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Workouts from Home

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After creating a list of home learning resources for the kids, I figured it was time to create a list of home workouts for me…

Home Workout Roundup

Spartan Virtual Challenge Workouts

4 Rounds of:

  • 30 alternating lunges
  • 15 plank up-downs
  • 15 Squat thrusts (regular burpees)
  • 30 alternating crab toe touches

100 Reps Each:

  • Bodyweight Squats
  • Alternating Plank Shoulder Taps (50 each side)
  • Squat Jumps
  • Mountain Climbers (50 each side)

Fitness Instructors on Instagram

There are quite a number of fitness instructors on Instagram doing live workouts. Here’s one that I’m following: @yipingteo and this is a sample of one of her live workouts that we’ve done:

Booth popping

I never used to think much of workouts with resistance bands but I will never again underestimate them. It was tough! Definitely a far better workout than the water bottle weights I was initially using.

Here’s another one – Sculpt Club:

Youtube Workouts

App Workouts

Fun Stuff

These are the interim programs that we have on hand. I try to use them when I feel like reaching for that chocolate bar out of boredom rather than any real desire to eat. They provide a welcome distraction, a bit of family bonding (when we play together), and they’re so fun, you don’t feel like you’re working out.

Now, over to you… What other programs are you using to stay active during this period?

Over-Training, Rest, and the Immune Response

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Over the last few weeks, my mind has been swinging backward and forwards between my training plans and the Spartan Trifecta Weekend that I’ve signed up for at the end of June. The fear that I won’t be ready by June keeps returning despite my efforts to keep it under control. I tell myself to push harder and longer until my legs are shaking, my stomach is nauseous, and I feel tired all the time.

Part of me asks why my body is so pathetic. The other part of me knows that if I keep going too hard, a burnout is coming for me. I need to drag myself back from the mania that keeps me lingering on the precipice before I fall over the edge. So here we are, back to the topic of over-training…

Janda Baik Run

Like a guardian angel watching over me, a friend sent an article to the Jungle Babes group about exercise and immunity. Exercise, like vitamins, is good for our health, but you can OD on it. You know how that saying goes – “too much of a good thing”. The problem with exercise is that it’s like a drug. It feels really good when you’re on it and it’s easy to get addicted to that high. When you can’t exercise, it feels like withdrawal symptoms – well, okay, maybe not that bad but I feel pretty low.

Exercise studies show that regular, modest exercise boosts immunity, and lowers your risk of infection.

…hard, continuous, long-effort exercise like marathons and ultra marathons can lower your resistance for 24 to 72 hours, and lead to increased colds and respiratory illnesses for a week or two. Too much exercise volume and intensity turns the corner on what experts refer to as the J curve—and your risk of infection goes up.

Women’s Running

In a study, David Nieman, Exercise Physiologist, found that running a marathon increased your risk of infections and respiratory illnesses by 6 times post-marathon compared to non-runners. I suppose that’s not surprising. Running a marathon is still extremely taxing no matter how well you’ve trained your body for it. But not only are you worse off than non-runners (albeit for a limited period after the run), you’re like an unhealthy, old person! Yikes!

After a marathon, your immune state is close to that of an older, not particularly healthy individual and those are the ones getting really sick and sometimes even dying.

David Nieman, Exercise physiologist
IJM 13km run

It’s not just the marathon running that diminishes your immune response. It is also the intense training that comes before it. Runners training 100km a week or more had more than double the number of post-marathon infections compared to those who trained under 30km a week.

The article might be talking about marathons and running but I’m pretty sure the same goes for other intense training plans and physically challenging races (think Spartan Beast). I know I’ve had instances where I’ve trained myself into illness because I wouldn’t let up even when my body was crying for rest.

I didn’t learn my lesson until a viral illness took me out for a month. Even though it was a low-grade fever that only hit me in the night, I suffered from terrible neck pains and found it a struggle to get through each day. After dinner, I was ready to collapse from fatigue. Ever since that experience, I back right off the workouts when I am falling ill or still recovering. It is definitely better to be out for a couple of days than a whole month.

Protecting Your Immunity

How can you protect your immune system from taking a beating? Women’s Running covers it in their article, but I like to keep all my information in one place where it is easy for me to find a few months down the track when I need to review what I read. Also, I like to annotate. I’ve added stuff I’ve read elsewhere, I’ve extrapolated, and I’ve combined it with my own experiences.

