April fools day ...

So I just got back from climbing Kinabaloo, although we failed to make the actual summit as the weather conditions meant they closed the peak for our attempt time slot, however it was a massive workout like doing 1,000 sets of lunges on the way up, my legs are now super sore so not looking forward to lunging again ... I was worried my knees would give me trouble after being in some pain from the skipping but they seemed to hold out pretty well and although the descent gave them a good bashing there doesn't seem to be any damage done .

Missed some skipping but think we did more than enough cardio, managed to keep fairly well to the diet principles although the timings of everything and snacking all went out the window but everything eaten was pretty much pcp as I took a bumper load of fruit and carrots and tomatoes on the trip this time.

So now I have 2 weeks of uninterrupted time in Singapore so I should be able to stick 100% to the game plan before we go on Holiday to Europe for Easter,   

day 27 - back home ...

So my last day 26 post was actually day 25 , got a little bit mixed up , now I am back home in Singapore, the short trip down to Sydney was a bit of a spanner in the pcp works, I give myself 6/10 for the diet and 5/10 for the exercise, I managed to get one of the skipping/.exercise done each day and one day got both done but I dropped 2 skipping days and 1 exercise days in total, which I can make up on tomorrows exercise day off ... Staying in Hotels is not the best for PCP, the choices are all bad and when faced with bad options its easy to do something naughty, the fruit snacks also are hard to get in if there is no obvious fruit snacks to hand.

Unfortunately I am off to Malaysia to climb Kinabalu tomorrow so there will be more hotel garbage and dropped workouts, although it is a fairly decent cardio workout so I dont think it will be all bad, I just hope all the pounding my knees have taken don't give me problems on the climb ...

I took my stats a day early today and despite all the bad behavior I still managed to trim .5kgs weight and .5% fat over the last 6 days and gain .3% muscle so not a complete disaster. 

day 26

I'm down in Sydney now so the traveling has caused me to miss 1 skipping session and 1 exercise session so far, but finding the workout is fairly easy to do from a hotel room and the fact that it can be done with minimal equipment means its harder to find the excuse not to do it !

The diet is harder to follow as there is less pcp friendly options around as well as more temptation, but broadly sticking to the scheme although I ate some garbage on the plane and was forced at gunpoint to have a glass of wine last night ....

Todays 1100 skips are out of the way and I'm looking forwards to some of these new exercises we are getting this week ..

day 21 - end of week 3

Polished off the skipping at lunchtime , skipping outside in Singapore at noon is like a workout and a sauna rolled into one,  there is more skipping and less resting going on now which is an improvement.


Took the stats for the end of week 3 after the skipping, small improvements, I guess if I manage to get the same each week then the result over 13 weeks will be good

Weight -1.1 kgs , fat -1.2% , age -1 year, visceral -.5% , muscle +.5%,  so looks like chopped of some fat and turned 500g of fat into muscle this week.

 One other improvement I notice is I used to pop alka seltzer very frequently, getting quite horrible indigestion that meant I could not sleep well after particularly indulgent meals, In the past 3 weeks no form of indigestion at all.

One confession is that I did succumb and have a glass of wine at a kids party last weekend, other than that I have been well behaved.  

day 19 - Pull up lesson

So today I tried again to do a pull up and yet again it was a dismal failure.

My 15 month old daughter Heidi was disgusted and she marched me down to the kids gym to give me a lesson ..

Here she is grinding out a couple of sets ...

day 18 - turning the corner

So I took up Patricks offer yesterday of a day off skipping and ran on the treadmill instead, my knees feel better today, then for today's skipping I found a nice decked spot to do the skipping, which seemed to go fairly smoothly so I did a few extra to make up for yesterdays switcheroo. The decking was next to the condos jaccuzi so what better after than a nice cool down dip ...

Splitting the skipping up from the exercise seems to work too, now I am skipping at lunch then exercising at night and then taking my daughter for a shower when I am done with it, which works for us both

I think I am finally gaining a little muscle although yesterdays dismal failure to complete a single pull up does not really bear that out too well, I wasn't even close to getting half way up ! I guess we have 72 days left to accomplish one still.....

day 16 - still plodding on

Still hanging in there, skipping still pounding the knees away like crazy ...

