Still, I managed to stick to my slow carb diet right up until Christmas week, when I unleashed and enjoyed all the sugary, dairy and carb filled foods of the season, so the damage hasn’t been too bad.

Now, it’s a new year and a new six week exercise plan has been started. This next six weeks is all about kettle bells. I’m still looking for the most effective workout routine, and having found kettle bell swings to be very productive, I thought this six week stint would be a good time to try some other kettle bell based moves out.

The weekly plan is simple, short and only three weeks in, I’m already feeling the benefits. It breaks down as follows:

• Monday – 200 crunches (can’t not do crunches) – Turkish get up (with a very light bell for now as I learn the movement which is harder than it looks) – kettle bell swings.
• Tuesday – 200 crunches – 20 press ups – 5k run
• Wednesday – 200 crunches – Turkish get up – kettle bell clean and press
• Thursday – 200 crunches – 20 press ups – 5k run
• Friday – 200 crunches – Turkish get up – kettle bell high pull

On the kettle bell days those swings, presses and pulls are all done with my heaviest bell (16kg) and are each done for a length of time dictated by rolling two dice and adding their values. The shortest time could be two minutes (1 and 1) and the longest time could be twelve minutes (6 and 6).

Whatever the length of time I try and do as many well formed sets of reps as possible, with rests where needed.

The idea is that by working for fixed but random lengths of time my workouts are varied over the weeks and hopefully there’ll be no plateaus in grains as I can up the weight / and number of reps per session.

Over time I should be able to do more reps with less rests in any given time frame. And the best part is that I’m not having to spend hours every day doing the workouts.

So far, my back and core are feeling stronger and my legs are feeling more powerful so it feels like it’s working well. We’ll see when the six weeks are up and my weight and body fat percentage numbers are in.

Fingers-crossed.

I applaud your efforts. Riding in and amongst some of the busiest traffic in the country is a brave endeavour.

I salute your commitment to getting in some extra exercise, saving on your transport costs, reducing your carbon footprint, or whichever combination of these noble goals drove you to peddle our streets.

But, FFS get some lights if you intend to ride after it gets dark. One on the front as well as that little flashing red thing you wear on your back. I don’t care if it makes no difference to how well you can see, it makes all the difference to whether we pedestrians can see you coming.

Yours,

One “I’ve nearly been mown down by one too many of you light-less tw*ts” fellow Londoner.

PS, Here’s a handy link to a whole selection of bike lights that you can buy from Amazon. No excuses. Bike Lights at Amazon

A fully immersive gaming rig. Omnidirectional moving treadmill to let you walk around for real. Game driven lighting and surround sound. 180 degree floor to ceiling video screen. Motion sensing crouch / jump controls. In hand gun controls for both weapons and viewing. And it shoots back at you for real.

Well done The Gadget Show.

The routine had been to do light weights and a 5km run on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and spend Tuesdays and Thursdays sessions doing heavy weights.

I’m now in week two of the current six week period and I’ve not done any of that. Instead over my rest week I decided to try to get more running into the mix and focus on endurance rather than strength in this period.

So, my weekly routine now involves: Mondays and Fridays: doing a set of 200 crunches and 15 pressups followed by a 5km run. Tuesdays and Thursdays: doing a set of 200 crunches and 15 pressups followed by a 5km interval run. Wednesdays: a rest day.

Last week I just ran 5km on the four running nights to get back into running after a week off, so yesterday was my first go at the interval running. Wow. Did that burn.

I did a 1km warn up jog and then did a 250m sprint, 250m jog, 250m sprint, 250m jog over the second and third km. Then jogged the fourth km and repeated the 250m sprint / jog / sprint / jog for the fifth km.

Ideally I’d like to be doing 1km warm up, 3km of 250m sprint / jog intervals and a final 1km of warming down, but last night my lungs were burning so much after the third km that I swapped the fourth and fifth km around.

I’m hoping that tomorrow I can follow the 1-3-1km pattern. I’m not sure if the intervals will improve my overall 5km time (they certainly didn’t last night) but I do think they will improve my sprint times and help reduce my recovery time.

But with all the games being played in the wee hours of the morning UK time if you’re more of a casual fan you may have shown no more than a passing interest, keeping up to date with developments on the pitch via online match reports or TV highlights. Or, thanks to a select few England players, you may have been more interested in the off the pitch activity than the games themselves.

That’s all about to change. This Saturday at 06:00 UK time Wales will take on Ireland in the first of the quarter finals of this year’s competition. If you are a hardcore rugby fan you will understand that with both Wales and Ireland playing some amazing, on-form rugby at the moment, this single game is certainly the most exciting prospect of the competition so far, and could prove to be one of the most epic games in the sport’s history.

If you’re not a hard core rugby fan, if you’ve only showed passing interest in the sport or the competition up until now, this is the game that will engage you, delight you and convert you.

