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dennyAbout six years ago I posted a fitness update (itself the first one after a long gap) - the title was "The numbers look bad, but I look fine". The numbers in question being:
(My scale measures visceral fat on an arbitrary um, scale; 5/6/7 are low/mid/high in the 'okay' segment - there's one 'better than okay' segment below those, and two 'worse' segments above them)
So... 6 years ago my weight and body-fat figures were back to approximately the same places as they were 9 or so years ago...
...when the sight of myself in a mirror had finally driven me into moving 'go to gym' from the 'yeah, yeah, mañana' area of my personal to-do list up to the 'every day, almost all I think about' section for a year or two (because I'm all about that focus, 'bout that focus - no balance!)
And yet, my strength was still okay, even though my general fitness was in decline a bit (nothing drastic - just too much cake in the weekdays, and not enough parkour at the weekends). Overall I'd reached a plateau that I was at peace with, at the time.
My circumstances didn't stay the same though, and the years following that post certainly didn't improve my fitness; I took a full-time permanent job in 2016, after 10 years of freelancing and contracting, and one with a high level of responsibility and stress involved. The dent this put in my quality of life was considerable, to say the very least, and there were a number of unfortunate outcomes. A cliff-edge drop in my general fitness levels being neither the least nor most significant of them.
And then along came the zombie apocalypse, and a chance to reset - to think about personal priorities and such. For me, this thinking was aided and encouraged by work explicitly giving us permission to flex our hours if we needed to do 'personal care' stuff, which is pretty good of them. So, over the last few weeks I have: dug my weights rack back out from under the piles of boxes and cuddly toys that had built up on top of it; shifted my room about a bit to make the rack easier to get to (and harder to bury again); and a few days ago I started (gently!) exercising again.
And just now I stuck some batteries in my scales and checked out those numbers for the first time in a long time...
For anybody (including me) who can't remember what I chose as my 'ideal' stats that I was aiming for when I set out to get fitter all those years ago, I just looked them up again. Apparently I decided that I wanted to have 15% body fat and 42% muscle - which gave me an approximate weight target of 66kg, which happened to coincide with the centre of the 'healthy' BMI range.
The observant will note that I am not a million miles away from those numbers currently, so it's interesting that I feel so unfit, isn't it?
For completeness, here are the numbers from when I was at my fittest:
So; numbers in 'not whole story' shocker!
Speaking of which, about BMI... to recap something I posted a long time ago; I'm not really interested in defending BMI, I'm aware many people feel it's highly flawed, but for me it's always been a not unreasonable first-glance indicator of how far from (or how close to) my chosen 'ideal' stats I was - probably because I'm average height and for the most part have stayed between its 'underweight' and 'overweight' boundaries (just about). So, I continue to note it occasionally just because my scales tell me it, while not really caring very much about it unless it goes wildly off in either direction.
The 'measurements' I actually care about the most are:
1. Do I feel good today?
Bit nebulous, but I am daily aware that I feel my age more now than I did when I was fitter - although also, that was ~8 years ago, so there's more age to feel! Still, I am pretty sure that if I were fitter again, I'd be feeling those years a lot less when I did simple stuff like crouch down to pick the cat up or whatever.
I think goal one of starting to do weights and hopefully other exercise again is simply to feel like I can cope with day to day life without grunting involuntarily every time I exert myself the slightest amount :)
2. Can I do cool stuff?
This is mostly about parkour movements (not that I've been out to play more than once or twice in the last 3 years), and the answer is currently mostly 'no'. Acrobatics also figures in here, but it's been even longer since I tried a somersault. Partially practice would help with being able to say 'yes' to this one, but reinstating a basic level of strength would certainly be reassuring, probably sensible, and possibly essential if I don't want to injure myself doing something that five years ago would have seemed trivial.
3. Do I look good today?
Vanity started this journey for me, and I will always defend it as a valid and 'worthy' motivation for people to choose to get fitter :)
I do think I look okay currently, as it happens, although that's partly because I'm relatively lean and like most people I score that too highly when assessing looks. Once my brain kicks in a bit more I note that I'm nowhere near as muscled as I used to be - I'd like to restore at least some of that muscle before I'm happier answering 'yes' to this question without qualifiers.
