Blurgh… head cold. It has been a tired, sniffly, and sneezy start to 2014.
Meanwhile I have come up with yet another personal health plan, you know… those things you do for the new year and then utterly fail at? I started out with the idea of repeating last years booze-free-January, which was a success – but well, the end of January comes and old ways return. I do think I drink too much, I also eat too much… but hey, I enjoy both these things so why quit the things you enjoy during the most dreary months of the year?
A goal: in the short-term, at the end of the month calories out must be greater then calories in. The yard-stick by which this can be measured is simple: weight. How will this be achieved?
Exercise: sign back up with a gym… the home-gym just doesn’t supply enough stimulus. I erg every now and then, I toss some weights every now and then… but three times a week? No way. Its too boring. I have found a gym to try that isn’t far from home. It looks good, I’ll be signing on there next week. The weekly blueprint, to start, is:
3 x resistance sessions (2 heavy ones at gym, 1 light at home)
“heavy” sessions will start out pretty light really, and mostly machine-based until I build stability (and confidence) back up to move on with proper squats and deadlifts and more general heavier freeweight work.
2 x erg a week (at home, just ~30 mins)
2 x cross-trainer per-week (at gym)
plus general cycling…
cycle to gym/back is 11 miles, need much more than that
do a couple of 30+ mile on-road/busway routes a week
do drive-to MTB sessions twice a month – i.e. Thetford Forest
Too much? Remember: I’m unemployed 🙂 and I *used* to do more than this whilst full-time employed a few years ago. This is the plan for the next 8 weeks – I’ll revisit it on Saturday March 1st and see how I’ve gone.
I have a cycling goal for this too… if my right knee co-operates. Spring sees the beginning of the year’s cycling event season and I’ve got the following sketched into my calendar:
love the format of this event, it was a blast when I did it a few years ago… would love to do it again but not yet sure I’ll be ready for heavy off-roading. I was 85kg last time I did this and I’m ~100kg (with less lean mass) now… but I do have 4 months…
I did this last year loosely alongside chaps from Windsor & Eton brewery. It was a great weekend… but painful. The 100-mile 1st day was exhausting for this overweight bugger… but I did it & was happy to have done so. The 80-mile 2nd day was killer… I was VERY happy to complete it without having to get off and push at all, but it buggered my right knee for over two months. Anyway – Windsor & Eton have put the call out again for riders in 2014… I’m tempted.
Food:Â a somewhat radical plan… 5 days of “fasting” every month. It’s like a reset, and it isn’t a “grand month off the booze” sort of thing, just 5 days – once a month… 12 weeks a year. This starts on Monday… the general plan is to aim for 600 to 700 Calories per day, for example:
Breakfast: 50g musli, 200ml milk
Throughout day: 500g carrots/celery/raw-veg
Dinner: 300g soup @ ~150Cal
Obviously: no beer/etc
The rest of the time is business as usual. With the hope that the general bit of extra discipline in life will spread out to the rest of the month to add just a little extra control.
During the “fasting” days the gym load will be lightened, with no heavy lifting and no long distance rides.
It’s an experiment… As with the exercise I’ll revisit this on March 1st, with 2 sessions under my belt (I hope).
On a less grim note… as 2012 rolls to an end I can pick out some highlights:
Indy Man Beer Con — what a brilliant beer festival, it was great fun and very rewarding being involved as a volunteer. I’m glad it is happening again in 2013 and I hope I can fit it in!
North Herts CAMRA beer festivals — both Hitchin and Letchworth. There were difficulties and drawbacks, but at the end of the day both were successful and good fun. I was involved in selecting and buying beers again and enjoyed the job, though I think this’ll be the last time for that level of involvement. Too time consuming and North Herts is a bit of a trek from our current home.
Moved — yeah, the unexpected forced moved from a house we rather liked living in after less than a year in it really sucked. At the same time it has been a force for good. I no longer have anything to do with trains! I can cycle to/from work in 30 to 40 minutes depending on conditions and I can come and go at whatever time suits me. It really is wonderful. The house we found to move to in Willingham isn’t bad either, it isn’t perfect but they never are. A friend at work says I’ve been a lot less of an angry bastard since the move… sounds like a plus to me.
Car — we bought one. Nothing special, a 12 year old Volvo V40 Estate (“Wagon” for the Aussies). Living out in a village kind of made it necessary, but it has also been useful and even slightly liberating having it.
