Today I went to the park equipped with my usual kit of a pair of dumbbells (6.8kg each), football and cones for the exercises and a hand towel, intra-workout shake in one shaker and iced water in my flask bottle (inside an insulation jacket to help it stay icy cold).
I managed to do 53 minutes of the usual mixture of weights, cardio and ‘benchwork’. The benchwork involves doing some plank type exercises on the park bench where I keep my gear.
I put the cones down in a left-right zig-zag pattern so that I can do little sprints around them, plus I dribble the ball around them as well. At the moment I usually just do one circuit using only my left foot to control the ball and another using only my right.
I don’t play competitive football anymore – the logic behind doing this training is to try to work my muscles in as many different ways as possible. For a while a few years ago I was mainly just doing longer distance jogging which was effective in helping me to lose weight, but in many other ways it wasn’t really achieving the goal of keeping my body as fit as possible as I get older.
I stopped the jogging and completely stopped running on concrete because my knees and ankles were giving me strong messages that they weren’t able to deal with that kind of impact anymore. So once I got on the grass and started jogging and ‘sprinting’ (older person version of sprinting) I figured that I might as well start running from side to side a bit more, changing direction, stopping and starting and such and dribbling a football and running zig-zags around cones is a great way to enable these kind of movements.
With the dumbbells, I tend to do whatever exercises come into my head but I do try to push a bit harder on the two areas I am focused on for that day. I use a system where I divide the body into six areas – legs, shoulders, biceps, triceps, chest and back. I try to focus on two of these areas per day so that however often I train, each area is guaranteed to get two days rest where it is not in focus.
I also split abs into upper, lower and obliques and tag these on as well. So I like to do one of either – biceps/chest/upper abs, triceps/back/lower abs, legs,shoulders/obliques. Today was the latter.
When I came back from the 53 minutes in the park, I did about 20 minutes in my garage/gym which I use purely for weights, mat work (usually abs) and paralettes.
As for diet and nutrition, today I am once again trying to ‘get back on the horse’ as it where and make some changes and improvements to my regime. I fasted today until about midday when I had my pre-workout shake. Then I had the intra-workout shake during training. After training, I immediately had my post-workout shake, some nuts and a small bowl of cereal.
Later I had a proper dinner, a small dessert and then closed the food-window and started fasting again. This latter part is where I have been particularly weak recently. I have been doing OK with the early fasting and eating sensibly during the day but by the evenings my discipline is often fading – especially on workout days when I am even more hungry. I have been experimenting by changing what snacks are available but whatever they are I end up abusing them, eating without discipline throughout the evening and ruining whatever good work I have done throughout the day.
So today I changed that and as I write this (11pm) I can feel the effects of less carbs and being fasted for four hours since I finished eating – my body/brain notices and sends me into a kind of mini-keto state as it tries to make me feel bad enough that I will cave in and eat lots of bad food.
So I have a dry-mouth, probably bad breath, a fair bit of hunger and I am drinking lots of water and a few herbal teas. I also have a minor headache.
The last challenge I set myself today was to try and push myself to stretch my muscles and to use the roller-massagers and foam rollers more (more than not at all!) I am particularly lazy with these and especially on leg day (like today) and when I have done lunges (like today) I need to push myself to repair my leg muscles in this way because if I don’t, I can be really stiff and sore for the next two days which can hamper my training schedule and can have quite a negative psychological effect.
In short, it makes me feel old. As I go through the day, groaning as I get out of my chair or the car, feeling the aches and pains, my brain doesn’t always register that this is self-inflicted from doing good things. Many times throughout the day, I catch myself feeling miserable regarding how knackered my body feels and when I examine these thoughts (which seem to occur on some kind of subconscious level) I notice that at times I am telling myself it is because I am old, not because I am old but did lunges and other leg work, which is a completely different reason.
So I have done the roller-massaging and the stretching, just not the foam-rollering. I can feel that I will probably still be quite sore and stiff tomorrow but I pushed my usual limits quite hard while training therefore my muscles should be getting stronger and fitter from these exertions and that is why it hurts. No pain, no gain, right?
So that’s where I’m at today – I’m in a good place. It’s the 30th today and although I did weights sessions in my garage/gym on the 28th and the 25th, I hadn’t had a run around since the 23rd which was a week ago so it feels good to get that run out, to get the blood pumping from cardio, to get that oxygen shoved into the lungs and back out and to get out on the grass in a bit of sunshine.
I got a few ‘sprints’ in as well which is always good. I know that if I can still run for a short period at a decent pace a few times in a sesh then I’m taking the aging process by the scruff of the neck and telling it ‘I aint ready to go into terminal decline just yet you old bugger.’ And that’s a good thing in my book.