An exercise tidbit

When I became an ossifer, er, officer, I managed to get roped into what we called the fat-boy program. Now this is usually run by an NCO for enlisteds, but officers do a LOT of paperwork and tend toward seat cushion spread. The upshot of this is that I got a lot of lessons on the subject – and enough contradictions I went and did the research to get things right.

I’m going to share one little thing I ran across that’s a very useful gem for those of us working on getting back where we should be. Make sure you have a timepiece that sounds off every hour on the hour – a watch with a beep, a chiming floor or mantle clock, whatever. When it sounds off, do a short set of exercises. One set of 20 something works while you’re beginning, build it up to a minute or two of sets down the road. Not (quite) enough to build a sweat, but enough you can feel your body recognizing it as exercise.

Here’s the thing – the body is lazy. Yes, when you do your regular 15 minutes to hour and a half of exercise every couple of days your body seriously burns calories. It also continues to burn at an elevated rate for a while after you work out as it works to flush the waste and redistribute nutrients, fluids, and other bodily requirements. But when that’s done your body slooooows down. Burning excess calories when it’s not needed is not usually a survival element – you might need those down the road, and food is scarce. Or so says the hindbrain. It is the hindbrain we’re working on here.

See, it’s harder (not a lot, but a little) for the body to move from sedentary to move fast than it is to move from medium to fast. In fact it’s hard enough that if you can convince your body you need to jump to “hard work” at frequent intervals it’ll just give up and “rest” at a slightly higher rate. Sure, it’s burning more calories, but obviously if you’re having to sprint a lot the body has a better chance of surviving if it’s ready to sprint.

Boy, was that clumsy. Let’s rephrase that. If you bump your caloric burn at frequent intervals, the body will keep the base burn rate a bit higher than it would if you just sit all day. That burn is on top of the actual caloric burn of your short workout.

Bottom line, by doing a bit of serious (though short) work every hour, you’ll increase the burn. It will NOT keep your muscles in top shape. If you’re trying to build massive muscles it’ll work against you. But if the primary goal for the moment is burning off excess calories, it’s a very useful trick.

So every hour on the hour my watch beeps. Gads, I’m getting to hate this thing.

Reminiscing – exercise

Since I’ve gone into nostalgia, and at the same time I’m trying to lose weight and get back in shape, this post seems obvious. Sorry, no beer tales like yesterday.

For most of the time I was in the Rangers, our exercise was very close to habit; enough so that I can still walk through most of it. I know it has changed some, but I thought I’d share – and then discuss some underlying reasoning.

Most of the time, our pattern was:

Monday through Thursday

- Daily dozen
- Run
- Exercise.

Friday

Road March.

Now the daily dozen was twelve exercises (and I’ve finally aged enough I can’t recall all twelve, even though it was what I did every single week for a very intense period of my life), 20 repetitions of each. They included side straddle hops (jumping jacks), pushups, situps, boot slaps… Anyway. I have been to civilian exercise programs where that is a workout. In the rangers (and later the pathfinder unit) that was the warmup. It got the blood running in preparation for the workout.

The run was… Well, first we (usually) got two minutes to stretch and warm anything the dozen didn’t get. Most of us did something for the achilles tendon but it really wasn’t necessary. Then it was back in formation. Monday and Wednesday was a short run of 2-3 miles. Tuesday and Thursday we did a longer run of 4 to 6 miles. Enter the fun… The pace was 8:15 +/- :15 per mile. Seriously, I saw more than one junior NCO receive counseling when they went too fast or too slow. Now this might seem pretty peculiar. After all, it’s not much of a run speed. At ranger school you had better be able to do 6 minute miles. But at 3d bat it was rigid. Of course as a consequence, we could go for miles at that pace – and proved it more than once. (Every so often the battalion commander would order a change of pace. Sometimes we enlisteds would find out ahead of time, but more often it was when we went off the normal course. The furthest I recall was 14 miles – at 8:15 +/- :15 per mile. If you knew how far the unit had to run to come to your assistance, you KNEW the latest they’d arrive.)

Exercise was either a mass of upper body or a mass of abdominal/leg work. 30 minutes to an hour of pushing the muscles to burnout. Upper body went with the long run, lower with the sprint (so to speak). Rope climbs, pushups, incline pushups, buddy lifts (squats with your partner riding piggyback), … yeah, I know an exercise or two.

Friday was the fun day. Draw your full load, ruck up, and take a road march. The army’s Expert Infantry Badge requires (as part) that you go 12 miles in 3 hours carrying weapon, gear, and a 35 pound ruck. pffft. Again the battalion standard was you’d go at least four miles and take a ten minute rest to take care of feet, gear, etc every hour. Three weeks of the month we’d do 12 miles. The fourth would be 20 or 24 – never figured out the pattern to that. Now we did decrease our load from that … interesting jump I discussed yesterday, so my load dropped to around 80 pounds. That wasn’t all that atypical so we’ll use it as the standard. 80 pounds at just under 5 miles per hour for at least three and up to six hours

Every so often we’d go off-road. Sometimes the pace slackened. grin.

That was our maintenance level workout. An hour and a half of PT (Physical Training) four days a week with a longer ’special’ on the fifth day. Two days to let the feet recover, and do it again. I’m not going to do that again – not least I’ve got some foot problems from way back when that would put paid to the road march. But it’s nice to have a baseline against which to measure myself.

And I thought some of you might be interested.