So after writing about something a little more personal, I’m going to continue talking about data driven fitness!

So, after finding out my actual statistics from the DEXA scan and not making the progress I want, I tried to go back to the drawing board.

Look at the data, look at the target, set realistic goals.

SO I’m going to stick to a routine that’s:

  • Easy to do in a crowded gym - It’s hitting summer now and peak times at the gym equipment is pretty sparse. Something that avoided the super busy squat rack and bench would be nice.
  • Something I can do at home in a pinch - Sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I’m working, sometimes I’m traveling the next day. Hell, sometimes it’s raining and I don’t want to leave the house!
  • Something that is both a cardio and weight workout. Cardio is great, but it’s an easy way to accidentally lose muscle if you’re not careful. The same way lifting weights is great, but it’s hard to use it to burn calories. A super intense deadlifting session is short spurts of effort, and it’s estimated to only burn around 150-200 calories.
  • Something super simple - I like the term dedicated but lazy, it’s basically how I do most of my work. I want something that’s easy to setup, but I can keep at without having to tweak to much.
  • Easy to track progress - Something where I can see a number go up or down. With any deadline you need acceptance criteria. Weight and body fat is one thing, but that moves slowly and is hard to accurately measure. So being able to see the progress I’m making in the

So I went to the data. Looking back over my weight loss for the last two years, the most I lost consistently was when I was doing a kettlebell routine:

4.0kg weight lost over 3 months, not too shabby!

That was the 10000 Swings workout (Warning: There’s a lot of male nipples on display, maybe a little NSFW depending on where you work!).

At the time I wasn’t actually fit enough to do 20kg, so I was doing 16kg. Now I feel I could do 20kg (the guide actually says 24kg, but I only have a 20kg at home, so I’m going to play it safe!).

So to start with I did a little warmup to get a vague idea of where I’m starting. Since the scan was May 31st, I wanted to find out my Day 0 time. I went with doing 200 swings a few times to feel out how hard it would be, and what kind of times I could expect before I threw myself fully into the 500 a day.

200 Swings Total Time

16:10 min for 200 swings - 21st May
10:51 min for 200 swings - 27th May
9:40 min for 200 swings - June 1st

I think the longer time’s in the early stage were taken at home, which explains the big jump. Lots of distractions at home!

So after that I jumped right in to 500 swings a day.

500 Swings early times

My times shot down rapidly, and settled at around 25 minutes:

29:33 (8:03 - 200 Swings) June 9th
24:54 (7:47 - 200 swings) June 12th
25:11 (7:45 - 200 swings) June 16th

I also have been recording my 200 swing split also, as it’s a good metric of how the rest of the session would go. For example I tried harder to get a good time on the 16th, but it left me gassed out and took some time off the final score.

So 500 swings a day. My DEXA scan is actually August 30th. So this is only 30 days or so.

I’m thinking it’s going to be a few kilos lost, hopefully maybe 1 or 2% body fat, and I’m aiming to get my 500 swing time down to maybe 24:00 minutes and my 200 swing time down to at least 7 minutes. That seems optimistic in 30 days, definitely achievable in 90!

So in a month’s time I’ll check in, see how I feel. I’ll probably be sick to death of kettlebells and try something new!

Next check-in on July 1st.