iRide
Zaskoda’s Snowboarding Journal

Recently I noticed a massive spike in my site traffic. Apparently, my Hardcore Fitness Training post from last November caught on over at Stumble Upon. I was shocked to see nearly 4,000 visitors in a single day. I generally don’t get traffic of that magnitude to my little blog.

Some of the comments left both in my blog and in the review of my post warned that I was losing the weight too quickly to be healthy. In most cases, these comments said I would almost surely regain the weight once I started eating again. It’s been over four months and I have not sustained significant weight gain. I also have not been ill this entire season and I’ve had relatively good strength endurance while snowboarding. Coming off of my one hardcore week, I did the following:

• Slowly increased my calorie intake. This was easy because my stomach shrank a bit.
• Continued to eat a veggie heavy diet.
• Continued to exercise regularly. I snowboard nearly every weekend and hit the gym irregularly.
• Monitored my weight and made adjustments if I began to slide. Sometimes I would eat unhealthy and start to gain. If this happened, I spent about a week focused on eating as healthy as possible.

There are no real “tricks” going on. I’m not counting calories anymore. I’m not working out a whole lot outside of snowboarding. Keep in mind, snowboarding can be a huge calorie burn. A friend of mine tracked her heart rate on the mountain and noticed that 55% of the time she was in the “fat burn” zone (it’s just below “cardio gain” zone). Consider that some days of boarding last 6 to 8 hours.

The one thing I’m not doing is gaining any significant muscle mass. Sometimes I will lift free weights at the house; however, I’ve not been dedicating enough regularity to really modify the shape of my body significantly. My current goal is to simply maintain the gains I’ve made during the season. I do intend to focus more on personal training some time in the future.

As a side note, I’m shocked at how popular my last post turned out to be. It’s inspiring to see my post affecting so many people!

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Health and Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.