1. Train Smart

In the case of running, that means doing less than 100km a week, mainly at low intensity (60% of max VO2 which is about 75% of max heart rate), and with most workouts being less than 60 minutes at a time. They also recommend a run-walk approach or even something like 10 minutes hard/10 minutes easy. This is because long, hard runs give your immune system a beating, but intermittent runs are kinder.

I don’t know what this translates to for other workouts, but I’m guessing back-to-back workouts should be kept to a minimum. Perhaps the key here is keeping most of your workouts to no more 60 minutes at a time? Although I am still wondering how much time you need to leave in between workouts. You could argue that a 50-minute workout in the morning and one 40-minute workout in the evening is still adhering to the “less than 60 minutes” rule.

2. Eat Right

Specifically, eat your carbs – before, during (if it’s a long workout), and after. Also, eat blueberries because they help to negate part of the inflammatory response triggered by hard workouts. These are basically stuff like HIIT, heavy strength training, and long-distance running or cycling. Actually, any workout that pushes you beyond what your body is conditioned for counts. Although that said, inflammation after a workout isn’t necessarily bad. Again, we’re back to – a little is good, too much is bad.

Inflammation is part of the body’s natural immune response. It occurs when the body is trying to heal itself from injury or when harmful foreign objects enter (e.g. viruses).

The harder the workout, the bigger the inflammatory response. And if the body is busy responding to the damage caused by exercise, it follows that it will be more likely to succumb to bacteria and viruses we are exposed to.

Digressing… if you don’t like blueberries, other similar foods that are rich in flavonoids (see below) will also help your body cope with the inflammatory response.

Flavonoids
Image Source: American Institute for Cancer Research

3. Take Preventative Measures

Take the usual preventative measures, like wash your hands, sneeze into your elbow, don’t touch your face, and:

  • Get enough recovery time and sleep.
  • Don’t do anything significantly harder than what you’ve been doing.
  • Monitor for early signs of illness and/or overtraining, and adjust accordingly.
  • Avoid crowded gyms and train outdoors.
  • Avoid excessive alcohol intake.
  • Use stress management strategies.

Sleep it off

We know that sleep is important but I think we seriously underestimate the power of sleep.

In his series of exercises on Calm – a meditation app I’ve been using, LeBron James talks about the importance of prioritising sleep. He always makes sure he gets 8 hours of sleep every night and a 2-hour nap during the day. It’s so important to him that he schedules his sleep hours on his planner before he adds anything else. 10 hours of sleep sounds like a lot for a grown man but considering the physical demands he places on his body, I guess it’s really not.

Calm - lebron on sleep

There is a stage we go through as we are falling ill. The medical term for it is “general malaise”. It happens before the real symptoms kick in; we get this feeling of unease or discomfort. I call it that “yuck” feeling when I describe it to my kids. Sometimes, it feels a little like the ache after a tough workout, but there is something distinctively negative about it. The post-workout ache is usually a good ache. The general malaise ache is not.

I’ve noticed that if I catch myself in the phase of general malaise and go to bed early, I can usually prevent the illness, or at least diminish it. When I say sleep early, I mean like getting at least 10 hours of sleep. If I still feel uneasy the next day, I make sure I get a second night with extra sleep or at least a nap during the day. I find that this is the critical stage to increase your sleep hours. If I miss the window, I inevitably fall sick.

Moving Forward

As much as I want to keep hauling my flagging behind into the next workout, I must remember the wise words of my OB when I was in labour with G1 – “There is no point flogging a dying horse”. Worst of all, if I get sick from working out too hard, I will only waste more time.

Related:

The 18 Month Review

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If you’re interested to read about my journey, the first two parts are here:

Losing weight was never my intention when I started this fitness journey. When it happened, it was a happy by-the-way. Now that I have lost the weight, I’d like to keep it off. Shopping for new clothes is tedious and I’d like to keep it down to a minimum.

Eighteen months on and I have discovered that losing weight is not the hard part. Keeping it off after you lose it is. I wasn’t going to write another update until the 2-year mark, but I’ve noticed a few things lately that I felt were worth mentioning.

But First… What Happened…

In early August, I took a trip Down Under so the kids could spend time with their grandparents. Like all my other holiday plans, it was two weeks of unrestrained indulgence and a minimalist workout regime. The most physical thing we did was a bit of running and a lot of walking for sight-seeing. It was no surprise to me that the weighing scales had shifted by the time I got home.

