Fitness/Diet Accountability Thread

[BPPLEE]

Saturday Workout
Back
X3 Seated Row ss/w Krusher ss/w BodyBlade x 15-10-1 minute, 20-10-40 seconds, 20-10-30 seconds
TG Pull Ups x 15, 15
15 lb Clubs swings ss/w 10lb Clubs High Swings x 20-10
10 lb Clubs High Swings x 20,20
TG Pull Ups ss/w KB Swings x 15-30
BodyBlade 5 minutes
Over 400 reps

Rest

Workout 2 -300 reps
Heavy Mace
Overhead Swings x 20
1 Arm Swings 20 r 20 l
Rev 1 Arm Swings 20r 20l
Right to left x20
Left to Right x 20
Side to Side x 60
Rest 30 seconds
Overhead Swings x 20
KB Swings x 50
Club High Swings x 30
(300 reps)
BodyBlade

 

[FireDragon76]

I took 16500 steps today and got 125 intensity minutes on my Garmin watch. The Garmin is very liberal handing out intensity minutes. Technically, moderate aerobic exercise should involve an elevated heart rate of 50-70 percent maximum heart rate for at least ten minutes. I think the watch generally does that by default, but sometimes it was suspicious. It's definitely more liberal than using the Amazfit Band 5 with the data uploaded to Google Fit (Garmin doesn't support sharing data at the moment, it's a closed ecosystem, unlike Huami/Zepp).

The overall exercise load is higher than it has been in weeks (today is my ordinary high intensity day, but I did only low intensity with higher volume due to COVID recovery), but I still have a bit left on my Body Battery and it's holding steady in the evening. Which means the volume probably wasn't too excessive and it seems to line up with my own subjective intuition, but we'll have to see what it is tomorrow morning.

Garmin watches and bands track VO2 Max as well, provided you go on a walk of sufficient duration and intensity. It says my VO2 Max is only 41, not the 48 predicted by my resting heart rate. It also has a dedicated walking VO2Max test, but you have to have 15 minutes of continuous walking on a relatively flat surface, tracked by its GPS (it also has a running test). I think doing this kind of test properly should involve a person being highly rested: I took subsequent tests later in the day and they all had diminishing scores. I also think I probably need to read more about the finer points of how to do this test to get the best scores, my intuition is that walking style might play a big role, and faster might not necessarily be better (I tried power walking but it might be that my form isn't as good as a slower style).

A day and a half of heavy use, including several GPS-tracked walks, got the watch down to around 70 percent battery. This is actually good compared to an Apple watch, but it's more battery drain than what you'ld get on a fitness band. The watch seems to continuously monitors heart rate multiple times per second to get continuous HRV data (which uses up more power than on a cheaper fitness band, which might only monitor once per minute during non-activities, and perhaps once a second or two during exercise), and there's no way to really do anything about that except turn off heart rate monitoring on the watch, which would compromise about a half dozen features.

The watch seems to do fairly well with Indian club swings and calisthenics. It only over-reported the heart rate of a club swing once, before I learned how to wear the watch properly. If anything, it may be under-reporting those kinds of activities, which is very different from the Huami bands, which tend to suffer from noisy heart rate sensors if there's any kind of wrist strain, resulting in wild spikes in heart rate half the time I swing a club with my left hand. Doing calisthenics on some bars (pushups, rows) also seemed to at least be close to what my average heart rate was, though I suspect in some cases my actual heart rate might have been higher by ten points on some reps. Only using something like an arm band or a chest strap would confirm this. I feel like for the moment, the basic watch sensor is good enough. If I were doing actual HIT, I might want to get a newer arm band based optical sensor (decent ones are actually cheap now, you can get them for about 30-40 bucks now).

 

[FireDragon76]

I woke up around 1 AM. Sore, and feeling too warm, just barely starting to perspire. Body Battery is 62, which is only fair. According to Garmin, it may take a few days for the score to reflect the actual energy state of your body. It also collects data on your VO2Max and uses that, and the VO2Max score evolves over time.

More advanced Garmin watches support a training load metric that is more precise in giving estimates for recovery. So do all the Polar watches. Some even try to quantify estimated muscle strain. I suspect the basic watches are all using TRIMP (for TRaining IMPulse), which is a formula used to measure cardiovascular load based off multiplying your heart rate by the duration of an activity, but they don't perform as complex calculations to support recovery estimates (all the widgets make calls to an API specifically tailored around physical fitness and activities, that has various extensions for different models with different capabilities).

