My arms don't work good no more

C25K: Started final week! 2 more sessions to go!
Push-ups: Finished week one! Five more to go!
Squats: Finished week three! Three more to go!

Pretty pleased about the running guys: I managed to go for the whole thirty minutes! In fact, I went ahead and went for another three minutes. If my treadmill is to be believed, after thirty three minutes, I ran the full five kilometres, supposing that the treadmill reports the distance accurately and in kilometres! So I'm going to have to kick up my speed a little to run the full distance in thirty minutes, but I'm really happy that I managed to do the whole distance. Still gotta finish the last week before I can pass final judgement, but it's looking like the programme is a winner, I'm certain I couldn't have gone the distance back when I started.

Push-ups are going well: Finished the first week, at the lowest tier. I don't think I could have done what I did in the last session when I first started, a whole.. week ago. So yeah, there's next week coming up, followed by an exhaustion test at the end of that. I'm aiming to beat 11. I feel pretty good after these sessions, I can't wait to find out if they're doing anything! The only downside is the complete exhaustion in my arms at the end of each session. The sensation comes back in a couple of days though, so it's all good!

Squats are pretty.. Well, not easy, but they're fairly comfortable. I'm wondering if there's any cross-benefits from the squats to the running, or vice-versa. Indeed, I'm surprised I was able to start at week three at all, maybe that came from the seven weeks of prior running? Man, this health business is really quite involved!

Another day, another pair of broken legs

C25K: Had to abort at 25 minutes due to broken glass, 2nd session of week 8 marked complete anyway
Push-ups: Finished day 1 of week 1 (Sets of 2, 3, 2, 2, 3 + 0 (max) knee push-ups)
Squats: Finished day 2 of week 3 (Sets of 13, 16, 11, 11, 16 + 5 (max) squats)

So yeah, my treadmill and my running managed to break a glass today! My set-up was less than ideal, and the vibrations caused by jogging knocked open a cabinet, and a bunch of glasses fell out. One broke. So, I had to stop at the 25 minute mark to tidy that up. I feel confident I would have got to 28 minutes anyway, so we'll continue on the schedule anyway!

Push-ups! I did them! I finished all my sets today. I'm happy, even though they were all the easy mode sets. The next day looks like it'll be way too difficult, but I'll give it a go anyway! If that's a bust, I'll redo day one until I'm happy and think I have a chance of finishing day two.

The squats were fine. I can see why the sets are ordered like that, if they put the first sixteen later on I wouldn't have been able to finish. The one minute gap between sets is a god-send. It's funny how after a minute break, I can do the first five or six reps like I'm completely fresh from the start of the day, but they get harder faster as you finish sets. I'm happy to say that I managed five squats on top of the sixteen minimum squats for the final max set! We're going to get there, I think. It's gonna be okay. Sweaty work, this squat business.

Lessons are Learned

C25K: Started Week 8, finished day one (28 minutes running)
Push-ups: Did not finish sets (1 set from the top bracket).
Squats: Did not finish sets (4 of 5).

Today is what you'd call a learning day. I've learned two things:

• You should have more than one day off between sessions, at least when starting
• I should be in lower brackets.

For the push-ups, I had no chance of finishing my sets in the top bracket, so I switched to the mid-bracket. Even then, I couldn't finish my sets there either, possibly due to the fact I'd already done one and a half sets of the top bracket. So next time, I'll be starting from day one again, in the lowest bracket.

For the squats, it seems skipping to week three was an okay choice, but I just about couldn't finish my last set (of five) in the mid-bracket. So, I'll be in the lowest bracket of week 3 next time. Looking at the number of reps per set, I can probably get away with moving on to day two of the week, so next time I'll be in the low bracket for day two of week three.

I found that my legs and arms didn't want to play today, possibly having not fully recovered from the stress test. I will wait two days before picking up these programmes again. However, the jogging went fine, with 28 minutes clocked up. Next time, I'll be jogging for 28 minutes again. The time after that will be the first thirty minute run, I'm looking forward to it!

100 Push-Ups, 200 Squats, 200 Sit-ups

Right now, I'm in the unfortunate position of not being able to fit any more gear in my house. For one thing, I plan to move soon, so it would be ill-advised to be buying big unwieldy things like power cages or bar-bells. That said, I hope to eventually give 'Starting Strength' a try, by Mark Rippetoe, a complete body strength building programme focused around bar-bell training. Whether that will come about by buying a bunch of stuff or getting a gym membership remains to be seen, but until then, I'm interested in programmes that require no equipment, save the floor beneath my feet.

