Resurgence

It has been over 2 years since my last entry.  Life has a funny way of engulfing you in unforseen activities that derail any plans you may have made.  Having made another cross-country move, adjusting to new positions at work, settling into married life for the third time, adjusting to the news that I'll soon be a father again (ironically for the third time), then preparing for that new adventure, all within the span of 14 months has left me with little time for my own pursuits.  Through all of this madness, some nuggets of learning and wisdom have surfaced that I was not expecting.

1) I've had noticeable changes to my recovery ability as I'm entering my mid-forties
This could be due to age but I suspect another culprit is cumulated effects of working a sedentary job for the last 14+ years.  I've always had problems with my right knee, especially during low barometric pressure weather episodes, but now I find my right hip, ankle, and shoulder are consistently tight and overly sore after workouts.  I spend a lot more time doing warmup activities before working out and have dedicated more time every week to stretching and soft tissue work.  Chiropractic, while a staple component of my recovery routine during my competitive years, has fallen to the wayside for the past 4-5 years.  Now that I'm back in north Texas, I've scheduled my first appointment back with my old chiropractor to help get my joints re-aligned.  I've learned that regular chiropractic care is essential for those of us that work desk jobs.

2) I've learned that I respond well to an overload of exercise on a weekly basis, however that exercise should be balanced
Having gone through years of concentrated strength and strength endurance training to compete in Powerlifting, Strongman, and Olympic-style Weightlifting, my natural inclination is to train hard and heavy with weights.  Having neither the drive, the desire, the time, nor the recovery I did 10 years ago has left me a sore bag of bones at various times within the last year or so.  Training in this style (low rep, heavy weights combined with HIIT style cardio throughout most of the year) requires a certain level of time investment that I simply do not wish to carve out any longer.  I've learned that a good mix of strength training geared towards hypertrophy for my upper body and flexibility/mobility for my lower body a couple of days per week balanced with 2-4 days of strategically organized HIIT and medium endurance cardio work best for me at this age.

3) Exercise selection is highly dependent on environment
This one has only become apparent to me this past year.  Living in SoCal offered me so many awesome opportunities to exercise outside (cycling, hiking, running the Santa Monica Stairs or the stairs at Sand Dune Park in Manhattan Beach) that I'd let my weight training reduce to 2 days per week of mainly O-lifts and I was able to stay lean through all of the other activities.  That doesn't work here in DFW b/c, although there's a pretty large cycling culture here, I just don't enjoy getting outside in this environment very much to exercise (heat, allergies, bugs, etc).  Hence, I've picked up 10 lbs of unwanted flab that I struggle mightily to get rid of.  I've been my leanest in Texas when I have a membership at a gym with a lap pool and I can swim 2-4 days per week to complement my strength training.

4) Diet is even more of a 4-letter word in your forties
I've probably most acutely felt the effects of age-related metabolic decrease when it comes to my diet.  I still track my food and honestly, my diet hasn't changed much at all in the last decade yet I hold on to ~10 extra pounds of body fat compared to in my thirties.  In a nutshell, this is metabolism.  I don't do the same amount of high-intensity exercise that I did back then but I'm eating roughly the same amount of calories.  This coupled with the natural decrease in metabolic rate that comes with aging are the culprits.  I am stubborn and loathe to decrease my caloric intake by 100-300 calories per day so I tend to seek to make this up with exercise.

These are four of the key things I've learned in the last couple of years.  The purpose of this blog was initially to chronicle a long journey from fatness to fitness.  Now, I believe the purpose is aptly morphing into the long journey through the life of fitness.

More to come...