My watch does have a few training plans for running and cycling that looks at your data and tries to formulate a plan, but I don't see one for other activities like walking. I might have to check out a forum, or perhaps even consult with a doctor, personal trainer or physical therapist.

I made a cup of American ginseng, which is something I've sometimes found beneficial when I am dealing with being fatigued. Hopefully I get in a nap before church. My experience with this kind of poor sleep, with a night cut short, is due to either too little or too much exercise. Occasionally it's due to random noises in the night (I'm a lighter sleeper, I've known that for a while), or a combination of the two. If my nervous system gets switched over to too much sympathetic activity, poor sleep seems to be the result. I also suspect there is elevated cortisol happening, which is why I think the ginseng could be helpful. It seems to be better for me to exercise earlier in the day, and to be actually somewhat lazy the rest of the day, especially 3 hours or so before bedtime (not just avoiding exercise at night, which is something I've heard about for a long time).

Sometimes Florida can be tough because I have found I actually sometimes sleep best with a room that's about 72 degrees, if the air isn't directly blowing on me. But in Florida, not only is that expensive, sometimes it's impossible to get a room that cooled. This past summer was brutal. One day the air conditioner was going full blast and the temperature didn't fall below 78 in the daytime (the unit is relatively new, too). We live in an older duplex unit, though, built around the late 60's, so that might be a factor.

 

[BPPLEE]

I woke up around 1 AM. Sore, and feeling too warm, just barely starting to perspire. Body Battery is 62, which is only fair. According to Garmin, it may take a few days for the score to reflect the actual energy state of your body. It also collects data on your VO2Max and uses that, and the VO2Max score evolves over time.

More advanced Garmin watches support a training load metric that is more precise in giving estimates for recovery. So do all the Polar watches. Some even try to quantify estimated muscle strain. I suspect the basic watches are all using TRIMP (for TRaining IMPulse), which is a formula used to measure cardiovascular load based off multiplying your heart rate by the duration of an activity, but they don't perform as complex calculations to support recovery estimates (all the widgets make calls to an API specifically tailored around physical fitness and activities, that has various extensions for different models with different capabilities).

My watch does have a few training plans for running and cycling that looks at your data and tries to formulate a plan, but I don't see one for other activities like walking. I might have to check out a forum, or perhaps even consult with a doctor, personal trainer or physical therapist.

I made a cup of American ginseng, which is something I've sometimes found beneficial when I am dealing with being fatigued. Hopefully I get in a nap before church. My experience with this kind of poor sleep, with a night cut short, is due to either too little or too much exercise. Occasionally it's due to random noises in the night (I'm a lighter sleeper, I've known that for a while), or a combination of the two. If my nervous system gets switched over to too much sympathetic activity, poor sleep seems to be the result. I also suspect there is elevated cortisol happening, which is why I think the ginseng could be helpful. It seems to be better for me to exercise earlier in the day, and to be actually somewhat lazy the rest of the day, especially 3 hours or so before bedtime (not just avoiding exercise at night, which is something I've heard about for a long time).

Sometimes Florida can be tough because I have found I actually sometimes sleep best with a room that's about 72 degrees, if the air isn't directly blowing on me. But in Florida, not only is that expensive, sometimes it's impossible to get a room that cooled. This past summer was brutal. One day the air conditioner was going full blast and the temperature didn't fall below 78 in the daytime (the unit is relatively new, too). We live in an older duplex unit, though, built around the late 60's, so that might be a factor.

Sounds like you don’t sleep well either. If I get 4 hours it’s a good night.

 

[FireDragon76]

Sounds like you don’t sleep well either. If I get 4 hours it’s a good night.

I had been sleeping better than I had in a long time doing more volume cardio (a few nights I got a solid eight hours), but COVID disrupted my sleeping pattern.

 

[FireDragon76]

I took a nap yesterday before church and that helped my Body Battery score, but it only rose to about 63, then I went to bed with it being around 30. I woke up around 1 AM again. I checked my tablet to look at my Garmin watch's data. It says my sleep wasn't very restorative I only slept about 4 1/2 hours or so, and only gained a few points on my Body Battery score. I looked at the sleep, and the HRV reading showed periods of rest interrupted by some stress. Exercise yesterday seemed to be followed by alot of stress also, though it decreased before I went to bed. Heart rate went up during sleep about an hour after I fell asleep, maybe there is a connection.

