TV, Books, Workouts and More

I've been silent on my blog for a while.  Mostly because I've been a slacker lately and watching way too much TV on Netflix.  I was watching Merlin the other day on Netflix and realized I was bored out of my mind watching one of my all-time favorite shows.  So the day after watching the last episode of Merlin, I decided to take my mind back and canceled my Netflix instant account, and my Hulu Plus account.  Tomorrow I'll be canceling my cable.  I plan to keep my Netflix DVD account, and I have a pretty decent DVD collection.  I'm not completely crazy.  But now all my TV/movie watching will be completely deliberate.

So what am I going to do instead of watching TV?  Workout, read, cook, quilt, and I'm sure I'll think of plenty of other things.

Here are a few workout goals to accomplish by the end of the year:

Run another 5K
Bench Press 100 pounds
Squat my weight (note to self - lose some weight...again.  That will make it less weight to squat)
Deadlift 200 (minimum)

And my books.  Tonight I looked through all the books in my living room and dining room (note that this does not include all my unread books in the other rooms of my apartment) and made a list of all the books I need to finish or need to start reading.  Here they are in no particular order:

1. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
2. The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok
3. The Hidden Reality:  Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
4. Cooked by Michael Pollan
5. Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
6. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
7. Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.
8. Again to Carthage by John L. Parker, Jr.
9. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
10. My Antonia by Willa Cather
11. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
12. Spark:  The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, MD
13. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry  (I only have about 100 pages left in this book.  I've been avoiding the sad ending)
14. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
17. Doughnut by Tom Holt
18. Musicophilia:  Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
19. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
20. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
21. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
22. East to the Dawn:  The Life of Amelia Earhart by Susan Butler
23. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
24. Middlemarch by George Eliot
25. Emma by Jane Austen
26. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
27. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

27 books that need to be read just in my living room and dining room. That reading list should keep me busy for a long time.  And I've been trying to find a copy of The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton.  Might be time to check a used bookstore.

Must start cooking more, eating out less.  I bought Happy Herbivore Abroad the other day and everything in it looks really good.  It's about time I found an interesting vegan cookbook.  I'm not vegan, but I think vegan meals are a good thing to have.  Maybe some day I will make that switch to vegan, but not yet.

My mom and I and 2 of my aunts and 2 of my cousins have been working on a quilt for my mom.  My mom and I started working on it in the mid-1990's.  We take our time on our big projects.  I can identify the parts of the quilt that I worked on while watching the 2008 Presidential Debates.  We're finishing up all the little pieces that need to be appliqued onto the quilt.  Our goal is to have the quilt ready to send off to a friend to finish by the end of July.  I totally think we can get this done.

I'm getting really excited about this list.  Feel free to let me know your thoughts on any of the books you've read.

At Home Workout

There is a delay at work this morning, so I used some of that time to get in a good workout at home.

Here's what I did: 

Warm-up
Hip Mobility Series

• Fire Hydrants
• Hip circles counterclockwise (each side) 
• Hip circles clockwise (each side)
• Cook Lifts (10 each side)

Planks
Bridges

Work Sets
Body weight Squats (2 sets)
Goblet Squats with 25# Kettlebell (1 set)
Good Mornings
Stability ball exercises
Band Pull-aparts
Kettlebell Swings

Foam Roll - T-spine, Quads, Hams

Stretch - Child Pose, Half Pigeon, Forward Fold  (I think a little yoga is the best way to end any workout)

Hope you are enjoying the delay this morning.

Quote of the Week

I was reading various fitness and personal trainer blogs last week, and somewhere in all those blogs, I came across this quote:

“The hardest thing to do is work hard when no one is watching.” -Ray Lewis

I finished school to get my certification in Personal Training a few months ago.  Without the workouts at the gym for school, and without being a personal training client any more, it really has been more difficult for me to have the same motivation for getting in a really great workout.  And my nutrition needs a serious overhaul.

I've thought about New Year's Resolutions and I'm not really setting any.  I'm going to get back in the habit of setting my monthly fitness goals. 

12/31/11 vs. 12/31/12

I've been thinking today about the difference between what I did on New Year's Eve last year, and what I did on New Year's Eve this year.

• 12/31/11 - Woke up early, drove out to Ashburn to run my first 5K ever with my younger brother.
• 12/31/12 - Forgot to set my alarm clock and ended up being almost an hour late for barely a half day at work.

Interesting contrast.  I think I'm going to plan now to run a 5K on New Year's Eve 2013.  It makes the day so much more fun.

I did run this afternoon, just for fun.  No race involved.  That was the first time I've run outside since April.  I think today was the coldest day that I've ever run outside.  But it also proved that my winter running gear works pretty well.

HDL - An Update

A little over a year ago, I wrote this post about HDL cholesterol levels.  My HDL had never been over 40.  I had always thought that my HDL would stay low.  Today I got the results of the lipid panel that was taken on Friday. (I still have the bruise on my arm from the blood test.)  Total Cholesterol: 169 (not too bad); LDL Cholesterol:  97 (still not too bad, for the bad cholesterol number); HDL:  69 (really awesome number for good cholesterol). 

The only change that has happened is the type of weight training I've been doing.  I've been lifting heavier weights, and focusing on powerlifting (squat, deadlift, bench press).  I did some research on this earlier today through an abstract at NIH:  "Weight training regimens are generally thought not to improve cardiovascular function or lipid parameters. To evaluate this further, we studied 25 men before and after supervised weight training three times each week for eight weeks. Mean plasma HDL-cholesterol level increased significantly with training, from 38.8 to 44.1 mg/dl, while calculated LDL-cholesterol decreased from 132 to 121 mg/dl."  I think this study applies to women as well.

One other thing that is different from last year to this year is that I do eat oatmeal more often for breakfast, but not every day or anything.  I think it's mostly the weight training.

One Of The Best Things...

...about being a certified personal trainer is that when I join a new gym, the general manager doesn't try to sell me personal training sessions.  They give me the fitness director's business card instead.

This will be fun.

Graduation

I graduated from the National Personal Training Institute on Saturday with a 4.0!  I really enjoyed the class.  I learned so much about exercise, anatomy, nutrition, and how to be a personal trainer in the class that I feel I have a really good foundation to be a great personal trainer. 

I'm looking forward to starting out as a personal trainer.