BBQ — well, simple things in life and all… I bought a nice new and quite large gas BBQ. I’d prefer wood or coal, but gas is convenient & clean.
Indefinite Leave To Remain — after much stress and hassle and 4 months without passports our ILR was finally approved. We’re UK permanent residents now. This is a huge relief and opens up various possibilities…
Kat got a job — after more than a year off work (job hunting is difficult with impending visa uncertainty) Kat secured a job close to the end of the year. The job starts in January and is in Cambridge town and sounds like it has the potential to be quite interesting & bleeding-edge. In practical terms, this makes life a lot more financially comfortable.
Hey, and I’m still employed too — not that it was in much doubt, but it has been an interesting & somewhat perturbing year integrating from startupesque land to big-US-corporate land. I still have reservations about “big company” environments, but I’m not confident there are other appropriate start-up options in Cambridge at the moment and “big company” does come with stability, etc. I think I make this “I’m employed” note more in the context that a lot of other people aren’t. It is going to be a tight NYE for a few folk I know, mostly folk not in IT. Lots of early and undesired retirements, labour work still hard to find, lots of small business churn. It isn’t at all rosy out there… so I’m just thankful I can still pay the rent on a decent home and have some disposable income to afford luxuries like beer.
Well, as per the previous post I hope 2013 brings more positive than negative. Despite all of the above I leave 2012 feeling pretty deflated and directionless. And fat & unhealthy.
Some may have thought that four of us in my workplace had skyved off on Thursday September 6th on a long weekend “junket” in The South, kicking back and enjoying the sun. Sunny & pleasant the weather was, but somewhat less pleasant the activities of the weekend. Albeit “fun” in a masochistic sort of way and quite rewarding. This is how these charity events work, you raise awareness (and cash) for the charity by doing something that pushes you out of your comfort zone. In this case the charity is the Prince’s Trust, which you can read all about here – and if you’re feeling generous you can donate here. We still need your support to reach our target.
Team Riverbed
TL;DR: Pre-event: 5 hours driving. Day 1: 25 miles hiking, sleepless night in a tent. Day 2: 5 miles hiking, 1.9 miles kayaking, 32.5 miles cycling, sleepless night in a tent. Day 3: 33.5 miles cycling, 5 hour drive home. All with no real beer, no real coffee, and very sore feet.
Getting There
The swearing galah.
Thursday saw us picking up a hire vehicle and driving down to Dunster. This was about 5 hours on the road, so Thursday was really mostly written off to travelling to a hotel where we spent our last night in a comfortable bed for the period. Dunster itself is sort of touristy, which means the pubs are rather “gastro” and thus average on the beer front. So we didn’t even get a final chance to quaff some good ale. I can however recommend that the Foresters Arms is probably as good as it gets and as a bonus they have a swearing galah.
Day 1 – A Long Hard Hike
Start!
On Friday we had to be at the nearby registration point & car park by 7:30AM. We registered, had a quick wholesome breakfast of bacon butties (or egg butty in Piotr’s case), drank an awful instant coffee for the sake of the caffeine and set off to the beach. A quick 1 mile wander.
This took us to the official starting point for the coast-to-coast journey. From here a mass-start set us off on a marked trail to Exmoor’s highest point – Dunkerly Beacon. A 10 mile slog along bridleways and up some pretty steep ascents. It wasn’t too bad though and we came in 11th of the 32 teams. Alas, Andy managed to strain something in the groinal region on the final couple of hundred meters! Leaving him with a limp for the rest of the trip.
Dunkery Beacon
The next part of the day’s challenge was to navigate between marked checkpoints on a map and end up at the evening’s campsite within a specified timeframe. You could choose which checkpoints to “bag”, aside from a couple of compulsory ones. We set off intending to bag-’em-all. A minor navigation error approaching the third checkpoint made life a little difficult as we bush-bashed our way down into a gully, through brambles, mud, and across a stream. We popped out wondering where on Earth we were, but as luck would have it there were a few folk nearby who knew – they were checking-in to our destination checkpoint. Our primary enemy was the steepness of the terrain as we crossed from valley to valley. By the time we reached the first compulsory checkpoint we were clearly taking too long to bag-’em-all so set off on a beeline to the next compulsory checkpoint skipping a couple, but bagging a nearby one along the route.
