Hello, reading several. I hope you’ve enjoyed not feeling obliged to skim my blog posts so they’ll mark as read in Reader! Sorry, but I’m about to start posting again.
Here’s are some examples of things wot I have dun that I might have written about on here if I’d been writing anything on here:
- I’ve painted a fair few individual miniatures, mostly as gifts. I have learned that two-brush blending is brill. When Tims get gift miniatures they make compliments that sound like insults then backtrack awkwardly, engendering chuckles.
- I’ve read a book or two. I can thoroughly recommend “The Hippopotamus” by Stephen Fry to just about anyone. Although I should mention it’s quite rude, so have a care before suggesting it to anyone upset by rude activities.
- I’ve lost some weight. I can now wear some trousers which, last August, I could not have put on without chancing public indecency if I walked fast or sat down.
- I’ve played some computer games. The Witcher 2 is amazing, in that I was amazed by how awful it is. Perhaps I’m naive and should not be amazed by this sort of thing, but sometimes I am.
- I’ve gained some fitness. Recently I did two pull-ups! Can you imagine? I hope you can. It isn’t a difficult thing to imagine.
It’s been a mixed little while for the fitness project, chums.
I got lazy for a bit, and missed some gym time. Then I got motivated and back into the gym. Then my memory failed me and I misremembered my weight for deadlifts five kilos too high. Deadlifts are not tolerant of overloading, especially after a fortnight off.
My back is very nearly better now and I will be back in the gym shortly. I think I’ll post about deadlifts next week.
The funny thing is, I’ve kept up the calorie counting and my weight is still trickling down. Hurrah for weight trickling down!
Or, “Why Squats?”. Or “This is quite long, sorry.”.
Me. At the gym. Yesterday.
In my initial post about Primus I list some specific goals. These were:
Lose at least 10 kilos, taking my weight under 110kg.
Squat my bodyweight and a half for five sets of five
Bicycle home from my sister and her husband’s flat without ending up a wheezing wreck
The first is a matter of taking a measured approach. At 110 kilos I will definitely still be overweight, but to a far lesser extent. If I can get that far I’ll have built good habits, and it will be time to assess whether I should continue along the same lines, or if I should change m’game up.
The third is just a nice landmark on the way to fitness. Fairly often I cycle the ten minutes downhill to visit, but dread the half-hour uphill journey back (note: these times are guesses). For various reasons it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve tried the journey, but I’ve every confidence it’ll be a less painful experience next time.
The second, however, might seem like rather an arbitrary strength goal (and perhaps quite a high one). Allow me to explain.
About two years ago I had a nasty accident in a judo class and bothered a cruciate ligament in my right leg. At least, I hope it was the cruciate ligament or the pun in the post title ceases to work. The alternative is damage to the meniscus, which is far less a serious matter but also harder to pun on. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.
I can’t recommend the experience to anyone. The closest thing to a positive is that the terrifying cracking sound made me think, at first, that I’d broken something – but I hadn’t! Not that I was doing a lot of thinking amidst all the screaming like a girl whenever anyone tried to touch my leg.
Like I say: not an experience I’d recommend.
Damage to any of the soft tissues that support one’s knee joint can be persistently troublesome. Once there’s been some time to heal one is generally okay unless one does something silly like walk uphill or slip on something and step awkwardly or really quite a lot of things one never notices oneself doing with a healthy knee. Short of surgery, which has a lengthly recovery time and doesn’t necessarily make things much better except in extreme cases – which I certainly am not - there are only really two treatments. Losing weight is the obvious one: rotational stress on your joints goes roughly by the square of your weight so a little loss (or gain) can make a big difference. The other is strengthening the surrounding muscles.
A ligament/meniscus/whatever it was I actually hurt, once damaged, is always weaker than it was to start with, so the muscles around the joint are recruited to help stabilise matters. Which means stronger muscles make for a more stable knee, which means working on exercises that build up quite a lot of strength in one’s legs is a Good Thing. Enter… the squat, as demonstrated by some nice people on YouTube who apparently work out in limbo, or another mystical dimension:
There really is no single exercise in the world that does more to strengthen the muscles in your legs. Cycling did wonders at first in building up a bit of extra strength and improving mobility, but hefting the weight of another person on my back then sitting down and standing back up again several times on a regular basis has taken up where that left off very acceptably. Squats also have the side benefit of working your core – so I’m not troubled by a bad back the way you might normally expect of a big fat fattie.
By squatting my bodyweight and a half I mean doing that with one and a half times my bodyweight on my back, not with half my bodyweight on my back – which a perfectly sensible interpretation you, Reader, might have made. There’s a strong consensus in strength training circles that more or less anyone who isn’t seriously overweight should be able to manage it with a few months of regular work. In fact, many people consider a squat of less than 1.5x bodyweight to be a fair indicator of beginner status (a beginner being defined as someone who is still making nice, easy gains and doesn’t yet need to switch to a complicated advanced program). So it is definitely an attainable goal.
