Working Out
I worked out with Iggy Pop the other day. Not to Iggy Pop, but with Iggy Pop. The only other celebrity that I see regularly is The Undertaker, who is really just a quiet, soft-spoken guy named Mark.
Anyway, Blake and I have been stepping-up our workouts over the last few months. I had hit a plateau and I just wasn’t getting as lean as I wanted to be. So, we added running to our workout schedule. Now we run at a track on Mondays and Fridays. We also run at home on any day that we miss a workout. Currently, we jog for two miles and then sprint the straights and walk the curves for two miles. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday we go to the gym and work two muscle groups a day (chest/shoulders, biceps/triceps, legs/back) 3 exercises, 5×10 reps for each. We do situps at the end of every workout. The reality is that we never have a perfect week. We each miss one or more workouts a week because of our schedules. Still, once we started running, I started to see immediate results.
I decided to get my body fat measured every quarter to keep track of my progress. The first results were remarkable. They show an almost perfect example of the addage that says not to set goals based upon weight, because if you are working out, you will be replacing fat with lean muscle and your weight might not go down. In exactly three months of exercise and watching my diet (okay, not really), I didn’t lose even an ounce of weight. Not one. But, I lost almost 2% body fat. Here is the raw data:
So, what’s the goal? Well, I turn 40 in four months and though the days of having the body fat of a jackrabbit are long gone, I would at least like to get under 10%. The problem? I love to eat, I love to drink, and I hate working out. But, if Iggy can drag himself to the gym do qi gong for 40 minutes a day, swim, and have lots of sex when he is almost 60 years old (next month), I guess I don’t have much of an excuse.
Jimmy