This is the game to get everyone you know up early to watch. Don’t set Sky plus, don’t wait for the highlights, don’t miss the live broadcast.

This game will set the benchmark for the rest of the World Cup. If I was a betting man, I’d put good money on the winner of this match making the final.

I’m hoping it will be Wales. I’m confident that Wales have the skill, the depth in numbers and the belief to win. I’m also aware that Ireland have beaten Australia, won their pool and have the experience that Wales is lacking with their young team.

As a Wales fan, I’ve no doubt that Wales can win. But if Ireland take the game and knock Wales out of the competition, I’ll support them in the next round, the final, and hope to see them lift the Webb Ellis Cup. It would be a grand farewell for Ireland’s great elder statesmen of rugby.

But for now: COME ON WALES!

After that set back and once I was feeling better, I gave myself about another 4-5 days off to fully recover and then kicked off another 6 weeks of what I referred to as my “burn workout plan”.

Quick weights; core, chest, back, arms, shoulders followed by a 5km run Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, mixed with a heavy chest and back weights session on Tuesdays and an arm and legs session on Thursdays.

I’ve just finished that six weeks and things have gone pretty well. I started the six weeks with my body fat percentage at 22.1% and finished with a reading of 20.3% (using my new scales, after the old ones that gave lower readings stopped working).

My weight has gone from 98kg down to 94.1kg which I’m not so happy about (remember I’m not looking to loose weight, just fat) but it’s too bad.

But over the six week period both readings have fluctuated up and down a fair bit. I’m not sure why that’s been the case. The trend is still in the right direction but it’s not been a steady decline.

While the body fat percentage and weight readings are good, but not spectacular, the area I am blown away by is my running. When I first started running my 5km route at the beginning of August I was happy to finish in under 29 minutes. Over the past six weeks I’ve been able to bring my 5km time down to consistently under 26 and a half minutes and I’ve broken the 26 minute mark twice now to bring my PB to 25:57.

I had planned on doing sprint training instead of the 5km run on a Wednesday, but opted to stick with the distance running as I was enjoying it so much.

This week is now a rest week, I’m relaxing the diet to allow carbs and I’ll not be doing any proper exercise (I may do a couple of light 3km runs just to keep my legs going, but won’t be pushing it too much). Then next Monday I’ll start my next six week diet and exercise stint. This time I’ll be doing the sprint work on a Wednesday in the hope it will improve my distance time even further and also help in the fat burning stakes too.

Store your bike and your helmet in one place with this neat Bike Rack Birdhouse

Hat tip @alexmace

Found via: kotaku.com

Then over the weekend I got knocked for six by either some form of food poisoning, or some sort of tummy bug. I was bed-bound for the best part of four days.

I basically didn’t eat anything for the first two days of the sickness, and then could only manage some toast and chicken soup once I was eating again.

I’m all back to normal now, but four days of sickness has taken it’s toll. I’ve lost the best part of 3kgs in weight and dropped 1% body fat, which you would think would be a good thing. But it’s not. My goal has never been to loose weight, and while my body fat percentage dropped, not eating is not a healthy way of achieving it or loosing the weight.

I’ve taken the rest of this week off to recover and make sure I’m back up to full strength before pushing the exercise too much. Next week I’ll pick up the routine again, though I may hold back a little to give myself some time to get back into the swing of things. I’d prefer to be working at 60% capacity for a week and be able to continue training as normal the week after rather than going all out next week only to knock myself out again for the following couple of weeks.

It’s a good thing I’m targeting next May as my deadline, the set backs are starting to add up!

1. Firstly I’m tweaking my diet slightly to include a daily low fat yoghurt, berry and protein powder smoothie. This will be had after my daily workout to boost my calcium, vitamin and protein intake. Both the yoghurt and the berries go against the slow carb diet, but I’m keen to experiment.
2. The second change will be to mix cardio and heavy weight days to see if the mix will increase my strength while burning more fat. The plan is to follow a 5 day a week plan that sees me doing a quick weights session followed by a 5km run every Monday and Friday, a heavy chest and legs focussed weights session on a tuesday, a light weights session followed by a sprint session (or touch rugby match) on a wednesday and a heavy arms and core focused weights session on a Thursday. This week will have to be a warm up week as I’m away from Thursday evening so will only three days in this week, which is probably good as it lets me ease back into running after not doing it for over 6 weeks…
3. The final change is that I’m going to start recording some additional body measurements to remove my over reliance on weight and body fat percentage readings. I will now also measure my biceps, waist, chest and thighs to see what change my plan has on my size and shape as well as composition. I should really have been doing this from the start, but I’d thought that the weight and body fat measurements would be good enough. They’re not.

Despite my best efforts it wasn’t a great six weeks. To start with my scales broke which means that all my measurements taken since week three have been different and can’t really be compared with those taken before. So, I’m not entirely sure what my progress is.

