The hair of the dog that bit you...

Way back when I did my first run in Toulouse, the dismal state of my body was brought to my attention not so much through pathetic gasping attempts to pass enough air through my lungs to stay alive (although there was a bit of that), but rather through a nagging and persistent pain the next day when I got out of bed.

My Achilles tendon was not happy at all.  In fact, it seemed to have shrunk by about an inch in protest at my mishandling of its emotions.  I actually limped for the first five minutes I was up.

I mentioned it in passing to the sports doctor who told me to lay off the running for at least a week and let the inflammation die down.

The pain, however, did not go away after a week.  Although I was fine during the day, the tightness remained every time I stayed immobile for some time.  I began to wonder if I didn't have a "chronic" injury.  The sort of thing that really scares me.

I remembered after a while a theory put forward by an old rowing coach that muscles heal and strengthen in response to the demands placed upon them, and so if I wanted something to get better, I had to - gently - let it know that it's services would be required in the future.  I checked online and indeed, light exercise is recommended for Achilles tendinopathy.

So yesterday, as part of the gym routine, I did some gentle lower leg resistance exercises.  And lo and behold, this morning, the pain and tightness were much reduced.

Colour me relieved.

More exercise, less detail

So I'm trying to do the HIIT on the indoor bicycle at least 3 times per week, but I'm going to stop blogging it every time I do it because frankly 8 minutes of exercise do not a blog entry make.

I'll summarise everything I do on a calendar page.

One of the frustrating things is that I'm not really losing any weight.  The general trend is down and so is the body fat measurement, but not by much.

An effort in honesty, this is probably caused by :
- Not having reduced my alcohol consumption
- Occasional food excesses being too frequent

Nevertheless, I eat very healthily compared to your average diet, salad every day for lunch, very few carbs, lots of fish in the evenings and no high-sugar drinks at all.  I've done obsessive calorie counting before and it's helped me understand where calories are coming from, but I've done enough reading to know that not all calories are created equal, and that upping my exercise regime is going to be better for me in the long run than trying to lose weight by starving myself.

Effort is really only one third of the information - there's also diet and results, I'm putting the results on another page.  As you can see, my weight and body fat are heading in the right direction, but not as fast as I'd like.

Summary for this week's effort : 3 trips to the gym, HIIT each time.

 

HIIT Tabata Protocol

Tabata protocol, indoor cycling again, adjusting for the poor performance of the Garmin last time, this time I used the built-in intervals function to see if I could push the device into making more pertinent heart rate recordings.

Much better, with accurate readings that somehow fail to convey the excruciating pain, the bulging eyes and the strange, concerned looks from other gym-goers.

The first time I got HIIT

I mentioned a couple of articles ago the inclusion of the Tabata Protocol in my workout.  Today was the first time I tried it.

The basic principle is that you do 4 minutes of very hard work and it's somehow equivalent to an hour of cardio.  While initially somewhat sceptical, I found it hard to turn down such a huge potential improvement in training efficiency.  If I can do this in four minutes (eleven once you include warm-up and cool-down), then that leaves a lot of time afterwards for weights and strength training.

There's indeed a compression effect going on : 1 hour of pain in 4 minutes of time.  Efficiency has downsides.