In my experience honesty is the best weapon in retaining health and fitness. Burying your head in the sand is the exact opposite, and we all know how easy it is when you know you’re going backwards.
Sadly this is exactly what has happened in the last few month. At the end of July (2020) I went away for a long weekend which disturbed my diet and training routine. Then in the first few weeks of August I had to bunker down to prepare for a job assessment. I ultimately got the job (which obviously I was delighted with), but the transition from one role to another came with its own challenges that have preoccupied me recently. As a consequence, almost 2 months have passed since I was in a disciplined and standardised weight loss programme.
Body transformation was my No.1 priority for summer 2020 and I have made signficant progress, even if it has been disrupted in the last 2 months. The task now is to refind my groove, getting back into a realistic and sustainable diet and training rhythm. My new job will be home-based and desk-based so it will be the very definition of sedentary. It will also be 9-5 Monday to Friday, none of which I am used to. The implication is that I will need to build a workout schedule around a typical work week and furthermore, I will need to be very disciplined on calorie control.
Cycling and gym remain my “thing” (see: https://martinjamesphd.com/cycling/ & https://martinjamesphd.com/gym/), athough I have started to struggle with a sore knee lately. This has prevented me from doing my conventional “leg day” which has been the lynchpin of my gym routine. For the time being leg day has been suspended, and I will focus on body weight (rather than “big weight”) sessions.
Flexibility has always been my Achilles heel, in this respect I’m a born loser and if I work really hard I might merely become “below average.” If I dare to dream I might even achieve the dizzy heights of “average” one day but that’s as good as it’s going to get. Once a physio told me that I’m “the least flexible person [she’s] even seen for my age.” True story. We all like to feel special but this particular instance was quite depressing. 😦
Anyway, my revised training plan and diet are detailed in the links at the top of this page. I also have an Instagram account dedicated to diet, health and fitness. Follow the link below:
https://www.instagram.com/dr.james_workoutwarrior/
TRANSFORMATION POSTS
Amazing t-shirt, decent office too
“Monster Thursday” is a 13-hour round trip to campus, with meetings and classes sandwiched between long drives. It’s exhausting, having to snap out of bed at 5am is certainly no help either. I’m getting used to it though, I felt vaguely human for portions of the Halloween week visit. 🎃 Style is wasted on business…
Try, try again
Irrespective of whether you “fall off the wagon” due to choice or circumstances, all you can do is dust yourself off and climb back on. Back to basics, back to the grind, winning your health and fitness back one meal or workout at a time. So here we go….
Weigh-in week #9
I skipped weigh-in last week, having had a highly turbulent Friday 10th July. I try to standardise the 2 days prior to weigh-in so as to ensure that results are not skewed by something abnormal. It is basic scientific practice to isolate and control variables other than that you are interested in. The result for…
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Dr Martin James 