So I woke up just before 6am this morning as I am on holiday today and tomorrow so I decided to wake up when I woke up! I then got up and did my weigh in and I was back down to 106.5kgs this morning so I lost 0.4kgs yesterday 🙂 I have decided that as my weight fluctuations have shown weighing myself every day is a waste of time and effort!I have decided that from now on I will do my weigh-in’s on a Saturday from now on and stop the daily weigh-ins and see how that goes! I have also decided to do 20 press-ups, squats and calf raises every morning in the time that I would have normally be doing my weigh-in as its a more positive habit anyway 🙂 I have also decided that reading kindle books is not for me so I have bought Atomic Habits in paperback and a book on learning git as well so I can read them at night instead of watching TV as much to see how that goes. I also have the Ansible for DevOps book that I bought a couple months ago and never started to read as well so I have enough books for a few weeks at least!
I then went back to bed and doom scrolled on my phone until just after 8am when I got bored and got up and made my bed. I have decided that from now on to stop me wasting time on my phone I will go back to leaving the phone in the lounge and using my alarm clock again! That way I will not get sucked into using the phone first thing in the morning. I have also decided that I will change up my morning routine a bit and after reading some more of Atomic habits I will assign times to my actions to make them set in stone so my week day routine will now look like this:
5:00 – Wakeup
5:05 – Make Bed (Stops me going back to bed)
5:05-5:10 – Press ups, squats and calf raises (New add to replace weigh-ins)
5:10-5:30 – Toilet, shower and get ready for day
5:30-6:30 – Walking (May add weight vest from next week)
6:30 – 12:00 – Work
12:00 – 14:00 – Ride MTB or BMX Track
14:00 – 16:00 – Walk on tread mill and work
16:00 – 16:30 – Make food
16:30 – 17:00 – Cleaning half hour
17:00 – 18:30 – Play and blog
18:30 – 19:00 – Manual half hour
19:00 – 20:00 – Play and blog
20:00-21:00 – Reading
21:00-5:00 – Sleeping.
I have decided that I will try and cut out TV from my life this month as I keep getting dragged into wasting time on it instead of doing my study and blogging so I figure I I try and not watch TV at all it will be easier than cutting down as that never works!
My idea is that after work at 16:00, I power off the computer entirely and cook food and eat until 16:30 when I do my cleaning 30 minutes (which has been a game changer already 🙂 I never knew that spending just 30 minutes a day on something I would make such a huge impact on your life)
I have been thinking about why I have not been doing my study and blog time and I think that it is because I am calling it study and blog time which sounds boring and exhausting so its easy to talk myself out of it! Because of this I have “re-branded” and renamed it play and blog time as I essentially play with automation and blog about it so its a better name and sounds more fun too 🙂
At 18:30 I again get off of the computer and go out on my bike for 30 minutes to practice manuals outside then at 19:00 its back inside to do another hour of play and blog time then from 20:00 to 21:00 its time to relax and read before going to sleep at 21:00 (An hour earlier than I usually do). I have decided on trying to sleep an hour earlier as I think with all the extra exercise I will be doing I should get more sleep to fully recover for the next day!
I am thinking that I stick to this routine from Tuesday to Saturday then I have Sunday and Monday as rest days to be less structured and bum about like normal! That way I get the best of both worlds.
