Health Stuff

So yes, last night at the gym was a bit rough. Not unexpected, really.

Basically, I’m changing some of the stuff I do there. I’ve lost a lot of weight in the last year, and while I still want to lose some more, I also want to make sure there’s some good muscle and so on there too. So I’m going to continue with the cardio-vascular stuff, the exercise bike, the cross-trainer and *shudder* the rowing-machine. But I’m also going to be doing a lot more work with weights etc., and that was what last night was about.

We went through a fair number of the machines for weights, along with some stuff around free-weights, which I’ll probably also be getting into later. For now though I’m going to work to build up the basics using the machines.

The way of working out what levels of weights I should be doing at the moment was kind of interesting. First we went with what I thought I could do, discovered I’m a bit – in some cases, very – optimistic, took them down to a do-able level, with my first estimates becoming the target I should aim for. So not breaking myself initially, but building up to where I should be (or at least where I want to be) – and from then, well I guess it’ll just be a natural progression. In theory.

We also did the dread thing at gyms – my Body Mass Index (BMI). It’s a ratio of fat to weight, and I always knew it wasn’t going to be great. It’s not something I obsess about, or anywhere even close, but on occasion it’s interesting to know, as it gives a decent set of figures to track over time and see how the BMI decreases.

Anyway, last night it pegged at a BMI of 30.1 . Not great – it still puts me in “obese”, but only by .1 ( or .2 , if you’re feeling picky) as the cutoff from “overweight” to “obese” is at 30. I know that this time last year I was closer to the 40 mark, so I’m not unhappy with that progress at all – there’s still a way to go, and I’ll conceivably never be in the “OK” weight range, but that’s fine with me too. All the same, it’s progress, and I’ll keep on with it.