Fourth for Four is the idea, on the 4th of January 2016 and for 4 weeks a few things to do, nothing to do with new year resolutions or even “Operation Transformation”, also not for ever just four weeks, do the following.
Stop drinking any form of Alcohol
Stop smoking (just four weeks)
Do at least four hours of sport of your choice a week, 30 minutes each day and one hour one day.
If you take up the challenge the drinking and smoking thing is fairly self explanatory. The sport though can be any form of sport that gets your heart going just slightly above what would be normal for you. So for example a steady one hour walk would suffice. Do more if you have time.
If you do all of these things for the full four weeks there can be no doubt that you will lose some weight and your heart rate will drop.
To help your motivation there will also be spinning sessions in Allihies Community hall on Mondays and or Lehanmore on Wednesdays. One hour spinning is good exercise for weight loss. Any sport or physical activity will do I will cycle, but walking, running, circuit training etc are all good.
On top of the benefit of losing some weight your heart will improve. On day one before you get out of bed take your resting heart rate and do this every three days, count it for the full minute. Mark it down on a piece of paper. Everybody has different heart rates so the comparison is between the beginning and the end of the four weeks. There is a good chance that it will start to go down very quickly. Especially if you have a drink or two every day. Also weigh yourself at the end of each week, after two weeks you should start to lose weight. Take a look at a previous post I made about November off the drink.
Fourth for Four
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Polar M400 Fitness Watch, is a fairly new device that has an integrated Heart Rate Monitor and GPS system. As well as a device that recognises when the wearer is moving. Therefore it works out during each day how much exercise you have been doing. It can be used in three modes.
1. Just wear the watch and the device recognises movement, therefore exercise
2. Turn on the GPS, walk the dog and it will track your walk and recognise your efforts
3. Wear the heart rate chest strap do the same walk and it will work out more precisely your effort.
Polar M400 Fitness Watch
For example take the dog for a 3KM walk, which just wearing the Polar M400 Fitness Watch works out to 33 %. As does wearing the watch and turning on the GPS 33% . Or use the HRM and GPS and the same walk works out to 50% of your daily needs.
The watch is quite clever and needs to know your height, weight, age and gender to work these things out. Also via the polar website you can hook up your watch and tell it more information such as your BMI and how much exercise you would expect to do in a week..
I bought the Polar M400 Fitness Watch as I do a bit of cycling, obviously there are cycling specific devices that attach to the handle bars which is what I could have gone for, the reason I went for the watch is that I also do a fair bit of walking on the roads or in the hills and want to be able to use the device to calculate my efforts and fitness. So I use a piece of foam to thicken the bar and strap the watch to the bars, it is easy to read (even for my old eyes) and I don’t need to remove my hands from the bars.
A short video showing some of the screens
There are four built in sport settings for the watch including cycling so the device is good for cycling too. If you use the polar website app you can configure extra activities too, however I have not done this.
If you have never used a HRM before it will work out your training zones. There are two main options for working out zones and the polar uses the simple percentage of maximum system. It creates five zones. I won’t go too much into detail but basically most training should be done in the zones 1 – 3, Zone 1 is very easy and is a recovery zone that is also good for burning fat, where as zone 3 is a reasonably hard zone that you should be able to keep up for a few hours, mainly burning carbohydrates. Zone 2 is in the middle. Zone 4 and 5 are fairly flat out and on the limit and would mainly be used during races etc. The other main system has six zones which are worked out of percentages of your working zone (Max minus Minimum HRM) The problem as far as cycling is concerned is that most riders train to hard, the Zone 2 is a perfect place to be to increase endurance and train the heart to do be more efficient. What happens to most riders is as soon as a hill comes they go over zone 3 into 4 or beyond which actually is not so good for the training. This is my number one reason to buy the HRM as I need to slow down on the hills to stay in my good zone. Also, and good to know for lots of people, if your main goal is to lose weight you don’t have to go hard, you need to stick to zone 1. But it is all about time, so you need to do TITS…. time in the saddle… Obviously it is not just about cycling and power walking in Zone 1 is better for losing weight than power walking in zone 3. Without going over the top. Two hours in Zone 1 is better for burning fat than 2 hours in Zone 3. But two hours in Zone 3 is a better work out for your body, it all depends what your objective is.
