Bag Work, Hiking & Mountain Biking in Santee!

The world is wonderful! The last post I mentioned that I was going to fix my mountain bike’s gears and then go on a ride. I was successful at getting the gears adjusted ok and went on the ride through Sycamore Canyon! Here is a couple of links about Goodan Ranch and a map of the park.

I am not going to focus on that trip this time as I forgot my camera but let me tell you it was a nice ride. Not too difficult or steep but I did have to ride through some sandy areas in low gear. In this post I will focus on some activities I did this last week to keep in shape and show some pictures. Here is one picture of a heel-hook kick on the bag.

 

I have not put too many pictures of myself but I figure now that I am committed, I’ll start showing you where I am starting at. Actually I started at the beginning of last year closer to 260. I just weighed in at 245 this morning and am on track for the last two weeks. I have been careful for the last two weeks eating between 1500 and 1800 calories and have been steadily taking off the weight. I expect one to two pounds to come off a week.

The strange thing is this is easy. I mean once I finally (and I mean finally) realized that my 52 year-old body cannot consume as much as I used to when I was 22, the fat is starting (slowly) to melt off!  As you know I did my mountain biking last Sunday and I found time to go hiking with the dogs during the week. The only problem is these are old dogs in dog years – (8 x 7 = 56 years old) and they did not like the long hike up the trail. They drank a lot of water and the round trip took 2 hours. Yesterday I repeated the hike without the dogs and did the same trip twice in two hours (without dogs).

I’m not too sure of the distance and I am walking slow but overall the vertical lift is 400 feet. Here is a google map of the terrain (I circled the hiking trail).

 

Here is the map of the terrain.

I use a 5′ staff as a walking stick to keep the rattle snakes back (but really to keep me from slipping). The fun thing about hiking is it does not seem like a workout! So long as I have enough water and the energy, I can keep walking for hours.

Another of my favorite activities is punching and kicking my bag. My wife caught some of the action towards the end of my bag workout yesterday (before I went hiking). Unfortunately the camera did not snap the picture fast, so there are a lot of pictures where I just seemed to be staring the bag down! Don’t think I was trying to psych the bag out before I hit it… this was just that the punch or kick had already happened or I was starting on the next one.

I’ll just post the pictures sequentionally so some will make sense.

 

Well there you have 5 minutes of my bag workout on yesterday. I did not want to pick out just the best shots because in a workout – you have a lot of movement, which is the point I was trying to make. I try to focus on keeping my ribs covered while I am throwing punches, elbows, knees and kicks. To that end I think I did ok and I did work up a sweat.

So a quick review of what is working for me now is eating about half of what I used to and exercising fun workouts (for me)! I hope some of this has helped someone figure out how they can improve their fitness goals.