This beeline was a long hard trudge on tarmac, which ultimately did my feet in. I do a lot of hillwalking, but clearly my feet and shoe combination does not work well for bashing the asphalt. By the time we reached the checkpoint I’d gone from hot-spots to definite blisters, and acquired a limp of my very own.
We picked a route down to the day’s final destination that took us away from roads and bagged us a couple more checkpoints. This brought us into camp eventually, all a bit tired of foot. We “checked in” to our tents, showered (ah, great hot showers!) and had a beer (not great alas, options were Tetley’s Smooth and Carlsberg, but it was cold and good after the day’s toils). We were pleased to learn that at the end of the day we had placed 10th. Perhaps all the pain and suffering was worth it. Over the course of the day I calculate we had walked about 25 miles.
When I took my shoes off earlier I found blisters on the soles of my feet the diameter of tennis balls! Not nice.
And relax…
Day 2 – A Foggy Beginning
Foggy Morning
The morning of the second day greeted us with fog when we popped our heads out of our tents. Everything was grey and soggy. Breakfast was at 06:30 – a rather early start. Tents and bags were packed, horrid instant coffee forced down, and we trudged to the starting point for our first challenge.
The day was to begin with a bit of kayaking, but this was delayed due to the fog and we had to do a foot-trek instead. I’m not sure any of us were up to this, it was early, damp, and none of us had had much sleep. Our tent-neighbours were chatting, laughing, and playing music into the early hours. *grumble* This is somewhat of an excuse for our initial good judgement being tainted by a navigational stuff-up on my part.
All teams were “released” at the same time and most headed to the same checkpoint. This was obviously a bad idea since if you didn’t get there first you’d be in quite a queue to “dib in” to the digital receiver. So we took a perpendicular route to bag a different nearby checkpoint instead. A combination of off map reading & being mislead by a blue marker that looked a little like a local bridleway blaze wasted a good chunk of our time. We gave up on this initial checkpoint and trekked off toward one of the compulsory ones.
Matt in the mist
I had glanced at the scale info on the map which stated that 4cm equals 1km – so it seemed that a checkpoint around the corner was only about 800m away. We trekked off for it, and trekked, and trekked. Wow, this checkpoint was really placed a bit further away than marked!
We bagged it and trekked back, around the lake, past the start point and down to the next compulsory checkpoint. Only seeming to be less than 1km from the start on the map. Wow, another long long trek. We ended up jogging much of it – absolute pain on my feet! We bagged the checkpoint, jogged back, and checked in. Late. Losing points as a result.
So, twenty-twenty hindsight kicks in. First the start point marked on the map was nowhere near the start point in real life. Which explains the initial misnavigation. Misjudgement is then amplified by the fact that the map had been scaled down and “4cm” really meant about “2.5cm” – our 800m trek was actually more like 1.5km. *sigh*
Lakeside
The fog had cleared, mere wisps of mist remained. It was hard to be too downhearted as the sky turned blue and the sun shone down. Next was a spot of kayaking. The time of this was drastically curtailed and we only got 30 minutes on the water. We did well in this, quickly outpacing others who set off. We bagged three checkpoints then judged that we didn’t have time to safely bag any more. It was all over too soon.
The rest of the day was on the bikes. Another navigation challenge. This took us through the hilly countryside between Wimbleball Lake on the edge of Exmoor to Crediton via Tiverton. Along the way we had a side-challenge of taking photos of a specific set of things, including “The Beast of Exmoor” (which we never found). This trek took us up some pretty difficult hills, but we were pulled along by the sight of Piotr storming up them ahead of us.
Early on during the day we opted to not visit one checkpoint because we were worried it would delay us too much. I think we’d picked up a conservative tendency from our previous foot-trekking failures. This checkpoint was at the bottom of a steep-sided gully along a bridleway. Knowing it was steep, and not knowing the terrain, we skipped it. The rest of the day was constant peddling, “dibbing” one checkpoint after another. After Bampton checkpoint “G” provided some entertainment as we attempted to escape the area on a very rough track scattered with loose rocks. This earned me one arm shredded by brambles and a little further on I copped a handlebar in the chest when I stacked it. I have a nice strip of bruising across the width of my chest from this now.
The pub is shut!
