I am feeling much better today and I think I am finally over whatever I have been suffering with for the past couple of weeks.
I have decided to start my 10000 Steps challenge up again so that I can at least finish the year doing something as I am definitely nowhere near my weight or fitness goals for the year but I may asa well try to build up the habit of walking every morning again so that I can at least start to get a little bit healthy.
I also need to stop drinking coca cola again as I am back to drinking about 1.5-2l a day again which is no good for me at all! I am going to start from Tuesday as I am in the office on Monday and I don’t want to go cold Turkey when I am in the office! I am working from home on Tuesday and Wednesday so I will be able to cope with the withdrawal more easily then and then I am off from Thursday onwards until after xmas so that gives me about a week to get used to no coca cola before I have to work again!
On Boxing Day I have booked as van so that I can take my dining room table and chairs to my parents house as it is too big for my lounge and I need the space to setup my smart trainer and bike up permanently so that I don’t have any excuses to not exercise from then on!
I think that I will just walk 10000 Steps or more a day this week, and then next week I will organise my lounge properly and get the smart trainer setup and then I will start walking 10000 steps in the mornings and then do a Zwift ride at lunch time or after work! This will mean that I can make an early start on getting my fitness/ weight goals sorted out!
I am off work from 22/12/2022 until 27/12/2022 and then I am in work from 28/12/2022 to 30/12/2022 (basically 3 days) and then I am on holiday from 31/12/2022 until 09/01/2023 as I always book the first week or so of the year off to give me some time to get used to doing my new years resolutions and also to de-clutter and organise my flat ready to start the new year in a good place.
As I am not racing this year I am hoping that I can avoid any major injuries from crashing on the BMX and actually start making progress with my fitness goals for once. Over the past 4-5 years I have fallen into the pattern of training hard at the start of the year and making substantial fitness gains only to crash and get seriously injured which means I fall back into old habits and put more weight on than I lost so when I start riding again I have got less fit instead of fitter! This is why I decided to take the 2023 season off so that I can get fitter and heal from all of the injuries that I have picked up that have only partially healed as I keep going back to racing too quickly and they never heal properly!
I think that if I just walk and ride the smart trainer for the rest of December and all of January, I will be ready to start at the gym by February! Once I start the gym I will replace 4 mornings a week with the gym and then potentially change up my training so that Sundays are a total rest day so I may have to change my 10000 Steps a day challenge to a 70000 steps a week challenge and then I can divide the walking between 5-6 days instead of 7 days so that I can fully rest on Sundays. 700000/6 = 16667 steps a day roughly so it is very do-able with a bit of a change in lifestyle! Especially as I will be doing pretty much 10000 steps 4x a week walking to the gym and back so adding another 6000 steps a day to the total shouldn’t be too hard! Especially if I walk in my lunch hours every day which is a really good habit to get into anyway!
I haven’t done a weigh-in for a couple of weeks so I will do one tomorrow morning so that I know how bad things have got in the last couple of weeks while I was ill.
Resolutions wise I have the following goals so far:
- Lose 40kgs by the end of 2023
- Drink no fizzy drinks in 2023
- Get into the habit of walking 10000 Steps a day
- Ride the road bike for at least 1 hour a day 3x a week Mon-Friday!
- Go to the gym 4x a week EVERY Week! I may go to the gym in January just to get my hour on the bike in so that I get into the habit of going even though I don’t intend to start weights until February!
- Stretch 4x a week
This years resolutions are all about building healthy habits to reach my main goal of dropping my weight from around 110 kgs to my ideal weight of around 70kgs! I will be honest and say that I could be happy with getting back down to around 80kgs but 70kgs was my ideal weight when I was at my peak level of fitness so getting as close to that as possible is my goal. Giving up fizzy drinks also really helps with dropping weight as well as feeling a lot healthier once the withdrawal subsides so that is why it is second on the list. My 3-6 goals are all about getting used to regularly exercising again and being less sedentary which will definitely get me well on my way to reaching my weigh goal by the end of the year. I am trying not to ramp up from doing pretty much nothing as I have been for the last 5 months since I got hurt to working out 3x a day Monday-Friday and then my body breaking down and me getting sick and unable to workout for weeks at a time again from overtraining.
I think by getting used to walking from now until the end of the year and doing 3-4 light smart trainer/ ergonomic bike sessions from 26nd – 31st December my body should be used to it to start adding light weights 4x a week in the mornings from February onwards. As I am pretty broken still I will start using light weights/ high reps and machines only for a few months before I start to get into squats etc later in the year once my body is stronger. The last time I started back in the gym I went straight into doing heavyish squats and broke my ribs on the 3rd set and had to take 3-4 months off to get the ribs headed! This meant that I didn’t go back to the gym again!!! Also the road bike sessions will be really low intensity rides to work as Level2 base training so that when the weather gets better I can start doing outside rides without being too out of shape, with my goal to be able to do all the local hill around Bath without having to get off and walk them half way up which is what I had to do the last time I was riding a fair bit 🙁 What happened last time was that the more I rode the lighter I got and the easier it was to ride up hills so I am hoping that com
As I will be 50 in January I need to take things a bit slower and listen to my body more as the older I get the more beaten up I get so I need to take it slowly in order to build the habits before I ramp up and start lifting more heavily in the middle of the year!