to keep my approach of only adding 1 kg to an exercise every week. And adding 1 kg when you are pushing 10 kg is a 10% increase where adding 1 kg when you are pushing 20 kg is only a 5% increase. But the approach is working and it should keep me injury free while I continu pumping iron.

Greasing the groove

This might be the part of my regime I enjoy the most. It is only 1 minute of exercise 8 times a day but it does lead to impressive numbers.

At the end of March My regime was 8 times x 16 reps x 6 days a week = 768 crunches and with the Sunday included actualy 800 crunches that week.

Even after plateau-ing at 20 reps for 2 weeks I reached 21 reps this week. So that was 8 times x 21 reps x 6 days a week = 1 008 + the 44 I did on Sunday brings me to a total 1 052 crunches this week

Ultimate end goal remains 50 reps every hour but interim goal is 25 reps. When I reach this goal I will add kettlebell swings to my greasing the groove regime. Once those kettlebell swings are added I will alternate by adding sit-ups reps one week and kettlebell reps another week. Again, slow and steady progress and no time limit on when those goals need to be reached. Actually, I do not even NEED to reach those goals. As long as I add something every week I am doing good!

Cardio

Cardio is what should help me loose weight. Last month I explained why I choose rowing as my main cardio exercise.

I started at only 5 minuts of rowing my first week. But slow and steady also wins the race when it comes to rowing. Back in March I was already rowing 3 x 8 minutes a week and this week I reached 12 minutes! At the moment I am adding 1 minute to my rowing every week and I am sticking to it for the time being.

The last health report I did was from October 2018. 2018 people!!

As is usual with these things, when the reports stop it usually means it didn’t go well.

My weight continues to be something I struggle with. I eat when I am stressed and work was plain and simple exhausting me. And the end of the day I was just mentally beat. So I started eating more. This remained reasonable as long as I kept swimming. But having the mental energy to go swimming was also running out …

I just didn’t have the willpower to swim for 2 km on end. In a last ditch effort I started to reduce how much I swam in the -futile -hopes of keeping the habit of going 3 times a week. I wanted to keep the habit in the hopes that the mental dip would be temporary and after a month or two I could bounce right back to the full 2km.

Well that didn’t help. Swimming dropped to zero. The weight kept stacking up and with the heigher weight the push ups became harder so those stopped as well.

Exercise was down to zero and I was eating all the time.

How bad did it get? 120 kg bad.

Somewhere around the end of 2019 I did restart swimming. Knowing I am going to do exercises usually helps to eat less as well (because swimming when you are all bloated isn’t very fun). It was slow going but I enjoyed it again and slowly training my way back to the full 2 km. Then the lockdown due to Covid happened. The week they closed everything was THE week I was going to do my first 2 km again.

Being pissed off was an understatement! By the time the swimming pool re-opened (under very ridiculuse Covid measure as well) I knew I would have to restart all over again. And I just couldn’t. Especially with all the uncertainty of a possible new closing.

I wanted something I had 100% full control over. Because if I was dependant on our government making smart decisions I could wait a long time.

Luckily I already had moved my exercise bench from my parents home to my home before the lockdown. And the plan had always been to start fitness once my swimming was a strong habit again. So I just decided to flipped the sequence and start with the fitness.

Fitness

I started with the fitness on 21st June of 2020. To keep me honest and being able to track my progress I decided to pay for an anual subscription fot the Jefit App.

I started low (because it had been a long time since I did this) and didn’t progress a whole lot until september. Did had two reasons, I had to get into the habit of regular exercise. Being 120 kg does not help with this. 120 kg is already a lot of weight to get moving .. I also lacked some weights to start adding in a gradual way. And since the start of this pandemic exercise equipment is hard to get because everybody started exercising from home. As a little side note, i would not invest in any stock from gym compagnies. With people having all the equipment they need at home I can see their membership numbers not really rebounding after Covid.

The gap in the picture below is our 10 day holiday in Portugal. And you do see chart starting to go up after that holiday because I finally received my weights ordered back in August.

