D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Don’t know what I did, but something has my right shoulder hurting with flat or decline flyes and bench presses, so much that I can’t lift much weight,   It started last week, but was just sore for a day or two afterward and seemed to be better, but this week when I tried the flat bench and flyes it really started hurting.  I am not too happy, of course.  I can do incline flyes and presses OK, so it must be just one specific muscle or something.

Things seem to be OK in the BF% area.  Pinch measurement over the weekend was down from the week before, and I have been noticing some "veinage" lately here & there which would indicate the BF is down some more.  My forearms are showing some more veins than usual, and I noticed the other night that I had just a little showing in my calves.  That really psyched me.  Of course I still have the rubber around the middle so there is still a ways to go yet, but every little step over time means a big step closer to the goal.  Though, I got looking at my records and see that my BF% pinch total is down only 5 mm from last year at this time.  I thought I had made better progress than that.

Summer seems to have finally found my part of the world and it’s good to get outside in the sleeveless shirts and get some sun on the arms.  Cottage season is coming very quickly so I am very much looking forward to more sun and some swimming.

But until then I need to keep liftin’.

BF% pinch total is down about a half mm this week.  The slow-but-sure progress continues.  The BF pinch total is down between 4-5 mm since the beginning of the year, and down 50 mm — yes, that’s correct, 50 big ones — since I started lifting seriously in October ‘07.  Couldn’t believe that number just now when I looked it up!  Talk about small bits of progress adding up to a big change.  There’s weeks when there is very little change in the pinch total, or worse yet it goes up a bit from the previous week and it can be discouraging.  Gotta keep the big picture in sight.

And here I was mad that I have been somewhat bloated the last few days.  The weight got down to 166.5 on Thursday and we went out to eat Thursday evening and I admit to having french fries and other stuff not good for you and Friday morning the weight was 170!!  Had to have been mostly retained water because of the salt in the stuff I ate.  Arrgh.  Oh, well, in the next day or so I’ll suddenly be peeing like crazy and all that water will leave and I’ll be back to the current normal.

However, I want to keep at that lowering BF pinch total, so I’ll keep liftin’.

OK, so what happened to bb.com yesterday?  I couldn’t get onto the site all day, and even "ping" attempts came back with nothing.  Checked the "news" page today and of course nothing is mentioned… just like the picture counters that apparently are broken for any newly posted pix.

Had a wild week at work which previous to my lifting and diet minding would have meant a lot of extra eating, but I managed to avoid that.  The lifting also helps to keep the frustration in check, too.  I did have a "screaming hissy fit" one morning about yet another snafu that developed, but that’s the only one I have had in a year or more.  Without the lifting it might be a daily occurrence.

There was a big event at work Friday night and I saw some folks that I hadn’t seen in a while and there were a lot of compliments in my direction about my appearance.  "You’ve lost weight!"  "Wow, you look great!" "What’s your secret?"  When I replied that my "secret" is to eat right and exercise, I got a groan in return, "Oh, I don’t know about the exercise part, that’s what I have trouble with."  Everyone seems to want a quick fix to weight loss and fitness, no one wants to put out the effort to actually do what you have to do.  It was an ego booster anyway to get the compliments.

BF pinches this week were undetermined, I guess you could say.  The cheap plastic calipers have me down a bit from last week, the digital one has me up a bit.  I guess we split the difference and say there was "no change.  The tape measure didn’t say it a couple of weeks ago, but I think the shape of my arms is improving… at least that is what I think I am seeing in the mirror!  The pecs seem to be doing well with the routine I am doing, I am trying to hit the bis and delts a little differently, so we’ll see how that goes in the next few weeks.

Work is still screwed up and I have to keep an even head with the stuff that comes up, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Continuing with the routine here.  BF pinch total is up a mm from last week, but that is possibly because I hit the chocolate a little too hard this week,   Work has been crazy the last two weeks and while I have been very good in not attacking the chocolate like I used to in similar circumstances, I did hit it some.