The last time I went on holiday (one year before this trip), I’d done exactly the same thing. After resuming my usual workout routine, the weight returned to normal and all was good. I expected the same thing to happen again this time, but it didn’t. I tried to ramp up the workout and ended up hurting my knee from overuse.

Scratching my head over what was happening, I started checking my workout stats (which I hadn’t been paying attention to for some time now). I noticed that my heart rate was down and my calories burnt was also down (even though the workouts were at the same intensity as before). Initially, I thought there was some error. I changed the batteries, I re-adjusted the straps, I recorded several more workouts – same deal. What was happening?

My Body had Adapted

As it turns out, my body had adjusted to my workout. Do anything for long enough – apparently, 6 months would do it – and the body adapts. Isn’t the body amazing? Sometimes, it would be nice if it wasn’t this amazing, though.

When you do the same activity all the time, your body gets used it and becomes very efficient. Eventually, that adaptation will mean that you burn fewer calories even when you’re doing the same amount of exercise.

Arnold Lee, MD.

I’d read about it before but I thought I was getting in enough variety in my workouts to keep my body guessing. Apparently not. Or maybe the body will eventually adjust no matter what curveball you throw at it. The worst thing about adapting is that it’s not like the workouts have been feeling easy or anything. I still struggle through them and ramping up the activity levels to increase the burn is killing me. Why doesn’t my body adjust to that part?

The Middle-Age Spread

The other thing working against me is the middle-aged spread. It is a gradual weight gain that occurs even if your diet and activity levels remain the same. This is a phenomenon that affects everyone 30 years and over. When you hit 50, it gets even worse.

“Middle–aged spread” is weight gain that tends to appear as we move into our thirties, forties and beyond. And it’s usually obvious as extra fat around the belly.

ABC Health and Well-being

What’s happening? Once we hit our 30’s, the hormones that maintain muscle mass begin to drop off. If we take no action, our muscle mass gradually decreases every year. I didn’t realise how bad it could get until my 70-year-old father told me he was struggling with the elliptical cycle on zero resistance.

Physically inactive people can lose as much as 3% to 5% of their muscle mass each decade after age 30. Even if you are active, you’ll still have some muscle loss.

WebMD

Why do we gain weight? Muscle is active tissue and it burns more energy at rest. The more muscles you have, the more energy your body burns at rest. If we start to lose muscle, our resting energy expenditure drops. It can be as much as 100 calories a day or more. That doesn’t sound like much, but over a week, that’s an extra 700 calories. With every additional year, there is more muscle loss, and, well, you can see where that’s going.

I’ve been thinking about what I should do and this is what I’ve come up with…

Changing Up Workouts

The general recommendation is to change up our workouts every 4 to 6 weeks. The easiest way to do this is by using the F.I.T.T. principle – frequency, intensity, time, and type. We should change two of these every 4 to 6 weeks. It is also recommended that we make minor changes within those 4 to 6 weeks. For instance, if weight training, we could add more reps, add more weight, or add new moves. If it’s running, we could do sprints one day, and a long, steady run the next.

From the advice given, it doesn’t sound like I have to deviate too much from my existing workout routine. That’s good because I really like what I’m currently doing. It’s my special time with the girls. Working out with them is as much social engagement as it is fitness. Not to mention that they also keep me accountable and committed to the routine. If it weren’t for them, I would never have lasted this long.

Doing Personal Training with Fitness Achievers is also a change-up to the workout. I know it pushes my body harder than my other workouts because the DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) is worse after these sessions. As my body adjusts to a workout, I find that the DOMS diminishes. After the Spartan Beast, we dropped our PT sessions from twice weekly to once weekly. That was a mistake, especially since I no longer had Cirque workouts to fill the gaps.

With the Christmas break coming up, I will have the opportunity to really shake things up for a few weeks. The plan is running, hiking, swimming, rowing, yoga, and rock climbing. Hopefully, by the time we hit the new year, my body will have reset itself.

Increase Strength Training

Since the natural order is to lose muscle mass with age, the best thing to do is to counter it with strength training. The goal is to build muscle mass or, at the very least, prevent or minimise muscle loss. An added advantage of this type of workout is that it will also build bone mass. As a person with a family history of osteoporosis, this is an important plus for me.

I can’t say I have much love strength training but what must be done, must be done.