4. Am I strong enough to be useful?
One of the mottos of the people who developed parkour as a discipline was 'be strong to be useful', and I think it's a nice guideline to aim for. Can you carry your shopping home without hurting yourself, no matter what you choose to buy? Or a real example from back when I was strong enough to be useful; can you carry your friend to the car if she can't walk right now? I was pleased to be able to do that back then, and I doubt I would do it so confidently now. I'd like to be approximately that strong, and that useful, again. I don't need to be much stronger than that, to my mind, and just piling up bigger numbers on the weights for their own sake doesn't appeal to me (any more) as a motivation.
It'd be nice to claim these four questions were all I care about, but I am a geek and of course I want to reduce problems to nice simple quantifiable measurements and then keep score :-P
So, of the numbers my scales give me, the ones I care about (in order of how much I care), are:
1. Muscle percentage
2. Body fat
3. Visceral fat
4. Weight
5. Estimated age
1 is pretty simple - the more of me that is muscle, the more cool stuff I can do with my body, and the more likely it is that I am strong enough to be useful, etc :)
2 and 3 are almost a tie - body fat is slightly ahead because I'm vain, and also because the less of it I'm carrying around, the more cool stuff I can do with my body (higher power to weight ratio ftw). However, as I understand it visceral fat correlates pretty strongly with health outcomes; I'm old enough to care about that shit now, especially since my dad's heart attack. I suspect these two will swap places for me at some point in the next few years.
The fact that I care about 4 annoys me, I'm occasionally even tempted to stop tracking it, but much like BMI it is a useful rough proxy for various other things (notably, 'do I look good') and so on the list it stays for now. I might stop listing it first though, to fight the precedence that both scales and society give it ;)
(I have now gone back and demoted 'weight' in the stats boxes) :)
And finally, while I am fully aware that 5 is the most bullshit stat of the many dubious stats that fall out of my scales, it's still hard not to feel a bit miffed when it's higher than your actual age as it was six years ago! Or to feel quietly smug when it's 12 years below your actual age, like today. But again - I know I was stronger and more capable then than I am now. So, not too smug, eh?
I've just been reading a few articles on 'getting back into weights/exercise/fitness after a few years away' and they all had the same obvious advice - don't rush it. Sadly there were no magic shortcuts to be found, not entirely to my surprise. But most of them did also say that if you're sensible and just work at it steadily, it's quicker to get back to where you were than it was to get there the first time, even if you're starting from the same place again.
Hopefully I'll find out this year.
(My scale measures visceral fat on an arbitrary um, scale; 5/6/7 are low/mid/high in the 'okay' segment - there's one 'better than okay' segment below those, and two 'worse' segments above them)
So... 6 years ago my weight and body-fat figures were back to approximately the same places as they were 9 or so years ago...
...when the sight of myself in a mirror had finally driven me into moving 'go to gym' from the 'yeah, yeah, mañana' area of my personal to-do list up to the 'every day, almost all I think about' section for a year or two (because I'm all about that focus, 'bout that focus - no balance!)
And yet, my strength was still okay, even though my general fitness was in decline a bit (nothing drastic - just too much cake in the weekdays, and not enough parkour at the weekends). Overall I'd reached a plateau that I was at peace with, at the time.
My circumstances didn't stay the same though, and the years following that post certainly didn't improve my fitness; I took a full-time permanent job in 2016, after 10 years of freelancing and contracting, and one with a high level of responsibility and stress involved. The dent this put in my quality of life was considerable, to say the very least, and there were a number of unfortunate outcomes. A cliff-edge drop in my general fitness levels being neither the least nor most significant of them.
And then along came the zombie apocalypse, and a chance to reset - to think about personal priorities and such. For me, this thinking was aided and encouraged by work explicitly giving us permission to flex our hours if we needed to do 'personal care' stuff, which is pretty good of them. So, over the last few weeks I have: dug my weights rack back out from under the piles of boxes and cuddly toys that had built up on top of it; shifted my room about a bit to make the rack easier to get to (and harder to bury again); and a few days ago I started (gently!) exercising again.
And just now I stuck some batteries in my scales and checked out those numbers for the first time in a long time...
For anybody (including me) who can't remember what I chose as my 'ideal' stats that I was aiming for when I set out to get fitter all those years ago, I just looked them up again. Apparently I decided that I wanted to have 15% body fat and 42% muscle - which gave me an approximate weight target of 66kg, which happened to coincide with the centre of the 'healthy' BMI range.
The observant will note that I am not a million miles away from those numbers currently, so it's interesting that I feel so unfit, isn't it?
