A young man's game

The heat was constant and it made for some very arduous working conditions, everything we seemed to do was very intense and confirmed why I needed to sort my fitness out.  Not only that I didn’t like being in the body of a man twice my age with arthritis.

My first step to a new body was to learn or relearn some old exercises that I thought I knew.  For years I have been doing press ups and sit ups.  Not one of them was correct and I could do loads of them.  All of a sudden I couldn’t do 10 press ups or 4 sit ups.  Had I really turned into Mr jelly ?  Don’t ask how many pull ups I could do as it was just disastrous and as for the weights, I felt like Mr Muscle from the TV adds.

I was fully aware that my co-ordination wasn’t that good when it came to multiple exercises, I’d also lost the ability to count.  What was that all about ?  I had no idea there was so much involved in doing a press up correctly or there were so many different ones to do.  Form, it was all about form.  Not how many you could do but how many you could do with good or correct form.  Once you have lost form, it was time to stop.  Not leave the gym but change to a different exercise.  I made for the door a couple of times but coach is much bigger than me and it wasn’t worth running.  We moved onto a number of exercises that would improve my strength, agility and stamina.  There were two major floors that needed addressing, the only problem as coach explained to me was I had very poor strength in my core and the muscles in-between my shoulder blades were non excitant.  The Rhomboid and Trapezius, my Lats and Rotator cuff muscles had never been retrained since my accident and would take a long time to build and strengthen.  As for my core, a lack of use and a poor diet was showing.  It was going to take time and there was no quick fix.

By the end of week one I was sore all over, there wasn’t a muscle in my body that was not screaming at me.  The simple task of washing my hair in the shower was hard work.  In my ignorance I decided to go on a diet in an attempt to lose weight.  I thought it would help if I was lighter or just a bit lighter, maybe I could do more press ups and pull-ups if I was lighter.  How wrong could I be?

I think it was about day 3 of week 2 when I couldn’t finish the 45 minute workout period and I was feeling terrible.  If this is how keeping fit makes you feel, you can keep it.  I was feeling very low and disheartened about myself and what I was doing.  I ached all over, I felt very ill and I couldn’t see the benefits of my hard work.  My ankles still hurt, in fact everything hurt, I was in bits.  Maybe 45 was too old to start a young man’s game and I should stop before it gets any worse.

It was a couple of days later at the end of the week when coach asked me why I was only eating enough to keep a hamster alive, a very small one at that.  So I explained I was trying to lose weight to make my life a bit easier in the gym. 

The explanation I got back was on the nose and very easy to understand.  Coach sat me down after my very small tea and educated me on my diet or my lack of it and the effects it was having on me.

Your body is like a fuel tank and needs to be full before it goes on a journey or you’re not going to finish it.  That was exactly what I was experiencing in the gym, I was running out of steam and finding it very difficult to finish.  If you only eat enough to put ¾ in and train, each time you train you are emptying the tank a bit more and a bit more.  What this means is your not burning fat at all, you are forcing your body to start to feed on itself.  Because the body doesn’t know when the next refuel is, it turns that food into fat, i.e. it stores it for later.  Any amount of training requires energy.  So you need to eat properly, the right food at the right time.  It sounds very complicated but it’s not. 

Put in very simple terms, the first thing I had to rectify was my eating habits.  I needed to eat 3 good meals a day, I now have a good breakfast to start the day.  It varies between a yoghurt or porridge, followed by an omelette with peppers in (they are hard to digest) or two fried eggs with bacon and sausages.  A cup of tea with no sugar and that’s me until lunch.  I don’t think about food because I’m full.  The next meal is at 12 and I eat what’s available but I stay away from the whites and the same again for my evening meal.  Whites are sugar, bread, salt, pasta and potatoes, no matter what form they come in.  I’m not a great lover of veg and could quit easily miss it out but I don’t.   I try to eat it as often as I can and normally as a salad.  My evening meal is at around 6 and that gets me through until breakfast.

I was also told not to be obsessed with my weight, as I train and get stronger I was going to put weight on.  That’s because muscle is heavier than fat.  The ideal situation would be my weight staying the same.  As I put on muscle I would be losing fat so my weight would remain about the same.

One other aspect of my diet is my consumption of water.  I’ve never been a great water drinker and to be honest, I found it very dull.  I found it hard to start with but you get used to it and the difference it makes in you is very visible.  I now drink a minimum of 6 bottles (3 Ltrs) of water a day.  On a good day I can do 8, it all depends on what I’m doing.  Water not only hydrates you and cleans out your kidneys and liver but it helps with fat loss.  Who’d have thought it, losing weight by drinking a set amount of water each day. 

I’m all for that.