Back to the watch I have been using it for a few weeks now, on the bike I rarely scroll through the different screens, there are multiple screens per activity. But distance time and heart rate are what I want to know. It also works out average speeds, times in different zones, altitude etc. Oh and altitude is the watches biggest problem, way out and if I started syncing the watch with strava I would not get any where near the climbing in meters that I actually do. So polar could do with fixing that.
The Polar data from a ride, the height gain is noted as 450 Meters Where as in the Strava data from the same ride coming from an Android device it is 587 Meters (below), that is a big loss of climbing and can be checked using a OS map at the high points. The distance difference is due to my method of standby being different on the two devices.
The battery is charged using an android type smart phone charger and the watch will go for days on end no problem. However with the GPS and HRM turned on I doubt that it would do the 8 hours Polar say it will. If I was going for a long 160KM cycle I would make sure it was fully charged before I set off. Maybe this will improve with time.
Would I recommend the Polar M400 fitness watch to others, yes and no. Yes if you have never used a HRM GPS before and want somewhere fairly easy to start. No, if you have a good idea how it all works, in that case maybe spend a bit more and get something a bit better. Or forget the GPS and just buy a HRM for about 60€. Also if it is your only device and altitude is important, No… I do like it though and am happy enough, especially at the price.
The Polar M400 Fitness Watch website page for the Polar M400
This post follows on from November No Drinker if you like this post please use the Social Media Buttons Below, cheers
November no Drinker, As a drinking man who does a fair bit of cycling, or a cyclist who does a fair bit of drinking… I decided to give up drink altogether for the month of November. I did not know if it would be easy or hard, given that I consistently drink a bottle of wine a day and in the weekends would top that up with a few pints as well. Over drinking some would say, but I have no problem getting up every day at 8AM and doing long cycle rides with good average speeds and height gains.
36 hours in and I already knew that I was sleeping more soundly and on the second morning I had a resting heart rate of 60BPM which for me is quite good. I needed to find some scales to weigh myself.
Two nights on and the sleeping is very good, off to bed around 11PM feeling the need for sleep and sleeping through the night no problem. Resting heart beat of 58 BPM and a weight of 92KG which puts me 6.5KG over the BMI, which is a bit of a joke in any case. Cycling well and doing some good times on the climbs. I do feel the need for chocolate so I guess I am finding a replacement for the drink, this should wear off…
A week in and heart beat at rest is down to 56BPM just goes to show the effort the body uses to eliminate the toxins in alcohol. On day 9 went for a cycle with the Katurk cycling lads and did three hours at 30KMH, it is very flat around Kanturk though. The heart rate keeps going down and is now 53BPM. Day 10 and I have covered 300 KM and 2000 meters of climbing, I still weigh 92KG I do feel slimmer and fitter though and that is as important.
The days are passing by without much to mention, there is no difficulty in not drinking. Went to a party where most people were drinking away and it made zero difference, apart from going home at 12:30 as I was so tired. Sleep is much better without drink. Oh and now on day 16 my resting heart rate is down to 51BPM, I have lost 1KG and so far this month I have cycled 422 KM and climbed 4500 Meters.
Day 18, now I’ve cycled 471 KM and Climbed 5100 Meters.
So after three weeks I have treated myself to a fitness watch (read review here) that calculates my Heart Rate and speed whilst cycling or walking etc, apparently it tells me I have a V02 Max of 48 which is very good for my age. So after three weeks and a day I have now cycled 642 KM with 7000 Meters.
Day 24 another short cycle and weight down to 90KG when I went to bed I had a slow heart beat so counted it for three minutes it was down to 45BPM. This morning (day25) when I awoke I counted again to 48, strange. I also did a V02 test and was up to 60 which amazes me. I wonder how good the test is… (Tested using https://www.worldfitnesslevel.org/#/ and that gave me 58)
November no Drinker
Day 30 last day resting heart rate consistently around the 48BPM, 750 KM on the bike and a height gain of 9000 meters. I weigh 89.5KG
Oh and by the way:
I have not snored all month…
I sleep really well
I have lost a bit of weight
I feel good
In conclusion, I found it very easy to not drink, and in fact now two days into December and I think I will go another few days. Give it a go.