When I was doom scrolling after my weigh-in I was looking at rucking or basically walking with a weight vest and I think that instead of adding more steps to my daily routing I will instead start wearing the weight vest while walking in the morning to make my walks burn more calories as well as build more muscle while walking! I figure that by doing this I can get more of a work out from the exercise that I am already doing so it makes sense really and means that I don’t spend any more time walking than I already do to get more out of the walking! I am not sure how my knees and ankles will cope with adding 10kgs as it will basically be the same as walking when I was at my heaviest and literally everything hurt then! I guess I am way fitter now so it may not be as detrimental as being that heavy AND unfit so we will see I guess! I have to walk to the track on Saturday morning so I will try wearing the weight vest and see how it goes 🙂
As I can not ride properly at the moment with my wrist I will spend my lunch breaks riding on the MTB to get out of the house and also build a base fitness level so that once my wrist and ankle are better I can swap some lunch breaks to track sessions where I work on jumping and manuals as I am not racing much this season I can hold off on starting sprints for a few months to work on skills instead and hopefully break the cycle of getting faster, crashing and having to start over! I have decided that riding to bitten and back on the Bath to Bristol bike path is plenty of riding for me at the moment then when/ if they re-open the tunnel on the 2 tunnels I can start doing bath to Wellow and back every day instead as its much less boring a ride than the Bath to Bitten ride is! There are also more hills on the ride to Wellow and I can get 2 big hills in at Wellow before heading back to start working on my hill climbing again! As I am off Tuesday afternoons I can do a longer ride then to Bristol and do another longer ride on Sunday morning then I should get fit pretty quickly! And drop weight pretty fast too!
I am unsure about being able to practice manuals until I try it so I will see next week when I start them! I am also not 100% sure how I will go with the pressups and squats as my wrist and ankle are still pretty sore but I will see how it goes!
With walking and riding the bike each day I am confident that I will start dropping weight again as long as I don’t over-eat due to the hunger after riding the bike but I am going to shop for healthier food so that I can’t snack on chocolate, sweets and drink fizzy drinks as I am getting back into them again at the moment 🙁
I have noticed that since I have been drinking the fizzy drinks again this week (Started again on Monday!) My asthma is back as is my acid reflux at night so I guess that is a definitive reason to stop drinking the crap in the first place! I am going to stop again from tomorrow so that by Monday I will be back to not wanting to drink them again and will be over the worst of the come-down! Today I am going to get a couple of Soda-Stream gas refils so that I can get back in the habit of drinking fizzy water not fizzy drinks again!
This morning I also ordered a new larger saddle back to old a spare tube, tyre levers and multitool as well as a new mini pump to attach to my water bottle cage and some extra long water bottle cage bolts to allow me to attach the pump holder below the water bottle gage as the standard bolts are too short! Either tomorrow or over the weekend I will ride to my parents and borrow their car to take my Sunday Cruiser to their house and swap it for the road bike as I want to try and ride that more now too as it is much nicer to ride for long distances than the mtb but I am not sire if my wrist will be able to cope with riding it. At least if its in my Garage not theirs I can swap and change depending how the wrist feels. I also need to get it to fir a new tube to the front wheel and then also at some point get it serviced and have a front derailleur fitted as it currently doesn’t have one at the moment so its a nightmare when you hit hills!
This morning I have also caught up with my training log and I have changed it as I have simplified my training for now so tracking all the different training is not needed. I also added a weight column to my training tab so that I can see my steps, weight and training on the same tab now:
As you can see it is only between 29/01/2024 and this Tuesday that I have been lighter than I was on the 1st of Jan this year and my lowest weight all year so far was on 02/02/2024 when I was 105.8kgs.
My goal until the end of this month is to work out consistently so that I can try and drop below that 105.8kgs and remain below it and hopefully drop into the 104kgs or lower by the end of the month!
At the present time I still have 21.5kgs to go until I reach my 85kg goal weight so a long way to go but now that I am starting to train more consistently I am hoping that I can kick start some weight loss soon! If I can start dropping 0.5 kgs a week (healthy weight loss amount) I can get to my goal weight by the 12th December 2024 so I would be on track to reach my goal weight before the end of the year which would be amazing!
As I said before I have decided to take this year as a recovery/ rebuilding year so I will now not race other than a couple of local races so my training is going to focus primarily on building a good base fitness so predominantly walking with weight vest int the morning and riding mtb/ road bike at lunch time and at weekends and doing 20 pressups, squats, calf raises and building up pull ups to max every morning until my ankle and wrist are healed enough to start doing weight training 3 x a week from then.
I am thinking that I will not add any BMX specific training until the clocks go forwards and its light after work then I will change up my training so that I ride the track from 16:00-17:30 when the coaching sessions start again and I will do gates on Wednesday nights too. These evening track sessions will be just working on jumping and manuals for now so that I can build up to doing full laps jumping and manuals everything without getting tired! My focus will be to get outside of my comfort zone and push my jumping and manuals to new limits and will be on the jump bike to protect my wrist!