Took my monthly progress pix tonight, a week late since I should have done it last week, and did some comparing with some of my earliest pix.  I made up a comparison shot between 2006 and tonight and it is quite striking, I think.  I was a little down the last day or so as I was "feeling fat" and then the BF pinch was up a bit sort of confirming the "feeling fat" and then I looked at these pix!  Not feeling fat any more!  Keep taking those pix for checking your progress, they’re the biggest ego booster out there!

Had what I thought was my best arm pump ever tonight.  After I was done I was thinking that the guns were the biggest/best looking they had ever been, so I tried to get a pic right away.  And, as always, it doesn’t lookanything in the photo like I think it does… I hate when that happens.

I want to look good all the time, not just with a good pump, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Continuing with the routine here.  BF pinch total is up a mm from last week, but that is possibly because I hit the chocolate a little too hard this week,   Work has been crazy the last two weeks and while I have been very good in not attacking the chocolate like I used to in similar circumstances, I did hit it some.

Took my monthly progress pix tonight, a week late since I should have done it last week, and did some comparing with some of my earliest pix.  I made up a comparison shot between 2006 and tonight and it is quite striking, I think.  I was a little down the last day or so as I was "feeling fat" and then the BF pinch was up a bit sort of confirming the "feeling fat" and then I looked at these pix!  Not feeling fat any more!  Keep taking those pix for checking your progress, they’re the biggest ego booster out there!

Had what I thought was my best arm pump ever tonight.  After I was done I was thinking that the guns were the biggest/best looking they had ever been, so I tried to get a pic right away.  And, as always, it doesn’t lookanything in the photo like I think it does… I hate when that happens.

I want to look good all the time, not just with a good pump, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Last night was my monthly measurement night and for about the third or fourth straight month in a row, there are no significant changes.  My chest is down a quarter inch this time, but everything else is the same as last month.  I am not surprised at the chest measurement as there is still fat there and on my midsection to lose, and the BF% pinches keep coming down, albeit very slowly.  The BF pinch total is down another mm or so over last week.  Again, slowly but surely.  My pinch total for some time now has been less than my stomach pinch alone was the first time I did a BF pinch.

So, I guess I am officially on a plateau.  I have made steady progress for most of the time I have been at this, starting in late October 2007, until the last few months.  Time to change things up, I suppose, but it’s tough to come up with other things to do when one has only a set of dumbbells.  I can’t do anything involving cables or barbells since I don’t have any of that stuff.  I have slowly upped the weight on some of things that I do, but I try to do it when I can handle the weight w/o sacrificing form, so weight-upping has come very slowly.  Any of you CPTs out there looking for a challenge, PM me and I’ll let you know what I have been doing and maybe you can come up with a new routine that’ll get me making some progress again.

It’s not to say that I haven’t improved in the time I have been at this.  One of the things I have upped the reps on is close-hand pushups for hitting the tris.  When I first started into this seriously it was all I could do to get three sets of 10 reps in, and I even found I note in my exercise log from those early days that "close hand pushups are HARD!"  I can now do three sets of 20 of those, and can probably bump those up a couple more reps each again.  At first it was all I could do to lift 20 lb DBs for alternating bicep curls, now on a good night I can do 10 reps of 25 lbs on the last set!  I’ve previously mentioned being now able to do a sitting leg lift thing where when sitting on the floor you put your hands on either side of you and lift your butt and legs off the floor in a pike or "L" position… I never could have even thought of doing that before I started lifting seriously.  It’s not like all my hard work hasn’t resulted in any improvements.

We’ve been having some summer-like weather here the last few days and I have been outside in the sleeveless shirts… not quite ready to shed the shirt entirely yet!  Still not ripped enough, and probably won’t be this summer as I had hoped all through the winter.  Also my arms don’t look all that great out in the bright sun, despite all my work.  That was a little depressing.  But it’s great to have the good weather around and get outside and do some yard work or whatever.  It also means it’s bicycle season again so I can get some add’l exercise riding the bike on errands and such.

