Be Excellent To Each Other

Of course not, and that's exactly what everyone did. DavPaz's post was a joke based on a purposefully over-literal reading of Kov's post.

Ah that's the confusing part. Jokes are usually funny.

You need a double blind control test to confirm that hypothesis. You can't be the control.

About time you realised that.

Blimey. Sorry Kov

It is ok dude.

Been out running 5k six times in the last week and a bit. I know it's not long but I seem to be finding it way harder than usual to recover any fitness. Either it's because of the cold or just I'm old and useless and shouldn't bother even trying to do anything.

5k is not a short distance, are you having a rest day?

I just go out as and when I can so no fixed pattern but yeah, it's not like I've been running every day.

https://www.strava.com/athletes/3016964

I'm sure it'll get better, it just seems so much harder this time.

Maybe vary the distance - might keep you interested, and also means your body can't get as used to it. You needn't run much further, see if you can go for 7-8k. But then have a day or two where you do just 2 or 3. The shorter ones are still good for toning and maybe for a bit more speed if you want to give that a go once a week. The longer one will give you a bit more fat burning time.

Cool, yeah, I'll try mixing it up a bit and see what happens.

Just done my first 14 miles. Apparently I was muttering, laughing and swearing at myself for the last few miles.

Just saw that on Strava. Well done dude!

I now know I can do a half marathon. Got one booked in two months.

Great stuff! Go for it!

Remember the Beex record for the Silverstone half marathon remains at 3 hours 30 minutes.

You know FaceBook has started doing the memories thing...

A year ago I had a BUPA medical, I weighed 16 stone 12, I weighed myself this morning I am down to 14 stone 7, I have still got a bit of belly to go.

Hopefully I should be coming off my diabetic meds this year.

Should be a yay. Well done.

Good stuff Kovacs.

I fell off my skateboard and onto the floor really hard the other night, proper stacked it right onto my arm and side. Had the best skate in years after doing that but I was fucked the next day. So now I've got no skin on my elbow and it hurts to even breathe, much less run. Might try going out tomorrow, though.

Well taking JBR's advice I went out for long run on Friday which was really nice then played golf on Saturday then tried to run yesterday only to experience crippling calf pain in both legs as soon as I left the door, tried to keep going to see if it would ease off but it didn't. So I'm just going to lay off for a day or two then try again.

Argh! Hope that does it, or a lifetime of guilt awaits me.

It'll be fine, it'll just be from not running at all and then suddenly running quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. Doesn't hurt when I'm walking or anything.

Stretch stretch and stretch again. I will post some stretches later.

I will post one now.

Yeah, I know I should but I never usually bother with anything like that although having had a bit of a read up I've been doing some calf raises to try and strengthen those muscles a bit. It's just doing stuff like that enough to make any actual difference that I always struggle with.

It's pretty dubious as to whether stretching before and after exercise prevents injury. I've never bothered.

Stretching is usually what gives me a bloody injury, normally in my neck and/or back and leads to cunningly good Robocop/Batman impressions.

These are the ones I do, it helps.

Only stretch after exercise

Fucking fucking ugh. After about a year or so of steady and pleasing weight loss due to dropping my calorie intake down I plateaued completely and for ages wasn't able to shift any more of my still sizeable gut. This was only bothering me a little bit until I put a load more weight on at Christmas and now I'm stuck at that new size due to the aforementioned plateau. During all of this I've even ramped up the exercise I'm doing (increasing swimming lengths, adding in HIIT and weight sessions at home) and it's made little to no difference. The extra Christmas weight is now really, really bothering me all the time and I've no idea what I need to do to sort the situation out. Attempting to look up anything online is just a depressingly chaotic mix of difference voices shouting different things (you're eating too much/not enough; you're doing too much cardio/not enough; increase/don't increase the weight you're lifting; fucking etc) and I honestly don't know how to proceed. As far as I can tell I'm eating less and doing more exercise than most of the people I know but continue to be fatter than most so obviously something's wrong but I don't know what. Fuck sake.

Cheers, none of that is ever going to be a waste of time. I keep meaning to check out some yoga apps or something. Gaining flexibility definitely helps stave off injuries.

Do a food diary for a week, make sure you write absolutely everything that passes your lips down, be it food/drink/sperm/whatever.

It's easy to forget about little snacks etc... and they soon make quite a difference to your calorie intake.

Also it's not been that long since Christmas, keep doing what you're doing and I'm sure you'll start to see a difference.

I did that with an app last year and kept logging for months. Obviously weekends, especially in the pub, would sometimes push me over my target but I was consistently under my calorie target during the week so I eventually stopped logging stuff as my intake was under control in that regard. Nothing's really changed since that time but I have begun logging my food and exercise again as of this morning. Partially to verify calorie intake but also to check out levels of protein I'm actually consuming as that keeps coming up in chat about weight loss/muscle building. I honestly don't think I can drop my calorie intake any further down though, I'm pretty brutal about it already.

Cut out booze for a week, see what happens?

I have started yoga about 3 weeks ago..

Classes or just by yourself? I keep meaning to give it a go, but I really don't like classes

Classes. I am the only bloke....

Was meant to be going for a run at lunchtime but it's blowing a gale and I'm aching all over from skating last night so fuck that. Instead I've gone on ebay and bought 10kg of American style pancake/waffle mix.

It's a reverse double-whammy! I ran in this morning - little bit testing in the open bits across fields.

I hate running in really strong winds, it seems to fuck with the rhythm of my breathing somehow.

My running is getting a bit better.

Ran 71 miles this months.

So, I'm a fucking idiot.

After reading stuff up online it seems that doing pretty serious weight training is good for losing weight, and I could certainly do with building some muscle, so I'm going to be trying out this programme. It's well recommended, seems pretty straightforward and has a really, really good mobile app to take you through each session.

I started out last night and it gives 20kg for squats/presses and 30 for rows. While I could do the exercises alright in general, I didn't feel entirely stable when moving the weighted bar around the room. And getting it up to shoulder height for squats seemed like a really bad idea in terms of stability so I just did those with the bar at my waist. This is the absolute starting weight though and I was concerned that it seemed such a struggle outwith the actual reps themselves.

Fast forward to this morning and I'm talking to some folk at work about it. I happen to remark at how surprisingly heavy the empty bar itself is at which point the penny drops in my head. Like a fucking tit I was adding the 20/30 kg to the bar and not taking into account the bar itself. A quick Google shows the the empty bar is likely around 20kg itself so, basically, for my very first foray into free-weights I've accidentally pretty much doubled the amount I was supposed to be lifting. 40kg for bench presses is bad enough, but going straight to 50 kilos for a row is properly spazzy and I worry I could've really fucked myself up. I'm amused at myself but also pretty horrified.

Still good mate...

When i used to do the gym properly, i got up to 140kg on the bench press. Doubt I could do that now

I'm more concerned at the moment about getting the form right because I've never done proper heavy weights before and I don't want to start with dodgy technique that'll mean I fuck myself up once the weights increase; which they do by a couple of kilos every single session in this programme so shit will start getting real sooner rather than later.

140kg is pretty impressive, I can't currently even imagine being able to lift that kind of weight.

Getting faster....

In context, the run for 10 miles was quicker than my 10k pace last year..

That's bloody good.