Goals and plan

I apparently forgot some of the best advice I've ever gotten. If you want to exercise and improve, moving forward with just about any decent plan is better than not moving forward because you're waiting for the perfect plan.

I've modified the spreadsheet I'm using to track my activities and relevant daily statistics. There is a new tab specifically for caloric expenditure over time. If I want to add much strength, I need to add muscle mass. When I weigh 81 kg, I'm sitting at around 10 or 11 percent body fat, which is about as low as I can go without getting pretty extreme on my diet. Right now, I weight 85.6 kg; therefore, I could theoretically build 4.6 kg of muscle, the work of around 5 months with "beginner gains", stay at exactly the same body weight, and get down to around 10% body fat.

But my current plan is built to last about two months. Assuming that I can add 2 kg of muscle in that time, that makes my target mass 83 kg. The caloric expenditure spreadsheet is set to calculate caloric values at a loss of .5 kg/week. In terms of cardio, I'm going to maintain my goal of doing a half iron man cumulatively each week. I'm thinking about increasing the running volume, or possibly doing a full olympic triathlon once per week, but those modifications can come later.

For now, the main changes are going to focus on diet, strength improvement, and stretches. The changes for stretches are nothing much; still six days a week, but with 3 of each stretch instead of 5. For strength, I'm going to do a dumbbell-only program designed for 3 days a week (https://www.muscleandstrength.com/workouts/dumbbell-only-home-or-gym-fullbody-workout.html). It's originally designed to last 8 weeks, but I'm going to do at least nine; this first week is going to be for building familiarity with the routine and starting to dial in the correct weights for each exercise. I also plan to do 100 reps each of pushups, situps, and squats on saturdays; I worked hard to achieve that goal, and I don't want to lose that ability. For diet, I'm going to stick to a few simple rules. Rule 1, track absolutely every calorie I consume. Rule 2, eat at least 160 grams of protein per day, spread out over at least 4 meals that are at least 2 hours apart each. Rule 3, eat the number of calories recommended by the TDEE tab PLUS the "active" calories from garmin; only the TDEE-recommended calories will get entered onto teh TDEE tab, so that its math will continue to work properly.