Enjoying the fresh air - quantifying your exercise regime

 As I get older I find myself more interested in quantifying my exercise effort. I wish to keep my weight down, enjoy the great outdoors and most importantly, live a long and healthy life. However, gone are the days of marathons and PRs, and now I have a slight heart issue. As several friends have run themselves into an early grave, I want to ensure that I avoid my ultimate personal worst run. 

I run about 30 miles a week, far more than most people of my age, and I’d like to measure how hard and how much I’m working out. Specifically for my workouts, I want to monitor 

 a) the total expended energy (workout Load)

 b) the average energy expended per unit time (workout Effort)

 c) the peak energy expended per unit time. (workout PeakEffort)

 d) work per mile or vertical distance

I want to do this without fancy equipment or lots of statistical  analysis. Let’s look at each, but first let’s see how we measure workouts.

NB: I have a spreadsheet you can use if you like. ping me.

Workout Measurements

I use 4 metrics:-

a) Workout Effort

b) Workout Load

c) Peak Effort

d) Work rate (per min or mile or vertical distance) ... and inverses

e) Lactose Threshold

Inputs

You need to record only 5 things 1) average heart rate, 2) workout duration 3) maximum heart rate 4) distance 5) elevation gain

How hard was that workout? This you can measure from heart rate performance. If your heart rate stayed at the resting heart rate (Hr) then you didn’t work out, you slept instead. If you did a very, very short HIIT session then your heart rate was probably close to the maximum heart rate (Hmax). By the way, I do NOT do HIIT sessions (see “personal worst” above). 

On a normal workout you need to measure your average heart rate (Hav). Then a greater Hav during of the workout means your Load was greater. Sure, but by how much? As we age, our hearts age, our fitness decreases and so an Hav of say 140 beats per minute (bpm) is quite low for a 25 year old but it’s absolutely knackering for a 66 year old like me. 

So we really need a comparison. We need a measure of our possible heart rate range and this needs to change as we age. There’s a measurement called the Hrr, heart rate reserve, which is the difference between your resting heart rate your max heart rate. So Hrr is really a yardstick for your heart, it shows you what’s the range over which you can push your heart, and it’s linked to your age by your Hmax. You get Hmax from (220 - your age) or (206.9 - (0.67 x age))  - unless you have access to a sports physiology lab and piles of cash so you can get a proper test. You will also need your resting heart rate, Hr, which probably means you need to wear your fitness watch or monitor thing, to bed a few nights. Note that this will be lower than the heart rate you get just sitting around the house watching the telly or relaxing

 Then the Hrr = (Hmax - Hr)

So now you can compare your workout’s average heart rate Hav to the possible range over which you can push yourself, your Hrr. Of course you need that as a relative amount (percentage) because your 25 year old heart could operate over a much wider range than your 65 year old heart (eg (195 - 60) > (155 - 60) ). 

Workout Effort

As I’ve defined the Workout Effort as the average energy expended per unit time, the formula for this is

Effort = (Hav - Hr)/Hrr

Or, in English, how much above my resting heart rate did I keep my heart working during the workout, as a percentage.

Workout Load (or total effort)

As I’ve defined the Workout Load as the total expended energy during the workout, the formula for this becomes

Load = Effort x workout duration

Or, in English, for how long did I keep my heart rate working at this effort during the workout

NB: This is a relative load rather than an absolute load, ie how hard did I push myself compared to my absolute maximum (when Hav=Hmax). 

Workout Peak effort

We can only get this from looking at minute by minute heart rates rather than the workout’s average heart rate. So, you can get this as Hpeak from Strava, probably most other apps, but it’s not in Apple Watch fitness, you need to go to the Apple Health (which is annoying). So we get,

PeakEff = (Hpeak - Hr)/Hrr

Work Rates

There are several ways to measure the work rate. per mile (and miles per work) 

Work/min - W/min = load/duration

Work/mile - WpM = load/distance

Miles/unit work - MpW = distance/load 

Work/elevation gain - WpV = load/vertical gain

These may sound arbitrary but in combination may be useful over the long term. For example, if MpW increases over the year that means you can go increasingly far without stressing your heart. However, this assumes your runs haven't changed! So, check that WpV and W/min don't change. So a good graph would be MpW and WpV and W/min over time. Actually, the WpV is less informative eg you can still work hard even if you have a net downhill - which is hard to graph - so we won't graph this.

Best long term Performance gauge: If you graph MpW and W/min then if your performance is improving then we'd expect to see MpW increasing and Work/min decreasing (or staying the same) over time.