Evidently, from what I have read on Reddit so far, there are alot of things that can cause the Garmin to track more stress and poor quality sleep and low Body Battery, some of them potential medical issue, some related to psychology and lifestyle. I know when I visited my dad and mom yesterday, my watch recorded that as somewhat stressful, more stressful than when I went to church yesterday (it was actually on the low side at church, between 20-45). My dad has a bad habit of talking about politics alot, or focusing on negative things and trying to argue. Also, the exercise I was doing yesterdayI, even though it wasn't particularly intense, was causing my stress to be fairly high, far higher than anything else in the day. Doing things like yoga or meditating cause my Body Battery to actually recharge during the day somewhat, however.

I've heard some Garmin users say that caffeine does nothing good for the Body Battery score. I had a few cups of coffee and tea yesterday. I don't feel jittery after drinking coffee (I don't drink alot, typically), and I don't drink coffee in the afternoon, but maybe it is having physical effects I'm not perceiving.

 

[timewerx]

The last whole month, I had a break from intermittent fasting and exercised a lot less. We had relatives staying over for a month and I can't resist being polite by eating with them and eating whatever they're eating.

Ironically, I also ate more and I felt worse as a result. For sure I gained weight. Surprisingly, did not manifest noticeably in my figure. Even more strangely, I'm still entering the state of Ketosis (not Kansas).

I'm still making that strong Ketosis smell despite quitting intermittent fasting for a month and continuing on a high carb diet with less exercise. It would seem like I'm still burning fat at a good rate. Overworked brain maybe?

 

[FireDragon76]

I just took a small amount of magnesium citrate, along with a cup of green tea, and the stress score on my Garmin watch decreased significantly. The past hour there's been alot of "blue" (rest) in the Body Battery screen, indicating recovery/recharge. So it's possible I've been somewhat deficient in magnesium. Before COVID I was often taking theanine and magnesium before going to bed, and it was improving my sleep, but I guess I got out of the habit.

I suspect I might be deficient because palm hearts aren't particularly a great source of magnesium compared to whole grain rice or nuts, foods I have been cutting back on. I have to eat a relatively low calorie diet because my basal metabolic rate is so low (it's around 1400 calories/day), and maybe it's harder to get all the nutrients. Magnesium can also be lost through sweating, and I've been outside more and maybe that is the cause.

A source of cheap magnesium is Epsolm Salts, BTW, but I prefer just buying magnesium citrate liquid at the pharmacy in the bottles and taking it by the tablespoon (as opposed to drinking half the bottle as a laxative). It's better absorbed.

 

[FireDragon76]

I had another night of early waking. I woke up perspiring slightly, even though the thermostat at night has been set to 74F. I felt sore in a few places (IT band around the knee, just general soreness from exercise). I looked at my watch and it said that most of my sleep was low level stress, and the Body Battery score hasn't risen much (57). Sleep duration is a little over 5 hours. So sleep was short, and not restful.

My scale weight has gone down to 162.5 lbs, and tape measurement says my body fat is around 19.3%. My Bello app says visceral fat is trending downward, but still higher than 54 percent of sample data. I've got a feeling the sample data is from South Korea and therefore it's standards are fairly demanding. The World Health Organization recommendation for visceral fat is to keep your waistline at half your height or less, which in my case is 34 inches. So I'm not that much over. In terms of American context, my risk of diabetes is already low, just looking at my BMI, but I want to get to a more optimal place and meet the WHO guidelines at least.

Ironically, I am not eating as "clean" as I used to, in terms of adhering to a strict low fat diet and avoiding added sugar. I eat a sugary nut bar occasionally (I love peanuts), and I've gone out to eat a few times in the past week. But I'm avoiding eating alot of empty calories, like tortilla chips and things like that, and I don't load up on rice at a buffet (I visited a local Indian restaurant that's relatively new and only about a mile away from our house on Sunday).

I think that's in line with the standard model of obesity though, that it's ultimately about energy balance. Also, all of my cardio has been very low intensity (50-60 percent of MHR/Maximum Heart Rate), and resistance training has been calisthenics only.

According to my watch, my basal metabolic rate is around 1450, and I am burning about 1750-2000 calories per day total. The calculated resting heart rate has been rising for the past few days. Stress/HRV isn't bad when I'm awake, but it's not good when I'm asleep. If I had to guess, I would say I am dealing with overreaching/overtraining slightly. Even though most of my exercise is just walking, with average heart rate of around 100-105.

