D.Alan’s BodyBlog

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’…

The euphoria of the lower BF% pinch total was killed a bit tonight… damn pinches are up about 2 mm from last week!  Up, down, the battle continues.  The weight has been up a bit through the later part of the week and here I was hoping that there was some muscle mass adding on, but probably it’s the fat adding on.

It’s not a lot and I shouldn’t freak out over it, but it’s sure a let down after last week’s totals.  Just gotta watch the eating this week.  I think I know what happened this week, had a couple of extra cheat foods here & there over the course of the week and that is likely what made the difference.  I guess it also shows how close to the edge I am running on the diet between losing and gaining fat.  But, that kind of thing isn’t new to anyone likely to be reading this!

Had a really good bicep workout tonight; had the best pump I have had in a long time and they even looked the best so far afterward.  I should have tried to get some pix of them.  That helped make up for the disappointment in the BF% pinch news.

Gotta keep that BF% on the downward trend so 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’.

Dropped a bit in the BF% pinches this week, rah.  Pinches are down a total of almost 5 mm for the week (4.6 to be exact), which has me really psyched, esp. after last week’s monthly measurements coming up with no changes in the previous month.

I had thought that the pinches should be down this week as I hit my new all-time low weight of 166 late in the week for a couple of days, and my obs seem to becoming more visible all the time.  I still have a lot of ab flubber so no visible abs yet, but they’re coming.

Restocked on the whey protein this week and was able to get back to my favorite chocolate flavor, and one diet tweak this week was hitting the protein an extra time each day.  I just couldn’t face it with that awful chocolate caramel whey protein I was given by mistake and couldn’t return because I discovered it was wrong after I had opened it.  So, with an extra hit of the whey protein each day and I am looking at other diet tweaks, hopefully I can get a few muscle gains going in the next few weeks or so.

Oh yeah, and gotta keep liftin’, too.

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’.

Still plodding along.  BF% pinch totals continue to slide down ever so slowly.  On the digital calipers I am down just shy of 3 mm in the time that I have had that tool, which is about four weeks now.  Nothing else has been particularly remarkable, like my weight hovering around 168 +/-, hence my not posting last week.

The last week or so I have been trying to go more slowly in the lifts, particularly in the lowering part of the lift.  Everything you read about lifting suggests that better gains are to be had by lifting more slowly.  We’ll see how that goes.  I know after doing bis and back tonight being conscious of lowering more slowly I have the best pump/burn than I have had in a while.  I just need to keep doing it that way.

The positive comments continue to come in and they are most appreciated.  There are weeks like the last few that I feel that I am not making any headway but then someone will comment on a pic or give me a profile comment saying that I am doing great, keep it up, and it gives me the oomph to keep at it.  Thanks to everyone for their support!

I don’t want to let anyone down, least of all myself, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Monthly measurement night and am not overly thrilled with the results, I think.  Some things are down, and it’s probably due to fat loss, which is a good thing, but it’s not where I want to be losing size!  Around the middle is what I want to lose more from, and that remains unchanged from last month!

The measurement that has me really mad is my arms.  No change despite adding an extra bicep routine to the week for the last month.  But, since there was a loss on my calves and chest, maybe the fat loss and muscle gain on my arms negated each other.  Whatever, it’s a long road and not every month is going to be a winner with the tape measure.

I did BF% pinches with both measuring tools again and there was a 5-6mm difference between them again.  Looks like I have to go back to all my BF% pinches and add 6mm to the totals and recalculate the BF% numbers.  But, there was good news with the BF% pinch, I am down a mm on the new micrometer from last week, so the battle of millimeters continues its downward trend, and that’s a good thing.

I want to keep the BF% trending down and the muscle size trending up, so I’ll keep liftin’.

I bought a digital micrometer this week and used it tonight to check my BF%… I think now I know why my BF% readings seem to be low… they were!  The cheap plastic micrometer I was using until now was reading less than accurately, shall we say.

I measured with both tools tonight and there was a 6 mm difference in the total between them!!!  According to the pinch total from the digital one I am around 12%, which is probably closer to accurate than the 9.8% that the total from the other one is telling me.  Sheesh.  I am going to use both over the next couple of weeks to see what the difference is between them and then I will have to go back and look at all my BF% pinches and adjust them accordingly.  Disappointing in a way since the BF% is higher than what I was measuring, but somehow I knew it wasn’t right, and even commented on it often in the blog posts.