Long-term Dietary Changes

Finally, the topic I try not to think about – diet. I confess that there is a part of me that wonders if shopping for new clothes might not be as bad as altering my diet. Yes, it’s that bad. The thought of having to behave when it comes to dessert? Somebody stab me already. Let’s only consider this as a last resort.

Related:

SCKLM 2019: 10 KM Leisure

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Scklm2019

On Sunday 29 September, I ran in the Standard Chartered KL Marathon (SCKLM). This year I was in the leisure category – no stress, just take it easy. I did the same race last year (nearly 18 months ago) and I thought it would be a great opportunity for a progress report since the course and distance was exactly the same.

My time last year:

Klmsc results

My time this year:

Klmsc results

Looks like I’ve managed to shave off my run time by about 4 minutes after nearly 18 months of additional training. That’s really not too bad. Well, I can’t say I’m complaining.

I must confess that I had a little more incentive to run faster this year. I was trying to catch up to my friend who started half an hour before me. She said she would walk and she kept texting me photos of the markers she passed. Would I have finished as quickly if I wasn’t trying to catch up to her? Possibly. I definitely pushed harder than I would normally run but it was good to see that I can pick up the pace and keep it up.

Scklm2019

Oddly enough, my Garmin record shows somewhat different timings. It recorded the race distance as 11.1 km and my run time records improved for both 5 km and 10 km distances:

  • 5 KM – 26:27 vs 30:08
  • 10 KM – 1:01:16 vs 1:08:55 (previously my fastest 10 KM) vs 1:10:27 (my Garmin 10 KM record for SCKLM2018)
Run times

According to Garmin, I made an improvement of 9 minutes over last year’s run. Following that recording, I have nearly reached Sub 60 for a 10 KM run! Gosh, I do like the sound of that… Anyway, regardless of which stats I follow, it’s still progress!

Scklm2019

Run Analysis

I increased the tempo this year and felt pretty good for most of the way. Instead of the 2:1 run/walk rhythm I used last year, I was able to keep up a 5:1 run/walk rhythm. My knees gave me trouble somewhere around the last two kilometer mark when I had to tackle the decline near KL Bird Park / Masjib Negara. They were okay at a slow jog, but I felt left knee pains after I reached the finish line. I couldn’t bend it and had to limp for a while. Luckily, it didn’t last too long and I was okay to walk normally by the time we were ready to head home.

Scklm2019

Gear, Water, and Food

After running a Spartan Beast, I have to say that I felt quite relaxed facing a 10 KM run. Breakfast was the usual peanut butter and two slices of bread, a banana, and a coffee (two sugars, half milk). I only packed water and didn’t even stop at any of the water stations.

No knee guards this year, but I ran with the 2XU MCS compression tights I bought recently from Australia. Did they help? Well, I still had knee issues towards the end of the race so I can’t say they were fantastic. However, considering that I ran without knee guards, trouble-free for most of the way, they definitely did help.

Scklm2019

2XU advocates wearing compression for recovery. Could I extrapolate that to suggest that continuing to wear the compression tights on after the run helped my knee? If I had taken them off, would my knee have continued to hurt? Now there’s food for thought…

Related:

The One Year Review

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It is now a little over a year since I “lost weight” for my Spartan Journey and I thought it would be a good time to review my progress. Change is not change unless it can be maintained for a significant period of time so this is where I stand a year later.

Before and After

Let’s start with the before and after picture: left – taken recently in Ipoh; right – taken last year at the Spartan Sprint in Semenyih. No significant changes since the goal has been maintenance rather than further weight loss.

Ipoh Girls Trip - Jungle Babes April 2019

Workouts and Physical Activity

My current workouts include a combination of the following, five times a week. I’ve mostly dropped the back-to-back classes now because it’s been extremely hard on the body and I feel the fatigue impacting my overall performance.

Diet and Food Consumption

Kapiti ice cream Kapiti ice cream

I still eat recklessly, although I try to keep my indulging days to the ones where I actually workout. On the days I don’t workout, I try to be better behaved. I frequently enjoy my chocolates, ice cream, cakes, and, well, dessert in general (I eat one or more of these on a daily basis). The food fest during our recent trip to Gua Tempurung/Ipoh was a tad excessive but nothing I haven’t done on the occasional basis.