At checkpoint “J” the promised pub was closed. On a Saturday?! We peddled on and came into camp in the glorious sunshine. With enough time to spare to mock up some photos of us “in camouflage” and “doing cartwheels”. Even then we checked in 22 minutes before the cut-off time. We really shoudn’t have skipped that checkpoint! We sat in the sun and dissected the day, voiced our regrets, and enjoyed a beer or two. That evening we learnt we had slipped to 12th. The navigation failure in the morning combined with our conservative approach on the cycling challenge had damaged our ranking!
Another sleepless night, another early morning with breakfast at 06:30.
Day 3 – A Day On The Bikes
Ready to roll!Day 3
On the final day we had to make it from the campsite at Crediton to the coast at Exmouth. The day promised to be an easier one than yesterday, with just the cycling to do and a scattering of extra challenges along the way.
The morning’s cycling was going pretty well and then we hit Exeter. One of the checkpoints was at high point north of the town, accessed by a long hard uphill slog. The challenge at the top was an old “matchstick” problem, but our brains were all too addled for it. A little later Andy had an “ah hah!” moment… too late, alas. From this hill we zoomed down to the bottom of the Exe Valley. From here on most of the trek was to be along the river on a good cyclepath, a pleasant end to the journey.
The second valley checkpoint came with an extra challenge. A climb up a climbing wall! We sent Matt to the ropes – judging that he’s the most wiry member of the team so ought to be a good climber. He hadn’t tried this before, but he executed the climb with finesse and bagged us the extra points.
Spider Matt! Spider Matt!
A further checkpoint was a way off this valley path however, and we wound our way off to it. The obvious route back was along a marked right of way down a “track”. Oh, whoever set the route is a right sadist! This track was a quagmire of mud. We sloshed & “paddle-steamed” our way through. At one point there was an odd orange patch in the mud. I wondered why as I approached and soon found out. My front wheel dived into a huge hole, suspension fully compressed, and I just about went over the handlebars. Despite called-back warnings this little trap seemed to catch everyone by surprise.
After this adventure we made our way back to the river and scooted down to Exmouth. Along the way we had a “Chinese whispers” style extra challenge with the aim of reproducing a diagram. We “ninja-ed” this one, quite impressed by our own efforts. Who needs fax machines? We’re good at describing and explaining data I guess – a desirable trait in a code monkey I’d say.
Eventually we reached the coast, and our final challenge. A swim at the Exmouth seaside. By this stage in the day the sky had darkened and the wind had picked up, so a little dip in the sea was far from enticing. Piotr was up to the challenge and toiled away for the required 30 metres – netting us some further bonus points.
Piotr – swimming MACHINE!
It was back onto the bikes for a final leg to the finish line. Done!*breath* We’d raced in with just 20 seconds to spare!
We’d travelled a little further this day on the bikes, about 33.5 miles. It was all in all a more pleasant day; fewer hills, more rolling countryside. The muddy slog was my personal highlight of the weekend, that’s my sort of biking!
Muddy legs.
At the finish line we enjoyed some beers – just missing out on a decent ale from St. Austell! Woe! A refreshing glass San Miguel mega-corp fizz went down well enough however. After a bit of lunch when everyone had come in we learnt we hadn’t managed to slip either way from 12th – but had closed the gap to within 10 points of 10th. *sigh* So close! But just not quite there.
A 5 hour drive returned us to our homes in and around Cambridge. Glad to be back in our comfortable homes & beds after a tough weekend. To be up bright and early for work the next day.
Postscript
Results Table
We’re quite happy with our 12th placing to be honest. Especially given our general lack of training (triathlene Piotr excepted) and that our local training grounds in Cambridge can accurately be described as “flat as a pancake”. Sure, we could have done better – half the fun is in the post-event analysis I think. The take-home lesson for me is: be bold – if in doubt, just do it. It’d be better to fail for trying to hard than for not trying hard enough.
Would we do it again? Despite the hardship and peppering of pain, I believe we all would. There is fun to be had in challenging yourself, pushing your limits to see where they lie.
Well, we’re pretty much settled in here in the village of Willingham (Willy?) now. This place is large enough that the house still feels a little empty… but must resist the urge to fill it with more useless stuff. As far as quality of “homes” go it is probably the best we’ve had in the UK – very happy with it. As always there are bits and bobs that could do with a tweak. The conventional gas oven here is officially “not my friend” – though I have had some success with bread and stew. It doesn’t seem to handle large cakes very well. Conventional ovens, IMO, just aren’t going to work very well unless they’re large – like commercial large. Have certainly been contemplating popping in a replacement at my own cost and popping the current one into the shed.