 

[BPPLEE]

I get off work at 12 today and will be off Thursday, Friday and Saturday so my workouts start today.
I have been taking NMN and so far it’s been remarkable. No pain in my knee and no nerve pain.
If this lasts I will be recommending this supplement. I take it 3 times a day

NMN

NMN Cyclosome® – The Most Effective and Bioavailable NMN Product on the Market! Hi-Tech has added another cutting-edge supplement to its Healthcare category. NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) is naturally found in fruits and vegetables such as avocados, broccoli, cabbage, edamame, and cucumbers...

hitechpharma.com

 

[FireDragon76]

I get off work at 12 today and will be off Thursday, Friday and Saturday so my workouts start today.
I have been taking NMN and so far it’s been remarkable. No pain in my knee and no nerve pain.
If this lasts I will be recommending this supplement. I take it 3 times a day

NMN

NMN Cyclosome® – The Most Effective and Bioavailable NMN Product on the Market! Hi-Tech has added another cutting-edge supplement to its Healthcare category. NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) is naturally found in fruits and vegetables such as avocados, broccoli, cabbage, edamame, and cucumbers...

hitechpharma.com

NMN is part of Bryan Johnson's longevity protocol. NMN is basically a form of niacin.

I ordered some NMN to try as well. I probably will only be taking 300mg though, at least to start out.

I've been taking TMG off and on (trimethylglycine) and I've found it beneficial (more energy, less fatigue). Dr. David Sinclair has used it alongside NMN in his clinical studies.

This is a sort-of mini documentary about Bryan Johnson's Blueprint plan. Apparrently, his protocol has some evidence behind it.

 

[BPPLEE]

NMN is part of Bryan Johnson's longevity protocol. NMN is basically a form of niacin.

I ordered some NMN to try as well. I probably will only be taking 300mg though, at least to start out.

I've been taking TMG off and on (trimethylglycine) and I've found it beneficial (more energy, less fatigue). Dr. David Sinclair has used it alongside NMN in his clinical studies.

This is a sort-of mini documentary about Bryan Johnson's Blueprint plan. Apparrently, his protocol has some evidence behind it.

Someone told me they were taking it and their shoulder pain had went away so I decided to try it.

 

[FireDragon76]

We went to the gym today and signed up for a membership. It's only 10 dollars a month, and they let you suspend the account for up to six months a year. We figure we'll just suspend it during the next COVID season. I'm not particularly worried about COVID for a while, considering I've already gotten in recently, I'm unlikely to get it again for a while. I just wore a mask in the Uber back and I used some nasal spray (Vick's First Defense). The mask is also useful to cut down on some of the air pollution that sometimes happens near corners (trucks and SUV's are particularly bad in this regard).

All we did is easy cardio on exercise bikes and some of the hand cycles. We also walked to the gym, but we'll probably take Uber or Access Lynx in the future (a disability ride service here in Orlando) and plan out our trips twice a week. There's a big sweeping curb with some hedges on one of the driveways to an apartment complex that looks dangerous for pedestrians, people drift the stop sign all the time and it's a sweeping blind corner (difficult to see traffic coming). Orlando is one of the worst cities in the US for pedestrians.

We also went to the local park in the neighboring duplex complex, after we had walked to the local convenience store and bought some drinks and snacks (Vitamin Water and some kind of nut clusters), and I did about thirty minutes of air walking.

I'm actually having to focusing on eating more food. It's really important on days that involve more volume of exercise. My watch says I burned about 850 calories today above my basal metabolic rate, which means I need to be consuming at least 1800 calories a day to have healthy weight loss goals and not get run down again. I also probably need to be increasing the number of rest days this week.

I noticed my exercise capacity has been reduced post-COVID. Everything feels more intense. Zone 1 feels like Zone 2, and I've stopped using the Karvonen formula altogether to calculater intensity (based on heart rate reserve), and gone with just percentage of max heart rate (widely used as general health advice by AHA, CDC, WHO, etc.). Mostly I've been using 92-102 bpm as my target heart rate. I cut out resistance training completely this week, trying to have a lighter deload week, and focus only on low intensity cardio and building back my conditioning from the ground up.

On Saturday at the gym, it's my usual "intense" day, but this week I will be aiming for doing intervals between Zone 2 and 1 at the end of the workout. I figure that's a better way to ease into higher intensity exercise and test my limits, than trying to do an actual HIIT session and potentially get into overtraining/recovery problems.

 

[FireDragon76]

I slept terribly last night. The first third of the night was good recovery, the last two thirds had no recovery. I woke up with a Body Battery of about 35. That's more or less how I felt, too. I got 5 1/2 hours of sleep but most of it was unproductive. My heart rate was also elevated during the second half of the night. I remember having some vivid dreams, too.

