Weekly Recap

Fitness & Nutrition

The point of making weekly plans is that my workouts are all planned out and I got to the point now that I simply follow the plan without thinking about it for too long.

If I have a workout on a day, I pack my gym stuff the evening before and head straight to the gym after work. Yes, even the slightest detour, like going home before, would mess it up.

Plus I have now a backpack that is big enough to fit all my gym stuff so I don’t have the opportunity to leave my gym bag at work and postpone the workout to the next day, which I did too often.

Last but not least, posting the weekly plan online forces me to stick to it because it would be so embarrassing to come at the end of the week and say that I did nothing whole week.

So I made it this week according to the plan three times to the gym.

I had a tough weight training session on Tuesday following the new training plan and lifting as heavy as I can. All I can say is that I couldn’t walk or raise my arms for two days!

Thursday was Pilates and Friday Yoga, as planned. Both went OK but my mind and body was not so much into it. I couldn’t really disconnect especially during Yoga, which should be exactly the purpose.

I decided this week to buy a new Yoga-Pilates mat and a bag to go along with it. It’s definitely more hygienic to bring my own to the gym. It’s still quite slippery as most new mats are but I will wash it with soap on the weekend and hope it’ll be better. Don’t want to fall flat on my face during downward-facing dog!

My nutrition has been quite good this week, the only bad food I had was a Caesar salad. Yes, you read it right, a salad. I was shopping in the city one afternoon and I went to a Yoghurt & Salad Bar for a healthy dinner. I chose the Caesar salad and although I know that the grated Parmesan and the dressing is not so healthy, I expected a healty-ish salad nevertheless. Well, this one was LOADED with bad-quality grated parmesan cheese, swimming in Caesar dressing and topped with, what I think was a whole big box of croutons and, instead of the usual light grilled chicken breast, there was smoked pressed meat. To top that all everything was soooo salty. Yuck! Needless to say that I will never ever go back there.

I used BodySpace from BodyBuilding a year ago but the iOS app was simply a wrapper around their mobile website and it was terrible. I tried it again this week and was pleasantly surprised to see that the app got so much better and all exercises, training programs are availabe directly in the app. I will definitely start using it more often at the gym.

Weigh-In

If only you could see the charts on MyFitnessPal! It goes up and down and up and down, just like the rollercoster. I wish it would more consistently go down but I am planning to do something about it, more on that in the next weekly plan blog post.

Weight: +0.7 kg
Body fat: -0.6 %
Muscle: +1 %
Chest: +1 cm
Waist: -1 cm
Hips, thigh: 0 cm

Geek

I registered for Born To Learn, a website with lots of resources to help prepare for the exams like the MCPD that I am studying for right now. I love the concept but the site is still buggy, full of errors and access denied messages at each click.

We’ve introduced a Kanban board at work and additionally to the usual sections on the whiteboard and sticky notes for work items, we decided to make it fun by using magnet Lego figures from Star Wars. I chose Obi-Wan Kanobi. 😉

For my personal productivity, I’ve started using Trello, which is digital board used for managing everything from projects to weekly plans by creating boards, lists and cards.

I’ve been tinkering a bit on the sample game I am doing since a few weeks. I’ve come so far that my game is now fully object-oriented using a main loop and it also includes fluent rendering and responding to keyboard input. A blog post with lessons learned will be coming soon.

I’ve been doing some performance and memory profiling this week using Visual Studio 2012 and dotTrace from JetBrains. There are tons of great resources online and these were some of the best articles I’ve read:

• How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications
• Profiling an application with Visual Studio – Memory allocation
• Performance Profiler in Visual Studio 2012
• Performance Tips and Tricks in .NET Applications

Great podcast episodes:

Model View Culture, a new media platform covering Technology, Culture and Diversity http://t.co/ad61dFOYUi

Music

I am currently listen to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ The Heist album. Nothing better than a bit of hip-hop during a coding session!

Reading

No time this week.

Gaming

I’ve been playing Threes on my iPhone on the way to work. Planning to continue Tomb Raider Definitive Edition on the Xbox One this weekend.