Exercise for Nerds

I'm still alive! In fact, feeling more alive than ever.

The last couple months, I've been doing what I can to do cardio and strength exercises and made a concerted effort to look and feel better. I suppose I want to make posts detailing exactly what I'm doing, what's working, what's not working, and the results I've been getting.

I started all this when I was in California on around September 17. At that point I weighed a personal record 195 pounds and wasn't particularly happy with how I looked or my abilities when it came to exerting myself. I started spending a half hour every day on the elliptical machine at that point, and when I got home in early October I signed up for a gym.

Ever since, I've been alternating cardio and strength training at a few different gyms. I started in the Riverton Fitness Center, which was delightfully only a mile away from my house. Unfortunately, this didn't allow flexibility for when I had to travel for work, so I suspended my subscription there and signed up for LA Fitness. This allowed me to visit locations in or near Corona, CA and Laurel, MD where I generally travel, as well as a location near me in Mount Laurel, NJ. Unfortunately, there's not one particularly close to my parents' home, but I'll deal with that later this month.

On cardio days, I usually do walking/running intervals for an hour on a treadmill. I started slow, likely doing 2-3 minutes of running with walking in between. I resurrected my Couch-to-5K app to pace myself, and after several weeks I ran my first non-stop 5K on Thanksgiving. It felt great, and I've been able to do it twice since then, now beginning to work on speed. I'm not particularly fast yet, as my personal best time is 30:14, but I anticipate that once I get more and more used to running that distance I can steadily improve speed. The best part of this routine is that it burns between 600 and 700 calories, which I'll elaborate on a bit later.

On strength days, I have an A and a B day. A day is squat, bench, and row. B day is lat pulldown, overhead press, and deadlift. I used to do squats on both days, but was cautioned against it by a couple friends, unless I wanted giant legs and tiny stick arms. My current 5x5 abilities aren't stellar, but I've hit some walls and busted through them, which is amazingly satisfying:

Squat - 160 lbs
Bench - 105 lbs
Row - 100 lbs
Overhead Press - 80 lbs
Deadlift - 155 lbs

Finally, I've been doing my best to get my caloric intake and macronutrients under control. In particular, I've been logging with MyFitnessPal, allowing me to convenient record what I eat and get a lot of useful statistics out the other end. I've limited myself to about 1500 calories daily, allowing me to lose on average 1.5 lbs per week. I was able to push that up to 2 lbs per week when I weighed more, but now that I weigh appreciably less than I used to, I've slowed down in my losses.

I've basically stopped wearing any clothing that I owned prior to September, also. I'm changing a lot in the meantime, so I haven't bought a ton of clothes as yet, but I'm building up a nice wardrobe and being smart about my purchases for the first time. It feels great and I feel like I look so much better in both my weight and my dress. It's a good feeling.