Working Out The Kinks...

Yesterday morning, I discovered that I haven't been doing my workout correctly for the past several years.

I'd been using the wrong target heart rate, a rate lower than what my actual target should be.  So, I've been getting some benefit from my workout (anything is always better than nothing), but not as much as I could've been, and not as much as I thought I was.  I could've been losing more weight, building more muscle, and doing it faster.

I also discovered that I need to adjust the methods I'm using to work out.  I've been working out solely on the elliptical, with the goal of losing a certain amount of weight that way before going back to trying to incorporate weights into my routine.  But I found out that the anaerobic activity of lifting weights actually helps to increase metabolism more effectively than aerobic activity alone, and so along with building muscle mass, it can also help you lose weight faster.  So, sometime in the next couple of weeks, I think I'm going to start trying to incorporate weights back into my routine.

But this morning I just tried out my new target heart rate on the elliptical, and wow!  Instant improvement of about 75%.  I burned a ton more calories than I normally do, and I ran almost twice as far as I used to (virtually, of course), managing 3.5 miles in forty-five minutes.

And now I feel awesome.  I have that delicious, relaxed, rubbery exhaustion in my limbs, and I feel ready to do anything, like I could take on the whole world.

Goes a long way towards making up for the seemingly endless series of humiliations I suffered in the game last night.  More on that tomorrow...