TheAndySan – Weight Loss 2 of 3 – My Exercise Routine
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
http://www.theandysan.com
Due to popular demand, I’ve decided to do a 3-part mini-series on how I lost over 20 lbs in 2 months without starving myself to death.
The second video will cover my workout routine as well as give you guys a quick back-story on what was going on in my life after I made the decision to lose weight.
When I started working out again, it was the dead of winter so I couldn’t do much outside beyond shoveling snow, which definitely helped me lose a couple of pounds. During this time, I stuck to using the treadmill in the basement that had been collecting dust.
Originally, my daily treadmill workout consisted of a 20-30 minute routine where I’d start off at 3 MPH at a 3% incline and then increased the speed every 5-6 minutes and then went back down to 3 MPH when it got to be too much to maintain. I then tried increasing the intervals as well as the overall length of the workout to 30-45 minutes, but I soon realized that simply increasing my workload wouldn’t help me lose more weight. In fact, I happened to be gaining a little bit of weight during that time.
Instead of chalking up my weight gain to muscle gain or some other BS, I decided to change up my routine in order to shock my body into losing the weight.
I then changed my routine to the following: 5 minute warm-up at 3 MPH, 1 minute at 6 MPH, 2 minutes at 3 MPH, 1 minute at 8 MPH (later 9 MPH), 2 minutes at 3 MPH, and so on until I’ve been working out for 20-25 minutes. This kind of routine is commonly known as interval training, and it really kick-started my weight loss and I began to notice that my endurance was increasing as well.
I used to do situps as well, but I found those to be largely ineffective since in order to lose the gut, you’d need to do cardio routines and have an overall good state of health. Even if I did situps until I was blue in the face, nobody would be able to see any changes because even if I had rockin’ ab muscles, they would be covered by fat.
Since the weather’s nice, I’m doing pretty much all of my workouts outside now. I would either run up and down my street for 1.5 miles or go on a long bike ride around town (by long, I mean at least 10 miles round-trip).
I remember back when I left UU around May 2007 and moved to Coldwater, I weighted around 230 lbs. This is definitely the heaviest that I ever been, and the heaviest that I ever will be! Besides blaming myself, I blame my weight mostly on poor eating, late-night eating, and not too much physical activity. Granted, I did go out on walks with my friend Dan and whoever else wanted to come along, as well as solo bike rides and stuff like that, but I was simply eating too many empty calories for it to make much of a difference. Not to mention that I was a pretty depressed guy at the time (just read some of my blog entries from late 2006-mid 2007 to get an idea of what was going on).
Anywho, when I moved from UU to Coldwater, there wasn’t much of anything to do there so I decided to walk around town every day. I then progressed to taking bike rides around town to going to the Wal-Mart in Celina and back every day. As a result, I lose 15 lbs in just a month’s time!
I know that there’s a large group of people who think that running is a more effective means of cardio training than biking, and it is when you compare the calories lost/distance, but I find riding my bike much more enjoyable than running because I can be outside longer and actually enjoy the scenery more than I could while I’m running. Also, biking is much kinder on my back and knees so I don’t feel like crap the next day.
Even though I’m not rockin’ the six-pack yet, I’m still the slimmest I’ve been in years and I couldn’t be happier! For a guy like me who’s 5′10″ (that’s 70 inches total or 175 cm for my international audience), being over 200 lbs is considered heavy. At the time, I didn’t think I was heavy (I knew I wasn’t slim, but I didn’t think I was fat), but now that I lost all that weight, I look back at some of my earlier videos and I can see that I was indeed overweight.
In the next and final video in this 3-part mini-series, I will go over my dieting routine. Hope to see you there!
TheAndySan
Duration : 0:5:24
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