Yesterday, wanting to get a jump on my steps for the day and knowing I’d be busy later, I set my elliptical trainer for a full hour’s workout, instead of my usual 45 minutes.
I also decided I’d try to push the speed, and see how many calories I could burn (the machine calculates that based on, I guess, my weight, time, speed and resistance level). Usually I stay around 60 rpm and tend to get about 10 Calories per minute. The one time I’d ever done 60 minutes at once before (the previous weekend), for instance, I’d burned 609.
But on Saturday, I’d done more than 500 in 45 minutes, and I was curious whether I could maintain that pace for an hour.
I did so without ever breathing hard — although there was a lot of sweat. I also did it with a relatively slow average heart rate — 119 bpm. (Which sort of surprised me. I had looked down in the last few minutes of the workout, and it was at 135.)
The result? 671 calories.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that I didn’t get to do a second workout, so my total for the day was only 11,460 steps. Before that, I’d done more than 15,000 each of the three days in February.
I’m going to try to top 15k again today. We’ll see…
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Good job!
I’ve been doing the gym thing since October and it isn’t easy. The gym’s rules for stationary bikes, steppers, and tread mills is 20 mins to prevent backups, so I really can’t imagine doing that for an entire hour. My hat goes off to you there.
Still, I can “bike” for 13 miles without getting too tired (sadly, can’t seem to break past the 13 mile mark). The first time I thought it would kill me and I was only getting a couple miles. After the first month I didn’t even notice it. Good time for reading. It’s given me time for two collection of Larry Brown short stories, that awful Fire & Fury book, the Timber Press Guide to Gardening in the South (highly recommended BTW), the Tao Te Ching, and a quarter of Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens (it’s a very, very long read).
It’a amazing how far you can get by consistently adding increments. An extra quarter of a mile, another 5 lbs on the bench press, 5 more sit ups, or one more pull up every couple weeks adds up quicker than you’d think.
Pondering the idea of doing the 4K training thing, but my joints simply can’t take it. I can run a half mile and for the next week I’m moving like a broken push puppet, wondering if my hip joins are going to give. Even doing a real farmer’s walk (walking with a max load, in this case 150 lbs) without knee braces will make the cartilage in my knees pop and even then it’s a total gamble. I envy those 25-year-old guys who can do deadlifts all day without batting an eye.
“Good time for reading.”
Oh, I wish I could. Cindi Scoppe used to take her proofs down the gym in the basement and read them while on the elliptical. I tried that once or twice years ago, but I just can’t read (much less write on the proofs) with my head bobbing up and down like that.
I CAN watch TV, though, and it’s a wonderful distraction. I’ve got a Roku 2 hooked up to the old standard-def TV in my home office, where my elliptical is located. Netflix and Amazon Prime provide me with plenty of distraction, with some of the TV shows being a perfect length for my usual 45-minute workout.
The great motivator for me? When I discovered inadvertently several months ago that my phone had been counting my steps every day for the past two years. From that day on, I can’t let myself get through the day without topping 10,000, and preferably 15,000…