Rob's Nerd Fitness Journey

So as I mentioned in an earlier post I’m doing workout 2 in the Nerd Fitness Academy. This is mostly pretty easy, or would have been a few years ago, but there is one exercise that I’d rather not be doing. Wall Slides – how the heck can raising your arms above your head a few times hurt so much, and why am I being made to life my arms above my head in the first place.

What are wall slides? I hear you asking.

So this is an exercise where you have to sit with your back to a wall, with as much of your bum, back and head (angled down to make a double chin) in contact with the wall then raise your arms above your head, keeping them in contact with the wall throughout the movement. The key is to not let you back arch away from the wall.

Here’s a video that will do it more justice.

When you google this exercise you will see examples of them being done standing, but that’s pretty hard in a cottage with low ceilings.

There you go, sit against a wall and raise your hands above your head, and let the agony begin.

So Why Should I do Them?

My Shoulder say “bloody good question”, but following a little research it appears they appear to be a wonder exercise.

To be clear these are a beginners exercise and many people people do move these to their warm-ups, and even though they are a pain they are move there because of their benefits.

Most people these days spend many hour of the day sat down, they move from a seated position in the office to a seated position in front of the telly scrolling through Facebook and this, as I’m sure you’ve been told a million times before, is not what the human body was built to do. Some of the negative affects of sitting from the NHS website:

“Sitting for long periods is thought to slow the metabolism, which affects the body’s ability to regulate blood sugar, blood pressure and break down body fat.”

One of the other impacts of of sitting all day in front of a computer is a rounding of the shoulders and a hunched posture, neither of which is a look many would want. Shoulder neck and back pain can also be a result of prolonged sitting.

Wall Slides are a proven exercise that can help to correct these issues. Wall Slides improve shoulder mechanics and helps strengthen lower/mid traps which tend to be fairly weak in most of the population. They are recommended by numerous sites and professionals to improve posture and rid your of shoulder pain. In fact there are a number of sites that recommend doing them 2 to 3 times a day. I better stop complaining about having to do it once every 4 days in the Nerd Fitness Academy.

So there you go, if you’re not already doing them you should start as soon as possible, correct your poor posture and help prevent injury. There are lots of resource on the web with instructions on how to do them.

Good luck

So here I a writing my second blog post. I’m roughly 5 weeks into the Nerd Fitness Academy program, but I didn’t do week five tasks last week because I was on my holidays and didn’t prioritise them (other than setting up my blog site), because of this I have decided to concentrate this post on the first 4 weeks of my journey.

As I mention in my “About Me” page i signed up to the academy about a year ago, but wasn’t very good at sticking to it. At the start of August things started to feel a little different, I was fed up of feeling fat and unfit, drinking too much and was generally ready to make a change. I therefore decided to respawn and start again.

First, a little bit about http://www.nerdfitness.com. I first came across the site when doing so research into running 5K, I was thinking about joining my partner in running the local Parkrun. It was a previous iteration of this blog I came across, https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/couch-to-5k-crucial-things-to-know-before-you-start-training/. I found the style of writing entertaining and the nerdy references and silly Gifs were right up my street. Also the article did talk about doing exercises you enjoyed and not feeling obliged to do endless hours of cardio, I liked this approach, I like cycling an swimming. This then linked me to the free news letter and other free documents that were being provided, all of which were again very well written and fun.

Obviously signing up for a news letter meant I was going to get bombarded with offers to follow the sites paid for program, Nerd Fitness Academy. This program was been offered as a big help towards your weight and fitness goals by concentrating on Nutrition (90% of the battle where weight loss is concerned), Fitness and mindset, and to help us along the way the program attempts to gamify your progress. To join the academy was a one off life time payment, to progressively change your lifestyle for good. I succumbed to the marketing and signed up. n.b. the academy is no longer available, the current version is Prime, an annual subscription service, that include the academy, plus other improved services, at this time I have not felt the urge to move to this new service.

When you sign up to the Academy you get Steve Kamb, the site owner and ring leader of all of us Nerds introduces you to the academy and gives you a tour of the Academy. One of the first things you are encouraged to do is to create your character. In every day life you may be plain old Rob, the fat lad, but who would you like to be, who would you be if you were a super hero, what is the character/persona you want to be? I found this a struggle and ended up settling for “Real Rob”, it felt dull and in no way creative, but at the same time I wanted to unleash the real Rob, not this fat fella I actually am.

Next up is the class you want your character to be, the Choices are:

Rebel

Everyone comes into the Rebellion and starts out as a REBEL.

Adventurer

Adventurers are brave souls who fear nothing and are always curious about what’s over the next hill or across the ocean.