However, I still need to drop some BF and build some muscle so I need to keep liftin’.

Wow, a couple of weeks that I haven’t posted a blog.  It’s been pretty busy around here, not the least of which was getting ready to go away for a few days over the Easter weekend.

I went and visited friends from college, with whom I spend every Easter.  They are very good friends and when their kids were little they thought the Easter Bunny wouldn’t come to their house if "Uncle DA" wasn’t there.  Great friends, lousy eaters.

I blogged about my visit last year with these folks and nothing has changed.  The wife and hubby are endomorphs with atrocious eating habits.  Wife is terribly opinionated in that everything she does is the "right" way whether it’s child rearing, household management or nutrition and meal planning; no discussion, she’s always right.  An example meal from this weekend?  Hamburgers and popcorn.  Another example meal?  Try no meal because wifey was "still full from the big lunch we had," so therefore no one else was expected to want food.  And there I was, being very used to eating every three hours, having a dinner meal that includes not only some protein but some veggies as well (I guess popcorn is a vegetable, right?).  And forget any working out, just wasn’t gonna happen.

Surprisingly enough, I came through the four-day stint up only about a pound.  I was at 166 Thursday morning before I left and was at 167 this afternoon.  Not bad for living on hamburgers and popcorn and bowls of ice cream, and meal times that were sometimes up to six hours apart.  Sheesh.

And speaking of the weight, I need to do some investigating with some scales.  I have been weighing myself all along with a scale I bought back when I started into the lifting and diet minding, dutifully recording and agonizing over my weight for the last 78 weeks.  The other day I was doing some cleaning in the house and was in my dad’s bathroom and spotted his scale in there, having to move it as I was vacuuming, and for grins I got on his scale.  It read significantly higher than mine!  It was zeroed properly.  What the…?  I took it upstairs and put it next to mine and I tried them both dressed in only my skivvies, which is the way I weigh myself.  His scale was reading ten pounds more than mine.  I pulled out some of my dumbbells and tried them on each scale and they read the same.  Even stranger.  I am wondering if one or both of the scales is non-linear and reads incorrectly with more weight applied.  Now I need to find a third scale for the deciding factor.  Geez.  That will be a major pain if my scale is the one that is wrong, that will mean ALL of my weight data since I started into this is likely no good.

But, no sense in losing sleep over it.  I have gone through something similar with the body fat pinch calipers.  Bottom line: I have lost weight and dropped body fat.  I just don’t have exact numbers on either!!  Oh, and the body fat pinch I took tonight is down yet another 1.5 mm from the previous pinch 10 days ago, so the downward march continues.

Now that I am back home, I am glad to be able to keep liftin’.

Random musings this week.   

It is monthly measurement night and it’s been another month of no changes… arrgh.  Everything is the same as it was last month.  This after upping the protein intake, and concentrating on form with the various arm routines, adding a rep on each pullup set, and on it goes.  At least the BF% pinch total was down a bit over last week’s total.  I think last week I had some water bloat going on, for whatever reason.

Twisted my ankle this afternoon.  I was doing some work behind my garage and the ground is so soft right now that the ladder sank into the mud unevenly and threw me off it and I landed on my left foot rather hard and rolled my ankle.  It hurt.  It doesn’t appear to be broken, it’s just sprained/strained.  I am OK walking on the level, but stairs are interesting at the moment.  There’s a little bit of swelling.  Such fun… not.  Glad I do legs on Thursdays, I might be able to do them again this coming Thursday.