Lactose Threshold

To train best you should train around your Lactose Threshold (I'll add stuff about this once I've done a calibration run to figure out what mine is). Apparently*** this is 80-90% of my max heart rate Hmax (so if Hmax=155 then LTR is 124 - 140 bpm).

These are the metrics I use, they’re all available from Strava or Apple Watch and can be put into a spreadsheet easily. 

Charts

Miles per Work

You can chart lots of things. For example, plotting distance/Load over time you can see that at the end of June I was performing the worst but then things got easier in the first week of July. That was because of the two hard and hilly runs on 6/22 and 6/24. 

Best long-term Performance gauge

An even better gauge of long-term performance is to plot MpW and W/min. If your performance is improving then we'd expect to see MpW increasing and Work/min decreasing (or staying the same) over time. In the plot below, we can see that towards the end of the period I was covering slightly less distance but working harder.

Notes on Relative Effort, Zones, Trimps, RPE

There are other workout measurements. I don’t use them primarily because they’re too tedious and slow to calculate or they’re based on younger people or hidden algorithms. As Albert Einstein said, keep it simple but not simpler.

Workout zones - these are an artifact based to some extent on the lactose threshold of athletes. Firstly, they need to be calculated based on your resting heart rate, which is possible in Strava but I want custom zones due to my heart issue (which appears under load) and Strava doesn’t actually use custom zones.

Trimps is a way of using workout zones and comes in a variety of forms (eTrimp, iTrimp etc)

Strava has the Relative Effort. Its calculation is hidden but I think it accumulates previous days’ workouts and possibly Trimps. This is totally useless to me

RPE, the Perceived Rate of Exertion is more of a smeared out wishy washy way of doing my calculations, at least as far as running workout is concerned.

Maximum Heart rate, Hmax is either  (220 - your age) or (206.9 - (0.67 x age). I use the former, not the latter (Borg calculation). This is because, while I have got up to the Borg Hmax value, I don’t want to have a heart attack just to prove a point. the (220-age) apparently underestimates Hmax but listen to your heart!

Enjoy your working out 

no worries

Norm

Addendum

1. I forgot to mention, naps - take naps. They're good for you :)

2. Just to show you how utterly useless Strava's performance metrics are consider this snippet from my spreadsheet below.

Strava thinks the Releative effort os only 56 and 60 (rows 15 and 17) despite the runs being knackering with Peak Efforts near 100%, Loads of 99% and 104%. Whereas it reckons that row 9 has a Strava Rel Effort of 148 ... almost 3 times as hard! Crazy!

3. It is easy to use AI to write a program to calculate the workout metrics. Attached are the Specs used to generate a python 2.7 using ChatGPT 3.5. It runs fine on MacOS.

Specs details

i need the following program.  inputs age (age) in years (a real number between 6 and 120), resting heart rate (Hr) in bpm (between 30 and 130), run duration (t) in minutes and workout average heart rate, (Hav) in bpm (between 30 and 230), workout peak heart rate, (Hpeak) (between (between 30 and 230). It outputs a blank line the maximum heart rate Hmax = (220- age), heart rate reserve Hrr = (Hmax - Hr) and Effort = (Hav-Hr)/Hrr. It also outputs the Load=Effort*duration/100 and the PeakEffort=((Hpeak-Hr)/Hrr). The Effort and PeakEffort are output as percentages It needs to run on a Mac laptop in python 2.7

4. Writing the workout calculator in a spreadsheet program is much easier. That's what I do as I want the history in any case.

5. Using AI to write an smartphone app to calculate the workout metrics is a bit harder. I'll do that later

6. the Chrome browser extension called Elevate gives you some extra performance details but I'm not convinced of their validity

References

*** https://marathonhandbook.com/average-lactate-threshold/

Africa - how the West destroyed our homeland

African History

Africa was destroyed by the Europeans and Americans. They continue to subjugate and castigate the people of Africa and refuse to consider recompense for their barbaric actions. Africa’s wealth was stolen and an entire generation of the most productive and vibrant youth were transported and enslaved. The economies, laws, cultures and political systems were systematically and deliberately torn apart, not just at the national level but also at the community, tribal, village and even family level. The Europeans and Americans blame African tribalism for its current woes when in reality it killed the countries and continues to make sure that it cannot rise from the ashes.

Mankind, homo sapiens sapiens originated in Africa. One theory is that plate tectonics made the climate unstable putting pressure on homonids to adapt. This theory is valid for the rift valley but the oldest known humans come out of South Africa and Namibia.