I have woeful upper body strength, and suspect that the strongest parts of my body are the legs. It's a pretty unbalanced system, and I want to correct it. There's a few programmes I've researched, and plan to start tomorrow, having completed their initial stress tests yesterday. The programmes are: The 100 Push-Ups Programme, the 200 Squats Programme, and the 200 Sit-Ups Programme. Programme, programme, programme. There's other programmes from the same series, for dips and pull-ups, but I'm not interested so much in those right now. Pull-ups are an especially distant dream right now, I imagine.

The average length of each regime is eight weeks, and each one begins with an initial test to see how many 'good-form' (correctly performed) push-ups, sit-ups, squats, etc. you can do. Then, depending on your performance, you either start at week 1 with a set of reps appropriate to your test results, or if you're really good, week 3, again, with sets appropriate to your test. Take a day off between sessions to let those micro-tears and whatnot heal.

Every couple of weeks, you take another test to calibrate how well you are doing, and make sure you're doing the right number of reps in the following weeks. When the programme is over, you take a final test to try and push out your maximum number of reps, hopefully hitting the target number. If you don't, redo the last week and try again!

It's all fairly straightforward, the websites have the complete regime breakdowns, and even provide printable schedules you can cut up and fold in to a neat little booklet. Some of the programmes have 'alternate' methods of performing your reps. For instance, I am so weak I can't do more than two ordinary push-ups before succumbing to fatigue. Instead, the website suggests I perform knee push-ups, where you let your knees touch the ground and you perform the push-up using your upper body only. Provided the program seems to work the first time around, there's definite incentive go back and do it again with ordinary full-body push-ups instead.

Unfortunately, the websites gloss over the fact that all this requires a proper diet if you're planning to build muscle or strength. Nutrition is beyond the scope of this blog post, but there's an excellent primer over at the Bodybuilding forums relating to building muscle and gaining weight under the 'Starting Strength' program, and most of the advice is pertinent to working out in general (note: The language can be a little coarse at times), and another at the 4chan /fit/ wiki (note: more bad language!). Once I get a little better at this, I might make a post with what I've learned.

So that's all the theory out of the way. How did I do in the initial tests for my three chosen programmes?

• (Knee) Push-ups: 11
• Squats: 33

As I said before, I am very poor at ordinary push-ups, so I'm doing knee push-ups. However, I'm pretty good at those, and will start the first week working with the largest sets. If that turns out to be a bust, I can downgrade, it's early days yet! My squat performance suggests I should start off at week 3. I'm not so sure myself, but again, it's early days; I can give it a go and if it's a bust, I'll go back down to week one.

I'm a little anxious about these results. For the squats, I was able to watch myself perform them, and have convinced myself they were good-form. My good performance might be attributed to my endurance training with the C25K programme, or maybe I've just always had good legs? Or, and I'm hoping it's not this, I've been doing bad-form squats! This sort of thing needs to be corrected right away so you don't end up throwing away all your effort.

I've yet to properly take the initial test for sit-ups, as I find I'm able to do over 100 without any real strain apart from boredom, pointing towards bad-form. I'll do them another time, paying proper attention to form, probably on the same day I start the other programmes.

Indeed, I was surprised by how many push-ups I could do, even if they were supposedly at 50% body weight. It's a little harder to check this myself, so I'll have someone check my form during the first session, or I'll record myself and see. I'm new to these exercises, I can probably expect to get better at them over time, but it would be good to start well too!

That about wraps up the introduction, time to get exercising!

Inauspicious Beginnings, and the Couch to 5K Programme

Hey all, and welcome to the first post on my little personal fitness blog! My name's Matt, and I've recently taken an interest in my body. Not in a dirty way or anything, honest! I've had it for twenty-something years now, and I've only just realised that it's there. And boy, it's pretty lanky and out of shape!

So I've decided to do something about it. I'm a month and a half in to the NHS Couch to 5K programme, and I've gotta say, it has definitely made me a better runner! In another couple of weeks, I will have finished the programme, and will continue to jog three times a week. So, why not open up with a review?

The Couch to 5K Programme

The Couch to 5K Programme (C25K) was developed by the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. The design choices are made explicit in the name: It has been designed for complete novices, pre-novices even, to running. If you've ever done any sort of running training before, you're probably already too good for the programme, or at least good enough to start several weeks in to it. That said, my only exposure to exercise up to starting the programme were some pretty intense Dance Dance Revolution sessions, so I was squarely in the pre-novice category!

C25K is broken down in to nine weeks, with each week containing three running sessions. It's recommended you leave a gap of at least one day between sessions. Each session starts with a five minute brisk walk. The programme starts off fairly easy, the first week is composed of 8 repetitions of one minute running and ninety seconds walking, for a total of 20 minutes. I didn't find this particularly challenging, but I wasn't about to start jumping ahead in the programme! In the following weeks, the rest periods get shorter, and the total time running increases.