Week five of the experiment also saw me start a new contract role at a legal publishing firm in Swiss Cottage. Being in a new office with it’s germ-harbouring-air-conditioning didn’t agree with me and I caught a summer cold that lasted most of week six too. Basically that meant that I couldn’t workout as hard as I would have liked in those last two weeks.

Now I’ve made my excuses, it’s time for the results. At the beginning of this six weeks (my second) my weight was 97.5KG and my body fat percentage was 17.6%.

At the end of the six weeks they were 96.8KG and 21.8%. Frustratingly, despite the lower weight (I’m not aiming to loose weight it’s just a by product of the experiment) my body fat percentage has gone up to higher than it was before I started the whole experiment.

I’m hoping that the jump is mainly down to the different scales, and to be fair to them they do have two settings: one for normal people (which I’m using) and one for athletes which if I use puts my body fat percentage down at around the 15% mark. I’m not entirely sure why there’s such a big difference. The instructions that come with the scales suggest only using the athlete mode if you exercise for more than 2 hours 4 or more times a week. I don’t. So I’m resisting using that mode.

I guess the lesson in all of this is that home scales, however nice looking or well recommended are probably not the best way of measuring your body fat percentage. As I get closer to the May 2012 deadline I may see if I can get a more accurate reading at my GP or at a sports clinic.

For now though, this week is a week off and next week I’ll start round three of a six week plan. The plan is to add running back into the exercise mix and to go back to the slow carb diet proper with a single exception: I’m going to add in a fruit, yoghurt and protein power smoothie every week day. I’m hoping that including some fruits like blueberries or raspberries in the smoothie will help fight off the germs in my new work environment and that the (low fat) yoghurt will give me a good calcium hit five days a week while topping up my protein intake.

I’m hoping that a full six weeks of using the same measuring device will result in the numbers going in the right direction, even if they are slightly higher than on the old scale.

Only time will tell.

Looking back to the start of this six week period, I was planning on trying something out, experimenting with the formula to see if a tweak here and there could improve upon my previous six weeks of intense workout plus slow carb diet success (I dropped 1.6% of my body fat without loosing too much weight in those first six weeks).

I wanted to see if introducing orange juice back into my diet along with dairy (low fat) could really inhibit me from loosing more fat. So for the past four weeks I’ve been having a glass of OJ with my eggs and spinach every morning and having a dash of semi-skimmed (1% fat) milk in my coffee now and then. I also changed my workout routine.

In the first six weeks I tried to run twice a week (5k a time) and complete a 30-40 minute workout routine 3-4 times a week. In this current six week set I decided to focus on building lean muscle and so dropped the running in favour of longer, harder weight sessions designed to be completed as circuits.

Over the first three weeks things were going okay. My body fat percentage was moving up slightly, but it wasn’t going up too much and a slight rise was to be expected given that I’d stopped running. I wasn’t burning as much fat, but I was feeling stronger, and after a few weeks of feeling like I was going to die by the end of my killer kettle-bell workout, I was adapting well to the workout.

But then, this week it all went wrong. My trusty scales, the seemingly magical device that I stand on every morning to see both my weight and my body fat percentage, my trusty digital friend died. Totally gave up the ghost on me.

No matter how hard I tried, it couldn’t be revived. So I had to make an emergency visit to my local John Lewis to get some new scales. Only, these new (very nice by the way) scales are not the same brand, or model and so when I read the instructions, set them up and got on to measure myself I wasn’t totally surprised to see that they give a different reading. I was, however, disappointed to see that they gave a significantly different reading. The last reading on the previous, original scales had been 18% body fat. These nice new scales showed 21.6%. Arse. (As an aside, they show my weight as being about 3kg lighter then the previous scales…)

As I said when I kicked this whole experiment off some two and bit months ago; home weighing scales are NOT the best way to measure your body fat percentage accurately. But, measuring with something is better than measuring with nothing at all, and as long as you stick to the same inaccurate measuring device, there should be an element of consistent inaccuracy. Alas, now I’m measuring with a different inaccuracy, and comparing my new readings with the old is like comparing apples with oranges.

So, as of week four of this second six week exercise and diet experiment I have learnt the important lesson of how faulty equipment can seriously screw up an experiment, that I should have been patient enough to source an exact replacement for the original scales and that not running (or maybe its the drinking orange juice / milk) does impact on how much fat I burn.

I’m going to continue with the next two weeks as planned (I’ve even invested in a bigger kettle-bell – 16kg – to make things a bit tougher) and continue to measure myself with the new scales. Then I’ll have the all important week off, and regroup for the next six week stint during which I plan on adding running back into the equation, perhaps even with a sprint training element in the hope of getting the new scales to show my body fat going in the right direction. Here’s hoping.