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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Losing Weight

When you want to lose weight, you run.  When you run, you lose weight.  Funny how it works.  What does it mean to lose weight?  People gain and lose weight every day.  During the night, we lose weight from doing nothing but simple respiring, perspiring, and our body metabolism.  In one night, an individual can lose 2 lbs because of those three factors.  But does it mean that they 'lost' weight?

The fluctuation of weight is something that happens.  To me, it's the product of what you do with your life.  Your body reacts to what you do and will adapt accordingly.  Should you go out and run every day, your body will do its best to adapt to that and make the body lighter, so as to lessen the strain and make it easier to constantly run.  Should you do nothing and lay around, your body will adapt to that and will not worry as much about the weight because you're not doing anything anyway, and instead, store the energy in fat.  If you lift heavy weights, your body will lose the fat and gain a lot of muscle to be able to lift what you have been training with.  Whatever you do will consequently change your body weight.

When running, I don't think your ultimate goal should be 'to lose weight' but instead, to run longer.  I don't lose weight to run fast, I lose weight to a certain point BECAUSE I run longer.  When I help train people to get in shape, I make sure they don't focus on the weight, because the weight will come naturally.  Instead, I work on the time and the distance.  Two important things that help push the body forward in the right direction.

I have seen too many times where people focus on the wrong things and worry about their weight.  Their ultimate goal is to be in better shape, so I believe that it's important that they focus on the runs, and not worry about the steps as long as they are going towards the right direction.  Of course you can't just up and go to the goal, you need to work at it.  In focusing on getting in better shape, your weight will automatically come to a point where your body needs to be.

Focus on what's important.

Today, because I felt my foot hurting, I did not go cycling and instead, I took it easy.  I did 8,000 calf raises.  Now, although it wasn't as much as much as I wanted, I was able to put the focus of my exercise on my calf muscles.  Now if each calf raise was a step in a run, that would mean that I took 16,000 steps, 8,000 steps per calf.  This would be approximately 48,000 ft, or 9.1 miles.  Although the work itself was considerably less, the effort directed on the calf would be just about the same, and it felt good to do that many calf raises.  Maybe next time I'll go for 23,056 calf raises, which would account for a full marathon.  Doing calf raises definitely was helpful, as it did not harm my joints at all.  Focusing on the muscle, I am able to impact one muscle group at a time, little by little working to make my body able to do long distances and have the muscles protect me from the jarring impacts the long distance running would have on me.

2 comments:

  1. Having read these posts daily, there are a lot of great points in them. One of the common themes in the posts is balance. The paradox pops up unwittingly of an inability to apply basic principles of balance introduced in this blog to the whole of life – meeting a deadline yesterday, throwing a disorganized (unprepared) party today.

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