Day 35 - Rest Day & Week 5 Analysis

What a weird week it has been.  I've had some work related stuff which has seriously affected my sleep, but due to my awesome family, and the challenge I set myself for this week's workouts, I feel pretty good at the moment (Plus we got the new Star Wars Trailer!).

As you hopefully remember from last week's analysis, week 4 was a disaster.  I ate badly, did the lowest intensity week of workouts of the whole year, gained body fat, and injured my left shoulder.  On Saturday, after my normal weigh-in, measurements and workout I challenged myself to turn that around this week.  As this week had the exact same workouts as last week, I wanted to know if I was just being lazy, and whether I could match week 3's calorie burn.

That was a pretty stupid challenge.  When I set it, I had already completed one of this week's workouts, and burning an extra 600 calories in 5 workouts would be really hard.  Especially when two of them (Back and  6 Pack & Cardio Recovery) are not high calorie burners.

So, now for the moment of truth.  Did I do it?  No.

In week 4, I burned 4172 calories.  This week I managed 4686.  That's an increase of 514.  It's short of my target, but I'm not hugely disappointed.  If we compare the last two weeks we can see where I fell short;

I made a reasonable increase in every workout this week except for one - The one I did before setting myself the challenge.  I'm still not convinced that I could have gained those extra 86 calories in Upper elite, but seeing as I managed a 79 calorie increase in Cardio Recovery, I'd have been a lot closer to my goal.

So, now that I've pushed myself harder this week, how does last week's theory that increased fitness = a lower calorie burn look?  Once again, I pulled the data from my Polar H7 Bluetooth 4.0 Heart Rate Sensor and recorded totals for duration and calories burnt.

As this is the last week where we have data for all five workouts, let's see them all together.  Firstly let's look at the duration;

There's no real surprise here - with identical workouts in both weeks 4 and 5 of the workout, there was no difference in time.

Now we look at the calorie burn for each of the programmes;

Now we can see those extra 514 calories!

Now if we combine the two graphs to look at the calorie burn per minute;

As week 4/5 was very slightly shorter than week 3, the difference in calorie burn per minute really tightens up.  I did 12.2 calories per minute in week three, 10.75 in week 4, and 12.02 this week.

I'll find out tomorrow if pushing harder has made any physical changes.  I'm hoping to have at least lost last week's body fat gain.

So did my increased fitness explain my lower calorie burn per minute last week?  Maybe very slightly, but the main difference was pure laziness.  I simply wasn't pushing as hard as I could.  The next question is whether pushing this hard is sustainable.  Only time will tell.

Next week is looking very light;

In fact, that almost looks like a recovery week!  I certainly won't be setting any personal bests, but I'll push hard all the same.

Thanks for reading!  I hope that this is of interest to somebody out there.  As always, I'll leave you with a little treat for making it through all my waffle.  If you haven't already seen this, sit down, turn up the volume and enjoy.  If you have already seen this, do that anyway :)