BFL – Day One
Today it’s my 44th birthday. Some say I might be slightly more than halfway through the natural duration of my life, but given my genetic pre-disposition towards heart disease and stroke, I might actually be a lot closer to the end than I would be happy to admit. My mother died of a heart attack when she was only 8 years older than I am now, and my Dad of a stroke aged 63. Many of his uncles and cousins also died in their 40′s and 50′s from similar things. It kind of puts things into perspective. Getting in shape and changing the way I eat has been something gnawing the back of my mind for years now, but the trouble has always been getting off my ass to do something about it.
I can’t recall when I came across it, might have been a few years ago, but the Body-For-Life program crossed into my radar screen and I was more than intrigued, because here were photographs of men and women who were in worse physical shape than me, going from what looked like amoeba shaped blobs of jelly to really nicely sculpted, athletic looking beings in just 12 weeks.
I won’t go into all the specifics of the program on my blog, but if this interests you too head on over here to check it out.
So, a couple of months ago I decided that in 2012 I was going to do this program and what better time to start than on my birthday. The lead up to this point has seen me doing quite a bit of research on the nutritional side of things because BFL is an American program, so many of the foodstuffs they recommend have a different local equivalent, specifically on the supplements side. The guys who run BFL over in the States recommend the use of EAS supplements for meal replacements (unless you really are up to preparing yourself 6 meals a day the supplements are essential!) but those products are not available in South Africa, so I had to find something similar. Fortunately Ultimate Sports Nutrition (USN) make the same sorts of things here and they even have their own 12 week program which is very much the same as BFL, but in my opinion a bit too restrictive in terms of entering (you have to pay to be in line for the R50k prize for the best transformation). I’m not in this for the money – I just want to change.
Anyway, I began going to the gym in December and had a couple of workouts with the guy who is now my personal trainer, Kyle. Instead of wasting my time trying to diet and workout over the Christmas and New Year period I decided to focus purely on light cardio workouts (bicycle, rowing machine, treadmill) to get my stamina up because in reality, if I had had to do any kind of aerobic exercise at that point I may very well have been re-united with my parents a lot earlier than scheduled.
I started out with the stationary bikes and the rowing machine, spending about 15-20 minutes on the bikes at varying levels of intensity and then 5 minutes on the rower. That machine is a bastard, but it certainly works just about everything. Over the course of a few weeks I could feel myself getting much fitter. I was still huffing and puffing, but instead of having to sit down for at least 5 minutes after my cycling, I am now able to move directly onto the next machine to get my heart rate up to around 170bpm.
On BFL you alternate training days between weight training and cardio. The weight training you do for 45-60 minutes and cardio only for 20 minutes. Thank God you don’t have to do them both on the same day because today I had my first real upper body weight training session with Kyle and I very quickly realised just how little upper body strength I have. By the time I got to the end of the workout it felt as if somebody had transplanted my arms with things that could easily have been mistaken for magicians balloons. Long thin and fairly useless for lifting anything! Even now, as I type this some 5 hours post-workout I have about as much use of them as I do the cranes offloading ships in the harbour. You should have seen me trying to wash my hair in the shower. Rowan Atkinson; call me. I have some brilliant material for your Mr. Bean character.
Well, on the bright side, there are only 5 days left to my first “free day” and I think I will celebrate that milestone with some form of hypnotherapy or PTSD medication.
Stay tuned for more updates as I progress. 
