I started the year on crutches so it feels somewhat of a success to reach the end of the year standing firmly on my own two feet. Apple Health confirms that my walking steadiness has indeed climbed throughout the year and I am now just OK. I thought I’d do a 2022 retrospective post in the hopes that I could glean something more successful from the year than that mediocre accolade. There have after all been numerous fitness experiments and another year of consistent dabbling - if those two words can actually sit happily alongside one another. The Fifty Year Old Rebuild Last year I entered my f ..read more

I broke my ankle at the very end of November when two large dogs running at full pelt, collided with each other and the back of my leg. I pirouetted and crumpled with a crack to my knee followed by another to my ankle. I thought it might be interesting to document my progress and share tips for ankle fracture recovery. How my Ankle Fracture recovery Progressed Ankle Fracture – Week 1 Fairly awful A&E experience. So glad we had crutches in the house otherwise I think I would have been on my hands and knees trying to navigate triage. I got called back the next day to have a weight bearing x ..read more

In my latest experiment I intend to dramatically increase my crushing grip strength. I’ve been humbled in recent weeks by a broken ankle that has required me to hobble around on crutches while keeping as much weight as possible off my left leg. It seems that my wrists have not really been up to the job and can’t adequately support my bodyweight through the full range of motion required for day to day life. Getting in and out of the bath without using my injured leg has been difficult and that makes me feel way more vulnerable than I would like. So my latest experiment is driven by a desire to ..read more

Since I broke my ankle late last year, I have been relying on my wrists a lot more than usual to support my daily activities and I have come to see them as my latest achilles heel in my resilience journey. They just aren’t strong enough for a day of crutch walking or heavy duty dip work, such as that required to get me out of the bath without use of my left leg. So for my latest experiment, I’ve started a program of grip strengthening which of course requires a spreadsheet to monitor grip strength progress over the coming months. This Google Sheets grip strength monitoring template can be used ..read more

A couple of years ago a surgeon told me I needed a knee replacement but he wasn’t prepared to operate until I’d lost a shed load of weight. I never really felt convinced that my knee did need to go, perhaps I was just running scared but accepted that the weight loss would be beneficial. Of course I’ve been losing weight most of my adult life (except when I wasn’t) and therefore strongly suspected a knee op was never going to happen. At the beginning of the year I was trying to ignore my niggles and revive my love for running, this time with a dog leading the way. Unfortunately by week 6 of the ..read more

At 50m the air a scuba diver breathes, starts to slowly and painfully poison them. A single but very long breath can enable a freediver to sink a whopping 200 toxic metres. While freediving has its attractions, my extraordinarily buoyant body precludes me from this activity. This hasn’t stopped me from gathering a small collection of freediving books and an assortment of apnea iPhone apps in a quest to hold my breath for an extraordinary length of time. The latest obsession with breath holding follows a really interesting podcast by Ben Greenfield where he was talking to a freediver about the ..read more

2 years ago I was offered a free Dexascan to reveal what lies beneath. Since then I’ve been booking myself in for 6 monthly progress reports at BodyScanUK. Most of these scans revealed only micro improvements to my weight. However, having this scheduled check-in booked, seems to curb the worst of my excesses and keeps me oscillating back to the straight and narrow. Historically if I take my eye off the ball, which typically means removing my daily or weekly weigh in, then my weight climbs. Easily half to one whole stone can slip onto my body over the year. So I had been happy at least to stop ..read more

My third experiment aligns with the start of the New year. A new year full of hope for global health and well being. This last year was truly an odd one. Where the world did its best to tackle the covid-19 pandemic, I managed to adopt a few healthy habits while I got used to a new life of working from the spare room. Despite my new habits (and a lockdown puppy that helped improve my step count), there is no denying that the negative effects of morbid obesity and advancing years are not easily escaped. Swinging a few clubs, an occasional inversion and a few spin classes have not held back the t ..read more

I’m a big fan of projects, if I haven’t got focus and novelty in my life I tend to drift off course. From today, taking inspiration from Raptitude and his series of experiments in life, I am going to start documenting these experiments more formally here in the blog. As lockdown started back in March I thought it would carve out a chunk of time and therefore an opportunity to learn a new skill. I opted to learn how to swing a pair of Indian clubbells. We are a few months on now and while I still swing clubbells consistently, I can’t claim to be very good. I’ve heard that we are likely to remai ..read more

I broke my ankle at the very end of November when two large dogs running at full pelt, collided with each other and the back of my leg. I pirouetted and crumpled with a crack to my knee followed by another to my ankle. I thought it might be interesting to document my progress and share tips for ankle fracture recovery. Ankle fracture How my Ankle Fracture recovery Progressed Ankle Fracture – Week 1 Fairly awful A&E experience. So glad we had crutches in the house otherwise I think I would have been on my hands and knees trying to navigate triage. I got called back the next day to have a w ..read more