Variety Is The Spice Of Life

This may be news to you and it may not seem so apparent, but I have been working losing weight for several years. At first, it started with finding an activity that I enjoyed after my knee surgery in 2018. After being cleared by the doctor and at the end of my insurance allowed Physical Therapy window, a hike was the first activity I did. My wife loves to hike and I very much dislike it. It’s so boring. Are we there yet?

After both knee surgeries, both doctors have said, you need to be active for the rest of your life, to keep your knee strong. I stayed true to that after my first knee surgery in 2003 until I got a job at Boeing in 2014. Then I stopped. I have been doing track days on and off since 2003. Some years I may have done one or two, others years I didn’t attend any. In 2016 I started to take track days a little bit more seriously with a focus on improving. I was listening to the Ken Hill podcast the way a teenager would listen to their new favorite song. Listening to it, over and over. But this didn’t mean I was being physically active.

Back to that first activity in 2018 after my second knee surgery. I had to find a fun activity, because hiking wasn’t cutting it. And let’s be real, if riding a motorcycle on track gets your adrenaline going, hiking would put you to sleep if you weren’t moving. An older coworker that liked hiking and mountain biking said, you need to buy a mountain bike, they’re so much fun. I thought, yeah, I love riding dirt bikes and doing sportbike track days. Each of these activities have two wheels. I think you’re onto something!

I started off just mountain biking. I say “just” because there was no focus on improving my fitness, like losing weight or getting stronger, just mountain biking. I was being active like the doctors said.

As my pace was improving on track, it quickly showed that my fitness was holding me back, as a matter of fact it is still holding me back. This is one of many things that riding a motorcycle on track improves your overall life. If you ride a motorcycle on track or off road, you have to become an athlete. The people that think you just sit on a motorcycle, even if they are motorcycle commuters, have never been off the streets, dirt or track. It’s a very physically demanding activity.

With all this talk of the track riding I’ve been doing lately and how physical it is, you’d think that I would look like an Olympic athlete. That’s definitely not the case.

So just mountain biking turned into tracking my heart rate on rides, which led to getting a WHOOP band, back in 2020. It was really cool, except for two things. One, I can’t stand a monthly or yearly subscription, I want to buy a product. Two, I was having fitness band-to-app connectivity issues and their customer service could not fix the issue. Then I heard a Gypsy Tales interview with Robb Beams. An elite performance coach of multiple sports, but has a website dedicated to motorcyclists, from training to nutrition, and everything in between. So I signed up for his yearly membership back in 2021 and still continue to support him. I know I just said earlier I can’t stand monthly or yearly subscriptions, but making people pay a subscription for a gadget puts a bad taste in your mouth. Robb’s membership to his training plans does not require the use of a gym, I workout in my garage. And his membership is way less than a gym membership.

I converted to a Garmin fitness watch in March of 2022 and have been recording my weight ever since. This is where Robb Beams and I disagree or misunderstand each other. He says weight is not as important as body tape/caliper measurements to track your progress because muscle weighs more than fat, but fat takes up more space. My point is, I have never known an all muscle and no fat, five foot nine man who weighed 245 pounds. That would be a monster, not a man. So, I’ve got a lot of body fat, in lbs, to lose.

These next paragraphs are embarrassing and also, all my fault. I had trouble following Robb’s training plan, my fault, not his. So I remembered him saying once, that if he had a year with a Biggest Loser contestant, he would have them do only zone 2 heart rate cardio training and strength training, with proper nutrition and lots of sleep, including naps. I thought, there’s my ticket, that’s all I’m going to do, zone 2 cardio and strength training. Although I have been slowly improving my nutrition, my sleep was falling off, I got up at 03:30 to start an hour of exercising at 04:00, before I went to work. I have learned that exercising towards the end of the day isn’t as effective. You’re already tired, and you are freshest in the morning.

The problem with only doing zone 2 and strength training is, I was slowly gaining weight (muscle???), but the clothes were not getting any loser (fat!). Two things that I think:

1. Only an hour of zone 2 is not enough to be effective, I’m thinking at least an hour and a half, to two hours.

2. There are other zones (1-5) that need to be worked. Even Robb’s off-season training has a tiny bit of higher intensity workouts sprinkled in there.

In September of 2022 I weighed 227.6 lbs and that slowly increased until December of 2023, at 246.4 lbs. At this point I had enough, something needed to change. This Youtube clip from the Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom channel changed my approach to training:

The Norwegian four by four. It’s as hard as you can go for four minutes, with three minutes of rest, repeated four times. I do a fifteen minute warmup before and at least a five minute cool-down, or however long it takes my heart rate to get into zone 1. I’ve been doing this once a week since January of this year.

Just before I discovered the Norwegian 4×4, I also discovered in December of 2023 that my Concept 2 BikeErg produces a measurement of watts that can be tracked and recorded with my Garmin watch. I’ve had this exercise bike for 15 months, and never knew this, how embarrassing.

So, how do you know how hard you can go for four minutes? Well, switching from heart rate based training to watts based training in December of 2023, Garmin already had a month of data before I discovered the Norwegian 4×4 and it produces a power curve of how many watts I can push for a given period of time. For me that’s 235 watts for four minutes and it is absolutely spot on. My watts numbers are nothing to brag about, as a matter of fact, just the opposite. But that’s where I’m at.

Since switching to watts based training and incorporating all the zones in my training, I have lost, as of today, exactly 24.0 lbs. I am 15.8 lbs lighter than this week last year and 4.1 lbs down from this week two years ago. And 0.7 lbs lighter than when I started tracking my weight. You might say that this is almost no improvement, but I spent a year and three months exercising one hour five days a week and gaining weight. This graph will shows the trend of improvement:

If you are interested in a more detailed explanation of the Norwegian 4×4, here is a clip from Dr. Rhonda Patrick interview with Dr. Benjamin Levine: