Topic: The Health, Fitness and Exercise Thread

@Thrillho cheers! 👍 Yeah just about!!

Nice one on the PB! Do you reckon your going to enter a half marathon when you get to that distance?

@ralphdibny Yeah, I’d like to. There’s one in Bristol in Sept I have my eye on and I saw there’s one at the Eden Project too which sounds cool.

@Thrillho oh sweet! I'm guessing the Eden Project one would be around the grounds. Not sure how fun it would be running through a Mediterranean climate and then a rainforest climate in the biomes 😅. Would be quite interesting though but a lot more difficult!

@ralphdibny Sadly I can’t see that one online any more now. If it’s something you would ever be interested in, this is the site I look at;

https://findarace.com/

There aren’t filters for it but some events have shorter distances than 5k too. Plus there are all sorts of other things including bike rides so it might be useful for @kyleforrester87 too.

@Thrillho I've had a look through and it looks like there could be some 5Ks I'd be interested in in the south east. Guildford, South Downs, Crystal Palace, New Forest etc. Quite expensive though! I guess they have quite a lot of marshals and stuff even if there isn't many runners

But, yeah looks good! Cheers for the link, I will check it out some more when I am closer to doing an actual 5K!

Wow, I really wasn't expecting it today but today is a frabjous day. I am now 16st9lbs with a BMI of 29.9 so I am now officially "overweight"! I don't actually feel much different to yesterday when I was "obese" 😂

The goal for the next few months to a year is to drop a few more stone I think. The "healthy weight" threshold for my height is 13st12lbs which is a BMI of 24.8. I don't think I've been that weight since I was 14 years old to be honest. Might be wrong, I did have some wild Uni years where I was proper skinny but I never weighed myself at the time.

But yeah, I'm sure when I get down close to that weight, I will figure out whether the BMI is accurate based on waist size and any muscles I may have accrued. So while 13st12lbs is the new "goal", I will play it by ear when I actually get close to it.

@ralphdibny

Top work. It sounds like you’re doing it in a sustainable way too so it should stick.

@Thrillho 😂 cheers!! And I managed to book my first vaccine dose for tomorrow so it's a double frabjous day

My weight has hovered around this 16-9 mark for the last week, sometimes going above it and sometimes coming back down. I assume that's to do with bodily functions like er...eating lunch 😅 but yeah lol.

Otherwise, both yoga and couch to 5K are ramping up. Cto5K is now constant running, 25 minutes, 3 days a week this week. Goes up to 28 mins next week and 30 mins in the "final" week of the app. Currently 25 mins gets me 1.75 miles of running so I guess I gotta keep going until I add another 1.35 miles to that distance to hit 5K!

The yoga has started adding the ab workout tape again which is good but still a bit painful lol. Next week onwards, it's going to be 5 days a week so I'm going to have to pull my finger out and crack on with it. I constantly procrastinate my current 3-4 day yoga week but there aren't many days I can push tapes to if it's already on 5 out of the 7!

@ralphdibny
Congrats matey, that's fantastic! Keep up the good work, you can do it!

@LieutenantFatman cheers! How are you doing/getting on?

@ralphdibny
Not bad, thanks. It's clear I've lost some muscle mass over recent months as I can't manage quite as many pull ups as I usually can. I'm trying to work on that! Using everything at my disposal. It's not easy in this heat though, I have to say, lol.

@LieutenantFatman oh dear and tell me about it! I can't tell if I'm battling exhaustion or heat stroke sometimes! My schedule just had to ramp up at the hottest time of the year (so far)! Is your pull up bar outside then?

I've actually ditched the strength training now. I will get back into it at some point in future but with the Cto5K and yoga, well it's a lot at the moment. I think what I did was well worth it though because during yoga, I can now do the knee push ups and the other day I actually did the negative rep part of an actual push up properly! I.e. going from full plank down into crocodile

@ralphdibny
Nice work on the push ups, definitely one of my favourites exercises. I should get back to doing planks, my core could really do with it.

I used to use my brother in law's gym in his garage but you know, pandemic. So I use the one in the park nearby. But of course even that wasn't allowed for a while. Hoping one day to get my own pull up bar, that's the dream!

@LieutenantFatman I ain't too bad at planks really, it's just the push ups that are difficult. It's really weird though because I do put my legs, bum, middle and chest as low as they can go with my arms straight but if I look over in the mirror, it still looks a bit off. Not sure if it's just because I have a big torso but it does look like a "fake" plank but it definitely ain't one.

I think it's the park pull up bar that partially put me off 😅. Too many kids around and they just don't have any sense of social distance so I just get really put off by the kids running around while I'm doing the ring pull ups. But it's more or less a free country so I politely stopped going to the bar on my own volition lol.

I did look up building my own pull up bar and I think the total cost was about £53. The posts were click and collect from Travis Perkins, the postcrete click and collect from b and q and the bar/fixtures would be ordered from eBay. I was Gona get my brother to help me carry the posts home but in the end I just thought it best not to mess up my mum's garden by erecting a pull up bar in it! I will definitely do it when I get my own place though.