Before I twisted my ankle I headed over to the local Penney’s store as they are having a sale and I wanted to pick up a couple of shirts for work.  Only problem is they don’t carry the athletic cut shirts in the store for the line of shirts I like.  "Oh yeah," saith the clerk, "you have to order those online."  It’s interesting that they have the fat guy clothes on the shelves, but not the ones for the fit guy.  Oh yes, the shirts online aren’t on sale, they’re $3 more than the ones in the store.  "Plus shipping and handling."  Way to cater to a society that everyone says is too fat and should be fitter, guys.  I get to pay a penalty for getting in shape by having to order my clothes online from an operation that has a local store but chooses not to carry athletic cut versions of its dress shirts locally.

As always, I read various blog entries of other BodySpacers this week.  I feel so insignificant and whiny compared to some others.  Some are insightful and reflective like Ryan__K, and then there’s the outright hilarity of family life documented by tclary.  Me, I grumble and whine about my fitness progress.  I suppose it’s because this is the only place I have to talk about it.  My parents, who are 70+, live with me and look upon working out and fitness as a lot of rubbish.  My mom is convinced I am dying of some dread disease because of my weight loss, depite my telling her I have been working out.  My dad makes fun of every fitness machine ad that turns up on the TV.  So I obviously don’t talk about my fitness progress with them.

My coworkers for the most part are supportive of me when they notice I am down in the weight, and I even had a custodian at work this week ask me, "Hey, have you been working out?"  But no one is into fitness themselves, other than trying the latest fad diet, eating wrong, etc. and wondering why they aren’t losing any weight, so I don’t engage them in conversation about it.  None of my friends are into fitness seriously.  I hang out with techno-geeks and they for the most part live up to the stereotype of that group being greatly out of shape, shall we say kindly.

So, I am on this island alone, except for the BodySpace folks who take the time to rate a photo or drop a profile comment, and maybe even read one of these blog entries… though I wouldn’t know that since the visitor counter to the blogs has been broken since last August!  This is my vehicle to celebrate the little bits of progress or complain about the setbacks.  Sorry that I don’t make you laugh or think like some of the other bloggers, but thanks for listening.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep liftin’…

Down some more in the BF% pinches!  It’s not much each week, but over time the little changes add up to a big change.  According to my calipers since the middle of January, I am down 4 mm according to cheap plastic one, and by the digital caliper I am down 6 mm in the same time frame.  For a while now my pinch total is less than my stomach alone was when I first did a BF% pinch over a year ago.  That’s rather cool.  As to what my actual BF% is, it’s open to interpretation.  The chart I have says it is now 8.8% according to the total from the plastic caliper… no way I am at 8.8%… and 9.8% according to the total from the digital caliper.  Um, I don’t think so.  Something around 11%-13% is probably more like it.  I put myself at 11.5%, just for the sake of discussion!

I was moving data around the other day, transferring stuff from some Zip disks to an external hard drive and came across a number of digital pix from several years ago.  One that caught my attention was one of myself taken at work in June of 2001… yikes, what a chunker!!  I was thinking that around that time I had been a little more svelte, but apparently not!  Nothing like some photos to encourage some progress.

I’d rather not look like that 2001 photo again, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Another month of no changes in the measurements.  Did the monthly measurements tonight and there is nothing changed from last month!  Weekly BF% pinch is nearly identical to last week.  Sigh.

I am sure my diet is a lot to blame.  I know I am not eating optimally for gaining muscle mass.  I need to work on that.  What also hasn’t helped is that my whey protein ran out earlier in the week and I haven’t had a chance to stop and get more yet.  Hopefully Monday. 

In an interesting turn of events this week, I had a round of email with BBer Dan Decker… but not about BBing.  Turns out he is into collecting items that I also collect and saw my web site on those items and emailed me for some advice.  I had no idea who he was at that point, but his email address intrigued me (it implies BBing) so I searched on it and found who it belonged to.  I played it cool, though, and we just discussed the item he was asking about.  I was thinking I would say something about the BBing, but I am such a soft tubby twerp in comparison that he didn’t need to have me bringing up the BB stuff.

Homework for this week is to study the diet and see what I can tweak to bring about some gains… and keep liftin’.