I have heavy things!
Apr. 11th, 2011 08:33 amMy parents gave me a gift certificate for Christmas and now that it's almost my birthday I've finally gotten around to using it. I went to the sporting goods store and picked up some weights. They're not as adjustable as I'd like -- there are 2.5lb and 5lb weights that you add to a barbell, but if you want to have the weights be balanced you have to add a 2.5lb weight to each side of it. Going from twenty to twenty-five isn't so bad, but five to ten will be tricky, and I may want to get weighted wrist bands. (When I was doing Morris dancing, I wanted to have the team practice with weighted wrist bands -- you have to lift your arms a lot and we had trouble keeping them high when we were tired. Practicing with weights and then taking weights off makes the off version so much easier...)
Starting something new
Apr. 9th, 2011 08:25 amFor the last eight weeks I've been participating in a program called Walk Across Texas. My co-workers and I have been doing various exercises in an attempt to log enough miles to walk across Texas. You can walk, you can do yoga, you can play squash; the WAT website has a calculator that gives you what it thinks is the equivalent number of miles for whatever activity you've been doing, which looks to be based on calories burned. I've been mostly doing the elliptical, and since the WAT calculator doesn't have options for working hard on it, adjusting my time on the calculator so the calories it thinks I've burned match the calories the elliptical thinks I've burned and get my numbers from that. Adding in approximate distances that I walk around at work, I've done the equivalent of 480 miles in the last eight weeks, which is half way across Texas all by myself, which is pretty cool.
Today I started following the program in The New Rules of Lifting for Women, which I ran across via![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
telophase. It seems pretty cool, and even though I can tell that I'm going to need to get heavier weights (I own two 5lb dumbbells and only know where one of them is) I can also tell that it's doing something -- it felt like more of a workout than doing the elliptical does, which is only moderately difficult while I'm doing it, and it's difficult in an endurance sort of way. I'll probably keep doing the elliptical a bit on my "off" days; I'm supposed to rest to give my muscles time to recover, but if I back off the high resistance settings, it'll probably be fine, and improving my endurance is always good too. Hi, asthma, I like it when you don't effect my life! Let's keep that up, shall we? I've been doing the elliptical before going to work; the weights take slightly longer than I'd like, but I do have time. My work schedule will be helpful-- I work Saturday afternoons and have Sunday and Monday off, so I can do Saturday/Monday/Wednesday workouts and only have one day out of three where morning workouts mean careful timing.
Today I started following the program in The New Rules of Lifting for Women, which I ran across via
telophase. It seems pretty cool, and even though I can tell that I'm going to need to get heavier weights (I own two 5lb dumbbells and only know where one of them is) I can also tell that it's doing something -- it felt like more of a workout than doing the elliptical does, which is only moderately difficult while I'm doing it, and it's difficult in an endurance sort of way. I'll probably keep doing the elliptical a bit on my "off" days; I'm supposed to rest to give my muscles time to recover, but if I back off the high resistance settings, it'll probably be fine, and improving my endurance is always good too. Hi, asthma, I like it when you don't effect my life! Let's keep that up, shall we? I've been doing the elliptical before going to work; the weights take slightly longer than I'd like, but I do have time. My work schedule will be helpful-- I work Saturday afternoons and have Sunday and Monday off, so I can do Saturday/Monday/Wednesday workouts and only have one day out of three where morning workouts mean careful timing.