Really miss all the good food and wine, I guess the craving goes away at some point but I am finding the food all a bit bland and boring, I guess a lot of the flavor in food is in the fat, especially meat. I don't miss the sweet stuff at all though, just fruit is fine. The only thing so far I am convinced I will stick to going forwards is a boiled egg with soldiers in the morning (free range organic boiled for 4 mins 15 seconds is perfect ) although post pcp I am sure there will be butter and salt in the equation ...

Weight still exactly the same, which is pretty amazing given I am drinking litres of water a day now which I guess is a function of less salt and I would have thought the water alone would have created some variance.

day 14 - two weeks in

Well this weeks stats are not as great as I would have hoped given the hunger and aching knees

Weight down a whopping 200g , ahh maybe its muscle growth but that only shows .2% drop too, the internal is down .5% to 13.5% but I think it does fell like a little more muscle has been built so maybe next week the scales tell a better story.

Anyway persevering onwards and we will see if next week we can put in some better figures, I am sorely tempted to take a day off skipping as my knee joints are pretty sore, may skip on the grass tomorrow to see if that helps, no sign of any other pains or strains apart from those. The exercises went fairly well this week, I think after reading Patricks recent email I am going to have a shot at doing some of the last sets to failure if those muscles are not needed in the next set of exercises.

day 12

So the weight is going up despite hobbling into bed hungry every night now ! I think its my bodies way of saying it doesn't like the idea of no glass of wine to relax in the evening with dinner, and it will put up a fight ... 

The skipping seems to be getting a bit easier from and ability to do them perspective but harder in terms of the aches and pains now in my knees.

Managed all the exercises fine today, just wish we had a day off the pounding knees skipping

Good luck and stay safe to everyone in Tokyo ... 

Day 10

I realize now I have been waaaay negligent on the stretching, which I guessed I didn't need to do for the skipping, However I tried stretching before the skipping today and realized how tight its all become, a good stretch after the workout and I now feel like things are sorting themselves out.

Failed to get the last couple of push ups in on the last set, I thought I was good at push ups and we had our first day off from them yesterday, but the final set was getting wobbly and I hit the floor two from the end and wasn't pushing back up again! punished my self with an extra set a few hours later just to make sure the full quota was done in the end.

I'm left a little hungry at the end of the day still, but breakfast with the pile of food I guess is the payback for that, weight is going nowhere but I hope there is some muscle being built somewhere .... 

day 9 - still in pain

Hobbling round like an old man today, my shins are still killing me, everything else is fine but the skipping with no let up is no fun for my poor shins ...

Quite a few new exercises on the sheet today, I found I got a good burn on the final set of the standing ovation and forward shoulder raise but my band was too weak to make the rowing much of an exercise, if I got a stronger band though I doubt the other exercises would be doable .. 

With the skipping I am wearing a heart monitor thingy and that is the thing that really gets it going, I find the best rest between sets is to let the heart rate drop to 150 then I'm just about ready to have another crack at it.

Food is all going ok, the hardest thing is adding the veggies in, a carrot at breakfast doesn't really feel right, I think the variety of veg will be the hardest to maintain, protien and carbs no problem ..

Really enjoying the evening snack which for me was 0 , I take this to be a donut,very nice ! 

Day 8 - ouch !

 So I finally sussed out the pain I thought was muscle being overworked was actually shin splints which are very painful, Hopefully a bit of stretching and some shin exercises will sort it out, but it has me hobbling round at the moment and while I can still do all the exercises it makes me very reluctant to get off the sofa once I am comfortable !

Sussed out a set up with chairs and a pole for the incline pull ups, pretty tough, I hope these will get us some way close to being able to do a proper pull up when the time soon comes to attempt them.

Breakfast was all a bit of an overload, I had boiled egg with soldiers, carrot sticks, museli and 3 cups of coffee with milk, by the time lunch came round I wasn't really ready for anything. My maid Uut has been given the diet sheet now and is going to work to keep me strictly on the PCP rations to the gram from now on !

day 7 - I have the body of a 53 year old !!!

So Jason bought me a set of the scales Patrick has in his Tokyo studio to Singapore for me, which tells me my body is 10 years older than it should be at 53, the odd thing is my wife is 8 years younger than she is supposed to be so these scales must have something wrong with them ! but its too late to send them back. I also have 26.3% fat, 27.9 BMI and 14 of internal fat, weigh in at 79.2 kgs, and if I lie in bed all day doing nothing I will burn 1754 calories.

