What Was Your Work Out Today?

Back to stationary bike. Almost fell asleep right before getting on the bike, thought I'd probably drag through the ride, but actually bumped up the pace a tiny bit compared to recent rides. Go figure. 95W average, allegedly 15.1mph, for the 60' + 3' CD ride. 63% Z3, 34% Z2, remainder below. 'Tis enough, 'twill serve.

I guess I'm going to count 54' of steady snow-shoveling and ice chipping as today's workout. (It would've been 2-4 hours, except my kind neighbor to the South came over with his garden-tractor-mounted snowblower and did the main part of my driveway, so all I needed to shovel was the sidewalks, the area too close to the garage door for the snowblower, and around my trash cart.)

Well, there were a few minutes of non-shoveling in there: The bus system's door-to-door transit driver (for folks like seniors or those with disabilities and the like) dropped off a guy at my neighbors' to the North, and got stuck trying to turn his big vehicle around in their driveway, so I went over with a shovel and bag of sand to help out for a few minutes. The guy who lives there came out, and he, I and the driver got him unstuck and on his way pretty quickly with that little bit of help.

Good moment before the shoveling, given the snow and ice: I found my Yaktrax without having to unload almost 300 pounds of dumbbells racked on top of the chest where I feared I'd stored them (but hadn't).

I also tried a couple of core exercises I'd never done before, dumbbell push-throughs in high plank and bear plank positions, but didn't do many. My post-IT wrists don't love those plank styles, and besides, they're hard. Good exercises, though.

AM
Yoga, deadhangs, wall handstands and shield casts...

PM
Iron Cardio (Light Day)
Clean, Press, Squat Snatch
10x1 of each O2M (20m)

Upper Body, DB Day

DB Bench Press <<superset>> 1A DB Row 3x10
Incline Cable Fly 3x10
1A Pulldown 3x10
DB Shrugs 3x10
DB Arnold Press 3x10
DB Hammer Curl <<superset>> Lying DB Extend 3x10
Cable Side Crunches 2x10 <<alternate>> Side Plank 2x15 sec

I have officially swapped the heavy DB presses/rows (5x5) for moderately-heavy (3x10). Debating doing the same with my BB bench presses, see if I can't work on increasing my range of motion once again. Years back it got limited when I hurt my shoulders, to where today I have to stop the bar several inches above my chest. Maybe if I drop the weight way down low I can get back to touching my chest, then slowly work my way back up. Maybe not, it may prove impossible, but with my son joining me in lifting now I feel like I should provide the good example and at least try.

Today - Improved Health walking video, 21 minutes; stretching 18 minutes. Same as last time.

@AnnPT77 -- glad you counted all the snow shoveling and ice picking. That's a workout in my book! In fact, I list "shoveling snow" among the 20 or so exercises I do regularly, but the truth is I do that once a year, tops.

I didn't work out T-Th because of what I thought was a developing sinus infection. My head feels better today so I got in the gym for 21 minutes on the elliptical, then another 20 of free weights, sit-ups, and the like. Also 20-25 minutes of walking outdoors.

I can feel my arm and lower back muscles while I sit here typing on the couch.

Leg Day

Squats 4x10
BB Step Ups 3x10
BB Hip Thrust 4x10
Seated Leg Curl 4x10
RDL 4x10
Seated Calf Extend 4x10
Hanging knee raises 2x25 <<alternate>> Plank 2x90 sec

My quad was still grumpy with any pressure from the leg curl machine pad, but I didn't want to skip hamstring work two weeks in a row, so swapped in RDL's. This got me to thinking how I really haven't been doing anything for my lower back, which has started to be grumpy, then it hit me: I can swap out the hip thrust (always uncomfortable the way the bar rests on my hips) and the leg curl/RDL, all while hitting my lower back, if I throw back in deadlifts. This time, however, I will do the trap bar version to save my back. Plus, I need to introduce my son to deadlifts now that he's been lifting with me for a couple months now.

Got in the pool at the gym today with my son (special needs teen). I did mini-laps around / beside him while he played with a kickboard for just over half an hour. A good time all around.

@nossmf

I love this story.

I especially like your take-away; can't change the past but can make changes going forward. That's wisdom.

💪😊🏋🏻‍♂️

Treadmill - 1 hr, 3.0 mph, 12% incline

I haven't reported in for a few days, and kind of mostly haven't worked out. But boy, have I been shoveling/sweeping snow, mostly at the friend's house where I was cat-sitting.

I did do a short 10k +3' stationary bike ride on Valentine's day, 102W average, over 80% Z, remainder below.

Saturday, did some shoveling, didn't track the time, probably 45-60'.

Sunday, about 1:16 moving snow around.

Monday, more snow, 49'.

Today, friend was coming home so I was more thorough (I have an AWD small SUV, she has a small 2WD sedan), about 2:49 shoveling/sweeping snow, and chipping ice.

