End of Week 24
I got caught up on the workout routines through the week after getting off track a bit with my vacation last weekend. Also bought a pair of dumbbells in a weight that I didn’t have so now I can up the ante a bit on some of the exercises. Did that tonight with the biceps exercises and think I had best bicep pump to date.
Weight has held steady. Nudged down just a bit to 174, but at least it’s not rocketing upward. Had a picture commenter say this week that my progress is not enough for the five months I have been at this. I am going at this at my pace, and am very pleased with my results so far, thanks. Yeah, if I were more anal about the diet and actually did some cardio I could probably drop the weight a bit faster, but geez, at over 40 I’ll be left looking like a sharpei wrinkle dog if I lose the weight too fast. Already I can see some of that over my abs; there’s a hint of it over my navel in my current avi pic. I’m trying to replace the fat with muscle… Oh well, there’s always a detractor in the crowd. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t joined a gym… there’s always going to be someone who thinks they know more/better etc. than you. Sometimes they do, but it seems like more often they don’t. I have seen comments about that in a number of other blogs.
I’m getting confused/frustrated on the body fat measuring. I have been doing the five pinch kind (triceps, chest, abdomen, oblique and thigh) and using a chart I found on another web site. I thought I was getting results that made sense. They say the love handles disappear around 15% and my love handles are significantly reduced and I have been getting results around 15%. Then I got looking around on bb.com and came across this one page: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drobson98.htm and got really confused. They have an online calculator where you punch in your weight, age and three pinches and it computes your BF %. OK. I did that and it came out to 9.8% You gotta be kidding me. I know I am no where near 10%, much less below it! Then there’s the videos on that same page that show you how to do the pinches. Yeah right. Everything says the abdomen pinch should be a vertical pinch one inch from your navel. Uh huh. The video shows the guy taking a horizontal pinch almost on the the guy’s oblique, both on the fit bodybuilder and the chunky average guy. Must be their inch is bigger than mine, or something.
I also have the tables for the military "quick" method, where you subtract your neck measurement from your waist measurement and look it up on the table based on your height. When I first started all this both the five-pinch method and the military one agreed, I was at around 23%. Now, it’s a completely different story. The pinches are telling me around 15%, the military tables are saying 19-point-something%. That doesn’t seem right since, as I mentioned, the love handles are almost gone, so that would indicate something well below 19%. Then there’s that stupid web page I cited telling me I’m at 9.8%. For now I am sticking with my pinches. It’s only a number anyway. If nothing else, the changes in the measurements tell me my progress.
Keep liftin’.
