Tuesday, August 28, 2007

I do loooooove a good rest day!

Mondays are rest days in the new training schedule, and yesterday I really rested. Not rested as in "slept," but rested as in "sat on my ass and watched 'How Do I Look' and knitted all day and didn't break a sweat."

I probably shoulda/coulda done yoga or lifted weights, but I truly believe in a total rest-from-exercise day once a week.

I didn't used to. And maybe – just maybe – I need to go back to working out hard every single day in order to get where I want to go. But I'm not quite ready. Yet.

Now that I've written it down, I'll probably be ready next Monday. Heh. Hey! It could happen!

I also truly believe in following the training plan, unless it says "Easy Run. Two Miles." I can't seem to just run two miles any more; four is the minimum. If I'm going to change clothes and drive to a flat road and work up a sweat, I'm not going to do it for just two miles.

I can't seem to lose weight any more, either. Or still. Whatever. The latest issue of Health magazine showed up yesterday – I don't remember subscribing to it, but whoomp, there it was! – and in it is an article about how The Biggest Loser show contestants lose weight.

Among other things, they do 90 minutes of high-intensity exercise daily. I only do that on Sundays – the day of my long run. They are also active in a less intense way several hours the rest of the day. As opposed to sitting on their asses watching "How Do I Look." And knitting. And, of course, they strength-train three or four times a week.

I have a ways to go. In more ways than one.

3 comments:

Laura N said...

Wow, yeah, no wonder they lose weight fast on that show. I'd be eating 1113 calories a day and probably would burn 500 with 90 minutes of exercise. And they do 3-4 strength training workouts a week? That's a lot of time in the gym.

Hope you have a good day today!

denise said...

You might find a recent Time magazine article interesting reading. Although the Biggest Losers do well on the show, they struggle like everyone else (and often lose the battle) to keep it off.

Here's a link to the article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1627013,00.html

It's interesting that the one person they point to as successful long term still exercises 1-4 hours a DAY!

There comes a point where the tradeoff is just too much.

denise said...

I notice my article link is not displaying correctly. If you just go to time.com and search on "biggest loser," the article comes up. It's called Fat Chance (Life as a Biggest Loser) - or something along those lines.