Had a number of positive comments from coworkers at work on Friday about my appearance.  Don’t know what inspired them to suddenly notice, but it was an ego booster, esp. since my weight has been creeping up since the holidays.  I want to say it’s muscle gain, but with the BF% pinch measurements all out of whack I can’t say it with any certainty.  The BF% pinches have been relatively steady with an ever-so-slow downward trend, so I am hoping the weight gain is muscle gain.  I haven’t been doing anything different with the diet than I have been doing all along.

I have added a second day of bicep work to the routine.  My arms just haven’t done much of anything except look a little more defined.  The size hasn’t really changed at all.  They initially went down from the fat loss and came back up to about where they were with the fat and haven’t changed much since.  There was a recent article on bb.com about adding another workout day for a particular body part if you aren’t getting the gains you want.  The multiple days seem to be working for my pecs.  I have been doing two days for them for quite a while and have added 1.5 inches to my chest since I started all this.  The first day I do flat bench presses and flyes, the next day I do incline and decline flyes and presses.  I figure since the dual day thing seems to be working for the chest, why not try the arms.

On Saturdays I do biceps and back and I have now added to the incline/decline chest day (usually Tuesday) a dumbbell curl "rack run," where you curl with the heaviest weight you can handle and work your way down to the lightest you have.  A profile commenter suggested that routine to me in the summer and I tried it a few times but didn’t add it to the routine until now.  I am anxious to see what the monthly measurements look like in a week since it will be about a month that I have been doing it.  I think my bis are looking better in the mirror, but as always, it could be wishful thinking.

I want it to be the real thing and not wishful thinking, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Back into the regular workout and eating routine now that the holidays and vacation and all that are behind me.  BF% pinch for the week was the same as last week, and the weight has been up a pound or two.  With the BF% pinch lower overall and weight up a bit I translate that as a little muscle gain, but I am not getting too excited … yet.

Noticed something last week that has been bugging me this week… my traps seem to be unequal.  When I try to flex them, the right one pops right up and looks awesome, the left side just lays there.  No matter what contortions I go through, I can’t get it to pop up like the right side.  I can’t figure out how I might have trained them unequally since I do everything in a balanced fashion whether it’s working the actual traps or doing lateral shoulder raises or whatever.  I can’t seem to move the left shoulder like my right one.  The right shoulder I partially dislocated/popped 20 years ago when I was playing hockey, I ended up down on the ice heading into the corner chasing after the puck and went shoulder first into the boards.  It was a minor dislocation as it popped right back in, though it hurt like hell, and I continued playing not only that game but the rest of the season.  As a result that shoulder has a bit more range of motion than the left, so I don’t know if this is affecting the traps thing.  Since noticing this I have tried to work the left trap a bit more, throwing in an extra set or so on a day that I wouldn’t normally work shoulders and traps.  Weird, and maddening, esp. if it is because I have been doing something wrong to cause this.  I’d appreciate any ideas someone may have about this.  It could be I just need to practice flexing it more, which I have been doing.

Another kind of awesome thing that I have recently been able to do that I could never even think about doing before is this leg lift.  I don’t know the correct name for it, but you sit on the floor with your legs straight out, put your hands on the floor on either side of you and lift your legs and butt off the floor in an "L" or pike position and only your hands are touching the floor.  There’s no way I could do this before lifting and working out.  I have been able to do this for a month or two now and try to do it for a few moments most evenings… trying to increase the time off the floor, but I am not sure I am improving on that yet.  On the good nights I can open and close my legs a few times with my butt off the floor.  When I was in middle school I had the ill-conceived notion that I wanted to be in gymnastics.  The PE teacher at the school had a gymnastics club of sorts and I participated as best a clumsy, tubby kid could.  This was the era of Nadia Komaneche and the ‘76 Olympics so the girls in particular were really interested in gymnastics.  There were even a number of boys in our group that took part, though except for myself they were all rather athletic; my one friend was really good.  My major accomplishment back then was that I could turn a decent cart wheel.  Big deal.  I watched with envy my friends getting better and better and some even doing back flips.  As it turns out, a gymnastics career would have been short-lived with me… you don’t see too many 6-ft tall gymnasts!  Anyway, I found it rather awesome that I could finally do this leg lift thing… if only 30-some years late!  Oh, and my friend from middle school who was a great gymnast at the time?  I saw him a year or two ago when his mom passed away and he now looks like a beach ball!  Somehow I don’t think he’s doing too many back flips these days.

Maybe there’s some other moves/positions I can work toward, and I don’t want to look like a beach ball, so I’ll keep liftin’.