I have some level of recurring issue with my right knee that I am trying to work out at the moment by doing different types of cardio, mixing up on the jogging and cycling, and also throwing in some simple walking as well. While I will save this aspect of it for another post I do want to point out that the exercise out of all of these that is most likely to cause me some aches is actually the walking. That sounds like it can't be true and I don't know why that ends up being the case but it does seem to be the case.
I was lamenting or questioning whether or not I should even bother to have my overpriced gym membership anymore and the renewal date is looming, the 20th of the month. So I went into the gym yesterday in order to just poke around a bit and not work too hard because it is no longer my focus to build more muscle, just maintain that which I already have or maybe even be ok with losing some of it.
This level of caloric burn is not impressive. My heart rate was just barely above resting outside of certain instances where I was really struggling to get those last 3-4 reps in on some sort of intentionally high-rep thing I was doing such as the tricep cable pulldowns that I am a little afraid to load up too high because of an old nagging injury. Instead I just do massive rep sets like 40. This brought my heart rate up to around 125 or so but for the most part, a lot of what I was doing was sitting, drinking water, and reading a book. I’m one of those guys that refuses to use my phone during a workout.
While the calories were not really stacking up and I did end up having a bit of a caloric issue later on that day after choosing my one “guess meal” per day poorly. It didn’t do much for my caloric burn ignoring cardio of the day but I am happy to say that I easily surpassed my protein goals by a good 20-30 percent.
This is kind of the opposite of what I would normally be doing in my exercise sessions because when I am jogging or even just light cycling, there are not the peaks and drops in heart rate that is obviously going to happen when you are resting every 1-2 minutes between sets. I don’t have a prescribed amount of time that I wait between sets anymore, when I was bulking/cutting and bodybuilding I had very specific plans that I stuck to like clockwork. This time though, I was just in there doing a shoulder and arms workout with high reps and sometimes breaks that incorporated several pages of the book I was reading, depending on if it was getting interesting or not.
Now here is the thing that I found kind of disappointing about this entire endeavor. By the time I decided that I was done I had covered more than enough exercises to get a good pump and that pump (where you look like you are flexing even when you are not) is still sticking around today, 12 hours later. I like that. That is not the disappointing part. The letdown was that this took longer than one of my runs or one of my cycling sessions and by the end of it I had burned almost an irrelevant amount of calories and I didn't feel as accomplished as I would have if I had done my cycling or even better, my jogging.
A lot of gurus out there will try to tell you that weight training is actually better for your long term health and weight management than cardio is, but I often wonder if these guys are just trying to justify their YouTube channel's existence. Is there any real proof of this? We'll probably never know because there are so many lies out there for the sake of profits.
After this one day though that was planned in the middle of the afternoon to avoid the crowds I think I have my answer about whether or not to keep my gym membership: I am not going to keep it. It's a waste of money for sure.
My main goal these days is to maintain decent cardio shape and since I basically refuse to use treadmills or stationary bikes (why would anyone use those things when we have a perfectly usable and FREE outdoors just on the other side of the windows?) there just isn't much reason for me to be in the gym.
I still have a very small gym in my building and I will just change over to that. I do still have until the 20th of this month to re-affirm this position. Now all I have to do in order to make certain I stay feeling this way is to go to the gym again during peak hours. That will definitely make me want to cancel.
The journey continues!