Body Stats

My weight hovers around 59kg – plus or minus. It has not changed since last April, which is good since the goal has been maintenance and I have been successful for a year now. Unfortunately, I still unable to claim a six pack and my bat wings have not gone. I suspect that if I could be more disciplined with my eating habits, I might actually have some abs to show off. But…

A long time ago, I listened to an interview with Supermodels Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista. When asked if they ever cheated with their diets, Claudia replied that she would allow herself a piece of chocolate once a week and Linda said she might have a chip. I don’t really care for chips, but you can slit my wrists before I’ll ever agree to one piece of chocolate a week.

So, yeah, I’m not very hopeful about those abs. I’m still waiting for someone to devise an “eat all you want six-pack” program. Until then, I’ll settle for a little more upper body strength so I can finally nail one upper body Spartan obstacle.

Since training with Fitness Achievers, I have more detailed body stats now. It’s a pity I don’t have anything from one year ago to see how far I’ve come in a year, but I do have some stats from over the last four months.

Body stats
Body stats

The interesting point to note was that while my weight has gone up, the fats have gone down and the muscles have increased. So there you go, it is true when they say that muscle weighs more than fat. We ought to focus more on the physical changes in our bodies rather than the number on the weighing scale.

Okay, so the changes are not particularly significant, but the numbers are moving in the right direction. When you consider the fact that I’ve enjoyed more than my fair share of junk food along the way, I’d say that this is a huge win. If I can continue to see this trend and keep eating the way I do, I shall be very happy.

Heart Rates – When You Really Should Be Worried

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Since writing my last post on “Heart Rates and Other Measures of Fitness“, I stumbled on an old article which challenges the Maximum Heart Rate Theory from The New York Times. I was re-reading an old post I wrote about my early flycycle experiences just to see how far I’ve come and noticed that I had a link to this article.

I don’t even remember reading it but boy did it have some great insights! Finally! Some real evidence to challenge the Maximum Heart Rate formula (220 minus your age). It turns out that the formula was devised on the fly based on limited data that was potentially flawed and not representative of the general population. The formula was never intended to be a prescription for the general public, but such was the desire for an easy way to determine how hard we should work out that it fell into mainstream use.

In my previous post on Heart Rates, I talked about #FMR’s slow and steady heart (where his heart pushes out large volumes each time it contracts) versus my hummingbird heart (which contracts at a faster rate but squeezes out less blood each time). I thought then that it had something to do with my lack of exercise in my youth, but it seems that even professional athletes can have hummingbird hearts.

So pushing my heart rate up over 200 bpm is not an indication that I am endangering myself. If I kick the bucket, it won’t be because of that. What is an indicator of danger is how quickly your heart rate falls when exercise is stopped. According to Dr. Michael Lauer, a cardiologist and the director of clinical research in cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation:

  • An average healthy person’s heart rate drops about 20 beats in a minute.
  • The rates of athletes can drop by as much as 50 beats in a minute.
  • In his studies, people whose rates fell less than 12 beats within a minute after they stopped exercising vigorously had a fourfold increased risk of dying in the next six years compared with those whose heart rates dropped by 13 or more beats.

So the stats that I should really be paying attention to is the heart rate taper at the end of a workout. As long as I’m dropping by more than 13 beats in the minute, I’m good!

Flycycle - Harris class

Out of curiosity, I did an impromptu test in the gym when I took G1 for his run. I did six rounds of slow/moderate/fast runs, then checked how quickly my heart rate dropped. It was most consistently about 23 beats.

There were some limitations in this test, though. Firstly, I wasn’t wearing a heart strap and the Garmin watch measure against my wrist has proven to be inaccurate in the past. Secondly, I didn’t run for very long – each round was only 6 minutes long. If I had done 10 minutes or 20 minutes, would my heart rate drop less? Thirdly, I didn’t come to a complete stop after each sprint. I only slowed the treadmill to a walk. Would my heart rate have dropped more if I had stopped? Finally, it wasn’t a full minute because the machine take several seconds to slow down, during which time, my heart is still being taxed.

After that little gym test, it finally dawned on me that I had all the stats I needed from my Garmin! The image below was taken from today’s flycycle workout. My heart rate at the end of the workout – which isn’t marked, but you can see its peak – was 207 bpm. After a minute, it dropped to 184 bpm. That’s 23 beats. I guess my little gym test wasn’t too far off after all.

Heart rate taper
Flycycle Stats from 18 March 2019

Since I have all my workout stats from the last two years, I could go back and check if there has been an improvement in how quickly my heart rate drops after a workout! It’s getting late so I’ll have to save that job for another day.