Waxing and Waning of Strength

My brother (L) and myself building ranch shed Feb 2011

Note: I've decided to post randomly selected pictures from my photographic library to add visual interest to these posts. Where possible, I hope the photo will show something where I was directly or indirectly exercising. 

Another brisk morning, so I bundled up in sweats, hoodie, gloves, and knit cap to walk Penny for another 25  minute route. Normally it would be a 30 minute route, but for whatever reason today she didn't stop to sniff stuff as often as usual so there was a lot of continuous walking which I enjoyed. Sometimes I get aggravated when she wants to sniff at every bush. She gets really sniffy after rain or drizzle or very humid periods.

After the walk I performed the Tue-Thu 8-session KB swings, for 120 swings then tackled three Turkish Get Ups per side. I was able to execute the "strong man" version of TGU on the right support side, but I could only do so once on the left side today before reverting to the "old man" TGU technique for the last two. Thus the post heading - my observation that from one day to the next the level of strength I possess varies. Even though mentally I felt no different than Tuesday, physically I was just unable to support my body weight with my left arm during the TGU. Did I over-tax myself Tuesday leaving too little in the tank for today? Or was there something in my diet over the last few days that reduced my strength for today?

The body is a wonderful mechanism, but subject to swings in responses to environment and input. I see that in my daily weigh-ins. The daily variance can swing at least plus or minus 3 lbs day-to-day and that is mostly due to the fact that our physical make-up is somewhere around 70% water. So dehydrate one day, loose 2 lbs. Drink tons of coffee and water and gain it all back the next day. That's why it's necessary to track progress through the weighted average of the daily data because it's hard to interpret progress through the noisy data.

Speaking of which, I've entered my first plateau. I've been bouncing within 1.5 lbs of 190 now for seven days. Often I've broken out of these plateaus by fasting for 24 hours. Typically I do so from after dinner Thursday until dinner Friday. (Thus it's not always exactly 24 hours but close enough...) I'll talk more about fasting in a future post.

Back on the waxing and waning topic: I wonder if there's a way I can track the progress of my strength and fitness through the noise of "old man" vs "strong man" TGU technique differences. I can evaluate this subjectively, but that's open to positive spin interpretation of the data rather than concrete and objective progress tracking through some metric analogous to the smoothed weight tracking. I hope to ascertain fitness and strength improvements in little victories like consistently doing "strong man" TGU and finding that my 30 lb Kettlebell has become too easy to wield. But my engineering mind would be really happy to put a concrete number on the progress from which I can derive a feedback mechanism to improve performance.