At the halfway mark in the programme, the total time is 21 minutes, but you only have two 3 minute rest breaks. By the end of the following week, you have no more rest breaks, and are running for 25 minutes straight. The remaining two weeks of the programme build your stamina, with the final week being three 30 minute long running sessions. Not bad for someone who two months prior was sat on their bum watching television, right?

I imagine many people look at the programme and think "Why do you only gain about a minute of total session time in all of five weeks?" The truth is, over those five weeks you go from running less than half the time (walking filling the rest), to running whole session. It's a necessary barrier to break: You need to be able to run for some length of time without a break before you can work towards that 30 minute / 5 kilometre goal. Of course, even across those five weeks, if you're tracking distance ran (or total distance ran and walked), you'll see gains! So if you're worried about the numbers, don't sweat it. Start at week one, work through it.

My Experience

So, I embarked on my epic journey. I say 'journey', I'm lucky enough to be in possession of the family treadmill (This should hopefully show that I don't come from a family of slobs, just I am the black sheep), so I don't go very far when I go running. And given where I live, it's probably a good thing that I don't go outside!

As I wasn't going outside, I didn't need to invest in things like interval timers, or music players: I could just move my laptop to my treadmill and program my own run timer, and use Spotify to build my running play-list. So step one was to write a little script in Python (I'm a computer programmer, by the way!) that would shout commands at me when I had to walk and when I had to run, and program the C25K schedule in to it. I fine-tuned it over the course of the programme to do useful little things, like actually say 'Walk!' and 'Run!' and 'Stop!'.

I experimented with various music, finally putting together a great Spotify play-list (parental advisory, it's got some Kanye West!) in Week 7. Turns out, good music can help you run better! Or at least, it helped me. I've got my warm-up track (Wing-stock by Ashley MacIsaac),  followed by seven songs that inspire me to keep going and push forward every time I hear them. They're not traditional running tracks (supposing you subscribe to the 'Now! That's What I Call Running' school of play-list design), but they work for me. Of course, it's a very personal choice, and I find that being inspired keeps me productive and on-task. And hey, I can sing along between breaths!

I set-up the treadmill next to a table, on which I could put my bottle of water (vital!) and laptop. I'd hit play on the run timer, start the play-list and begin the five minute walk.

As I said earlier, my experience with the first week of the programme was a little dismissive. Run sixty seconds, walk ninety, repeat eight times. It was easy, and gave me plenty of time to work out the kinks in my lil' run timer program and start to perfect the play-list.

The second week was a little bit harder, but still fairly unchallenging. It seemed as though my university years spent playing DDR did pay off slightly! The third week however, was a wake-up call. The overall time spent on the session is reduced, but for the first time in the programme I was running longer than I was walking. I had no idea how much of an effect this would have on my runs!

Initially, it was devastating. I was having real trouble finishing until the start of week five. Sure, it was still difficult, but I could deal with it better, as though my lungs had woken up and realised it had to be at maximum efficiency during these short breaks. However, this obviously didn't help for the end of week five, which was a straight twenty-one minute run. If there was a real wake-up call, it was the end of week five. By the end of it, I was feeling completely drained, like my heart was going to burst out my chest, and my feet were killing me and my legs would never talk to me again.

I didn't let that stop me though: I saw the beginning of week six, it was back to the good old 'run, walk' cycle that I initially wasn't fond of, but now had grown to love. And I powered through the week, even the last session, a twenty-five minute run! Again, it almost killed me, but it actually felt better than the twenty-one minute run, so I must have been making progress, right? It definitely felt like that, so I kept going.

No more walking, it's all running from week seven onwards. I've just finished week seven, including its very challenging twenty-eight minute run. And you know what? At the end of it, I felt I could have kept going for the thirty. But I'm on the plan, and I'm going to follow it. I'll get comfortable with twenty-eight through week eight, and I'll storm week nine and finish the programme laughing!

So yeah, if you ask me what I think of the programme, I'd have to give it an enthusiastic two thumbs up! It's increased my stamina immensely, as evidenced by the fact I can now blow through fairly difficult DDR songs like they're nothing, and not be gasping for air by the end of them like I used to. It feels good to run, and it's something I'll continue doing long after the programme is over. My curiosity for all things fitness has been piqued, and I'm going to start working on different parts of my body very, very soon. To wrap up, I'd have to say "Thanks, NHS, for introducing me to such a pleasant and fulfilling activity, and making it easy for me to get in to!"