Loosing those 'love' handles

In my youth (I am still in it!, keep saying that!) I was always doing sports, playing soccer for a couple of years and playing badminton on a competitive level for 9 years had given me a healthy body I was always proud of. Then when I started studying I took up rowing also at a quite competitive level. At least it prevented me from getting flabby from the copius amounts of beer consumed in that time. After starting with working I quit working out completely but was still biking to work and other appointments. Now since a couple of years I have a car...you can imagine the problem that gives me. I go by car to work every day and this does not give me enough exercise to keep my body in check. Additionally I eat too fat, too much sugar and I don't drink enough water so the lovehandles started forming. My metabolism is quite fast which has saved me from getting fat fast, lately I also noticed how my stamina is at a abhorable rate, I cannot even run for more then a couple of minutes without getting completely out of breath.

So my plan for february is to start exercising and eating healthier. Being a nerd I have an obsession with researching the net for information. There is an enourmous number of sites giving advice and resources about this subject. I will not try to list them here, I will try to list the information I gather from these sources in a way which makes it clear for me. A lot of these sites charge you money for their 'guaranteed six-pack in 4 weeks' etc programs, I will avoid these sites like the plaque! Information should be free is a motto I like to hear. 

I digest the following from the sources I have been consulting: 

• Set up a goal, aim for something you want to reach so you have something to look forward to. Don't set yourself a unreachable goal, make it something you are able to reach in the near future, you can always set yourself a new goal. Not reaching a goal will hurt your motivation enough to give up before accomplishing it.
• Do something you like, where you like it. If you are like me and don't want to go to the gym do it at home in your own time and pace
• Get a partner, you can motivate yourself by staying focussed on your goal but it will be easier to have someone you work with and you can motivate each other.
• Plan logically, don't start with a plan of an hour of exercise per day 7 days a week. Keep it accessible.
• Do something daily, it does not matter very much what you do, as long as you form the habit of doing something every day.
• Allow time to recover, when your legs are sore from biking the previous day do some abdominal excercises, or the other way around offcourse.
• Keep a log, it seems very important to me to be able to see my progress so I plan to keep a daily log of repetions and what I did.
• Monitor, from what I understand there are multiple plateaus in exercising all tied into your heartrate, which I will post about later. 

There are so many exercises to choose from I will keep it at a limited level for the first week. After that week I will evaluate and add an exercise per day.

For first I will start my training with some stretching exercises followed with a interval cardio workout, which the first day will consist of running since I first have to fix my bike to be able to do a bikeride. So I will start running for as long as I can (probably about 2-3 minutes) then a couple of minutes of walking fast and repeat this a number of times. I will keep a log of how many minutes I can run in the intense bits and note how many meters I will travel this way. I will end with walking for a little cooldown and at home I will do 5 different abdominal exercises for as many repetions as I can stand. This in all will take about 45 minutes I guess, 5 minutes of stretching, 20 minutes walking, then 20 minutes of exercises. The next day I will adapt this to riding my bike (which I am much more comfortable with then with running) for the cardiobit and maybe do 5 different exercises but that is to be determined.

Last thought: it would be a cool idea to take a picture of my body, take some basic measurements and record there per day so I can see my progress over the weeks.

//Z