Project Battle Fury Week 4: Gettin' Heavy

Hard to believe it's already been 4 weeks into this thing.  The most important thing about exercise and dieting is making sure you stick to it.  The change that comes with exercise is a slow and laborious climb up a tall ladder, and you quickly learn that it's easier to fall five rungs than grab the next.  Doubly so for someone like myself.

I made some changes to the plan.  My "Phase 1" hope was to burn off a ton of fat, then mix lifting and cardio during "Phase 2."  Turns out this is a serious pain in the butt.  Building muscle requires a caloric surplus, high in protein.  Rapidly losing weight, however, requires a caloric deficit.  Taking some advice, I solidified some suspicions: it would be much smarter for me to gain muscle mass now, then worry about burning off that fat later.

It's actually a pretty simple principle if you look at it from a Computer Science standpoint.  Doing cardio burns fat at a constant rate - O(1), as we like to say.  However, putting on lean muscle is a linear-time improvement - O(n).  This is because while cardio is excellent at burning calories while you're doing it, the only lasting improvement it makes is to your heart strength.  (Not that there's anything wrong with that, though.  Your heart is a pretty big fucking deal.)  Gaining muscle improves the rate at which you burn fat just sitting around.  It's a choice between $25 now, or getting your account's interest bumped to 5%.  Putting on muscle rewards itself in the long run, and the longer you wait to do it, the less time it has to work its magic.

So, who knows if I'll be hitting that 175lbs mark at June. The one thing I do know is that if I do all this right, I'll have less fat around my waist by then, and I'll be in better shape to do harder exercises.

By the way, here's what 4 weeks of lifting and judo have done to me:

Antediluvian

Postdiluvian 

Doin' it right, every night

The fact that I'm already writing my fifth consecutive blog post just further reinforces my understanding that human memory does not keep memories linear.  While it's been an entire month since the first post, each of these Sundays has felt closer together than the rest of the days in the week, scrunched together like the neck of a drawstring pouch.  Yet, I still can hardly believe that I'm still in the game.

I got the results in the mail last week, and I now can officially say that I have that thing everyone thought/thinks was/is bullshit and wasn't/isn't actually a thing. It's good to have this kind of perspective about yourself - to know what exactly is and is not within the jurisdiction of your executive consciousness.

The report says exercise is one of many things that helps with the focus problems.  First-hand evidence compels me to agree, though the effects don't last particularly long.  Still, it makes me feel even better about having taken the hit to my gaming time to go to judo and pump rubber-coated-iron.  What I've always worried about is having the focus in the first place to stick to an exercise routine in the first place.  I have to show up at the gym, three times a week, do this ancient pole-and-disc ritual, then go home and make sure to eat exactly the right things.  This must be repeated every week until I stop caring about the well-being of my meat bag.  So far, so good, as they say.

I usually quit after an excuse floats through my head.  Archery fell through when the costs added up and lasting benefits failed to manifest.  Fencing provided no community for my age, and plus everyone there was either far better than me and grew impatient teaching.  One of the unfortunate effects of this condition is having difficulty internalizing the outcome of past challenges - success or failure.  When you fail to internalize success, they call it the impostor syndrome - though it is not an official pathology.  I suspect it is one end result of many different diseases, ADHD included.  When you can't remember the successes of past trials, the only thing you can remember is how embarrassing starting as a newbie can be.

So, how is it that I've managed to log a full month's worth of lifting and dieting?  Your guess is as good as mine.  Publicizing Project Battle Fury may be keeping me honest, knowing that I'd let more than just myself down if the whole thing fell through.  The fact that the whole project is non-competitive helps a lot too.  I don't have to compare myself to other people to strengthen myself.  Finally, I suspect the simplicity of the whole thing plays a big part.  The biomechanics of lifting weights is so simple, I know that if a press seems impossible one day, a couple good nights' rest and a pile of dead animals will make it possible the next time.  Every other activity requires what appears to me to be a gargantuan level of focus, but the simple, steady progress of lifting asks nothing so strenuous of me.

Only time.

Weight: 194.9 lbs
Fat: 24.2%

Squat: 210 lbs
Bench Press: 120 lbs
Overhead Press: 105 lbs (seriously fuck these)
Deadlift: 245 lbs
Power clean: 55 lbs