Category: Sports

What sucks the most

What sucks the most when you have a cold is: you can’t go to the gym!
Argh, I haven’t been in a week (I only have a running nose but still, the beginning of the week I didn’t feel really all that good) and I feel fatter already. October was a bad month, I was gone a lot and “sick” a lot. I hope hope hope that November will be a better month, but I think it will be 🙂

Fitness Check #1

August_2013Yesterday I had my first fitness-check, which means:

  1. resting ECG (Cardio Scan)
  2. body fat measuring
  3. BMI measuring
  4. biking until a heart rate of 140

It all took about one hour. Here my results

  1. resting ECG

    Not that good, I have a little cold and you notice. My heart beat was at 80, which is quite high. I remember measuring my heart beat a few weeks ago at work and I had 60. My fit level with that rate was at 2, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Yikes! My trainer said it has to do with less sleep (check), stress (a little), being sick (having a cold – check)

  2. body fat measuring
    Body fat: 16,8% I was quite surprised. I let my boyfriend measure with a Skinfold Caliper and my result there was 23%. At the gym they measured with a Near-infrared interactance. No idea what is the safest way to measure body fat…

  3. BMI measuring
    18,7

  4. biking until a heart rate of 140
    I was in the area between “very good” and “very very good”. I warmed up five minutes, then had to bike at the same speed for one or two minutes with increasing inclination until I reached a heart rate of 140. Then cool down and my trainer wrote down my heart rate after one minute, after three and after five. Then some calculations followed and my result was 2.6 (whatever unit).

I’m happy with my results, the next check will be in three months.

Worst.Thing.Ever

Tuesdays I have one hour of TRX.

It already happened to me once that I go to TRX and noticed – damn, I forgot to shave my armpits!!
It’s not like I have a big bush, but I tend to let it grow a bit before I shave because my skin is way too sensitive there and I will bleed and get pimples and be all red if I shave every day.

So anyway, today was one of those days. I wanted to shave yesterday evening after my shower and forgot. Today at work I remembered.

I then went down to the store which is in the same building as my work and bought a couple of razors. I then, in the first time of history, shaved my armpits in the womens bathroom (sssht, don’t tell). I felt so much better after, there’s nothing more embarrassing than making a workout with a trainer and having armpit-hair!

Now I have about five razors at work.

HIIT on the Treadmill

hiit_treadmill
My heart rate during HIIT

How I do it

  • 5-minute warmup at around 8 or 9km/h (5 or 5.6mp/h)
  • 30 second sprint between 15 and 16 km/h (9.3 and 9.9mph). I usually start at 16 km/h and go down each sprint.
  • 30 second pause (I let the treadmill go fast while I lift my body up with my arms and spread my legs to each side of the treadmill)
  • all in all 10 times sprinting
  • after 14 minutes 30 seconds the cooldown begins
  • 5 minutes 30 seconds cooldown at 9 to 7km/h (5.6 to 4.4mp/h)

I do 30/30 sec. because it’s easy to monitor, you sprint/pause at either a half or a full minute.

Why I prefer HIIT on the treadmill

  • you sweat, a lot!
  • after every sprint you are so looking forward to the next 30 second pause
  • the 20 minutes go by fast
  • it’s short
  • it’s not as boring as running a constant speed all the time (running on a treadmill is sooo boring)
  • it’s exhausting
  • it’s a short effective training
  • I love the sweat!
  • I love being out of breath!

I always monitor my pulse which goes down to around 85% – 88% of my max. heart rate after each sprint. My top rate is between 95% and 99% for a few seconds. If I make a pause of one minute my heart rate goes down to about 70%.
When I go jogging outside I sometimes do some sprints, sometimes not.

Slimmed it down

I’d like to buy a GPS watch for biking and jogging. I think I had about ten different ones on my amazon wish list and always read the reviews and also googled a lot of reviews. You go nuts – it’s just like with little digital cameras, there are so many you go nuts reading all the reviews and deciding.

I slimmed my choice down to four, the Garmin Forerunner 210, 310XT, 410 and 610.

© Garmin Forerunner
© Garmin

So, today I went to a store named “Runners Point” to look at all those watches.

They didn’t have the 410, it sounded like the 610 was the newer version. I liked the 210 and 610 on my wrist, my favorit from the looks was the 210.

I decided I probably don’t need all the functions the 310XT has, also it’s huge, it’s like having a computer on your wrist (which, actually, I wouldn’t mind – I thought it was bigger when looking at it online but it did fit quite well).

So, I was looking at the 210 and 610. The watch should track my route, should tell me how fast I am, measure my heart rate and a thing which would be really nice – to measure the altitude difference. That the 610 can do, the 210 not.

So, sometime in the future I’m going to buy the Garmin Forerunner 610 with its touchscreen and hope I like it 🙂

Oh – my Hamartoma is gone!!! So so happy! The doctor just couldn’t find it. I stopped taking the Nuvaring in March which might be a reason for its disappearance but who knows…

[EDIT]Friday: Bought the Forerunner 610. We shall see 😀[/EDIT]