Health Reboot Week 4 and Total Update

Week #4 (plus two days) of my 30 day Health Reboot challenge is now in the books. With that the 30 day challenge is also completed. My final week had its rough points, as I predicted it would, but had lots of success too.

The grading criteria mentioned in the original post are:

So the 30 Day reboot goals looks like the following:

  • Goal 1: Eat a Blue Zones inspired plant dominant diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
  • Goal 2: Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
  • Goal 3: 20 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming)
  • Goal 4: Daily calisthenics or yoga
  • Goal 5: 15 minutes or more of meditation

Week 4 (Plus 2 days) Summary

I knew that the diet goal (Goal #1) was going to suffer grade wise. I had two parties that I didn’t mind taking the hit for. One of those, the celebration of the 5th anniversary of my favorite local restaurant definitely scored a goose egg score. The other party I moderated a little bit so didn’t zero out. However mixed in there were some other hiccup days. That all added up to not a total wreck of a week but an aggregate grade of a 3.09 (B).

Like with the diet goal, I knew that the sleep goal (Goal #2) was going to suffer this week but in that case due to circumstances that were out of my control. Essentially I was going to have a lot of nights of interrupted sleep and insufficient schedule time to fit in the difference elsewhere. That assessment was spot on but not as bad as I figured it would be. I assumed that for those days I would have sleep levels, like 5 hours of actual sleep time, that would cause me to mark myself a 1.0. I actually got a decent amount one night and not entirely horrible, but still way too little, on several of those days. That rounded out the score for the week on the sleep goal at 2.94 (C+).

The Cardio (Goal #3) and Training (Goal #4) goals were the ones that I was most interested in making sure I didn’t mess up since I had a perfect record. The same schedule and travel pressures that were driving the other two would make it more difficult but not impossible to get it in. Under normal circumstances I can guarantee I would have skipped any exercising of any kind even if I were in a training for a race. I would just have a “skip week”. As a first for me I was able to nail getting both of these in each day, thus getting a perfect score as well.

Meditation was also something that I would often drop too easily. I didn’t have great meditation sessions but I did get at least 15 minutes of them in each day for another perfect score. All of that together added up to a 3.61 (B+) grade for the week.

Challenge Summary

As I wrote at the beginning of this challenge, “By far the thing I have the biggest problem dialing in consistently is exercise.” While this was about doing an across the board tune up those were my focus items. On that score I was able to ace the challenge. I literally did not miss a single day of cardio or training. Across the years I tracked this I have never maintained such a long run. I am therefore beyond pleased with that result. Along with actually hitting the targets my capabilities in each of those categories. The training runs on the Peloton bike started off with me dogging it even on the easy “beginner” ones. Now I can do those same ones as my “easy day” rides within the prescribed rotation rate and resistance ranges. The HIIT training and more intense exercises are also becoming more approachable too. I’m actually mostly in the bottom end of the range on these hard rides. I will consider myself successful when I can be in the range the entire ride. I have a long way to go but am impressed with how much progress I made in just the thirty days. Which makes me tickled pink when I look at this chart from the Peloton site where I track all the workouts:

Screenshot of the Peleton Workout History Calendar showing 30 days record

The same is true on the calisthenics/yoga front. My first day of doing this I couldn’t even get one proper pushup type movement when doing a downward-dog to Chaturanga Dandasana movement (FYI to yoga people, I know I’m not doing the official proper form when I’m adding pushups to this movement). Now I can do many iterations of that as well as several proper push ups. A lot of the tightness I had in my…basically everywhere…has also worked its way out too. It isn’t completely gone but it is much better.

Mindfulness and mental health from being more mindful as driven by the meditation was another slam dunk with me meditating each and every day. At first I thought I’d be able to ramp up to a lot longer sittings being easy. I started at just a few minutes being tolerable but moved through it. Now it is improved but not as much as I would have liked. The point that I was able to be consistent and deliberate with it though as a win in itself.

Sleep I was able to do pretty solidly on, with the exception of Week 4 more which I didn’t have much control over. Week 2 I had some things I should have dialed in more. For the most part though I nailed that as well. Diet too was something I could have had more control over. Free days for special occassions I don’t think make longevity concerns. Instead it is the regular and unnecessary indulgences. There were several days in there though where I allowed stress eating or just a “screw it” attitude rein which then went into indulging not on healthy foods for snacks but junk food. That is probably what I need to dial in most.

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 (+2 days) Final
Goal 1 (Diet) 3.70 (A-) 3.14 (B) 3.71 (A-) 3.09 (B) 3.32 (B)
Goal 2 (Sleep) 3.93 (A-) 3.29 (B) 3.84 (A-) 2.94 (C+) 3.53 (B+)
Goal 3 (Cardio) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A)
Goal 4 (Training) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A)
Goal 5 (Meditation) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A) 4.00 (A)
Total GPA 3.93 (A-) 3.69 (B+) 3.91 (A-) 3.61 (B+) 3.77 (A-)

Follow-on Challenge

With the 30 day reboot challenge done I do feel rebooted. By “rebooted” I don’t mean done. These things are supposed to be about life long necessary habits. By “rebooted” I mean having some momentum towards keeping things dialed in. The last few days of the challenge aligned with Phase 6 of the 13 phases the year is divided into. What I therefore intend to do is do the challenge through the next Phase as I did before. I’ll write a separate post detailing how but what I imagine is to essentially continue status quo and blogging about it here at least at kick off and close out of the phase.