This past holiday season is behind us now. Don’t take the title wrong, I love the holidays and thoroughly enjoyed them. Perhaps a little too much. I am a little disappointed that I let myself slide like I did. I am only human after all and those pie’s were GOOD! Like most of you this created some new years goals based on health and fitness.

From the week before thanksgiving to two weeks after Christmas I managed to gain a little over 10 pounds. That was based on lots of cookies and pies and candy and eggnog and all kinds of things i could have been enjoying in moderation, but i let myself over indulge. Prior to the holidays i was definitely at a plateau which could have a lot to do with why I let myself slide. My sweet tooth IS OUT OF CONTROL!

That’s the past now. No use dwelling on it, time to focus on the present. My goal right now… get the abs out! That happens in the kitchen. Nutrition is hugely important and in cahoots with the workouts, it really is my nutrition that’s out of whack right now.

I am playing around with Noom (bought the trial) at the moment. Honestly, I am not that impressed so far. It seems like there is an automated attendant behind the scenes firing links to articles at you when you ask questions, not a real person. Another feature i am not a fan of is that it requires you to stare at your device more, like a lot more. I get it, they are trying to get you ‘on-roaded’ from a place of poor nutrition to a place with good nutrition and that is a daunting task, but we all spend too much time starting at our phones…. I don’t need another app that wants more screen time from me. I am probably more biased than the average user as i have experience with real human nutrition coaches and have been through the on road process previously.

My friend Kate Cretsinger is a health and fitness coach and is also hosting a wellness challenge. I joined that as well to help me get back on track. She is poking us with daily challenges that help build good habits like movement and hydration.

So far… down about a pound in two weeks. Its not going to be trivial to drop those holiday pounds. Think about it… to put those pounds on that quick i had to be over my normal caloric intake by 500-1000 calories a day. That’s actually low for some days, I know because I was tracking my bad decisions. I can’t have a 1000 calorie deficit every day to get back where i was. Well I could but that’s not healthy or sustainable. I know I need about 1600 calories a day to maintain my lifestyle. So I need to be in the 1500 calorie a day range to be in a caloric deficit and dropping pounds at a reasonable and healthy rate. My target is somewhere around a pound or two a week.

I GOT THIS!

If i can get rid of all the stockpiled candy and treats from the holidays without consuming it myself (**Put it in the break room at work**) and keep up the good foods, I’ll be back to normal in a few weeks. And hopefully I can take it a step further and get those abs out!

So this just happened! Facebook marketplace strikes again. Someone was cleaning out their garage and had two pull-up bars up for sale… for not much money at all, just $10. So naturally i got both of them, put one in my door, and one in a coworkers door.

I have a bad shoulder and i do a lot of pull-ups to make sure my back muscles are strong to keep that shoulder in line, per my Dr.’s orders. Pull-ups are a great exercise, but a lot of people’s nemesis. Its not easy to pick up your body weight with just your arms if you don’t do it all the time. So do it a lot, by way of having a pull-up bar readily available. A lot of trainers like to encourage the use of those gigantic rubber bands to build pull up strength. That’s not a bad idea, i prefer negatives, something an old school trainer made me do, and i saw results quickly. The biggest thing is just trying regularly!

The best part of these pull up bars is that every time someone comes to an equipped office to talk about boring specs for electronics, their hands end up on the pull up bar. Next thing you know they are hanging from it. Its great… coworkers that have been telling me they can’t do pull-ups and were not confident enough to try at the gym are already getting close to doing real pull-ups, unassisted. Its a great example of integrating little bits of motion into your day, that does not really disrupt it, and fitness results just kind of happen!

The only down side we have seen is that one set of the pull up bars has hard rubber bumpers for where it touches the door frame… and it marred the paint a little. If you go shopping for your own bar, find one with soft bumpers where it touches the door.

I am very pleased with the attention the $10 pull-up bars are getting and the very fast progress i am seeing from coworkers.

Its been another week of improving my fitness while at the office. I have the timer plugin for google chrome which goes off every 20 minutes while i am in front of my computer. Its working pretty well so far. It has never gone off while i was away from the computer and there have been a few instances where i was meeting in my office with co-workers and had to postpone, which it has a handy button for.

