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I caught Human Body: Pushing the Limits on the Discovery Channel the other night, and it was an amazing series. I hope it’s on again soon, so I can Tivo & watch it once more. There are 4 episodes: Sight, Strength, Sensation and Brain Power. I think I only caught Strength and Brain Power, but based on those the others must be good, too.

I have to admit when switching from live athletes / actors to the CGI models, where they took the skin off to show how the muscles worked, was pretty freaky. Probably because these things w/ no skin still had eyes.

But there’s a lot I learned about strength, muscles and bones. Like how bones are the strongest naturally created material on Earth, yet they can flex to avoid being broken. Or that when we use all of our strength, we’re only using about 1/3 of the muscle’s true power, but in life-or-death situations, our mind can override that and allow us to use the whole muscle.

If you see it in your TV listings, be sure to record it.

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve really wanted to go running again lately, and after a some emails were exchanged yesterday, a few of the group I workout with decided we’d get together in the morning. They planned on going pretty far (in my book), so I was going to turn around mid-run and keep it short. But I felt great at my pre-determined turn-around point and decided to keep going. And going. And going.

When done, I had run for nearly 1-1/2 hours, covered over 8-1/2 miles, and used up 1,160 calories!

The furthest I had consecutively run before that was the 5-mile Turkey Trot. Even with the Turkey Trot’s warm-up & cool-down, it didn’t total 8-1/2 miles. Needless to say, I was quite tired and my legs are killing me. But it felt GREAT to get out & run again. Let’s hope the weather keeps improving so I can get out more often.

I’m looking forward to next Saturday & a chance to run again.

This entry was posted by Eric on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

After my 9-month update went so well, I was looking forward to my 1-year update at the gym. However, as the week progressed, I wasn’t feeling too confident in what the numbers were going to say.

It’s not horrible - still in the right direction, but not where I hoped to be. My body fat went down again - at 12% now, down ½% from last time and way down from 22% a year ago. This time, the measurement locations were switched to the typical male spots (leg, abdomen, chest), which I’d like to stick with moving forward (instead of chest, I previously had my tricep measured, which I’m told typically comes in lower on men). My weight was down a little over 4 pounds, which is the result of watching my diet the past 2 weeks during the crunch time.

I figure I lost 5.67 pounds of fat, and added 1.37 pounds of muscle. I’ll probably stick around this weight now for the next 6 months, especially if I want to run. Next week, I start my VO2 Max training @ UB so 3 times / week I’ll get that added bonus.

Next update is June 15 - we’ll see if I can be at my 2008 goal of 11% body fat by then… wish me luck!

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

This morning I went to UB again for the 2nd day of VO2 Max testing. Today was much easier - warm-up on a bike, then pedal “like a bat out of hell” (they use such scientific terms) up to about 170rpm. Then they press a button and 5.7kg of resistance is added to the wheel. All of this data is recorded on a computer, and they see how quickly my heart rate goes up and I come to exhaustion. After that was 4 minutes of cool-down where they watched my heart rate come back down. So aside from warm-up and cool-down, it was a 30 second test today.

They did confirm that I’m the oldest participant in their study, but I also have one of the highest VO2 Max readings of the group. So even though I’m old, I know how to breathe efficiently.

Friday I go back, when I’ll get to ride the bike as long as I can while keeping up a pace of 70 rpm. They say it can be 15-25 minutes. I’m a bit nervous about this one.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

I started my participation as a human guinea pig in a VO2 max study at UB this morning. It was quite an experience.

They started with the typical stuff: height, weight, questionnaire, body fat measurements, then fitted me for a crazy headpiece that held a mouthpiece right near my mouth and hooked up a heart rate monitor. After a few minutes of warm-up on the bike, they started the testing, plugging my nose which forced me to breathe only using my mouth, which I’m not used to at all. As the time went on, they kept checking my heart rate and perceived level of exertion. Once I thought I was at a certain level, they began collecting what I exhaled in giant sacs. All the while, I had to maintain a pace of 70rpm on the bike as they increased the resistance on the bike.

My mouth got very, very dry and the mouthpiece filled with saliva (yummy, eh?). It was like breathing through a snorkel with a bit of water in there. When I felt like I had a minute left, they made the final adjustments and got the last bit of data. It’s hard to think, “I have 1 minute left” but I had to make the call at some point. I could have kept going, but maintaining the 70rpm would have been hard.

Then they emptied the sacs through some fancy equipment which measured how much I exhaled and how much of that was oxygen versus carbon dioxide.

There were other participants coming & going as I was there, and I felt like the oldest and most out-of-shape person in the group. I probably am, too. I don’t have any data yet, but to use as a baseline:

The average young untrained male will have a VO2 max of approximately 3.5 litres/minute and 45 ml/kg/min. The average young untrained female will score a VO2 max of approximately 2.0 litres/minute and 38 ml/kg/min. … World class male athletes, cyclists and cross-country skiers typically exceed 80 ml/kg/min and a rare few may exceed 90 ml/kg/min for men and 70 ml/kg/min for women. (via Wikipedia)

After more testing this week, there’s nothing next week, followed by 6 weeks of training then a final week of testing. As I get data about myself, I’ll share it. Then we’ll see if I can improve on those figures over the next 8 weeks.

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Let me start with last night - after dinner, we ran out to Cub Scouts then home for a little more work. A script that I had written & started just after 5pm was still going at 9pm (stopped at 2:50am - have to start it up again). Anyway, I was hungry, but stuck to my diet and didn’t eat last night. That was a mistake.

This morning I headed to the gym for my plyometrics class and was OK for the first 45 minutes, but didn’t have enough energy for the final 15. I think I need to eat on Monday and Wednesday nights, just to have the energy to get through class the next morning.

Lost tonight - can’t wait

Oh, and thanks to Chris for fixing the sifr on my blog. The pretty titles were not linking in Firefox. I’m not going to link to his site, because I don’t want to share him with anyone else! The fix was to upgrade to sifr 2.0.5 and re-export the swf movies. Simple enough (for him).

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:52 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.