Assassin

Every building can be climbed, every gap can be jumped, every obstacle can be conquered. Assassins spend most of their time training with functional body-weight exercises, as that’s usually the only thing they need to lift. Gymnasts and parkour enthusiasts would fit into this category.

Druid

Druids spend a majority of their time training in the arts of yoga, tai chi, and other movement-based disciplines. Each movement has a purpose, and that purpose is to further improve the dexterity, agility, and strength of the druid.

Monk

Monks can kick your ass with their fists and feet, and they can do it before you even know what’s happened. Incredibly agile, lightning fast, and loaded with power, Monks specialize in martial arts to stay in shape and destroy the opposition.

Ranger

A jack-of-all-trades, Rangers are well-equipped for any situation. You’re good at strength training and pretty good at covering distances when required, but neither is a specialty.

Scout

Built for distance and efficiency rather than strength and power, you can outlast any animal on the planet. Your muscles are designed with endurance in mind, and you can cover great distances whenever necessary.

Warrior

You love the idea of getting stronger and more powerful. Every day is an opportunity to move heavy things or test yourself against others in competition and prove your might.

I settled on the Ranger, maybe as I progress I’ll change, but this feels right for now:

This is all fun but what would have been great is if these pictures could have been linked in someway to your weight and measurements. There are other sites, such as http://test.modelmydiet.com/men.html that could maybe linked, then you could see what you might look like as your size reduces, this would be super cool if it linked to the class picture in some way.

Once you have created your character and class there are a number of Quests that you are able to complete that progress you through c=various challenges, you can search these quests based on your class, or just search those that you’d like to tackle next. I plan to talk about some of these in a future blog.

Once I’d completed these first activities I had to wait for the weekly email. These come with challenges that slowly build up the new habits that aim to create a new you. So what was I up to for the first four weeks.

Week 1’s challenges ease you in nicely, firstly take some before pictures to remind you of where you have come from and as a tool to track your progress. I warned you in my first post that you needed a strong constitution, here they are.

Next up was measurements. Then there was a challenge to start good habits, waling for 5 minutes a day. I was already walking the dog every day so either added a second walk in, or some other form of exercise, biking or spinning on the bike we were borrowing at the time.

On a nutritian front there was a challenge to track all your food. This was very interesting, and the thought of writing down all the food you eat makes you think twice before putting it in your mouth. This wasn’t necessarily the point of the challenge, more just a track of what you eat, to help with future challenges.

The biggest challenge in the first week was finding your Big Why, the reason your doing this, why you want to improve. The point about the Big Why is it can’t be just I want to lose weight, you need to dig deeper. As per the guidance I tried to get three layers deep and arrived at my big Why:

I’m scared I’ll die too young to see my kids grow up and have kids of their own. And I’m scared of what this Cornavirus does to fat people.

Some smaller Why’s
1) be able to buy and wear nice clothes
2) Fit comfortably in airplane seats and not worry about the seat-belt length.
3) Walk up flights of stairs without being out of breath
4) Fit into theme park ride seats without needing an extra hard push
5) Not have indigestion.

The next 3 weeks build on these. There are further challenges for nutrition, that involve learning where your diet is on the Nerd Fitness 10 levels. The Nerd Fitness nutrition focuses on real food, removing processed food and a paleo diet, although later blogs don’t seem to promote the paleo route as much, but still very much focusing on real food. There is even a Nerd Fitness Recipe book that there are challenges to cook from. None have tickled my fancy yet, but the general ideas are good and I am trying my best to follow the rules and guidlines.

For the mindset there are goal setting and building these into the Quests. As mentioned above I will talk more about quests in a future blog. Another mindset challenge relates to rewards for achieving things, but these shouldn’t be a doughnut, but something healthy,. Then there is customising your bat cave, or creating hacks around the home to support good habits or remove the oppotunity for partaking in bad habits.

Finally fitness, once you’ve completed your week one task of walking for 5 minutes a day you start the real journey. When you start, you take a base line fitness test, this defines which routines you will follow. I took the test and I’m level 2, this is a body weight routine. Here is probably the first issue i have, they aren’t all body weight, even at this level there are two exercises which require weights, at this level you can make them by filling bags with things to add weights, but this is not body weight.

Building routines for exercise is key in forming a habit, and one o the tips is adding it to your reminders. This is mostly working for me, but now the kids are back at school my 7:30 slot needs to be rethought.

In addition to the exercises themselves there are warm ups and cool downs to help with recovery and prevent injury.

What is cool about Nerd Fitness is that to progress to the next level of training, which from level three allows you to chose between the body-weight or gym, you have to complete a boss battle (it is NERD fitness after all). Not done my first yet, but plan to soon.

So I think I’ll call that a wrap. I plan to continue providing progress on my journey, what I like and dislike about the academy, and things I’ve learned from other sources.