Friends & family may be interested in some photos of the place – which I promised I’d post well before now. They’re sitting in the web album, actual pics around the house (before moving in, and after) are in a couple of sub-albums.
We have a new BBQ – very important. The old one we picked up for 30 quid (half price to 50 quid, and then a friend’s employee discount on top of that) back in 2006 had finally disintegrated just a little too much to be of any further use and it went to the scrap yard when we moved. The new BBQ is aptly branded “outback” – good marketing for selling to Aussie ex-pats I think. (Seriously, I’m also looking at buying a car and feel a strong pull towards the Subaru “Outback”.) We held the typical sort of “house warming” event a few weekends ago – very successful. A vast array of “craft” beer from Hardknott, Brewdog, and Ilkley went down well (first party I’ve hosted where *no* wine/champagne/etc has been opened). BBQed animals included mouflon (eastern European mountain sheep), horse, reindeer – in the form of burgers & skewers, and also llama and zebra in the form of sausages. I can certainly recommend mouflon – good solid flavour, unsurprisingly rather muttony. (I love mutton…)
The garden here is well established and ornamental, which is a bit of a pain as fitting in the sorts of *useful* plants I like is difficult. Gradually they’re edging their way in though. Alas it has been a pretty shocking summer thus far – something about “jet streams” being in the wrong place basically means it has been mostly cold and rainy. I don’t care if the locals thing 16C is warm enough, I want my 25C+! Due to the cool and overcast weather the little bit of gardening I have managed to fit in hasn’t yielded much yet – growth rates are incredibly slow.
The move has definitely improved my schedule, opened it up a bit. Still relaxing into it. The best news is I’m now getting a solid 60+ minutes of mid-high heart-rate cardio in every weekday. My commute is a 14km cycle on a mostly traffic-free route. It can be a bit of a trudge in the wet weather, but I don’t mind that too much. Winter will be… interesting. This isn’t enough exercise for me to make much positive progress alas. But I’m also fitting in the gym once again, early days yet but fingers crossed. I’ve switched back to a high-protein diet this week too. Not settling in well… due, probably, to glycogen levels my legs really didn’t want to shift me on the bike by the end of last week. It takes the body a while to adapt though, I know from experience.
Upping the fitness level is doubly important as I’ll be doing something called the “wild UK challenge” at the start of September. This involves cycling, kyaking, and, unfortunately, footwork. Running isn’t supposed to be necessary… but I don’t want to hold people back. I’ll be participating with young & skinny folks from work, somewhat daunting. Walking I can do, for miles and days – one of my favourite past-times. Mountain biking I’m comfortable with – probably not at the level of 100km per day pumping around the Peak District that I was at 3 years ago, but sufficient. This weekend I’ll be fitting new wheels and bottom bracket to my hard-tail MTB. I like Giant XtC bikes, but they do always use shitty Shimano Mx75 hubs with built-in bearing races. These never last more than 6 months of serious cycling for me – presumably a fat bloke problem. I’m fitting “Super Star” wheels that come with cartridge bearings. I’ve used these in the past on one of my bikes that got nicked, no problems but only in 6 months of cycling. Not reportedly as reliable as Hopes (which I had on the other bike that got nicked) but half the price.
We’re still waiting for passports and (hopefully) visas to come back from the UKBA. It’s been about 3 months now and I’m getting edgy about it. We got a letter about it asking us to “register out biometrics” at a local postoffice. Which we have duly done – no choice but to submit to the Orwellian state so that they can leak our private data. I may as well just post my “biometrics” online. As a “last laugh” after paying over 2000 quid for the processing we had to pay an extra 20 quid each for this. A bit of a fucking joke really. Anyway, I must not get into politics and how mismanaged this country is… it’s no better anywhere else I believe. Incredibly frustrating. When we get the passports back we’ll be permanent residents – or on a plane back to Australia.
What next? Buggered if I know. Clearing up the visa situation will make it easier (i.e. possible) for Kat to find a new job in Cambridge. Personally I feel vague pulls to get out of the tech industry entirely – I’m kind of bored of it really. That could be solved in various ways though, not all of which require going off-grid and becoming an unwashed mountain hermit. For now things just sort of bumble along. Much as is the case for most of directionless, ambitionless, and underachieving humanity.
