Thoughts in Veeberland

Back in early November I had a visit with my podiatrist.  I was complaining about some foot pain.  He took a few x-rays and diagnosed me with plantar fasciitis.  Basically he felt that my shoes were not providing sufficient support so the excessive flexing of my foot was calcifying my tendon.  He suggested getting custom orthotics.  He also mentioned that walking barefoot would make things worse.

Something didn’t sit well with me about the barefoot part.  I like walking around the house barefoot.  That’s one of the reasons we have wall to wall carpet.  I did some searching and found some information about barefoot running and how many people were no longer experiencing shin splints.  That prompted me to look further and found these new shoes from Vibram.

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So I’m sure everyone has been familiar with all my past attempts to get back in shape.  I’ve been playing with the Wii Fit Plus for a bit, but honestly it doesn’t really give you that good of a workout.  Some of the games are fun, but that’s about it.  Apparently just playing Wii Tennis or Boxing ends up being a better calorie burner that the entire Wii Fit genre.  It’s still nice to use to track your weight and play every so often.

Instead I’ve embarked on something that I had tried in the distant past.  I know I’m never going to run a marathon or be ripped like a 20 year old.  But doing simple fitness items like push-ups, squats, sit-ups, pull-ups, and jogging should be within my ability … eventually.  So for the last six weeks I’ve been going through the 100 push-ups program.  The goal is eventually to be able to do 100 push-ups in one set.  I’ve had to repeat weeks three and four, so I haven’t finished the initial six week program yet, but already I’ve gone from less than 10 in a set to 20+.  I’m going to have to continuously repeat the whole program to get to the goal, but it’s a start.  This week I just added the 200 squats program to the list.

These programs seem to be effective and don’t take that much time.  There’s a straight forward progression and it’s pretty easy to see progress.  As I get closer to completing the first round of these two I’ll add sit-ups.  There’s also another site that has a program for getting to run a 5K.  Here’s to hoping the new shoes can help me run again without the knee and back pain.  I just got the Vibram Five Fingers, so I can’t give a good feel for them yet, but so far they seem to be working to reduce my foot pain.  One of these days I’ll talk about them a bit more.

The most attractive thing about these programs is the lack of equipment required.  It’s pretty cheap to engage in these activities and the author even went ahead and developed an iPhone app for each one.  It makes timing the rest period pretty easy and tracks all of your progress.  I think it would be pretty annoying to use the Twitter integration to post my progress, but who knows, maybe I’ll be vain enough to do so one of these days .  I bought a set of the Perfect Push-ups to reduce the wrist pain and after I lose some weight I may get a Perfect Pull-up to start those workouts as well.  Still that’s less than $60 overall.  If anything, the new shoes cost me more than that.

So here’s to yet another attempt to get healthy and lose some weight.  Hopefully going slower this time around will help me stay focused and motivated.

Over the weekend we picked up a Wii Fit Plus at Costco.   Sarah and I had been looking at it for awhile.  I know that there is no way that the game itself will provide enough exercise to really get me to lose weight, but just having it these few days seems to be acting as incentive to get some exercise in.  I have a feeling it’ll be just enough incentive to get us to do non-Wii workouts to try and beat the game, because some of the routines are actually quite difficult to perfect.  The mid term goal is to learn all the routines over the next few months.  The longer term is just to get the Wii from calling me fat.  My little Mii is wonderfully rotund at this point.  So here’s to working out.  Anyone else up for a Wii Fit challenge?