Beginning of week seven, and the start of the next six-week phase. The aims for this next phase are a) to keep on losing weight, and b) to further increase fitness.

In terms of the first aim, the target is to drop below fifteen and a half stone by the end of the six weeks. I only need to lose another four pounds to reach that goal – and maybe my goal should be more ambitious – on the other hand, this one gives me a margin for error. If I go a week without dropping any weight, it doesn’t knock me off track – so long as it doesn’t happen more than twice (assuming I lose one pound per week on the other four weeks). If I lose any more than four pounds, I’ll consider that a bonus.

I plan to achieve the second aim mainly by increasing the intensity of the 20-minute cardio phase. I’ll do that mainly by introducing short bursts of high-intensity exercise, following the HIIT principle. For the ‘intense’ exercise, the choices are hitting the heavy bag at an all-out pace, or simply jumping / flat out running on the spot.

How much intense exercise? Again, I’m going to introduce this very slowly. By the end of the six weeks, I intend three minutes of the twenty to be flat-out intense exercise. That may not sound a lot, but I’ll increase it further in the third six-week phase.  The 3 mins is in total – I won’t be doing 3 mins in one burst (not really possible – the point of ‘flat out’ is to be going so hard as to only be able to keep it up for a short time, 30 secs or so). So 3 mins equals six flat-out bursts or ‘sprints’ over the course of the 20 mins.

So:

Week 7	Week 8	Week 9	Week 10	Week 11	Week 12
.5 mins	1 min	1.5 mins	2 mins	2.5 mins	3 mins
1 burst	2 bursts	3 bursts	4 bursts	5 bursts	6 bursts

The rest of the session will be a mixture of light and moderate cardio. For the light cardio, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing so far, such as the light aerobics. For the moderate cardio, I bought a small trampoline last week. I’ve tested it out and it is indeed pretty moderate exercise – harder work than the light aerobics, not so hard as the flat-out stuff. So a typical session will be a sort of circuit – switching between light cardio, moderate cardio, and a few intense bursts of flat-out cardio.   

I’m also toying with the idea of increasing the overall length of the cardio session – maybe to 25 minutes – but I’ll see how I go with the increased intensity first.  

With regard to the weights, I aim to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Current workouts are as follows:

Workout A

Bench press – 3 sets, 6-8 reps

Heavy dumbbell overhead press – 2 sets, 8 reps

Squats – 2 sets, 20 reps

Light dumbbell workout (lateral raises, rows, overhead press, curls, French press) – 1 40-50 rep set of each

Workout B

Deadlift – 2 sets of 5 reps

Dips – 2 sets of 8-10 reps (these are light / cheat dips – still too heavy yet for proper ones)

Heavy dumbbell rows – 2 sets  of 8-10 reps (intend to replace these with pull / chin-ups when I can, i.e. when I’m light enough to do them again )

Squats – 2 sets of 20 reps

Light dumbbell workout (lateral raises, rows, overhead press, curls, French press) – 1 40-50 rep set of each

I alternate the two workouts, so on one week I do Workout A 2x and Workout B 1x, the following week I do Workout A 1x and Workout B 2x. It’s a pretty minimalist programme, I know, and I’m aware it wouldn’t be much use for bodybuilding or strength gain – but that isn’t the aim. The aim of the heavy stuff is simply to preserve existing strength. When the weight and fitness are sorted, I’ll worry about stepping up the weights and gaining more strength then. The one exception is the bench press – the lift where I think I’ve lost a little strength – I’m compensating for that by gradually increasing the weight and number of reps again on a week by week basis, but I’m still not doing more than three sets. The other heavy lifts I’m not trying to progress on, just maintain the status quo. The aim of the light dumbbell routine is to increase upper-body muscular endurance, and so that routine is progressive. I’m currently doing one 40-rep set for each of the five exercises. When I hit fifty reps, I’ll add more weight and drop back down to 20 reps – then build it back up to 50. After that, I’ll probably go to two sets of 30, and build that up to two sets of 50…that will be over a period of several months, though.     

Well, there’s the goals and the plan. Let Phase 2 commence.