This is the first time I’ve actually ridden my bike back from work and I think it might become a regular Friday event.  I had planned on incorporating a large loop and making it about a 20km ride but the weather became a bit rainy and windy so I decided to go directly home.  This meant it was just a short ride of about 4.5 km with 3 large hills along the way.  Dead easy really even though I had to engage granny gear!

One problem I’ve got is that I’ve got a toddler seat on my bike and when it’s very windy it acts like a sail!  Not so good when you are not travelling with the wind.

I don’t think I’m going to become a keen road cyclist but it is handy to have some form of cross training I guess and cycling is supposed to be relatively good.

I’ve also started the 200 squats challenge.  This is similar to the 100 pushups challenge which I’m doing as well.  First time on the 200 squats challenge and about 7th time on the 100 pushups challenge! I’ve got both the iphone apps for them and it’s quite good to get a few more exercises in even if I never make the actual targets.  Although I have been getting closer every time I do the program!

The sun is just coming up here on Saturday morning so I’m off for a 10K run.  Hope you have a good day wherever you are!

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The testing process was quite cool. The store has a short running track which they get you to run up and down on while they film your gait.  They then replay it and determine what kind of shoe you need.  My wife is an overpronator and I’m more of a neutral runner.  My last pair of shoes were designed for overpronators so they were definitely wrong for me.

The salesperson pulled out a few different brands of shoes and insisted we try running around with them all to find out which felt best.  He also filmed us in each pair to check if they were suitable.  It was quite cool as you could immediately see which shoes helped your gait and which didn’t.

I ended up with a pair of Brookes Defyance 2 shoes which I really like:

One tip the guy gave us was to always get your running shoes 1 size bigger than your normal shoes as your feet swell when running.

I’ve done just over 40 km in these shoes since Saturday and I must admit I really like them.  They definitely suit me better than my previous pair of Adidas shoes.  My wife got some nice Mizuno’s – I forget which exactly.

It is funny that the most expensive items of clothing that I have are my shoes.  Well, except for my suit.

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The treadmills in my gym are polar compatible (which means they can pick up my polar heart rate monitor) so it made sticking to my target heart rate (180 – age = 146) a breeze.  All I had to do was adjust the speed a bit.  I can also set the machine to do a constant speed and it will adjust the incline to keep the heart rate stable but I find that’s a bit too slow to respond for my liking so I prefer doing it manually.

When I run outside I wear my Garmin 305 GPS watch which also has a heart rate monitor and I’ve set it so that a little alarm goes off when my HR goes to high.  I then have to slow down sometimes to a near crawl when I’m going up a particularly steep hill.  But I digress.

The run this morning was pretty good but felt quite hard towards the end for some reason.  I think it’s more that there is a lack of distraction in the gym as compared to running outside.  I did 10K in exactly 1 hour.  I think this shows the low heart rate stuff must be starting to work as I don’t think I could have done 10K in an hour without a higher heart rate.

The whole point of this slow, low heart rate training is to increase my aerobic fitness and cardiovascular system.  I’ve noticed that my resting heart rate is dropping.  It was in the low 50s before and now it’s down to the mid 40s so I must be doing something right.

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As such, I’ve decided I’m going to switch to displaying my Physics Diet weight. With the physics diet you weigh yourself everyday and it works out a moving average. I’ll still continue to report this once a week.

As such my weight is now officially 98.1 kgs which is down .5 kg from last week.
My average daily calorie deficit for the week was 674 calories and my BMI is 28.2.  You can see my public profile here if you are interested in taking a look.

Hopefully using the Physics Diet system will enable me to focus more on my weightloss trend rather than the specific number on the day of my weigh in.

As an aside I had something rather funny happen over the weekend. I put my ipod touch down on the roof of my car while I was putting some groceries in the boot and then drove off with it still on the roof. I was almost home before I remembered. Luckily for me I have stuck my ipod touch in a rubber sheath to protect it from being dropped and knocked about (I’m a little rough on electronic goods at times) and the rubber had gripped the car and it was still on the roof when I pulled over to check! Good on Apple for making low profile devices!

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The Google 15 encourages you to get on the scale every day by calculating a moving average from your daily weight. We then plot this average alongside your daily scale weight and a goal weight that you set–this gives you a better idea of your weight trend by masking most of the day to day noise that variances in water weight introduce.

I have had a look at it, but don’t actually use it as I use some other tools that do a similar job instead:

The first of these is Physics Diet.

With the physics diet you weigh yourself everyday and it works out a moving average similar to Google 15. To be more precise it uses an exponentially smoothed weighted average with a smoothing constant of .9. If you are more interested in the mathematics behind it you can look here.

One of the nice features is a fancy graph:

The Weight Chart lets you track your weight loss or gain. It shows you how many pounds you are losing or gaining per week, and it shows you what your calorie deficit or excess is.

The beauty of the Weight Chart is that it lets you focus on your overall progress rather than the individual readings on the scale. You will learn to watch, and appreciate the blue trend line that shows the moving average of your individual weight entries.

Daily Weight Entries

The points on the tips of the green and red shaded areas are your daily weight entries. The red area means that for that day, or period of days, your daily weight entries were above the blue trend line. The green area means that for that day, or period of days, your daily weight entries were below the blue trend line.

If you are trying to lose weight then you will want to keep most of your daily weight entries in the green shaded area. As long as your daily weight entries are green, the blue trend line will continue going down. Even when you hit a plateau, and your daily weights remain the same for several days or even a week or more, as long as those weights below the trend line they will continue to pull the trend line down.

The Trend Line

The blue trend line shows the moving average of all your weight entries. Because of the way the moving average is calculated, it emphasizes the weights in the recent past over those in the distant past. This makes the trend line the most valuable part of the Weight Chart.

If your weight changes and goes above the blue trend line you will see the trend line change immediately. If your weight stays above the trend line for very long, the trend line will change directions and show you that your weight is increasing. On the other hand, if you start losing weight at a faster rate the trend line will also show that change almost immediately.

The trend line is especially valuable when you hit a plateau.

The Black Best Fit Line

The black line is the best fit line. It shows you the straightest line that can be drawn through all of the points on the blue trend line. It is useful because it can show you the overall progress of your diet. But it can also be misleading. If your trend line is not moving in the same direction over time as your best fit line, then the best fit line should be ignored.

Another one that I use is Skinnyr:

Skinnyr is rather simple in that all it does is plot your last ten days weight on a graph. It’s a bit simplistic but it’s pretty and gives you a quick snapshot of how you are going. It doesn’t have any other advanced features. My graph for the last ten weigh-ins looks like this:

The last tool that I use is Traineo:

I record my weight on Traineo only so that I can get the fancy buttons on the right. T could write a little plugin that would do it for me but I’m too lazy. I only use Traineo for that really but in reality Traineo is more than just a weight tracking tool, it is a weight loss and fitness community.

Traineo’s idea is simple: join traineo for free and pick up to 4 friends or members of your family (who will become your ‘traineo motivators’) to receive weekly email updates on your progress towards your weight loss and fitness goals. Our easy-to-use software allows you to choose what you’d like traineo to report to your motivators so they can give you the motivation, support and accountability you need to achieve your goals.

Overall, none of them is perfect but they all help me track my weight and keep accountable so they are all worth using to me. Has anyone else found something that they could recommend?

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