Tonight, rowing team practice, the usual warm-up, stretching, pause drill and stroke progressions to start, then 4 x (1500m on, 3' off), with a strokes per minute rating increase each 500m, except a decrease on the last piece. As usual, I rowed at easy pace through most of the "off" bit. I forgot to wear the chest belt so don't have fully reliable HR data (too much arm flexion, so the wrist HRM drops out sometimes) but it looks like at least 13' Z4, 16' Z3. I did see it claiming 120bpm at some points where I know it was higher. Wrapped up with some more stretching.

Thought tonight's stationary bike ride might be poor, since my legs still felt a little cooked from the unusual activities of the past few days - I was already up to 456 Garmin intensity minutes for the week just from Monday/Tuesday - but it was OK. Back at 60' + 33' CD, 96W average, 16 pseudo-miles at 15.2 mph, overwhelmingly Z3 . . . plus another 125 intensity minutes, Garmin says.

KevinD6112 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Thought tonight's stationary bike ride might be poor, since my legs still felt a little cooked from the unusual activities of the past few days - I was already up to 456 Garmin intensity minutes for the week just from Monday/Tuesday - but it was OK. Back at 60' + 33' CD, 96W average, 16 pseudo-miles at 15.2 mph, overwhelmingly Z3 . . . plus another 125 intensity minutes, Garmin says.

what in the world does all that mean? I do stationary bike a lot and am curious. Thanks

I rode my stationary bike for an hour (60'), and afterward added an immediate 3-minute cool down (typo in there, should've been 3' CD but I accidentally typed 33' - oops). Usually, I start the cool down at the average power (in watts) for the hour ride, then try to drop it by 10 watts at each minute mark. That'll usually get my heart rate below 125 beats per minute before I stop pedaling.

The bike, which is technically a bike ergometer so gives me various semi-accurate statistics, said my average power output over the whole 63 minutes was 96 watts (96W average), and claimed I went 16 miles at an average of 15.2 miles per hour even though I was stock-still on the stationary bike in my living room so they weren't real miles (16 pseudo-miles at 15.2 mph). This is a kind of high-moderate-ish steady state pace, not stellar or super fast, even for my demographic.

My Garmin watch tracks my heart rate in 5 zones, zone 1 being the lowest. Well, technically, there's sort of a zone zero, not even counted as exercise. Zone 1, for me, starts at 91 beats per minute. The highest zone, zone 5, extends all the way up to my tested maximum heart rate.

The watch said 56 minutes and 27 seconds of this ride was in zone 3, which was 88% of the total time (so overwhelmingly Z3). If it matters, Z3 currently happens to be 127 to 144 beats per minute in my case based on maximum and resting heart rate. The rest of the ride's heart rate was below that - mostly occurred at the start, but a teensy bit more below zone 3 at the end of the cool down, too. The Garmin said there was another 22 beat per minute drop after I stopped pedaling, in what it saw as the recovery period post-exercise.

You didn't ask, maybe because you have a Garmin yourself and understood it, but the "intensity minutes" thing is basically Garmin's way of tracking that mainstream experts' idea that for basic health and fitness we should get 150 minutes per week of moderate cardiovascular exercise, or 75 minutes of more intense exercise, or a proportionate combination.

Garmin looks at intensity of the exercise the user did, splits the exercise time into moderate minutes and intense minutes. It then multiplies the intense minutes by 2, and adds the doubled intense minutes to the moderate minutes to get "intensity minutes" as a total. So after last night's (Wednesday) ride, I was at 581 of the expert-recommended 150 minutes I'd want to target for the Monday to Sunday week.

People who are serious about cycling look at Functional Threshold Power (FTP) as a key metric, testing it periodically and using it to plan progressive training. It's usually expressed either as watts, or watts per kilogram of body weight for comparability across people of different sizes. If you're interested, this seems like a reasonable overview article about cycling FTP and how to use it in training, with the caveat that I'm not a cyclist so I don't look at training in that way.

https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/what-ftp-really-means-to-cyclists/

I hope that makes sense now! If you have questions, please ask.

I know no one else here cares about all those details in my posts, but summing it up that way helps me stay focused on whether I'm keeping my workouts reasonable, making progress or not, etc. . . . a self-accountability thing.

I've been a cardiovascular-sport athlete for around 23 years (rower, not cyclist; the cycling is cross training and fun variety, plus alternating activity helps my aging body - now at age 69 - recover better). I started rowing while still obese, stayed obese training pretty hard for a dozen years, and even competing in both on water and machine rowing. I got used to tracking my workouts in ways like the above for training purposes, so have just kept doing it. I don't use cyclist metrics like percent FTP because I'm not really a cyclist.

You should just see how arcane my notation for the Winter rowing machine workouts can be! Stats for on-water rowing are probably more intelligible, though I semi-avoid the more obscure notations for either of those that we use among our rowing tribe.

Are you sorry you asked?