D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Well, I seem to have aggravated my tennis elbow.  Did biceps and back last night and this morning my right elbow is really sore… great.  Had this once last spring and it got better after a time and now flared up again.  It was a bit sore last week, but wasn’t too bad, and I had three days off on the lifting to rest it, but I guess it wasn’t enough or something.  So, now it’s back to working carefully around it.  Any hints/suggestions for working through this?  I don’t want to sit out the next six weeks waiting for this to heal again.  Guess I was hitting it a bit too hard.  Sigh.

Well, I managed to avoid pigging out on Thanksgiving dinner yesterday!  Weight today was up only a pound from my workout Wednesday evening, so I am quite pleased with that!

Picked up some whey protein today and started taking that; I discovered recently that there’s a GNC store not far from my house, how convenient!  I got looking at my half-arsed diet and see that I am not getting the protein that I should be for trying to lift and gain and from what I read about whey protein, this is almost a must-take.  We’ll see how this month goes with the gains and progress.  If nothing else it tastes pretty good and gives me a chocolate "fix"…

Measurement night: it’s been just about a month since I opened the bb.com account and posted my current stats, so it was time for an updated after a month of "real" lifting… such that it is that I do.  Hard to hit it really hard when your heaviest weight is a pair of 30-lb dumbbells! 

Overall I guess I am doing OK, I was just disappointed to see the drop in bicep size.  Guess it was due to fat that I lost rather than muscle since I think my arms look a bit more defined, but am having trouble getting the camera to see it!  The most encouraging stat was a 2% drop in body fat!  I took updated pix, I’ll post those in the next few days.

Mixed emotions this week, got on the scale earlier in the week and was down to 184 and I am thinking wow, great, etc.  Got on the scale yesterday and it was back to 190… huh?  Oh well.  Probably a number of things, most likely was because I had a huge burger (and fries, I was really bad) at Denny’s the night before… yeah, shouldn’t have done it, but I did it… and it was so good…  I think the salt in all that had me retaining some water, too.  Sigh.

Still sticking with the work-out routine and otherwise behaving myself with the food.  It’s hard to go full bore all-healthy because my 73-yr-old dad lives with me and does all the cooking, and he thinks Hambuger Helper three times a week is perfectly fine… and one doesn’t dare try to suggest anything different lest WW3 erupt.  So I try to make it up with healthy b-fast and lunch choices and mid-meal healthy snacks.

The diet minding and working out is working, though.  My pants are suddenly loose and I was wearing a vest today that fit just fine with room to spare, unlike a year ago when I last wore it and it was (too) snug.  Can’t wait to take measurements this week!

I think all this stuff is working… stepped on the scale today and I am down four lbs from when I started all this.  No, not a huge loss but it’s a loss since I am not going completely crazy with the food stuff, just eating more sensibly (and more often) and avoiding all the junk food.  Not that I had a lot of that to begin with, but there was never a cookie I didn’t like…  Oh yes, and I am working out, too!

It’s too tempting to overdo the lifting, that’s for sure.  Taking a day here and there to rest is definitely needed, but I also hate to do it, I feel like I have all this lost time to make up.  But, I am being good and taking today off.   I am also resisting the temptation to take masurements.  I told myself that I am waiting until the 21st, when it will be one month since I posted my stats and started a "real" workout plan.  I did update my weight today, though.  I am interested to see how my bf% will change in a month, if at all.  I took it on the 29th and it came out to 23%, ugh.  Came up with that both by pinching and the military quickie method of the difference between your neck and waist measurements and consulting a chart, so I guess it’s 23%.  Or at least it was on the 29th.  Gotta keep pumping and eating right…

Well, it’s been two weeks since I signed onto BB.com and a little over a week since I started with a "real" workout plan.  Since my home gym — if you can call it that — is just a small collection of dumb bells I am following the dumb bell workout in http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/wotw3.htm  — sort of.  I am not following the days strictly, just the order of the splits, skipping a day if my schedule won’t fit in a workout, which happens one or two days a week, and picking up with whatever the next split is.

I guess I am not as in shape as I thought, I was after three years or so of piddling around with the DBs on my own…  The legs and abs routines are killers for me, probably because I never did much with them before.  But I am sticking with it.  Only problem is my right hip flexor gets a bit snarly and did again tonight so I could do only two of the lower abs sets (reverse crunches, flutters and scissors, etc.).  Gotta take it slow and easy with that, I guess.  Need to warm up better, too.

I feel like I am making progress, though it’s too early to see or measure anything…  We’ll see when I take more pix on the 25th, which will be the one month point from starting.