rigsb.net

Last week, my mom sent an email out to the family proposing a health and fitness program that the entire family could participate in. She has proposed that we form a partnership or support group called EUREKA: The Rigsby Health and Fitness Program, where each member chooses their own plan and goal. As we all work through our plans we share things that work or do not work in trying to meet our goals. At the end of a 6 week period, we will all assess our progress and come up with some reward.

I have been meaning to get back into a normal and regular workout routine. I started out the year very well while training for a Spring hockey tournament. After the plans for that tournament fell through, I lost some motivation and have been slacking off since. I believe EUREKA will definitely get me motivated to start working out again.

I started researching different ways I could track my workouts and weight. More specifically, I wanted to find some way that I could track this information and share my progress via the Web. As I started looking for plugins to track data within WordPress, I found one called The Hacker’s Diet. The plugin itself is based on The Hacker’s Diet e-book. The basic idea is to track weight loss or gain as an engineering problem by tracking calorie input (food you eat) and calorie output (exercise). One of the keys to the diet is tracking weight daily and calculating a moving average over a period of time. The idea is, the daily value does not matter. Since human body weight can fluctuate drastically on a daily basis, you can easily be discouraged by a loss one day and a gain the next day. By focusing on the trend, which hopefully should show your average weight decreasing, you can realize your progress and stay motivated. The WordPress plugin tracks this trend, compares it to a goal weight you specify, and suggests a calorie deficit that needs to be achieved per day to meet the goal weight.

I think The Hacker’s Diet should fit in well with my participation in EUREKA. I should be able to track my weight loss progress, share it with others, and stay motivated on my plan.

My workout plan is a modified version of a workout suggested for individuals training to become Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL (BUD/S) candidates. It includes running three to four times per week, push-ups, sit-ups, and various weight training exercises. I have found that the types of exercises in this workout plan translate very well to hockey and really make me feel better physically and mentally. I have yet to find a way to track my workouts on the Web. For now, I will continue to use my spreadsheets. I may post them at a later date.