The health report – July

I dropped to 115 kg but didn’t get around measuring so no new table this month. I also came to the conclusion I am going to go see either a dietician of a health coach? In part this is because I am not loosing weight the way I want to. But also because it starts to become harder to add to my exercise routines. I seem to be missing the necessary fuel for all the exercising I am doing at the moment.

The slow and steady progress is still there but is it becoming harder.

In the first draft of this post I actually wrote I was not happy with how my exercises went but after some reflection I have changed by mind about that. I actualy am very ok with my exercing of the last month. Full explication of why I changed my mind below.

Fitness

I didn’t miss any fitness days and once more added something somewhere each and every week.

The week of 18/07 saw me lifting a total of 20 136 kg. This is 2 600 kg more than a month ago. It might explain in part why adding weight or repetitions to an exercise is starting to become more difficult. After all, I am a doing quit a lot as it is.

Total numbers for about 13 months of fitness aren’t bad either:

Greasing the groove

I missed half a day of greasing the groove. It was a Saturday where I only did 4 reps and not the standard 8. It was also a where I did a lot of working in the garden and I just couldn’t find the energy to stop the garden work to come in and do my sit-ups and kettlebell swings and then gho back out again to continue. Especially because I was sweating like an otter.

I am also still waiting on my ordered 10 kg kettlebell so I decided to increasy my sit ups. Last week I did 32 reps for 6 days a week. That’s 1 536 sit-ups over a 1 week period. With all this progress you might be wondering why I would think last month was bad exercise wise. Well the main reason was my cardio.

Cardio

Rowing is still at 20 minutes and I actualy missed quit a few rowing days. I more or less skipped about half my rowing exercises!

The resaon for this is the work in the garden.

The weather in Belgium over the last two months made my grass grow really fast and really high. A heat wave and rain prevented me from cutting it when it was lower so now I had almost 2 meter high grass to handle. Cutting my grass in my garden has alwasy been done with a brush cutter. But believe me that 30 or 40 cm grass is a lot easier to cut then 2 m high grass. It normally takes me about 5 hours (spread out over serveral days) to do the entire garden. I have now spend over 10 hours and have still a spot to go (I also have aprety big garden). And it has been a lot more physically demanding work also. Where I normaly just let the cutting lying on the ground I now also need to clean up the cutting as it covers the entire ground preventing the new grass to grow. Adding extra work on top of the 10+ hours I have spend cutting the grass in the first place! The warm, very mosist weather hasn’t helped either. It has been a brutal couple of weeks. And the rain and sun are making the freshly cut grass grow so fast that by the time I will be finished with the last of the high grass, the spot I started will be ready to be cut again! And I beter do cut it right then, to avoid having to deal with too high grass once more …

So I was a bit miffed about missing all that rowing but writing it all down made me realise I actually increased my cardio work out! Just not on the rowing machine but by working the brush cutter for several hours a week.

Now I am actualy happy I skipped the rowing as it would have been to much stress on my body and probably would have leaded to injuries. And an injury would have stopped all exercises.

If I sum it all up: I did all my fitness and improved in weight or repetitions. I improved the sit up reps of my greasing the groove and in an entire month only missed 120 reps which is tiny compared to the total of sit ups I do in one week now. And yes, I missed around 7 rowing exercises. But each one of those was replaced by at least an hour of working with a brush cutter in my garden. Physically speaking, last month was probably the most physically demanding month since my university years! So hell yeah, I am actualy pretty happy with last month!!