Today, I faced my resistance to resistance training head on—or perhaps I should say shoulder, arm, and chest on.
On Thursday, I received an electronic newsletter from WebMD (as part of IBM’s health plan), which was entitled: 9 Least Effective Exercises: Experts name their top picks for fitness moves that are best to avoid.
Obscurely placed up under item 7. Exercises done with the goal of spot reduction, which was under the subcategory of Exercises That Don’t Deliver, was this little ditty:
| Cardiovascular exercise is the biggest calorie burner, but resistance training is a big part of the equation if you want to burn fat. “When you build more muscle mass, you slowly increase your resting metabolic rate, burning more calories all the hours of the day that you’re not active,” says Warpeha. |
Reading this, and trying to process it intellectually, I thought of these three things:
- The Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Is some sense, that’s the idea here—get your muscles to burn off more calories for you on their own, so the time spent doing it isn’t really “taking away” from your cardio time in the long run.
- Covey‘s notion of “The P/PC Balance,” where P/PC = Production/Production Capability. The essence of this is: If you adopt a pattern of life that focuses on golden eggs and neglects the golden-egg-laying goose, you will soon be without the asset that produces golden eggs. So, resistance training is tending to the goose.
- When I taught the Defect Prevention Process in IBM, we used to show this picture on a slide:
while we talked about how we “don’t have the time to make sure we don’t put defects into our code, but for some reason, we do have time to continuously fix defects, which is a lot like continuing to come down the steps like Christopher Robin’s Pooh.”
Since I started working out on January 28th, I’ve only missed one day of working out, and all of those workouts have been cardio. I have not been wanting to give up the time spent burning calories aerobically to do resistance training. After working through this intellectually, today I transformed it to the physical—with the help of Britney at Planet Fitness.
She designed a resistance program to work into my exercising three days a week. We started with the Upper Body today, and that will alternate each time with Lower Body machines. I told her that I had no worries about what other people think of me there, so I wanted to start on the lowest level of weights even if it looks “wimpy.” As we started the upper body machines, I said, “I want to be able to use my upper body tomorrow.”
To which she replied jokingly, “Oh the upper body is so overrated.”
To which I quipped, “Girl, I need to be able to masturbate tomorrow, so my arms still have to work.” We both had a good laugh over that.
After Britney showed me how to use each of the machines, set the seats and other various adjusting machine accoutrement, I did the upper body circuit prescribed (12 reps of 4 sets), in about 40 minutes. After that, I couldn’t leave the place without hitting my old friend, the elliptical machine.
Today’s statistics:
Type |
Duration |
Burned |
|---|---|---|
|
Upper Body Resistance |
40 |
Not Tracking |
|
Elliptical |
30 |
557 |
I reached another weight milestone today: down 15 pounds. Who’s counting?
I worked on the STC newsletter judging today, but still didn’t finish. Tomorrow is the deadline.
I met Joe at Flex, and for most of the night it was pretty dead in there. At sometime near midnight, Joe, Scott, and I headed over to Legends.
I didn’t even bother to go in the lounge to see the show. At one point, I was people-watching outside in the courtyard area, when this lady came up to me and started talking. She was a big, brassy, bisexual who had six kids, three from each of two different husbands neither of which are now in hers, or their childrens’, lives.
She seemed to have a handle on the “pulse of the Lesbian BDSM scene”. “That one there,” she said indicating with a nod of her head, “She’s the dominatrix. She owns that one next to her. And that other one, over there on the other side of her, she’s totally submissive, but she’s not owned by anyone right now.
After about 15 minutes of talking with her, which I didn’t not like, I said, “I’ve got to go pee.” I didn’t go back for another episode of The Bold and Bondage, but instead caught back up with Joe and Scott and said goodnight.