Log of Amicus

[Amicus]

Hi all,

This is a great forum. I only recently discovered it. I'm starting a log to help my fitness training and hopefully make some friends here along the way. I work as a cop and often use tiredness and lack of time as my excuse to not work out. I'd say it's a reasonable excuse 40% of the time because shift work, overtime and "quick-changeovers" can really make exercise the last thing I feel like doing with my off-duty hours. On the other hand, 60% of the time I'm just being lazy and could exercise if I put my mind to it. By the public eye being on my log I'm hoping to ward off laziness.

My aims are:

(1) Stay healthy: I'm thinking in terms of a healthy diet and safe training practices.

(2) Improve fitness: I would like to develop my cardio fitness and also become stronger. I will post specific goals when I have had a few training sessions and have analysed my current fitness level.

(3) Improve appearance: Add about 10lbs of muscle and lose about 10lbs of fat. I would be happy with that.

(4) Have fun!

My training history is full of layoffs. I've never trained for more than about 3 months at a time before taking a couple of weeks of months layoff due to travelling, work pressure or other activities demanding a lot of time. As such I haven't achieved much in the way of fitness. I think my best achievement is running on a treadmill for 12 minutes at 13.7 km/h.

I will start off training at home. At the moment it is convenient for me to workout with weights 4 times a week and do cardio 3 times per week. I'm going to try a 2-way split repeated twice each week:

#1
Hipbelt wall squats
Leg curls
Straight-legged deadlifts (full ROM, i.e. full spinal flexion)
Crunches

#2
Partial chins (top & bottom ROM) and partial pullovers (mid-ROM)
Bench presses
Shrugs
Prone rearward shrugs
Barbell curls
Dips

I may add prone rear lateral raises and side lateral raises to #2.

I'll stretch after each workout

For cardio I'm going to run, ride a stationary cycle and do skipping.

In a few weeks I'll be working in another town where there is a gym in our station so I'll probably use that then.

Today is my day off and I'm planning on exercising in an hour or so. So expect a post from me later on today.

Thanks for reading,
Amicus

[jgriffith]

Nice to see you posting a journal, losing 10 lbs of fat and gaining 10 lbs of muscle could be pretty hard to do at the same time, I'd try to just gain the muscle right now and you'll notice in the mirror that you're look much better. I'll keep checkin in on this.

[Amicus]

J,

Thanks for your reply. I understand your point about the difficulty in losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time.

Today, instead of lifting weights or doing a cv workout I decided to jog to the local sports centre (5 mins away), play a couple of games of squash then walk back. I'm going to sleep well tonight Tomorrow I'm going to try to get in an upper body weights session and some cv.

[AnnaD - TX]

Good for you! Glad to see someone else keeping a journal here! Good Luck!