Unfortunately this post would be incomplete without listing my current squat weight: On Thursday I completed five sets of five squats with 90 kilos on my back, at a bodyweight of 118 kilos. Obviously that puts me quite a way off the bodyweight-and-a-half marker, but I’m adding 5 kilos per week (2.5 per session, two sessions per week) and, I hope, still losing weight – so I’m getting there.
To be clear: even without lifting heavy things I am utterly untroubled in my daily life by my wonky knee. It’s only because I want to be able to climb (odd, twisty knee stresses) and do judo (odd, twisty knee stresses) that it comes up at all. Otherwise I could ignore it and bumble along my way without the faintest twinge until I got old enough to start complaining about my bad knee so other people have to lift things for me.
“Exploit Physical Enfeeblement For Sympathy And Gain” is plan B, by the way. I have been practising my ‘cow eyes’.
That’s all I’ve managed, Secundus-wise, this week. The reason being: I’ve been trying to learn a clever miniature painting technique called two-brush blending. One brush plonks some paint on the model, the other is used to push and pull it around to create beautifully smooth gradients that would otherwise take a stupid number of individual layers. Proper artists do this sort of thing all the time, but they have the advantage of a longer, better documented technical history and *much* longer drying times in which to play with the paint.
Look what I did to a poor spare tank trying to get this business straight:
The wonky blending is more in evidence on the top, but I didn't think of that.
On the plus side, Project Primus continues apace. The scales are definitely reading lower, day on day. I even managed one whole chin-up yesterday, and I think my arms might stop hating me for it some time next week. Sometime next week, as well, I will attempt to explain the curiously specific goals of Project Primus.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack for a motorbike trip and decide what to wear. Sartorially speaking, biking in winter is something of a gamble. Not helped, I’ll admit, by my idiotic purchase of a pair of bike trousers which aren’t waterproof or warm without an extremely bulky thermal/waterproof lining. I will leave you to marvel at the notion of a british company imagining that it only rains when it is also cold.
I can’t say I’m proud, but I’ve finally admitted I haven’t the foggiest how to control my diet and started calorie-counting. If the gradually-falling numbers on my bathroom scale are to be trusted, it’s working quite well.
I’ve been using dailyburn.com to do the hard work for me, without which I doubt I’d have lasted long. It couldn’t have been more straightforward to set up. I registered, told it my height, weight, activity level, and goal weight and it gave me a goal number of calories to consume each day to lose roughly three kilos per month. There’s an extensive, searchable database of foods, which makes it very easy to track what you’ve eaten (at least roughly) without obsessive weighing and calculating. So far meeting the calorie goal hasn’t left me starving, which is nice – it’s just meant I don’t have toast before bed if I’ve already eaten plenty that day.
It also keeps track of how much protein, fat and carbohydrate you eat, and gives you healthy goals for those. Which means I now know I eat far too little protein, on average.
A bonus feature is that you can track your exercising as well, and adjust your calorie goals appropriately. I’ve switched that feature off for the moment, but I still enjoy the spurious statistics. For example: on Thursday I apparently lifted a total of 5,400kg! Which means nothing!
It’s just occurred to me that since I have a full day tomorrow of playing nerdy games with my chums I ought to put up my promised Saturday update a bit early. So I am… doing… that?
Fitness-wise, things are going rather well. I’ve been eating well, exercising plenty, and so on. Also, if you’re interested – and I’m sure you are – then you’ll be interested to know this interesting thing:
I’ve started tracking my daily calorie intake via the pleasing website Daily Burn. I’d love to give you an involved breakdown about it now, but I’m afraid there’s just NO TIME.
NO TIME!
Making-a-flash-game-wise, things are a wee bit rockier. My computer broke, so I had to fix it, but that took some time. I’ll do the stuff I was going to do this week, next week, I promise.
As one can tell by scrolling down a bit, my attempts to get in shape are something of a long-running comedy of errors. This time, however, might be different! It’s certainly possible!
My goals for this week are modest – I’ve certainly learned that sweeping changes wear out my resolve quickly.
By this time next week (the 4th of September):
I’ll have worked out three times. Whether that’s going to the gym or doing this workout at home. This should be easy enough, since I managed it last week, but I want to make a habit of it before I start making it harder.
I won’t have used motorised transport to go anywhere within, say, two miles by road. By this I mean that I’ll bicycle or walk, not that I’ll call a pedi-cab. Poor pedi-cab men. Travel for work is exempt from this rule, for reasons of sweatiness.
I will have had takeaway food a maximum of one time.
I won’t have snacked on more than one day.
To spare your boredom, I’ll spread out my reasons over forthcoming updates.
Longer term my goals are:
Lose at least 10 kilos, taking my weight under 110kg.
Squat my bodyweight and a half for five sets of five
Bicycle home from my sister and her husband’s flat without ending up a wheezing wreck