So I calculated that 500 skips would probably work out best as 6 sets of 83, but the first set felt quite good, which I guess is a function of not having just done a bunch of squats or lunges today, so I re routed to 5 sets of 100 when I got to 83 and found I had a few more left in me and it felt less winding than the last few days of jumping have too. So that is it ! first week of exercise all sorted and only a half dinner to go to complete week 1 .

Looking at all the pictures on the other blogs I think I am the fattest, oldest and most out of shape of anyone, now the challenge is to see what I can bring this 53 down to over the remaining 83 days .... 

Day 6 , sort of broke the rules ...

I sort of skipped my lunch today as we never really had an opportunity to eat as we were full time looking after Heidi today, soooo to make up for that went out for dinner with PCP veteran J-blow who was in Singapore on a business trip and while at the outset I fully intended to eat half what he ate, the food was soooo good ( Mozza in marina bay sands ) I ended up pretty much having a full meal ... hmmm boy was it good and all washed down with a very drinkable pinot ...

The skips seem to be getting faster, I dont feel doing more each day is getting any harder for now and I probably spend the same amount of time doing them because as the reps increase as the style improves, the sore calves though will probably remain for the whole 90 days was the unfortunate advise from Jason over dinner ... not looking forward to doing 21 minutes solid of these bad boys at the end !

Day 5 - feeling good

Feeling good today, did all the exercises and skips just before lunch and it felt good, much less sore now where the initial rope jumping had me hurting on the first couple days, then went out and really enjoyed an excellent salad for lunch, thinking pre lunch workout is going to be the best time of the day for me from now on.

I jumped with running shoes on today and found it drastically increased the tangling by making my feet a little bit bigger, I was thinking the barefoot I had been doing may lead to some impact issues with no cushioning, tomorrow my plan is barefoot but on one of these plastic foam mats my daughter plays on which should give a nice soft landing ...

Good luck everyone ...   

Day 4 - batteries are empty ..

Feeling very lethargic and hungry now, the half rations are beginning to take their toll, I think my brain isn't getting enough sugar, I did a one week fast about 10 years ago and the worst part of that was lack of brain function, forgetting everything all the time and lacking concentration to read or do pretty much anything engaging.

The skipping was definitely messier today I was tangling up on every set today, yesterday I pretty much got them all done with 60 at a time no tangles, I think this brain fog is to blame . The rest of the exercises were ok, I get a little wobbly on the lunges at the end of the last set, but still managed to get the whole skipping and sets done in less than 15 mins, I thought I would be working out for ages at a time but I guess we build up to all the nasty stuff slowly ... 

Day 3 - starting to get hungry .....

So I enjoyed a nice glass of Shiraz last night, normally it would have been at least half a bottle or more, oh Shiraz and your lovely sister Pinot Noir how will we cope without each other for 90 days .....

I found the skipping doesn't really take too much space so I can do it on my balcony fine, much less embarrassing than doing them in public, I also went out and bought a heart rate watch which the skipping cranked up to 166 which I guess is the aim. Found the extra 10 per set makes a difference now, as does starting with aching legs...

The half food is getting a little bit noticeable now too,  half a nandos for lunch and just about to have a single lamb chop for dinner rather than the usual 2 or 3

Day 2

So far so good , exercises , skips then a jump in the pool to cool off , nice !

I am not finding the half food too bad but its probably building up and will get painful later in the week.

After Patrick's email this morning I went off on a shopping trip, got the push up bars and a very cool pull up bar which magically fixes itself in the door frame with no screws or damage to the frame which is nice, and only $20 too ! Only problem is I am a mile from even being able to pull up half way once, I guess the pull ups don't arrive until after day 90 ! The push ups also seem much harder using the bars which is odd ...

here is the wife attempting a pull up ....

day 1

So we finally get going, Off I went with my skipping rope and wandered round looking for a good spot to skip as I don't really have space inside to do them without smashing things up with a flailing rope, anyway I found a nice quiet spot after a bit of snooping round and got jumping, within a few minutes I was gasping for breath, but it was not as disastrous as I had suspected once you get a rhythm going, anyway back at my desk totally pooped I realized I had misread the sheet and done 500 rather than 5 times 50 , I think I will be very sore tomorrow ....

Food wise no problems so far, only I read the email after breakfast so I owe the PCP gods half a breakfast, I guess the extra skips were punishment.




Big muscles here we come .........