Putting On Weight

As anyone who has read most of this blog would know, I spent a lot of time last year losing weight, “bad” weight.  It’s been talked about a few times.

Now I’m putting on weight, “good” weight and actually have been since about October.  My lowest weight was about 150 pounds! Yikes! And now I weigh about 164 give or take depending on the day.  Still a far cry from what I used to weigh and all the clothes I bought when I weighed 150 or so still fit perfectly (though the shoulders are a little tight in some of them), so the weight I have put on has been in the right areas and through the building of muscle.  Fantastic.

But it is really a struggle to be ok with gaining weight when one has gone to such great lengths to lose so much weight and so every now and then I feel the need to measure my fitness progress in a way that leaves weight out of the equation really.

Once I had met with Jodi last summer there was a standard sheet she had to track the goals and progress of someone that was under her tutelage it measured weight, skinfolds and that type of thing but for fitness it has pushups, crunchies and a standing high jump.  In February we decided that after having done 5 of those sheets I think that we had maxed out what that sheet could tell us and I asked her to devise some other sort of test to gauge my fitness progress.

She invented an obstacle course that involved doing laps around the gym while getting over a chest height wall, going up and down stairs, pushups, medicine ball smashes, burpees and dragging a fireman dummy.  All of this was done after going as long as my legs could carry me during the dreaded beep test! 

We first did this set of tests in March, I completed level 8 of the beep test and the course took me 6:47.66.  Which is not bad, but we also only had the one set of data.  We just did the test again this past week and I completed level 9.5 on the beep test and did the course in 5:54.62.  which added over a minute of running to the beep test and shaved over a minute off the course time!  Pretty impressive.

We also talked to one of the other trainers at the gym about what a good body fat percentage is for someone who is like me (short and over 30) and his “ummm… *this number*” was much higher than what mine is and when Jodi showed him the other measurements we had taken that day he said he was a bit jealous of a few of them.

So I’m in shape, but even still being ok with putting on weight is a hard thing to do.  I’ve been told by a few people though, most notably Amber and Jodi, that I was too thin last summer and where I’m at now is much, much better.  I do agree with that at least.