Weight (kg)
Late May last year (2021), after reading a book Body by Science by Doug McGuff, I've decided to try HIT workout program from the book. It looked interesting: just one session per week with training time around 15 minutes. It also strongly suggested to record data on all the exercises, which I did, and now, as a full year have passed, wanted to do some analysis and also share this data with anyone interested on how effective such program might be.
Note that although a full calendar year has passed, I have only 37 sessions recorded (out of 52 on perfect schedule). Most of the missing dates are in summer, right after starting exercises, as I've been traveling. However starting September, I was almost always on schedule, with a few weeks skipped here and there.
I must also mention that this was my first experience with exercising in gym or doing any sports in a while (besides some skiing in winter). I picked the recommended Big Five workout with machines, although gym that I'm going to is not equipped with Nautilus machines that book recommended. There were also some changes in pulldown and leg press settings across time, but I don't think those had any major effect.
I have recorded following data for each session: date, start/end times, for each exercise: weight, reps and time until exhaustion. As suggested in the book, I've done single pass for each exercise, aiming for 9-10 reps in ~90 seconds. As soon as I've had few consecutive sessions with the same weight and times >95s, I've switched to the next weight on the machine.
I've also occasionally recorded my weight, but recordings were sparse and not consistent in measurements (sometimes dressed up, sometimes not). But to give some idea, I've gained about 3kg, from about 62kg to 65kg.
Another thing I've noticed, is that whenever I had training close to breakfast (when I had coffee), I got better results. So now I'm also recording "coffee state" for each date, but it's only few sessions for now, so no conclusion yet if it actually helps or not.
Main value that I've been tracking is weight*time until exhaustion, since it effectively means how much force muscles had to use. Reps are not very representative as my speed still varies a lot, although I'm trying to keep it consistently slow.
Looking at these charts, there seem to be a decline from October to December, then stagnation till February, and finally a steady pace improvement since then. I'm not sure to what that can be attributed: it would make sense if I were sick or in stress, but that wasn't the case during that period (at least as far as I can assess myself). Many people who I talked to about this program (non-professionals) suggested me to reduce rest intervals, at least to 2 sessions per week. Rechecking book and looking at the data, I decided to keep pace as is, since main metric seems to be steadinly improving and even if it didn't, the book's suggestion is actually to lower frequency, not increase it.
Overall I like the program and feel way better than before starting it, however based on the data I don't see as much progression as I expected from reading the book. This might be attributed to lack of proper supervision/training. I will continue with program and recording data, hopefully discovering patterns that work for me (i.e. if coffee is indeed effective).