My base rotation of movements right now includes:
-20’ish pushups
-10’ish air squats
-10 burpees
-20 toe touches, with shoulder flares upward at the top
-20 cross body floor touches with wide shoulder flares on the way up (with weight, something from the desk, to help with my shoulder rehab)
-20 leg lifts, with a mix of torso twists to get the core and obliques engaged
Every now and then i get a little rambunctious and add in a cross-office-space-bear-crawl. Our office space is 27 yards long… its a substantial bear crawl.

How does the progress look? Hard to say so far. I need to add some kind of logging to this process. Without that its purely my ‘perception’ of progress, which can be clouded by all kinds of thing. I am tracking which exercises i do in my head right now. execution is surely not perfect, and that’s OK! Sometimes the order gets re-arranged with different office activities going on, sometimes i have to cut a break short for a phone call with a client.

The data i do have suggests there is progress.

• Body weight is down two pounds. (Halloween candy is just about gone, and diet is getting back to normal as well)
• Doing the exercises keeps me warmer as the day goes on. If i skip a break i notice i get cold as my heart rate goes to resting duty.
• I am getting more reps in before i feel like sweat may start.

That last one is subtle but kind of matters. I am at my office for this stuff. i am an engineer by day. I cant be huffing, puffing and sweaty in my office… so part of my selection criteria for number of reps is based on how i feel during the break. For instance, I can feel when my heart rate/blood pressure is about to turn into sweat. And that is when i dial it back right now. The first week, 5 burpees from cold and i was ready to perspire. It would seem that now i can get to 8 or 9 before i get that same sensation, so i go that far plus 1 usually. easy math!

*DING* time for BURPEES!

I am usually done with a break within a minute of when the timer goes off.

The long and short of this is that the movements and timer activity is working into my daily routine well, almost unnoticed, and small progress is happening. Sometimes i am like… AGAIN?!, and sometimes its like… yep i am freezing lets get the blood pumping!

Progress… stick with it, no matter what and changes for the better will happen!

For interested parties, this is what the control panel looks like for the timer i have been playing with in Google Chrome. I may have to reach out to Thomas James Watson about his Break Timer and see if we can get in the sandbox together for the development of the OfficeFitLife workout timer.

I started adding more physical ‘stuff’ to my day at the office about a week ago now. The first day i decided to do pushups/squats/burpees in a rotation, picking one of the exercises every 20 minutes. Just a few of each… like 20/20/5. The number of reps was somewhat arbitrary, i started and went until i felt like i might break a real sweat.

My fitness journey really re-started about 2 years ago. Nov 2017 is when i started a macro based diet program, quit drinking and started religiously walking my dogs every day. Since then i have had some shoulder surgery and recovered and gotten back into a workout routine using MX4 at the local YMCA.

My time at my job, at my desk, doing CAD work is still something i haven’t been able to improve on during the last two years, and honestly i haven’t really tried until now.

I started playing with timers to tell me to get up and do something. My wife has an apple watch and she says it does this for her, but she doesn’t really use it. I refuse to buy an apple watch. i don’t really wear watches. I tried some web apps and phone apps, but they required too much fiddling. I am currently evaluating a google chrome plug in.. goes off every 20 minutes. Its low input/interaction but it takes up my pc screen. That’s working well so far, but i can tell it needs more.

The next day i was sick of the rotation already. not good. That would result in not sticking with the work plan. So i added Good-Mornings, Star Toe Touches and leg lifts to the mix. that is working pretty well so far. I would like to add more core exercises next…. get the obliques an ass kicking.

In the last week i have put on two pounds… may not sound like much, but i am still on a weight loss project, track regularly, and this is bugging me… I am really trying to get to 160#’s. I crossed over 170 today. BOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I have two suspicions right now… one is that i am not sticking to my diet well. (i have a sweet tooth). The other is that all the extra squat and push-up activity is making me hold something… water? muscle mass? i don’t know yet. I am going to REALLY cut down on the candy and snacking and go back to logging my food intake more accurately for the next couple days. If I see the scale number come back down over the next few days i will know its the candy. If not… it might just be muscle weight and that is not a bad thing. Then i will have to get back to watching my measurements… i have never really been good at that.

The point of this, beyond rambling, is to share that just a timer, probably isn’t enough. i personally benefit from suggestions for activities too. I am compiling a list of good exercises for the office and working on a generator to bring them to you as a user!

*DING* time for 20 more squats!