Fitness, Health, Diet, Crossfit, Weightlifting, Musings and fun. Please comment on what you read.
Last week was cats, and this week’s friday fun videos just go to show how stupid dogs can be. First up, this dog is broken, I’d ask for my money back if I were you:
The case of the amazing disappearing burrito:
Dog Trapped in Invisible Forcefield:
I decided recently to try out a cool food diary website called fitday.com to track my diet and see how well (or not) I’ve been staying in “the Zone”, for a whole month. Every day I’ve been loading my fitday profile with the food that I’ve been eating and have been amazed at the quality of the data and reports you can get. You can see Colin McNulty’s Fitday Profile here. Additionally you can load up this data to get more useful reports:
Here are some of the great graphs and charts that I’ve got from the last few weeks, see if you can work out where the weekends were! 
This is my weightloss vs goal chart. I decided that I wanted to get down to 12st7 (175 lbs or 79.5 kg) and have been tracking my weight, nearly every day. As you can see, the weekends really show up as peaks in my fluctuating weight. I can only put that down to water retention due to increased carb intake at the weekends.
This is why the weight graph looks like it does, this is my calorie intake vs calories burned graph. Calories burned is made up of a base of approx 2,500 calories for my basic activity profile plus boosts to take into account the activity reports I’ve entered for when I go to the gym to do Olympic Weightlifting and/or Crossfit workouts
What really comes through on that chart, apart from the obvious excesses at the weekend (I neglected to enter figures for last weekend on this graph), is evidence that the Zone Diet is really a low calorie diet. A normal “good” zone day (during the week mostly) typically sees me come in at around 1,600 calories. That’s planning on around 14 – 17 blocks per day. It also nicely demonstrates just how good the zone diet plan is, as I can pretty much eat what I like at the weekend without putting weight on long term, as long as I’m good during the week. The big benefit here is this: I don’t need to feel guilty about that ice cream, chocolate or wine on a Saturday and Sunday.
This is a very interesting chart too, it shows the cumulative nutritional make-up of my food, averaged per day and normalised to 100%. You can see then that anything that is below the 100 line is a deficiency:
You can see that the graph shows that for the vast majority of nutrients, zoning my food provides a huge slew of nutrients that I eat a sufficient amount of. However there are 3 areas I should look at: Fibre, Vitamin A and Vitamin E. I know that not eating much cereals would limit my fibre intake but must confess to being a little surprised at the vitamin A and E. This alternative view helps to quantify this by making your nutritional intake look like a food label, with actual values:
Long story short, I did some research into Vits A and E, and discovered that there is little consensus amongst the different health bodies in the US, UK and Europe, as to what these values should actually be. Vitamin A for example is 900mcg (0.9mg) in the US, but 700mcg (0.7mg) in the UK (I’m at 695). As a result, I’m not too bothered about being a bit down on the figures on fitday, however it did give me the focus to check it out. The fibre is possibly a bit more of a concern, I’ll have to look at ways of improving this.
Ultimately I’ve been quite impressed with fitday.com It’s a quick and simple system to use that provides an amazing wealth of information. I know for example that you can pay hundreds to have your nutrition analysed, whereas fitday gives it to you all for free. Or you can pay a small amount to use the software on your desktop rather than on the website, and also to get access to even more advanced reports and to sync your online and offline profiles. Altogether, I highly recommend fitday as a valuable tool in keeping fit and healthy.
There’s not a lot that the internet does better than videos of cats, and here are some corkers. Checkout the pupil dilation on this cart video, it’s amazing! Great timed music too, wait for it, it takes 20 secs to get going:
Ahhh isn’t it cute when cats and dogs are friends. Checkout what happens when this forbidden love goes wrong as the cat goes for 3rd base…
And we’ll finish with a clear demonstration of how cats are a lot cleverer than they let on:
I was browsing the main Crossfit.com site at lunch time and the workout for last Saturday was:
- For time: 100 Inverted burpees
I’ve never heard of inverted burpees before and they look like an interesting thing to try (click image for the big version):
“The Inverted Burpee: starting supine, kip (or sit-up and roll) to standing, kick-up to handstand. This burpee derivative involves similar amounts of work and greater skill than the traditional burpee.”
So I tried them tonight. That’s the great thing about Crossfit, there are plenty of times you don’t actually have to go to the gym to do the workout, I did this on the landing at home! After the first 10, you soon realise it’s going to be a slog. My time: 21:35
As I was at home, I decided to check my heart rate recovery. When I first started exercising about 30 months ago now, I recorded what I was doing, what my heart rate was immediately after “exercise” (really it was just a warm up back then, and what it was again 10 minutes later. Here’s what I did on the 15 October 2006, 2 rounds of:
My heart rate immediately after was 140, and ten minutes later was 112.
Now today, that “workout” was what I did for the warm up for my 100 inverted burpees! Anyway, after the upside down burpees I immediately took my heart rate, which was 132. Note that I counted 33 beats in 15 seconds. The reason I did this was, as I continued, I counted 63 beats in 30 seconds. So in just that extra 15 seconds, my heart rate has already dropped by 3 beats. If that makes sense? Actually I’m not sure which measurement is the correct one, anyone?
