Outdoor Ride and BodyMedia Review

Spring is finally here in Minnesota! The temperature this morning was over 60 degrees, so conditions were good enough  to head out for my first outdoor ride of the season. For some reason I thought I would be cold, so I bundled up for the adventure. Running tights over bike shorts works pretty well and running base layers are good for biking, too. It turns out that I really didn’t need to be dressed so warm. The wind was warm and the temperatures were rising. Having a big race in the middle of July makes me more tolerant for being hot during a workout. I figure I’m just acclimating for the hot weather to come.  It was windy and the roads were wet, so I decided to take my road bike instead of my new tri bike for this ride. Here I am at the turn around with my reliable road bike:

I’m embarrased by how much I love this bike. From the first time I road it, we have been like peas and carrots. I’m anxious to ride my new tri bike outside but I’ll still make time to ride this bike, too.

My friend Deb and I are doing a lot of the same races and we’ve been training together. She made the maiden voyage with me this morning:

It was a windy but it was exhilerating to be outdoors. I feel like the training inside has been worth the time and effort as I felt strong and confident out there today. The weather is supposed to take a turn for the worse this week, so it may be a little bit until I get back out. That’s fine. The trainer is a great workout and I still have another few episodes of Lost left to go.

I mentioned in an earlier post that, besides Deb, my other training partner has been myBodyMedia Armband. This is a device that is worn on an armband that takes all kinds of measurements day and night. It communicates with your computer and consolidates all of your data onto an Activity Manager. The Activity Manager gives you steps taken, calories burned, a breakdown of vigorous and moderate activity, and sleep efficiency. You then input the nutritional information for the food that you’ve eaten. The Activity Manager will give you nutritional analysis and advice. This makes the Armband an ideal tool for weight management since you can see graphically calories in vs. calories out. Honestly, saying that it’s just for weight loss is selling this tool short. It’s really so much more than that.

For an endurance athlete, eating enough to fuel workouts while keeping weight low enough to make performance easier is a delicate balance. Sometimes a hard workout makes me incredibly hungry and sometimes it kills my appetite. A long workout can also effect my energy level for the rest of the day. If I do a hard, long run in the morning, I sometimes am so tired that I need to take a nap or take it easy the rest of the day. Other times a workout energizes me and I go non-stop for the rest of the day. My Garmin gives me an idea of how many calories I burn during a cardio workout, but I had no idea how many calories I was burning on a daily basis. Wearing the Armband has been a huge educational experience. It’s hard to sum it all up in a single blog post, so I’m sure I’ll write about it more in the future, but here are some of the main ideas that I have taken away so far.

Within a day or two, it became clear that consistent, moderate movement racked up much more calorie burn than spurts of intense exercise. Some of my lowest calorie burning days were the ones that I had a hard, two hour workout and then, unconsciously, moved less the rest of the day. I also noticed that I had the mindset that I worked out hard so I was entitled to eat more. The days that I burned the most were ones that I had an hour long, normal workout and then kept moving with normal household activities the rest of the day. Going up and down the steps, doing the laundry and walking the dog all add up over the course of the day. My husband Mike is also wearing the Armband. He sits at a desk all day and then works out at night. I’ve been consistently burning more calories than him, even though he is a guy and weighs more. I would have thought that his intense workouts and size would mean that he burned more calories than me, but that’s not the case.

If you’ve ever kept a food diary, then you know that just the act of writing down what you eat effects how you eat. Pair that with knowing exactly how many calories you’ve burned in a given day and it drives home the point that food is fuel in the tank. At any moment BodyMedia tells you if you’ve eaten more or less than you have expended. Instead of constantly thinking about whether I am hungry, I just eat consistently throughout the day to keep up with my calorie burn. A couple days I ended up using 1,000 calories more than I ate and I noticed that the next day I was starving. I’ve been feeling more energetic and less hungry by coming in around 300 calories below what I burn on most days, and then occasionally going over. My weight dropped by a couple pounds and now has stabilized at what I think is a good racing weight for me. Now I can concentrate on eating enough to stay strong and yet know that I won’t be inadvertently eating too much.

Asked how many calories I ate and burned in a day, I would have guessed around 2,200. I would have figured that I would burn 1,500 calories just doing my normal activities and then another 600 or so from my workouts, maybe more depending on the day. The BodyMedia software will run reports summing up information for the week or month, and it turns out that I actually burn almost 3,000 calories a day. If I had wanted to lose weight and used traditional wisdom to calculate how much to eat, I probably would have put myself on a 1,200 calorie a day diet. That would not have worked well. I’m sure I would have been very hungry and it would have hurt my training. You can set goals with BodyMedia and it will tell you how many calories a day you need as a deficit to meet your goals. Even though I’m not trying to lose weight, I pay attention to whether I am over or under. Sometimes it means that I’ll have a late night snack, and sometimes it means that I’ll take the dog for a walk. For me, being a numbers person, it makes tracking calories feel more like a game.

Another surprising thing I’ve learned from wearing the armband is that I’m not sleeping enough. The device can tell if you are just lying down or actually sleeping. I probably get a 45 minute nap a few times a week, so I thought I was getting a lot of sleep. I tend to get tired during the day but I assumed it was due to getting a little older and not drinking a lot of caffeine. I’ve written before about my trying to drink caffeine to keep myself awake, but I still struggle with getting sleepy in the afternoon. It turns out that most nights I’m getting less than 7 hours of sleep, so even if I take an occasional nap, I’m still not even close to an average of 8 hours. I’m also waking up a lot in the middle of the night. You can actually see on the Activity Manager your sleep efficiency which is how much of the time you are lying in bed that you are actually asleep. I’ve gone from thinking that I’m a slacker that gets too much sleep to realizing that I’m not getting enough.

There is more to this tool and I could go on and on about it. If you want to lose weight and are willing to honestly log your food, I think it would be hard not to lose weight using this device. It makes it clear that weight loss comes down to the math of eating and moving. For me, I’ve learned that consistently eating enough so that I don’t get too hungry makes me feel better throughout the day. I’ve also learned that I can’t eat anything I want just because I had a hard workout. I think I’m making better food choices seeing the nutritional breakdown of what I eat. I can have a guilty free splurge when the numbers go my way and I take an extra walk when they don’t. I’m glad I’ve been wearing it and will use it for the rest of the season. One thing I’ve learned from doing triathlons in the past is that racing means wearing spandex in front of a lot of people, so feeling good about your weight while not being weak with hunger is not an easy task. If you have any questions about BodyMedia Armband, leave me a comment and I’ll try to answer it in a future post.