Today, Jo wants to be picked up from work at 13:00 so I had to go to the gym early.  I struggled a bit on my workout but I'm not sure if that is because I was rushing, because I used extra weights or because I have reached a point of overtraining on those muscles.  No work tomorrow, so I may drop the weights to those I did on Monday and see what results I have.  I'm not suffering from any delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) which is quite strange considering that I am doing weights which are heavy for me and generally doing 6 sets of between 9-11 reps with very little breaks inbetween sets.  I pretty much just take the time to write down my results before going straight onto the next set.

I seem to be waking a couple of times during the night but I'm falling back to sleep without issue and I'm waking in the morning feeling refreshed.  My muscles do not feel painful at all so I will go to the gym today and see how my performance is compared to yesterday.  I need to map out my nutritional values for today because I need to be strict with my diet to try to shift myself under 200lbs.

If I'm currently not overtraining, I wonder how hard I can actually push myself before I am overtraining.  I shall try to keep it up for a week and see what the effects are and then adapt accordingly.

I've found two schools of thought with regard to exercising the same muscle group daily.  Some have said that without proper rest between workouts, you will over-exercise that musclegroup which will be detrimental.  Others have pointed out that Olympic athletes will exercise for long hours daily without negative effects.  The general retort is that Olympic athletes have been doing it for longer.  So, I'm thinking that the only real way to tell is to try it and see what the results are.  There are of course some important variables.  Mainly, sleep.  My sleep appears to be generally better quality than it has been in a long time with my body waking fully after 7 hours indicating that either I only need 7 hours or that my body only allows me to have 7 hours.  It will be interesting to see if working a muscle group excessively causes my sleep to increase to cope with the strain.  The next important variable is nutrients.  I need to keep my protein up but I also fully understand that there is no point in overloading on protein because I know that my body simply will not be able to metabolise it and will use it as fuel instead.  With this in mind, I'm going to keep my diet pretty much the same and ensure my sleep is kept in order but I'm looking to work on my upper body strength.  I'm using moderate weights for now but I'll be looking to increase my weights as and when I can.  I am looking to work the muscles without overloading them and keeping my weights within safe limits as I see little point in risking injury.

So, on the 9th I did an upperbody workout focusing on chinups, pullups, dips and bench-presses.  On the 10th I did pretty much the same but my phone did not record my previous workout and so I cannot see how I performed in comparison.  On the 10th, I recorded it on paper and in the morning I will transfer my results onto the computer and do the same workout again and see how they compare.  If I'm overworking my muscles, I should see a decrease in my capabilities whereas is I see an improvement, I know that I'm not overworking.  And of course, by recording my progress here, I will get to see who is right and who is wrong with regard to overworking muscle groups.

So, I've seemed to plateaued at around 201-202lbs but I have increased my exercise with gym work.  I'm satisfied that the IF has helped regulate my sleep patterns.  My next goal, which should help getting down to a healthy weight, is to improve my upper-body strength.  With this in mind, I'm focussing on my upper-body in the gym and not worrying about my cardio.  I cycle pretty much every day anyway.  I've still got far too much belly but it is starting to trim down.  I've started looking up how daily exercise will effect me and it's a bit of a mixed bag with some saying that it will be acceptable if you get enough rest with others saying that you realistically need 48hrs to have enough rest.  So I will try to do daily workouts and see how this affects me and try to record my findings.