I try to stay fairly active, but at 31, I’m starting to notice that I’m getting creaks and cracks in places they didn’t use to be.  Or if I do happen to hurt/pull something, it takes just that much longer to heal.

I’m also the king of taking a program like P90X and “modifying” it to suit my needs (read: don’t do the real hard stuff, but expect the same results).

This go-around I told myself to actually stick with it and follow the program to the letter.  So far (33 days into to it), I’ve not done it perfectly (I tend to prematurely hit the stop button on the ab workout and 1.5 hr Yoga workout), but I’ve stuck pretty close.

One of the hardest parts has not been the workouts, but trying to follow the diet plan.  It’s safe to say that I’ve had a pretty horrible diet for quite some time.  In my teens and 20′s, it seemed that my metabolism was able to counter-balance an endless onslaught of McD’s and TBell.  This is not the case anymore.

I’ve finally started to take steps toward eating right, and I would say thus far, it probably has had the biggest effect on my waistline.  On average, I’m burning about 650-700 calories per workout (the beauty of a heart rate monitor), and I’m doing that 6 times a week for a net of about 4200 calories burned per week.  My guess is with my improved diet, I’m probably eating 300-400 fewer calories a day, 5 days a week (I let myself slip a bit on the weekends).  This should net out another 2000 calories.  So, all in, I should be dropping a little bit north of 6000 calories per week.  At 3500Cals/Pound, I should be losing about 1.5-1.7 pounds per week.

So far I’ve dropped 4 pounds…so that would put me a little behind my above calculations.  My hope is that I’ve been replacing that with some muscle, which weighs more than fat…so I’m not going to get to worked up that I’ve only dropped 4lbs.

I’ve also been told/read that I shouldn’t expect huge differences in the mirror in the first 30 days.  The last 30 days of the program (apparently) is where the largest physical differences will become apparent.

Even though I haven’t seen dramatic physical differences thus far, I have reaped the following benefits:

• Improved Strength
• Pants are fitting a bit better…what was once “tight” is now comfortable
• Vastly improved cardiovascular endurance
• Reduced stress
• Better sleep

I was hesitant to blog about this early on, due to my history of starting fitness endevours like this, but abandoning early and often.  Now that I’ve got a good chunk of this under my belt, I think I’m in a good position to keep it going for the next 27 days, then finish off strong with the final third.

29 pushups puts me in the 3rd column workouts for week 3…and that’s going to make it pretty rough.  I did my first workout of the week last night (25-17-17-15-25).  The first 4 sets went well, but the last set of 25 got the better of me.  While I was able to do 18 normally, I had to finish the last 7 on my knees.

If I do the same tomorrow night (workout #2 for week 3), I feel that I’ll probably need a do-over for week 3.

On the initial test, I could 21 well-formed push-ups without stopping.  For my age, that put me at a “Level 3“.

I decided to blog about it to make it part of the public record.  Being shamed by my co-workers is a pretty compelling motivational tool.  I’ll try my best to subsequently blog about it each week of the program.