I did make a stupid mistake between June and September: in the abscence of the necessary weights I could have increased my repetitions! It was only when I started modifying the weight in the app that I actually realised I could also modify the reps! STUPID (afbeelding).

So as of October I started adding something (either a bit of weight or some extra reps) to 1 or 2 exercises.

It might not be all that much fitness I do, but I do I have now been doing it consistently since the 21st June, which brings me to 9 months at the moment!

Add it all up and total numbers start to be impressive:

Could I have pushed myself more in the fitness department? Probably. But I like my current approach and seem to be able to keep doing it. And that in itself is a big win for me.

The only thing I didn’t like with my exercise regime was that I didn’t make a lot of progress with my sit-ups. The orignal plan only had once a week 3 x 8 crunches. This was a bit low to make any decent progress. So I added crunches to another day as well. This helped but progress was still low. I used to do A LOT OF crunches when I was young and miss those days. Enter greasing the groove.

Greasing the groove

A co-worker mentioned greasing the groove as a way to make some serious progress in a specific exercise. It basically comes down to doing a lot of reps but spread out over the day and only at around 50% of your maximum. I like this approach, I have never been fan of the ‘No pain, no gain’ school of fitness. In general I like to avoid pain (self inflicted or not) as much as possible in my life.

Since I had slowly worked my way up to 3 x 20 reps of crunches twice a week I decided to start with 10 crunches 8 times a day, for 6 days a week. Sunday is rest day, except for a one time crunch session to determine my new max.

So I went from 3 times x 20 reps x 2 days a week = 120 crunches per week.

To 8 times x 10 reps x 6 days a week = 480 crunches per week.

Add in the Sunday where I determine my maximum reps I can do I did 500 sit ups in my first week of greasing the groove.

This week my regime is 8 times x 16 reps x 6 days a week = 768 crunches, add in the Sunday and I have reached 800 crunches this week.

My goal here? Well, remember how I used to do A LOT OF crunches when I was17 years old? A lot was 300 sit-ups, 5 days a week. I want to reach that goal once more! Actually, way back I did 3 x 100 crunches. I want to at least get back to 50 reps each and every hour. That would bring me to 2 400 crunches per week. This seems like a crazy amount of crunches but this is only trippling my current level and it would mean 2 minutes of exercise every hour. I can do 2 mins of exercise per hour!

Once I reach 1 500 crunches per week I will add a kettlebell exercise to my greasing the groove regime. And once my weight is back below 100 kg also push ups. Speaking of weight loss, enter cardio.

Cardio

Ok, so I have been doing fitness 4 times a week for the last 9 months.

The last three weeks I have started doing a lot of crunches.

How is my weight doing you might ask.

Holding steady at 120 kg …

So I went from a fat, out of shape sloth to a fat, kind of in shape sloth. But still fat. You know when I did lose some Kg’s? The 10 day holdiay in Protugal where we either biked or walked some distance every day (the girlfriend has this annoying habit of finding all these cool things to see on our holiday which usually involve walking). So yes, if I want to have any hope of actualy loosing weight I need to add in a cardio exercise.

I do not like walking (go ahead, ask me how much I enjoy our holidays …).

I do not like biking.

I do like swimming but Covid + our stupid politicians kinda sucked all the fun out of that one.

I also wanted something I could do in my house since our politicians seem to enjoy locking us up on random occasions.

Enter rowing! I remember liking it when I went to a gym back in my student years.

SO I bought a rowing machine. Financials details here.

It is slow going because cardio has been a while (March of 2020 actually) and rowing seems to use some muscles I haven’t used in a looong time. Next week will be my third week of rowing. I am at only 8 minutes for the moment. But the goal is to build this up to my level of swimming. 2 km of swimming took me about one hour. So I have a long way to go here.

Interim goal is reaching 15 minutes.

With so many things out off our control at the moment I do find it very soothing to know that all of this is in my complete control. All I need to do is go to our utility room and start exercising. Bad weather or a worldwide pandemic … nothing can interfere with me doing my exercises! Adding a rep, some weight, some extra crunches or extra time to my rowing, it can not be stopped!