For completeness, here are the numbers from when I was at my fittest:
So; numbers in 'not whole story' shocker!
Speaking of which, about BMI... to recap something I posted a long time ago; I'm not really interested in defending BMI, I'm aware many people feel it's highly flawed, but for me it's always been a not unreasonable first-glance indicator of how far from (or how close to) my chosen 'ideal' stats I was - probably because I'm average height and for the most part have stayed between its 'underweight' and 'overweight' boundaries (just about). So, I continue to note it occasionally just because my scales tell me it, while not really caring very much about it unless it goes wildly off in either direction.
The 'measurements' I actually care about the most are:
1. Do I feel good today?
Bit nebulous, but I am daily aware that I feel my age more now than I did when I was fitter - although also, that was ~8 years ago, so there's more age to feel! Still, I am pretty sure that if I were fitter again, I'd be feeling those years a lot less when I did simple stuff like crouch down to pick the cat up or whatever.
I think goal one of starting to do weights and hopefully other exercise again is simply to feel like I can cope with day to day life without grunting involuntarily every time I exert myself the slightest amount :)
2. Can I do cool stuff?
This is mostly about parkour movements (not that I've been out to play more than once or twice in the last 3 years), and the answer is currently mostly 'no'. Acrobatics also figures in here, but it's been even longer since I tried a somersault. Partially practice would help with being able to say 'yes' to this one, but reinstating a basic level of strength would certainly be reassuring, probably sensible, and possibly essential if I don't want to injure myself doing something that five years ago would have seemed trivial.
3. Do I look good today?
Vanity started this journey for me, and I will always defend it as a valid and 'worthy' motivation for people to choose to get fitter :)
I do think I look okay currently, as it happens, although that's partly because I'm relatively lean and like most people I score that too highly when assessing looks. Once my brain kicks in a bit more I note that I'm nowhere near as muscled as I used to be - I'd like to restore at least some of that muscle before I'm happier answering 'yes' to this question without qualifiers.
4. Am I strong enough to be useful?
One of the mottos of the people who developed parkour as a discipline was 'be strong to be useful', and I think it's a nice guideline to aim for. Can you carry your shopping home without hurting yourself, no matter what you choose to buy? Or a real example from back when I was strong enough to be useful; can you carry your friend to the car if she can't walk right now? I was pleased to be able to do that back then, and I doubt I would do it so confidently now. I'd like to be approximately that strong, and that useful, again. I don't need to be much stronger than that, to my mind, and just piling up bigger numbers on the weights for their own sake doesn't appeal to me (any more) as a motivation.
It'd be nice to claim these four questions were all I care about, but I am a geek and of course I want to reduce problems to nice simple quantifiable measurements and then keep score :-P
So, of the numbers my scales give me, the ones I care about (in order of how much I care), are:
1. Muscle percentage
2. Body fat
3. Visceral fat
4. Weight
5. Estimated age
1 is pretty simple - the more of me that is muscle, the more cool stuff I can do with my body, and the more likely it is that I am strong enough to be useful, etc :)
2 and 3 are almost a tie - body fat is slightly ahead because I'm vain, and also because the less of it I'm carrying around, the more cool stuff I can do with my body (higher power to weight ratio ftw). However, as I understand it visceral fat correlates pretty strongly with health outcomes; I'm old enough to care about that shit now, especially since my dad's heart attack. I suspect these two will swap places for me at some point in the next few years.
The fact that I care about 4 annoys me, I'm occasionally even tempted to stop tracking it, but much like BMI it is a useful rough proxy for various other things (notably, 'do I look good') and so on the list it stays for now. I might stop listing it first though, to fight the precedence that both scales and society give it ;)
(I have now gone back and demoted 'weight' in the stats boxes) :)
And finally, while I am fully aware that 5 is the most bullshit stat of the many dubious stats that fall out of my scales, it's still hard not to feel a bit miffed when it's higher than your actual age as it was six years ago! Or to feel quietly smug when it's 12 years below your actual age, like today. But again - I know I was stronger and more capable then than I am now. So, not too smug, eh?
I've just been reading a few articles on 'getting back into weights/exercise/fitness after a few years away' and they all had the same obvious advice - don't rush it. Sadly there were no magic shortcuts to be found, not entirely to my surprise. But most of them did also say that if you're sensible and just work at it steadily, it's quicker to get back to where you were than it was to get there the first time, even if you're starting from the same place again.
Hopefully I'll find out this year.
