Health & Fitness: The Road to 40

Let’s change the subject here for a bit… enough of these looser political and religious fools. How about we take a breath of fresh air and look to better ourselves.

So there is an old Bowflex commercial where this guy with his shirt off proclaims that he’s 40 years old and in the best shape of his life. Two years ago, a friend and I (both the same age) looked at this and joked that since we are 35 (that would make us 37 now), we have 5 years to get our act together and start working out again.

When we were younger, we went through the whole fitness thing but as we aged, we each stopped working out and started a more sedentary life. Well, that has changed. Last year, both of us made a new start with the fitness thing again. We both joined gyms and started (and stopped) down the road to being healthy again.

My friend has done a superb job getting the weight off and it shows (I think he is about 4% body fat now). With that out of the way, he is now trying to add more muscle onto his "swimmer's build" (and doing a great job at that as well). Sorry boys and girls, he's already taken; though not by me. Anyway, in all fairness, he does get obsessed when he puts his mind to something so this whole working out thing comes easily to him.

So, enough about him, lets talk about me and what I think of him… oh wait, I already did that. Anyway, I find it more difficult getting into obsessions and, as a result, have had more stops and starts than my friend.

Throughout the past year, I have never been able to hit the gym 5 times in one week; something would always come up (usually too tired to get my lazy ass out of bed and get down to the gym). Well, that has officially changed! Last week (October 2 – 6) I went every day and this week (October 9 - 13) I am well on my way to another 5 since today is the 4th time. Yay me!

I am also quite pumped about using the positions of flexion in my workouts. I have never done that before. Actually, I didn’t even know about it until two months ago when I Netflix'd a DVD called Iron Man Magazine: Critical Mass Positions of Flexion. This basically shows you how to work each muscle through a midrange, stretch, and contracted position for maximum performance.

Since I workout before work in the morning, I am relatively limited in time. As a result, I have currently been only hitting one muscle group per workout along with about 20 minutes of cardio. As I improve, I will probably start doing longer workouts (means I’ll have to get up that much earlier… did I mention that I am not a morning person!).

Anyway, my height is around 6’1” and I currently am pretty stable at 208 lbs (started last year at 220 lbs *embarrassed blush*). My goal is to get that to about 200 lbs with a LOT less body fat and more muscle mass. My build is larger than a swimmer’s so I hope to pack more onto my frame than my friend. The real challenge will to beat him in an arm wrestling contest (he spanked me last time we tried).

Well, it's a start at least.