Day 5, Failure to launch....

I'm on day 5 of the Turbulence Training Challenge and today was a little, er.. challenging (as a challenge should be?!). The idea with TT is that you follow a particular workout for one month, and there are many to choose, from simple beginners stuff to tricky advanced moves. I'm not exactly sure how many workouts there are, but they can keep you TTing for a long time to come and there seem to be new ones coming out regularly. There is an A workout and a B workout and you alternate them, training three days a week. You start with 4-6 resistance training exercises, followed by 20 mins HIIT cardio and you should get through each session in about 45 minutes.

My first attempt, as in my previous post, was thwarted by interruption of family obligations and todays session just took a lot longer than I'd planned for and so, yet again, I had to do the cardio in the evening. The first exercise was squats and, after my warmup set using only bodyweight, I stood up and found that my entire upper back was hurting and my neck had stiffened up. I'm really not sure what that is, but I experienced a similar thing once just preparing dinner. I think it's just one of those random muscular thingos that needs hot baths and deep massage. Yes, 'thingo' is the official term for such occurrences. I'm sure of it. Perhaps the back/neck thingo slowed me down today.

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I like my WebMD emails. They are so terribly sane and mainstream, like a Womans Weekly magazine. Very civilised, nothing radical, full of old-fashioned common sense. Today they claim to know the 15 best diet tips EVER. I especially like tip 2:

Think about what you can add to your diet, not what you can take away.
It's that whole idea of 'nature abhors a vacuum'. I have found that it is so much more effective to think in terms of adding foods (veges!) or replacing foods with more healthful options, rather than 'creating a vacuum' by inventing an 'I shall not eat' list. After, oh, 6 years of working on my nutrition, I've almost got this one sorted. It's just not that tricky. Whenever a food craving or meal assembly situation arrives, figure out what to substitute that will work on a physical and psychological level. Adding veges, or especially using veges instead of other carbs is always a step in the right direction. I'm working with someone at the moment that is having a very hard time changing her diet. It's the WebMD approach - no adding protein powder or messing around with egg-whites, both of which would be good - but she won't do it. It's just simple things like replacing half of the carb portion (bread, pasta) with green veges, eating low-fat dairy instead of full-fat, eating a few rice crackers instead of crisps, using oats instead of a sugar-packed breakfast cereal, choosing lower fat cuts of meat, snacking on fruit. Just doing that has reduced her caloric intake by nearly 700 a day, and she doesn't even feel like she's 'on a diet'.