Skip to main content

Cheapo PSA: Don't Get Into a Push-up Contest with a Navy SEAL

Week three of Navy SEAL training went pretty well. I got a break from running this week, but that's about to change. I know it'd be somewhat harder if I was able to swim every day. I kicked around the idea of trying to sweet talk the nearby 24 Hour Fitness into giving me a trial membership in order to get access to their pool, but that'd probably be more trouble than it's worth. Quitting gym memberships is often like trying to quit the mob.

Fortunately, I'm not having trouble with any of the workouts now except the push-ups. The sit-ups were pretty tough the first week, but my abs have adjusted pretty quickly. However, 5 sets of 25 push-ups is incredibly hard. I ended up having to break up the last 2-3 sets into smaller sets, but yesterday I was able to complete them all without splitting them up. I can't imagine trying to do this while 40 pounds heavier. It'd be humiliating.

I cleaned out my home gym, selling both the elliptical machine and my Bowflex clone thing but keeping the treadmill. I practically gave them away, but I just wanted them gone.

The military has it all figured out. Any exercise that you need special equipment for is probably not worth doing. I realize they have to consider that they'll be deployed places where they have little in the way of supplies let alone exercise equipment, but I do a fair bit of traveling too. I'll only be missing my pull-up bar, but pull-ups are my forte anyway.

I'm not sure if it's the workout routine or the psychological assurance that I don't have much more weight to lose, but I definitely feel myself craving more calories. So, I'm definitely glad I went cheapo before trying this. I'm still holding steady at 158, but I feel like I'm maybe still losing some body fat based on the vein popping barometer. But, that could just be my brain trying to justify my increased ice cream and chocolate intake.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...