Continuing Fitness Fanaticism

This morning, like the one before it, was another 6:30am start. Tough to get used to but ultimately very rewarding. I’m enjoying getting my training down early and having the rest of the day to pursue the other areas of my life.

Deciding to take a week off from strength training has been refreshing: I’ve been able to catch up on cardio, which I haven’t been doing as much of recently, so hopefully I’ll be a bit fitter before I hit the weights again! The obsession to lift bits of iron has been niggling away at the back of my head though and I’ve been planning to adopt a more abbreviated routine in the run up to Christmas: I’ve devised two different workouts comprised entirely of big, compound movements and I’m hoping that hitting each of the main body parts (legs, chest, back) twice a week and neglecting isolation work will help me advance in my lifts and avoid the dreaded over-training. It will be interesting to see if this strategy will work or not.

Another recent change has been the use of FitDay to track my macro-nutrients. I tried to use the service in the past after hearing it mentioned on various forums a lot and didn’t put enough effort into it, but I’ve been paying a lot more attention to my diet of late, trying to figure out the amount of calories I require to maintain my body weight so that I do what is called a “slow bulk”. Sitting down and plugging numbers into my FitDay account has paid off and when I got all my macros from that first day tracked the sensation was like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. It was not until I started trying to consume a specific number of calories in a given day that FitDay came into it’s own, now all the guess work and calculator wrangling has largely been removed.

If somebody told me 3 years ago when I first started going to the gym that I would be training in the manner that I am today I wouldn’t have believed it. It works if you work it!