I think I’ll bake some bread today. I have a pot of “dregs” from the homebrew I bottled last weekend which I put aside in the fridge just for this purpose… waste-not-want-not (ah – how trite, and utterly untrue). My friend emailed me this page about building an outdoor wood-fired oven a little while back. Tempting.
Me in summer 2009 - a good 15kg lighter than I am today
So many plans to loose weight come and go. I did very well for a couple of years simply going to the gym a lot, then good old “calorie counting” moved me on some more. At one point I got the weight down to a reasonable 79kg. Then a period of high workload and high despondency with life combined with more than an hour commuting daily set in and I now find myself back up at 95kg. Of course, this just makes one more despondent and everything gets worse. My move from 90kg to 95kg was pretty much fuelled by depression – not big-D depression I think, just a suffusion of self-loathing and general dissatisfaction.
So, as a “reboot” for getting out of my current rut I’ve signed up for the Prince’s Trust Wild UK Challenge. This is supposed to give some motivation, especially since I’m competing in a team. (One team member does Iron Man events and another is training for triathlons.) Motivation not to fail and look like a git is one thing, but planning and discipline are another. So, here’s step one of a plan, written-down, like.
I Must Earn My Beer
Shiny new bike computer
Beer… In the last 3 years I’ve starting drinking too much of the stuff – I blame BrewDog and CAMRA. Not drinking “too much” in the alcoholic sense, I believe, but enough that it is a significant calorific intake & a drag on my general productivity. Solution: I now have to earn beer by pre-burning the calories. (Well, it is worth a try.)
Cycling earns me half a pint (or a 330 ml bottle) for every 9km. The assumption is a cycling speed of a mere 16kmph (10mph) on average which should burn around 16 Calories per km. Calories in beer vary wildly depending on ABV (alcohol is 7 Calories per gram) and sugar content. Some examples: Sharp’s Doombar (4.3%): 233 Cal; Guinness (4.1%): 210 Cal; Leffe Brune (6.6%): 346 Cal; Skol Super (9%): 375 Cal. Skol is something I’d never drink, but I do drink a fair amount of craft beer that comes in at similar strengths. So I’m going to take a punt at my typical “pint” being 280 Calories (hopefully an over-estimate). This means I need to cycle 8.57 km to “burn” half a pint – which I’m rounding up to 9km for convenience.
However, I’m not simply going to start drinking what I cycle. There are 2 hurdles and a reset.
1st: The km count resets every Sunday morning.
2nd: My daily commute doesn’t count! (57km per week.)
3rd: I cannot drink in a week until I have done a gym session.
Basically – each week starting Sunday morning I cannot drink at all until I have tallied up over 57km (combined weekly cycle commute) and been to the gym at least once. If I want to have a pint on Sunday night then during the day I have to cycle 66km and do a gym session, for reference 66km is more than the cycle route I take to get from Hitchin to Cambridge. (Sunday beer is going to become a rare occurrence – which is a good thing!)
To help this I have bought a nice new wireless odometer for the bike with 2 mounting kits (to cover the cross bike and the hardtail). I tried using MapMyRide with my Desire HD but it isn’t reliable enough I’m afraid so I’m sticking to older-school technology. I do also use a reliable handheld Garmin GPS sometimes too, but that is a bit of a faff for everyday use.
The scheme starts today! I’ll be tracking weight & measurements every Wednesday, we’ll see how it goes. Also have already made some diet adjustments already, cutting out all carbs and filling up on lots of tasty salads.
One simple thing to say to fellow 10+-hour-per-day computer-monsters: Work your back! Worm!
[Disclaimer: I’m a tech monkey and not qualified, in any way, to speak authoritatively about training and physiology. What I have to say here merely comes from my own experience as a keyboard jockey who’s come a long way in undoing years of neglect through informed lifestyle changes. I hope I can enlighten some and incite some motivation, but please go to a gym and/or Chiropractor to see someone qualified. Now let me go on as if I know what I’m talking about…]
Rest breaks, stretches, chiro … remedial stuff you’ll find yourself doing more often because you’re weak. This goes for for yoga and pilates too, though less so since following a good program in either does have a strengthening effect on your back, but probably not quite enough. You spend hours sitting with your arms in front of you (t-rex! RAWR!) with your pecs, anterior deltoids, and abs contracted, this creates an imbalance. After years of this you’ll find your shoulders prefer to stay forward and, if you’re really bad, your relaxed posture will be rather stooped (Quasimodo!). Try to remember the drill sergeant: shoulders back! chest forward! (As my mother often told me when I was a child, I should have paid more attention.)
