Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Not too fat but a little too fat

Well, I did my first fitness test of the new season yesterday. It's something our local health sciences faculty can do. The numbers weren't too bad for the beginning of the season but there's a lot of room for improvement. My VO2Max was about 50 but I'm sure that'll improve once I get a better handle on my real max heart rate. The more interesting number for right now is my body fat percentage which was 15%. That's great for a regularly active person but a bit too high for a competitive athlete. The number I'm looking for is something down below 10%, so that means I've got to lose about 10 lbs prior to March. That's not a really big deal since 153 seems to be my normal spring/summer weight. The big relief is that I've been feeling like I weigh too much at that weight for some time now and to find out that almost all of the 10-12 lbs I've added over the last few years has been muscle is a good thing.

I'll take the test once a month over the next season and see if I can get a good sense of how my body changes and adapts to the work load I place on it. THe data won't give as clear a picture as something like a blood test but it will help me keep track. The big question is do I want to try and get a PowerTap to begin to do training based on how much power I produce rather than just heart rate which is only telling me how hard my cardiovascular system is working during a workout. The power data is a lot more insightful but the equipment will set me back about $500 which is a pretty penny (or is that "Penny Pretty" for all the Buckaroo Banzai fans out there).

So about a pound a week or a 600 calorie a day deficit should get the job done. The only problem is that I have to try to do this durign the Xmas season which isn't the best time to try to restrain oneself from an overindulgenece of food.

Thanks for reading.

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