Planning to Rise to The Challenge

Just before I turned 40 years old I began a fitness journey towards wellness. How I got to the point I was did not matter. The only thing was to make a shift towards wellness. What I started then was CrossFit. It was evident that self-motivating myself to “hit the gym” or workout at home was never actually going to manifest itself. I needed a group and some outside motivation to get things moving. In that light, I’m writing this, my plan to press a little deeper into my fitness goals.

Starting today is the beginning of “The Lurong Challenge“. It is a fitness, diet, and overall lifestyle change challenge. 

My goals are reasonably simple

1. Drop 15 lbs in fat weight
2. Stretch Daily, and improve my mobility
3. Cook Prep Like Crazy, and thus control my diet more
4. Rest 8-10 Hours a Day, sleep and/or prayer, meditation

My plan for all this becomes a little more complex.

1. Dropping weight, I have learned, becomes a game where one has to balance nutrition, exercise, and rest/recovery. If it was super easy there would not be a huge business to help people achieve that particular goal. My exercise regiment will increase to get back a regular 4-5 days a week of exercise. 3-4 days will be “in the gym” likely doing some CrossFit workouts. One day a week walking the golf course. Carrying a bag a few miles is slow work, but constant exercise. My water intake will undergo an increase goal over 100 oz. a day. My food I am going to track my food intake to meet a 200/200/100 grams ratio of protein/carbohydrates/fats. This will help to keep my quality of food in check as well. I took an InBody test earlier today to get my weight/fat/muscle mass baseline which I will be comparing myself to in a few weeks.
2. Around a year ago I had a mobility check and came to find out that, for my activity level, my body’s range of mobility was sorely lacking. And at time utterly frightening. I now work with a functional movement chiropractor to help get back to a normative level. However, I want to work deeper and have a greater range of motion, so the ambitious goals is to do the ROMWOD workout 5 to 6 days a week for this challenge. My end hope is to find a set up and a time of day that works to make this a forever thing. I like the idea of being a pliable old man.
3. Erin and I have done a number of cooking/diet edits over the years. We have done paleo and Whole 30 (or really Whole 20ish) and found them to be unsustainable for our lives. However, we have learned to cook better foods and understand nutrition more as fuel, which is a good thing. The plans to meet this goal is to meal plan more protein filled meals (we have learned this is the area we our diets, and most for that matter, fail miserably) and food prep like a crazy man. It helps that my friend Josh is prepping some meals for us to give a buffer when we need it.
4. I need to sleep more & pray/meditate more. My FitBit lets me know that I sleep around 5 hours an evening. Not good if you are trying to recover from an active life. Even worse if you are trying to lose weight. My plan to reach this goal is to stick my phone on the charger in my office at a set time early in the evening. Read a book. And then nod off to sleep only to be bothered by an old school alarm clock. I have started to do the Examen a few times a week as part of my prayer and meditation in the mornings or later in the morning. The grand plan for resting I see open space in the evening to rest on readings and open space for prayer. Open space that for the last handful of years has been occupied by an iPhone. 

Goals need to be specific to be achieved. Plans need to be even more specific. These are my goals and my plans open to the world in order to hold myself more accountable and to be able to share what trips me up or brings me best sucesses.

Shalom

-Gavin