Around June time I will swap out 2 of the lunch time road rides for sprint and track sessions to start getting ready for the next season and get faster out of the gate. These will be Tuesdays as its my afternoon off, Thursday lunchtime and probably Saturday as well to fit the sessions in so In June going forwards I will be walking AM, Road rides or sprints at lunch time and then track sessions or gates in the evening before coming home and doing my normal activities!
I think that by June, the walking first thing and the lunch time rides will be habits by then as will the evening track sessions so that adding 3 sprints sessions to the mix will not be an issue at all as my body will be accustomed to the training load and a lot of times sprints are actually easier on the normal riding sessions as they are quality over quantity so we should be good!
I am also hoping that my other activities will also be habits by then so I will just get on and do them during the week and that not being so structured at the weekends will mean that I can avoid burn out altogether!
I also hope that by consistently blogging on a weekly basis over the next 4-5 months will mean that my blog will be starting to make a bit of money from it so that I can get a bit of extra money each month to start paying off my debts as well! At present just adding a couple of posts a month has meant that I have started to make a few £s a month from add revenue already so with 5 months consistent blogging and all the extra pages available it should realistically be able to make above the £60 minimum to withdraw each month if not more which would be nice 🙂 I read online somewhere the the more quality pages you have online the easier it is to consistently make money and one article said that to make £100 a month from adds you need about 400 quality pages on the blog! I currently have just over 100 pages so doing 2 blog posts a day for the next 5 months would mean that I will be on 400 blog posts so I am making that my goal with the 2.5 hours of play and blog sessions in the evenings during the week and then at weekends I have an extra 8 or so hours a day so I should realistically be able to get 3 posts a day in to make up for Mondays when I can’t do much as I am on call until 22:30!
For this month I will not do the manual training as I have just tried a manual and it hurt my wrist so I will use that 30 minutes to organise my ideas and plan my play/blog sessions so that I know in advance what I am doing so I don’t waste time deciding what to do during the session!
I got out for my ride at 11:30 so an hour and a half later than planned but at least I got out! The weather was surprisingly sunny so glad I got out and there was very little wind either so it was a pleasant ride! I was 1.5mph average speed faster today than the last time I did this ride which was a lot to do with the wind I think!
I did stop Strava before I got home so from now on I will start and stop Strava at the start and finish of the Bath to Bristol cycle path from now on so that I can compare the rides to each other and use the ride there and back as my warm up and cool down as its it is impossible to maintain speed on those parts of the ride as its dependent on traffic, traffic lights and how many people are on the river path and also which way I go so standardising on just the cyclepath bit makes more sense.
It will also make it easier to compare times between bikes too which will be good! It will be interesting to see if the road bike is faster and by how much! I seem to remember that I used to average 16+ mph on the road bike before so I expect it to be way faster! Alos the readr disk brake on the mtb os warped so its basically on most of the time so its harder to ride than the road bike! Plus the riding position is more upright as well especially with the 29″ wheels and the road bike is designed to be faster 🙂
So I have been testing the weight vest around the house and the 10kg vest seems fine so I will try walking with it tomorrow morning early. The weight is fine as I used to wear it playing basketball when I weighted about 70kgs so I know its not super heavy now that I am 106kgs 🙂 Only 9.43 % of my body weight now when it was 14.28% when I was 70% and I was running and jumping for an hour or so! I was a lot fitter but I think it will be OK! I guess that we will see how it goes in the morning! The only thing that I haven’t checked yet is if my coat will fit over the weight vest or not!
**** I’ve just checked and the coat fits fine so all good 🙂 ******
Looking online I can see walking on the flat with my weight vest at my current weight will burn 709 calories per hour which is about 200 calories an hour more than walking without the weight so it will make my morning walk way more productive for the same amount of time! I will start with flat walks then after a month or so I will add in hills and see how that affects my weight loss!