Too Much Drinking, Now I Need To Diet

If like me you’ve lost as much weight as you want to you’re going to be faced with a bit of a problem, just what do you do next?

One of the biggest things that I’m conscious off is that as a man I don’t want to lose too much weight, I’m now at a very healthy weight the last thing I want to do is turn into skin and bone. On the other hand I still want to carry on exercising (It would still be way too easy to put on that bad weight again!). This is the dilemma. What I’m going got to do is set myself fitness goals, no more weight loss goals; my weight doesn’t really matter because now I’m going to get fit. There are probably 2 real approaches you can take to this:-

1. Get strong, build muscle mass and increase your strength (become a muscle hugger )

2. Improve general aerobic fitness

I’m going to combine them both. No more long easy fat burning workouts, from now on it’s about raising my heart rate fast and working it hard (for aerobic) followed by some fairly heavy resistance weight work. Whilst in an ideal world I’d like to concentrate on one at a time I know for a fact that by losing as much weight as I have I’ve also lost a bit of strength, nobody wants to be a boy arms! Whilst my first goal is really concentrating on my aerobic fitness the extra strength training should stop me from losing any more body weight. So that’s my plan, here is my first target:-

In 2 months (so by the 12th of June 2008) I want to have ran 12km on a cross-trainer in 1 hour or less and rowed 5km on a concept 2 rowing machine in 20 minutes 35 seconds or less.

That might not sound much but this is going to be really tough, so far my improved fitness has all been targeted at a lower fat burning zone, for these challenges my heart rate is going to be up around 95% of its maximum for long periods. The cross trainer challenge is going to involve me going nearly flat out for an hour! The rowing challenge if anything is even harder, I’m a short ass and concept 2 rowing certainly doesn’t suite my body shape.

In order to achieve this my general fitness levels are going to have to increase greatly, that means putting the right fuel in (or eating healthy as it’s also called) and getting my heart pumping at the gym. I’ll be testing myself as and when the mood hits, the only target I have is to beat those 2 times in the next 2 months or die trying! (As my dad would say, shit or bust).