Elizabeth’s Journal

New Year Looks Good

Over the last few days I have gotten some very interesting and useful information about the work I’ve been doing with a personal trainer at Lifetime Fitness over the last four months.

First of all, I repeated the body age assessment that I’d had done prior to starting training. First assessment was done on 31 August, this one was done on 27 December. In those four months, I changed my body composition considerably even though on the scale I lost only 3 pounds. What I did was to lose 10 pounds of body fat and replace it with 7 pounds of muscle. Not bad at all! One very nice way that was measured is that I lost 12mm off of my thigh skinfold caliper test.

I also added two inches to my sit-and-reach flexibility—still a long way to go, but two inches is a good amount to add. I could do 61 pounds on the bicep strength test, which put me firmly in the “good” category, the second-highest category. Regarding pushups—which I’m very pleased with since one of my stated goals at the beginning was to increase my upper body strength—I went from doing barely one at the end of August to doing a full 11 (not modified, but full pushups) last Thursday. Yay me!

So all this shedding of body fat and replacing it with muscle improved my overall fitness from the low fair category into the bottom of the average category—26.3% of my potential to 41.7%. I lopped six years off of my body age and am now at 41 instead of 47. Considering I’m 37, I still have plenty of work to do, but I am definitely headed in the right direction and what I’ve been doing has produced some real, measurable results.

Then two days later I did an O2 Metabolic Assessment Profile (try here or here for further explanation). That gave me information about how efficiently my muscles use oxygen to produce energy. In order to burn fat, oxygen must be present—so if I’m exercising with my heart rate above the zone that I’m using oxygen, then I won’t burn any fat. Very important for someone to know who is trying to undertake any kind of significant weight loss!

My point was much lower (149 bpm) than would have been statistically predicted, so now my workouts can be very precisely targeted to accomplish what I need them to do. We did find that my heart had an excellent recovery rate (how fast it drops down after being up at a high rate), which is great.

I also found my VO2 peak (the maximum rate at which I consumed oxygen), which represents my current fitness potential to perform exercise. I was at the absolute top of the average range for my gender and age, so I was very pleased with that.

I really feel like my exercise is now doing exactly what I want it to do, and I’m strong enough that I can do 5000 meters on the rowing machine and not really even feel it—it’s actually fun, and I really hated it when I started. I still don’t like doing pushups or planks (an abdominal thing), but I can sure do them a lot better than I could in September. It’s great to look back and have some good progress to measure.

Here’s to 2008!

Posted by elizabeth at January 1, 2008 12:11 AM