Be that as it may, the Africans formed small bands separated by dense jungles, rivers deserts, and plains. They thrived on primitive technology through the stone age and into the iron age. The bands untied often forming kingdoms and empires. These empires were impressive and long lasting. The best were in Sudan, Nigeria and Mali.

These kingdoms lasted for centuries and with them the mores, cultures, laws and traditions became deeply ingrained. The Africans were expert farmers, hunters and miners and skilled craftspeople.

One tradition that was emphasized by Europeans and Americans was slavery. Villages on the fringes of a kingdom or Empire would break away to form new kingdoms and in so doing, invade other villages and enslave the inhabitants. Slavery has been misrepresented by European. The slaves were skilled and valuable and usually kept their old jobs just with new masters. They were also much more like Medieval serfs or crofters than slaves, being able to marry as they wished, buy their freedom and sell their wares. However the bulk of their labour benefitted their new masters rather than their old masters or villages. As the boundaries of the Empires and kingdoms ebbed and flowed the populous would go in and out of slavery and see a succession of masters. This did little to change their daily lives and the laws and cultures remained steadfast.

When the white man penetrated the jungle he often came across cities and kingdoms that surpassed those in Europe. The kings possessed a public bravado designed to impress and intimidate visitors with a show of power and strength. However, they never made guns which the European possessed from the early 18^th century onwards.

The Africans traded with the Europeans through Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and so on via trade routes across the Sahara doen into cetral Africa. They began trading earlier with the Arabs out of Egypt, Ethiopia and West Africa. The Arabs were savvy merchants and expert sailors and African goods such as ivory and gold was popular throughout the Middle and Far East.

The French in particular found African gold very useful and invaded Morocco overthrowing the northern Empire and establishing colonies along the southern Mediterranean. In Angola and Mozambique the Portuguese founded a small colony which they extended deep into the interior destroying villages and cultures with reckless abandon.

The real demise of Africa was due to the European need for gold to fund their wars and the European and American need for slave labour. The Spanish raped South America to fund their attempts to invade England, Portugal and as much of Europe as they could.

The other European countries turned to West Africa for its gold. Meanwhile the Americans had virtually exterminated the indigenous native who, they complained, tended to die too much to be of much use as slaves. The Africans on the other hand were expert craftsmen, superior farmers to the Europeans and their death rate was only around 25%. Having seen the English use the African slaves to build up their colony in the West Indies they turned to Africa.

Enslaving West Africans relied initially on trade and later on deception and trickery. At first the Americans bought slaves, cloth, iron goods and so on from the costal West African kingdoms. These kingdoms obliged with the slaves found in the outlying villages. The Americans paid the Kings with guns but forbade their local manufacture.

The demand for slaves quickly outstripped the supply and the Kings sent raiding parties upriver and across the land deep into the jungles to capture more slaves. Several Kings saw the writing on the wall and refused to cooperate. However their neighbours quickly earned more guns and overthrew these Kings and thus the American push for slaves quickly decimated the West Africa of its young, strong and productive populous.

At the same time the raiding parties destroyed village cultures and laws and the downward spiral of millennia of culture penetrated deep into the centre of the continent.

Meanwhile, the Europeans, in particular the French and English decided that what they really needed was colonies so that they could have a steady income stream from Africa. The destruction that the Portuguese had started the other Europeans soon quickly turned into a rout. Under the guise of “civilizing the savages” the Europeans systematically took apart the entire African way of life utterly destroying the rules, laws and traditions created over thousands of years. This callous and calculated destruction left the Africans very vulnerable. The laws and traditions were vital to their very survival, without them they were open to bandits, thugs and robbers and without storing their harvests of grain and produce they were susceptible to starvation and disease. Further, with the bulk of their youth transported and enslaved the very old and very young were too feeble to fight back.

The rape of Africa is particularly severe in the case of the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Africa’s biggest and most productive river had supported thriving communities along its bank and tributaries. These were cruelly exploited by the Belgians, thus the rule of law and order was replaced by guns and warfare.

The Europeans never once made any attempt to “civilize” the Africans. There was no repayment for the theft and atrocities visited upon the natives. Right up to 1985 South Africa insisted that migrant workmen leave their families for years at a time and live in enclosed communities near their workplace. This effectively broke families apart. Ironically, the men had no work in their home countries because the Europeans had utterly destroyed their economies, infrastructures and political systems.

It is time for the perpetrators, Europe and America, to pay for their crimes. Africa deserves an extensive programme of recompense, something that would put the Marshall plan in the shade. Descendants of slaves can be compensated. Stolen gold and artifacts can be returned but how can the culture and traditions, the heritage of centuries be restored?

