Late fall 2022 through Christmas break (aka “The Week Between“), a number of factors, including but not limited to vanity and mendacity, conspired to inspire me to make some changes in myself. In an aspirational fit of hopefulness, I made a list of goals for myself. The categories:
- Health and Fitness
- Professional
- Passions and Hobbies
- Social Life and Support System
Regarding health and fitness, I wanted to do the following:
- drink less
- increase some key health metrics
- increase my bench press
- row 5k easily
- fit into a smaller size of pants, which hung, dormant, in my closet
I won’t get into everything here, but I want to highlight the degree to which I was able to follow some metrics to chart my progress. I used my Apple Watch and a couple of apps to keep track. I checked my updated stats each day in the health app on my phone. But first, what did I do?
First, and not necessarily in the order of the impact I imagine it makes, I row in the morning before work for 30 minutes. I drink less, but don’t teetotal. I eat less, because I drink less, because where there are big martinis, there are glasses of wine to follow, and too much dinner usually follows suit.
Rowing
I am luck to have a Concept 2 ergometer in the basement. I’m lucky, too, I suppose, to have a large basement, and to work and live in the same city. I row for 30 minutes most days, using Apple Fitness+ to structure my workouts. I started off following the stroke rate recommended by the trainers, but I blew past their versions of easy, hard, medium, and “all out” a while ago. I warm up around 33 s/m, and push up above 35 s/m for all-out efforts. I use Drafts and a configured action to log the distance and speed. I rowed a good bit back in 2015, and I have surpassed my stats from then.
Dranks
I used the Reframe app to learn a bit about the impact of drinking and to log my drinks. This was helpful briefly, but I settled on what I consider a reasonable amount to consume each day (tiny martini and a bit less than a glass of wine per night). I sleep better, most nights. I take less famotidine. I save money. And more good things, as you’ll read below.
Food
I didn’t really change anything except quantity here. I’m not afraid to miss a meal, because I don’t feel bad if I do. And when dining out, I usually don’t finish what I order. I eat about half and take the rest home. I can always eat more later if I under-eat, but that never happens. Did I mention I eat less when I drink less? Ah, yes. I did. It’s true. That’s like a two-fer.
Blood Oxygen
The Health app on the iPhone reports that my blood oxygen ranged from 88-100 over the last week. It has gone down as low as 77% in the past year… but not lately. I like to see it up around 97% or so, and although it does dip into the mid-90s, it’s usually in the range 97-100%. This is the so-called COVID feature on the Apple Watch. As the sampled bands of data move towards the present day, I see my blood oxygen moving up from 77-100 to 88-100, most recently.
Cardio Fitness
I got a warning a while back that I had “low cardio fitness,” which is what Apple calls V02 max.This is basically how efficiently your body uses oxygen. At the time of the low cardio fitness warning, I was exercising regularly, but only strength training. This sustained period of rowing has seen my average move up from aroudn 24 to over 30, and I’m on the precipice of breaking into “low average.” That sounds bad as I write it, but it’s the truth that it has taken a sustained effort to make a dent in this.
Walking Heart Rate
My walking heart rate went from an average of 107 BPM to 93 BPM for the last five weeks. I have never felt winded or tired walking, but it’s good to know that my heart finds this essential activity less impressive and worthy of exertion than it once did.
Cardio Recovery
This measures how much my heart rate drops within a minute after reaching its peak during exercise. When rowing, my heart rate gets as high as about 165 BPM (alhtough it has gotten highter, into the mid-170s). For the nine months leading up to my experiment, my heart rate would drop by about 12 BPM after exercising. For the past 17 weeks, I’ve seen an average of 20 BPM, athough for the last week, I’ve seen a drop of almost 30 points. The more readiliy your heart rate recovers to a more normal rate after exertion, the more healthy you are.
Resting Heart Rate
My resting heart rate has dropped over 10 points, from 83 to 73. This means that when at rest, like sitting at my desk or at a meeting, my heart beats 10 times less per minute. I remember a karate instructor saying once that your heart only has so many beats in it, so make them count. So: a more efficient heart.
Active Energy
I burn over 250 more calories per day for the past nine weeks. It must be more than that, because I’ve been burning anywhere from 250 to 300+ calories each morning that I row. (I bench press one day per weekend and managed to keep my 1 RM over 200 despite a break in the action due to shoulder problems.)
Blood Pressure
My doctor doubled my blood pressure medicine last fall. I recently knocked the dosage back to the original, because I felt dizzy a few times after taking it. I take my BP religiously to keep an eye on it, and it’s almost always below 120/80. As with rowing, I type the diastolic/systolic/heart rate data into Drafts, and fire an action to append this to a text file in iCloud.
Heart Rate Variability
This is a stubborn and somewhat mysterious metric, but it too has crept up from below 20, and in some individual caess much lower, to often spiking during the day into the 30s and 40s. I know it’s low if I’m tired or in a blue mood. I am usually pleasantly surpised to see a higher number, but often reflect that I was busy and not terribly reflective when the number is at its highest.
What else?
What besides data? Cheekbones! I have them. I got into my “skinny” pants and then blew past that benchmark, having to go out and get some new trim fitting chinos, and even two pair of size 34 jeans. 34! I wore that size in college, for a while. And in high school. High school.
So that begs the question of weight. I’m not going into specifics, but I started paying attention to my weight (not daily) about a month into this shredfest, after I’d managed to squeeze myself into some long-relegated-to-the-back-of-the-closet jeans. But I’ve shed an additional 12 pounds since then, so I’m gonna guess it’s around 30 lbs.
I even signed up for a testosterone blood test, which I paid for myself. I have never been a swarthy beast, prone to slavering over women or getting in fights. I wondered where I might be on the T scale. I wasn’t one to prowl for women in college or seek conquest. Turns out I’m in the upper range of average on the normal band, where between 200+ and 800 is considered normal. I got a 700 ng/dl (no, I don’t know how much is free T). Not bad for an middle-aged guy with a sedentary job. As with my weight, I didn’t take a baseline measurement, so for all I know, it went down. But I doubt it. It doesn’t mean much, I guess, but I will confess that I expected to be worried by the result.
It’s one of those reminders from the cosmos that you shouldn’t avoid things you’re afraid of.
I attribute the dedicated rowing and caloric restriction to everything. I want to pat myself on the back for doing it, and of course i did have to drag myself down in the basement every morning, and forgo some food, and drink less when I might have fancied another glass of wine or a larger cocktail. But it’s just what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a better version of me.
Still do. So I’m sticking with it.