I went for a slow walk today for about ten minutes in the morning and I used an air walker for another ten. I have an app on my tablet that lets me use my Scosche Rythm+ armband to do heart coherence training (the Rythm+ doesn't output the correct format to work with an app like EliteHRV, however- few armband sensors or smart watches do), and that helped me to lower my stress levels today, and around noon I've started to be more in a recovery mode and my Body Battery has started going up again.

I have found the best way during the day to recharge Body Battery is just laying in bed, closing my eyes, and focusing on my breath. If I do that for ten or twenty minutes, the stress levels drop very low and the Body Battery starts to go back up again. This is about as effective as sleeping, apparrently, in terms of what it does. I use the yoga app on my watch as it has a stress datafield that I can monitor, so I can just flip up my watch once in a while and look at it. At the end of the activity, it also reports the amount of stress that has lowered since the beginning of the session (which is very useful to know).

I don't think exercising in the late afternoon is a good idea, it seems to be about as bad as being too active at night. I probably need to stop, even though it's a good activity that gets us out of the house, it's probably taking away from recovery.

 

[FireDragon76]

I took a nap in the afternoon and just crashed. I awoke at night and my Body Battery had reached 85, the sleep was all very low solid blue, high HRV and low heart rate. Heart rate was 52 at rest. I stayed in bed for a half hour, and my Body Battery continued to rise. HRV was unusually high, indicating not alot of sympathetic nervous system activity. I think this is similar to "parasympathetic over-recovery" I have heard about. Also, my muscles feel tired and warm all over (it's only 75 in the house). I'm also feeling alot of "pump", sort of like I'd get in a gym, especially in my biceps, triceps, hamstrings and forearms, but I didn't think I pushed myself all that hard at the gym (everything was low intensity, and I got in only about an hour of exercise). Everything else seems to be normal, no kidney pain, nausea, or dark urine (I thought about maybe it would be a mild case of rhabdo, but the symptoms don't seem to be that severe). Just alot of fatigue, but mentally I'l calm and alert.

I think I'm going to make some Gatorade and try to get back to sleep.

 

[BPPLEE]

My workouts have been brief and intense this week, Supersets and giant sets, to exhaustion

 

[RDKirk]

I took a nap in the afternoon and just crashed. I awoke at night and my Body Battery had reached 85, the sleep was all very low solid blue, high HRV and low heart rate. Heart rate was 52 at rest. I stayed in bed for a half hour, and my Body Battery continued to rise. HRV was unusually high, indicating not alot of sympathetic nervous system activity. I think this is similar to "parasympathetic over-recovery" I have heard about. Also, my muscles feel tired and warm all over (it's only 75 in the house). I'm also feeling alot of "pump", sort of like I'd get in a gym, especially in my biceps, triceps, hamstrings and forearms, but I didn't think I pushed myself all that hard at the gym (everything was low intensity, and I got in only about an hour of exercise). Everything else seems to be normal, no kidney pain, nausea, or dark urine (I thought about maybe it would be a mild case of rhabdo, but the symptoms don't seem to be that severe). Just alot of fatigue, but mentally I'l calm and alert.

I think I'm going to make some Gatorade and try to get back to sleep.

You seem to be hooked up to a lot of things. My wife thinks I'm weird for just wearing a heart rate monitor.

 

[FireDragon76]

I did a walk/run workout in Garmin Coach. It wasn't too hard but I think I will try another approach. My heart rate got up to 141 bpm at one point, and that's in the high intensity zone and I am trying to stay away from that. So my running form probably needs work. and I could probably use more power in my legs (I'll probably spend some time on the recumbent stepper tomorrow).

There's a fitness fad in Japan and Taiwan called Slow Jogging, it looks interesting. I'll make a post about it. I think I'll give it a go the next time I am out at the park.

 

[FireDragon76]

I slept only about five hours. Body Battery hardly charged at all. My watch says I had poor rest as I slept. My heart rate got too high yesterday during exercise. I even tried a cool bath but it didn't seem to do alot of good. Exercising hard doesn't feel bad at the time, but you pay for it later, I suppose. When I was younger, I could bounce back alot faster.

 

[timewerx]

You seem to be hooked up to a lot of things. My wife thinks I'm weird for just wearing a heart rate monitor.

As for me, nothing at all! Everything to me is by feel and breathing intensity. That's how I gauge the intensity of the exercise and there are guides all over the internet to do it with good accuracy.

Breathing intensity/effort is closely tied to the heart rate.

Ofc, if I had some disposable money, I might have bought a smart watch for sake of curiosity although I never felt needing it. I did pretty well just by feel.