So, stretching from time to time, pushing your shoulders back, isn’t going to fix you. Your ancestors had to work to survive, not sit on their backside all day. So, until science can magic you unb0rked, you’ll have to work to balance yourself. You’re injured, you’re a broken human, you need to debug yourself.
Assuming you’re male, and that you even go near a gym, the following are things you probably think are great and hammer away at:
Bench Press, this’ll make your chest tighter.
Flys, the good old “pec deck”, ditto.
Crunches/sit-ups, you like that stoop do you?
These are all-time favourites and, in the case of the first two, essential and great moves. But your aim is to balance yourself, you want to emphasise the back until you’re fixed.
These are some moves you should focus on:
Dumbbell, barbell, and cable rows of all sorts. Cable rows are great for the beginner as it is easier to get the form right and there’s a lot of variance to keep you interested. Make sure you engage your back though, squeeze those shoulder blades together!
Shrugs, you’ll look like a dork but it’s better than taking 2000mg of Ibuprofen a day for chronic shoulder pain!
Pull/Chin-ups, one of the essential general moves. You don’t need to be able to do 10 of the things to make them worthwhile, use it as a benchmark and start your workout with as many as you can do (even if it is only one) and work your way up over the weeks. Once you can do around 10 start making pull/chin-up forms part of your routine, and add some weights!
Crunches can be controversial, padded people (not necessarily overweight) do them because stupid human plain-thinking goes: I’ll work my stomach to burn that nasty abdominal fat. But fat loss doesn’t work like that. Skinny people do them to bulk out the six-pack, fair enough, but if you have a core imbalance probably not a great idea. If you’re in either category you’ll just waste a lot of time enhancing your stoop. The predominant opinion in the building and lifting circuits seems to be that sticking to the major exercises will do all you need for the abs: squats & deadlifts (in various forms and along with some similar moves like good-mornings). But… if you are afraid of power lifts (don’t want to out-bulk those fashionable skinny-leg anorexic schmuck jeans?) you’d be best advised to replace those crunches with something more balanced:
Hyperextension, for the lower back, you need to balance your core as well!
Stick with the rest-breaks and the stretches, they’re essential, but strengthening your back is priority one. Don’t completely cut out presses and flys, the last thing you need is an imbalance in the other direction! Hopefully you can avoid the Chiro — but please see one if you’re in regular pain. (I suspect that they’re mostly not scam artists.)
Finally, if you’ve never done much lifting before get yourself to a gym with certified training staff. Bad form will injure you. Also, you might want to start of with elastics rather than weights, especially if you’re already chronic (this was suggested by my partner’s Chiro). Once you’re confident, at least a year in, sites like the ExRx Exercise & Muscle Directory are a great resource. (ExRx is most extensive and informative one I know, though Muscle & Strength and several others have better photo examples. Be careful though, I’ve seen a lot of very bad form demonstrated on YouTube.) Even questionable mags like “Men’s Health” are worth it for the canned-workouts and a bit of motivation (nothing like a stack of cover-models to make you feel like an overinflated weakling). And for sheer attitude I doubt you can beat T-Nation which publishes good articles by respected trainers and athletes along with the, ah, somewhat less-PC content (but wear your heaviest Americanism and canned-interview-marketing armour).
No matter what the publication, be aware that opinions can differ drastically from source-to-source and article-to-article, try not to let it get you down that one source tells you to do the opposite of the other (this can even happen within the pages of a single MH magazine!). Remember that a lot of the content is generated by professional trainers and athletes with an audience of hard-core lifters and builders in mind. Move variations, sets, reps, regimes — a lot of stuff that’s not too important if haven’t already got a pretty good start down the road already. That said, there is much less variance of opinion on what things will injure you, pay attention to such information. (Just try reading up on nutrition. Number one: Almost everything we were told when growing up is now wrong! Number two: There’s little agreement on what is right now anyway! For example, eggs and (good)fats are now in, soy and carbs are now out.)