The 10 minute mark also saw a drop, at 92 beats, a full 20 bps less than when I started. That’s tangible
I bought some of these chocolate covered coffee beans last week, and they are the roxors!
Just to be clear, I didn’t just by *some*, I bought *loads*. 3kg to be precise. It’s not really my fault, they got proportionately cheaper, the more you buy, so it was… well… a saving… sort of. Oh dear.
Anyway, they are my new most favourite food. I love coffee sweets generally, which puts me in a minority in the world I realise that. However these are some slight coffee tasting cream sweetie, oh no, they’re the real deal. A whole roasted coffee bean that’s been (haha) coated in chocolate. 
They pretty much taste like Mocha (I’m lead to believe, I don’t drink the stuff myself) but they do do a very good job of cutting out the middle man… water in this instance. I took some down the gym on Saturday (did I say I bought 3kg of the stuff?) and the reaction as pretty consistent: “Chocolate coated coffee beans? Are you sure? That sounds terrible. I’ll just try one… small one. Hey that’s not bad. Actually that’s pretty good. Let me try another. Hey, they’re great, can I take a hand full?” They were a great success and highly recommended, and I have to thank my friend Ian Sturrock for the original introduction to them.
I recently went to Asylum Paintball at Pear Mill in Stockport, which was awesome fun. I remember the first time I went paintballing, over 15 years ago, and the only guns available were push-to-load pistols. In fact I remember the revolution that was the pump action paintball rifle! Now the guns are fire-as-fast-as-your-finger-moves semi automatics. It got me thinking though, just how far can you go with paintball gun technology. Anyone fancy a minigun!
Here’s one actually firing:
But if you thought they were mad, how about a fully remote control sentry gun, think Aliens 1:
How cool is that!
The results are out for the English Indoor Rowing Championships, which many of my friends from Crossfit Manchester attended. I was planning to enter myself, but it was the same weekend as the Northern Masters weightlifting, and despite Crossfit’s tremendous multi modal fitness, training for both a weightlifting and rowing competition on the same weekend, didn’t seem like a good idea.
I’m pleased to report a very impressive set of results from my Crossfit comrades. For some reason, not all of them were shown as being affiliated with Crossfit Manchester, I suspect because it would have shamed all the other dedicated rowing clubs, to be totally out numbered by a fitness club that happens to use rowing machines in general fitness.
Either way, here are the results from the Crossfit members, bear in mind this is the whole of England indoor rowing championships. I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s a remarkable showing considering Crossfit’s non rowing specific training:
2000m
Men’s Open:
Pos – Name – Age – Club – Time
22 Daniel Green 23 Crossfit Manchester 6:54.3
Mens 30-39 Hwt (Heavy Weight)
18 Matt Foster 31 Crossfit Manchester 6:55.5
Mens 40-49 Hwt
18 Paul Kirk 44 Crossfit Manchester 7:08.8
Mens 30-39 Lwt (Kight Weight)
6 Sean Murray 33 Crossfit Manchester 7:33.9
500m
Men’s Open:
Pos – Name – Age – Club – Time
4 Daniel Green 23 Crossfit Manchester 1:26.2
5 Paul Kirk 44 Crossfit Manchester 1:27.9
Mens 30+ Hwt
6 Matt Foster 31 Crossfit Manchester 1:25.3
9 Dominic Beardwell 32 Crossfit Manchester 1:30.0
10 Chris Worrall 33 Crossfit Manchester 1:33.5
Mens Open Lwt
1 Karl Steadman 28 Glossop 1:34.0
2 Craig Massey 28 West Disbury 1:37.3
Mens 30+ Lwt
1 Sean Murray 33 Crossfit Manchester 1:38.6
Womens Open
1 Fay Collinson 21 Fallowfield 1:40.2
10 Lucy Goddard 27 Crossfit Manchester 1:55.2
Womens 40+ Hwt
5 Jane Holgate 49 Stockport 1:57.5
Womens Open Lwt
4 Rachel Steadman 28 Glossop 1:52.1
I’ve just realised that I never got round to posting up the picture of me and Giles Greenwood, one of the coaches at Bethnal Green. Well here it is:
If you don’t remember me mentioning him before, Giles is the British Record holder for the Snatch (180 kg / 396 lbs) and Clean & Jerk (207.5 kg / 456 lbs) in the 105+ weight category. As such, he’s lifted more than any other British person, since they reset all the records that is.
That photo is taken when he did both those lifts in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, he had less hair back then, though he’s since shaved it all off again. Giles took Gold in the Snatch, Bronze for the C&J and Silver over all. Along with Patrick Atteridge, he’s a dedicated and committed weightlifting coach, with a cutting and typical English sarcastic sense of humour.
I’ve previously posted an amazing video of someone editing a fat girl, thin, with photoshop. These are 2 more videos in the same vein. I’m amazed by what you can do with PhotoShop!
It just goes to show, that you can’t believe what you see on TV or in the magazines. This video is the reverse though, what if Celebrities we chubbers?!?