4x8

Another 4x8 minute session today. It gets easier for each session and and I notice it mostly on the fact that I manage to keep an higher intensity between each 8 minute interval. Today I kept it steady at 150watt between the two first intervals and 140 between interval 3 and 4.

I like the new playlist better but still think it has potential for improvements :)

4x8 Playlist

Here is my updated playlist for my 4x8 min intervals sessions:

Track	Artist
Bad Company	Bad Company
Love Lockdown	Kanye West
L'Amour Toujours(Turbotronic Remix)	Clubhunter, Miani
Sexy And I Know It	LMFAO
Beautiful Day	U2
Freak Out(Cj Stone Remix)	Roxfield
Still Loving You (Radio edit)	Level 4, DJ Deamon
With OR Without You	U2
Gotta Be Somebody	Nickelback
Ring Meg	Gabrielle
Motivation	Kelly Rowland, Lil Wayne
Overdrive (Extended Mix)	Wooferman
Be mine Tonight (Radio Edit)	Dj Evil, Jolly Axe
The A Team	Ed Sheeran
Ølbriller (feat, Byz)	Erik og Kriss
When We Stand Together	Nickelback
Far Away	Nickelback

4x8 interval session on the TacX Flow

Today I successfully finished a 4*8 interval session where I finished all the intervals properly. I have been working towards this the last 2 weeks so it was good to feel that the hard work is paying of. The session with warm up and cool-down period took 1 hour and 15 minutes.

My average wattage on the TracX was 155W which is not impressive. How real this wattage is I do not know but it is a good way of checking my relative improvements. So now i have my base and then come April 1 st I will check how much I have improved during April :)

Two months with TacX Flow

I have now had the TacX flow for 2 months and I absolutely love it. I started out easy and have increased the workouts more the last 2 weeks and I will write some post describing the different workouts I do on the TacX Flow.

I am now in a period where I try to put in a lot of hard sessions and I try to get at least 5 sessions a week. Because of this I have increased my carb intake as I feel I get better sessions when I get more carbs. I will stay on this regime during march and see what that give me in weight loss.

As of today I am 132.5kg that means a slight weight loss since January 1st of about 3kg. I hope to lose an additional 6kg during March, putting me at 126.5 kg at March 31st.

First workout on the TacX Flow

First 45 minute workout on the TacX Flow finished and it felt great. It is not the same as being out in the fresh air with natural resistance from all the good climbs we have here, but it sure beats my old spinning bike any time a day :)

The setup was very easy and the self adjustment of the break seemed to work smoothly. For my first session I did a easy warm up and cool down period with a 4x4 min interval session in between. As this was my first time on the Flow I took it easy but I still worked up a good sweat and heart rate. I have not connected a heart rate monitor yet but hopefully I will be able to connect using the Polar heart rate monitor that is on it's way in the mail.

The TacX monitor is easy to use to control the resistance and it is nice and easy to see the performance on the display. I will have to use it a bit more before I can give a better review but for my first session it seemed quite good.

For the coming week I will try it out more and then start setting up a workout plan to follow. Hopefully I can get some good input on the web :)

P.S

Finished of with 25 minutes of Jillian 30 Day Shred :)

Happy New Year and Status

2012 is upon us and unfortunately I have not managed to follow the very good flow I was in back in September. I have not been exercising much and the diet has gone down the drain both of which has resulted i a gain of 9.5 kg since September and it stopped at 135.2 kg.

It was terrible seeing this on the bathroom scale and to be honest I did feel embarrassed. But moreover I got very angry with myself because I know how much hard work was behind those 10 kg.

So what to do? Well the only thing I can do is to roll up my sleeves and get started again and in doing so I should at least take what was positive the last year.

• I lost 11kg
• I got in much better shape
• I finished my first bike ride Bergen - Voss (165km)

Before starting back up again for 2012 I have tried to understand why I did not manage to keep on the track with my training and diet once the fall set in. I think the answer is very simple. I really enjoy exercising on my bike and I have going to the gym, so once it got to cold and wet to go out on the bike everything fall apart. Once I did not exercise as much anymore the diet plan also started to get harder and harder to follow. 

So for Christmas my beautiful wife surprised me with a Christmas present that I hope is part of a solution to get me going again, through the winter. She got me a TacX Flow ergotrainer that I can use with my ordinary road racer bike :). I now have it set up and ready to use and I will come back with a review of my first experience with the TacX Flow ergotrainer. You can read about the TacX flow on the TacX web page here:

http://www.tacxflow.com/en_home.html

So, hopefully the shock over what was displayed on the bathroom weight and the vitamin boost from the present from my wife will get me back on track for 2012. I will also make sure I become more active on the blog again, which I  also stopped updating. When I used it, it worked exactly as I hoped it would as it was a way of "forcing" me to do well as everyone knew how I was doing. I think if I had started to write on the blog that I was not doing well with my diet and I was not  exercising as much I would have picked myself up much earlier. 

Hopefully people will start follow me and be an inspiration to me in 2012. 

Happy New Year

September 1st - Summary

That's it, August gone and way too quickly. I had a high goal, again, for my exercise this month but I did not reach it. I did 15 out of 30 hours. However, I have been doing a lot of construction work for the last 2 weeks combined with mowing to a new office location which involved a lot of heavy lifting and carrying up and down stairs. This has certainly giving me extra exercise that has not been counted up in any way. But for certain it accounts for my missing 15 hours :)

For my "diet", things have been going perfectly and it is getting easier and easier each week where it has gotten to the point where I do not have to think about it anymore. It helps that my wife is following the same diet, so that we do not have to make two dinners for example.

So for the interesting part, did I meet my goal for this month? Loosing 5 kg and a total of 10 cm at my measurement points? YES I did. I dropped 5.2 kg and 19 cm in total :). This puts my total weight loss at 22.2kg since January 1st. (see the stats at the bottom of this post)

After finishing Bergen - Voss I had a goal of managing to loose a total of 30kg before we leave for the Canary Islands in November. Deep inside I did not really think I would manage to reach this goal but I like to have something to stretch for and push myself towards. Now, two months away, I have less then 8kg to go so now the goal seems within reach and gives me extra boost to work hard for the next two coming months :) and hopefully I will get there :).

I have also got a new couple of jeans and a new sweater today. I am now a size 40 in jeans (Norwegian size) and the sweater was size XL. Cool to wear a sweater where the size does not contain numbers like, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL and so on :). Also cool to simply pick up a pair of jeans without having to ask them to look at the storage room for a bigger size :)

Weight
	August 1st	September 1st	Difference
Weight:	129.9 kg	124.7 kg	-5.2 kg
Measurements
	August 1st	September 1st	Difference
Neck:	42 cm	41 cm	-1 cm
Overarm:	44 cm	44 cm	0 cm
Breast:	121 cm	120 cm	-1 cm
Stomach:	129 cm	122 cm	-7 cm
Waist:	128 cm	122 cm	-6 cm
Thigh:	80 cm	77 cm	-3 cm
Calf:	47 cm	46 cm	-1 cm
Total:	591 cm	572 cm	-19 cm