End of Empire - the US Republican anti-government party

G'Day there,

Conventional wisdom used to tell us that politicians are selfless servants of the people, striving to improve the lot of the common man (and woman).

The behavior of politicians in America, Britain and Australia point to a more sinister, selfish and myopic motivation that in the long run could foment revolution and the end of democracy as we know it.

In winter 2008 Barack Obama came to power in the US. He won 69.5 million votes, the highest amount ever won by a presidential candidate in an election where 131 million votes were cast, the biggest turnout of voters in US history. Obama had a huge, resounding mandate to tackle severe problems of a global economic recession and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What happened next, the behavior of the opposition Republican party, was truly astounding, mind blowing and so anti-democratic it borders on treason. It is well documented(1) that sitting law makers such as Paul Ryan (now the leader of the House of Representatives) and Eric Cantor along with ex-heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich came up with plans to sabotage each and every policy of their new president and to make Obama a one term president. Such a nefarious conspiracy still merits the death penalty today so the Republican party was very serious and very determined to stop the president and return to power. Unsurprisingly, Obama failed to recognize the extent to which his sworn enemies would go to usurp his authorities. Indeed most US citizens would balk at the term "sworn enemies" but pacts against the democratically elected leader of the country indicate the machiavellian commitment to their goal.

The US Republicans have now extended their drive to power by encompassing Hillary Clinton in their remit. Their campaign for the next presidential election makes it crystal clear that they will stop at nothing to regain power in America.

So, the US Republican party are obviously no longer selfless servants of the people, rather they strive at all costs and by all means legitimate or otherwise, fair means or foul to rule in America despite the wishes of the American people. In a nutshell, they have become the anti-government party.

But the US Republicans are clearly not history buffs. Governance requires transparency, respect and cooperation. Ruling by secret pacts, disrespecting other political parties and trampling on the wishes of the people will result in chaotic failure. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolutions, the rise of Hitler and numerous other lessons proliferate in our history books.

Rule by anti-government dictat will be brief and bloody. America will end with revolution or dictatorship. Either way, the Republicans have changed the nature of US Democracy forever. The end of the American Empire, of America the super power, is well under way.

References
(1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html

the Uk leaps about - Brexit - or how to shoot your own foot

G'Day there,

A major miscalculation by the Conservative PM James Cameron may actually help the UK to clean house. Cameron sought to quell the Euro-sceptics in his party by obtaining a manadate from the public on EU participation. But instead of overwhelming public support that silenced the critics, he discovered that the pollys from both sides and Brussels are hopelessly out of touch with the people they are supposed to represent.

A swift kick up the bum, or rather in the goolies, has highlighted the huge gulf between London and the man in the street. Well, the older, whiter, less educated and less tolerant man and woman in the street anyway.

The older generation had it hard initially but were given free education, a new, effective and efficient social safety net and steady well-paid long term employment.

The youth feel justifiably betrayed by their Mums, Dads, Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents. Born in a world of declining affordability, increased competition with the net coming apart, they look to Europe for their future. More tolerant of diversity, more entrepreneurial, creative in outlook and with finely honed social networking skills the under 40's generations demand and need globablization. It no longer takes a village to raise a family. It doesn't even take a country, it takes the whole globe.

The sooner the UK pollys understand this then the sooner it can be fixed. But it won't be this old and outdated set of white males who bring revolution and change to UK. They've had their day. Yes Cameron is hardly an old man but his thinking is staid and outmoded and he has flung himself on the rubbish heap of Victorian ideas, bleeding from his self-inflicted bullet hole in his foot.

It will take a decade or more to turn around the the ship of Victorian dogma and Etonian elitism but it has to be done. The UK stands on the bleeding edge of change, looking down into the chasm of protectionism and recession. America watches looking for clues. Its intolerant hard-right wing in turmoil and the Democrats undecided on moving left and risking another 8 years of stonewalling by the Republicans. Will anti-globalization, racial hatred and protectionism become the New Order or it be just a hand pulled back hastily from the fire?

The UK has made its mistake. All it can do now is start the salvage operation. Keep Scotland from breaking away. Forge new trading ties and attempt to lower British unemployment and mollify the masses.

America is a time bomb. Will Hillary cut the live wire or will Trump strap a nuke to it?

We live in interesting times indeed.

Yeah G'Day,

My name is norm and I like leapin' about.

We'll see if that works ok. Now here's a picture of where I like to run.

and here's a link that I like footy

the end