Funnily enough, there's actually an archaic law that prohibits carrying long bits of timber on pavements. I don't think any police would know about it though. I found out about it from a rather funny Tom Scott video on YouTube!

@ralphdibny
Yeah, kids messing about on the outdoor gyms is annoying. There's almost always a playground about 20 metres away as well for all the gyms I've come across. Kids, eh?

I wouldn't worry about the timber law, I reckon you're safe there, messing up the garden would definitely be the point of contention, lol.

Bit of an update splurge here I think as I haven't posted in a while...

So I'm on week 9 of couch to 5K, the final week. Did my first 30 minute run today (with 5 mins of walking on either side of it). My total running distance was 2.07 miles with a pace of 15ish mins/mile (not sure how to read the pace thing 😅).

Obviously im about a mile off doing a full 5K and I doubt I'll get there by the end of this week but i think I will push a bit harder in my next two runs. Not sure how it works going forward after that, whether I just choose the "free run" option on the app and just keep going until I hit 5K or whether I just keep redoing week 9 until I'm there. I don't know if the free run appeals to me because I like to know when I'm half way through the run and I don't how what updates it gives you if any, guess I'll just have to give it a try!

I think the park runs are opening back up on the 26th and I might sign myself up to a local 5K as they are free and I do think I could do a full 5K even if i was a bit slow. Probably looking at a <45 minute time I reckon. So yeah, work dependent (I normally work on Saturdays), I will try and get myself down to one to try it out.

I've been down in Cornwall this last week and I've managed to keep up with both the 5K and the yoga but it's been heavy and I had a couple of false starts. I think my run last Wednesday was cut short by the fact I am not used to the steep Cornish hills. I got very stiff shins/calves from it but I managed to get out and redo that one on Thursday instead. I had to rejig some yoga around too but I managed to complete all of last week's tapes (about 4 of them I think?). Yoga is 5 days a week from now on (week 8 of the intermediate programme).

I have been drinking a lot this week (it's a sort of semi-quasi-kinda-holiday after all 😂). Normally about 2-3 delicious Cornish beers a day but I did get paralytic on Saturday at a wedding. I literally don't think I've been paralytic since I was 14 years old and I'm not keen on drinking again after that 😅. Luckily my partner was there to clean me up and look after me. Before that happened though, I did stock up on about 4 cases of Cornish beer that they don't sell in the rest of the country (Proper Black and Mena Dhu). Delicious beers but I think that will last me a long time now that I've gone off alcohol for a while!

I've also eaten out for the first time in over a year so I don't think diet has been great this last week but I am still feeling a bit fitter with all the exercise going on!

@ralphdibny ooh, whereabouts were you? And which brewery are those from? But yes, one problem with living near the coast in the south west are the hills!

I did a 10 mile run on Thursday that had 340m of climbing which left my legs a bit wobbly by the end

Park Run sounds ideal for you though. If you are planning to keep it up once you’ve hit 5k I’m sure some apps do further distances; a friend of mine who was only doing C25k recently is now using one for a half marathon!

Alternatively, it would be a good time to use something like Strava. You can set audio reminders for every half km or km (or mile equivalent) to tell you whatever stats you want; I have km cues for overall time and pace for that km. You could then easily decide to up your distance by a bit each week or something.

It’s really cool to then go back to running shorter distances and being able to see how you’ve progressed.

@Thrillho st Austell and st Austell brewery funnily enough 😅. I know it's a fairly big brewery for the area but the beer is still munch. I like their IPA Proper Job but that's available nationwide so I don't have to "export" it from the West country when I go down there 😂

Are you down that way? I thought you were up Midlands/north, possibly based on a running route you may have mentioned though I could be misremembering!

Nice one on the run! 👍 I don't think either of my apps detail climbs which I became keenly aware of last week! I'm definitely going to check out that Strava app, cheers for the tip. Might be time for a better watch/fitness tracker now I've had some time with a cheap one and sort of know what features I might like in a more expensive one.

I'm definitely going to keep it up I think! I've never been able to run 30 minutes straight in my entire life, it's not progress that I would throw away lightly! I'll probably stick to the 5Kish area for now. I know there are some 5Kto10K apps.

I actually bought some new running shoes last week too. I realised (because I am an idiot) that I was wearing trail shoes and they were really hard on my heels but I've been running on pavements/roadsides. So I bought some road running shoes that have got a really cushioned heels, Kalenji Kipruns from decathlon. They aren't as good as the fabled Kalenji Biprons of years past but they are a lot better than the trail shoes I was wearing before!

@ralphdibny I’m Devon but know the area. I’m a big fan of their Tribute as well (it was the beer we even had at our wedding!) but Proper Job isn’t bad either There’s a smaller one called Skinner’s brewery who are also great and I’ve seen some of their stuff in local supermarkets too.

Anyway… Strava is the big name app but I think it does everything I need on the free version and it does it well. I don’t bother with a watch or anything, just the app. Like I say, you can tinker with it quite a bit to make it most useful for you but it doesn’t have any training programmes in it (or not in the free version anyway).

I wear trail shoes on the road but most of my routes do go at least onto trails but also completely off road so I prefer them myself. I probably need some new ones soon as these have seen quite a few miles seeing as they’re at least three years old now!