Lies, damned lies and statistics...

 I'm good with numbers but bad at math. Does that make sense? One of my all time favorite classes in university was statistics. After I learned the algorithms, I could rip out a Chi-Square in record time. Now I can barely do 6 + 5 - squid = 42. More about statistics in a minute. As of today, this is my first full day on steroids. Yup, I'm now a roid raging freak, unfit to enter the cage for the UFC. My orthopedic surgeon is stuffing me full of Methylprednisolone for the next 6 days. Woohoo! According to the internetwebtubes, birth control pills can doubles it's effectiveness. I'm not going to dig through the purse of some chick at the club for some. Ladies, if you want to test this theory, ask your doc and get you some roids! I'm not responsible if you grow a beard and a set of girl testicles though...

So here's the theory of the day. Have my workouts made me better? Or did a quick stint of roids help?

Here's what I did:

Walked my usual route for a mile, then hit the lap button the moment I returned home. I then stood around, stretched my arms and hung from my chinup bar until my heart rate made it down to 100. Then I hit lap again. This next lap I layed down and started heavy breathing and psyched myself up for my test. I rolled over, set my stopwatch, hit lap and commenced. 100 knuckle pushups. All pushups were atleast until my upper arms were parallel to the floor, nose nearly smacking my timer with a 100% full locked arm extension. The same pushup I've been doing since my dad smacked me at age 10 for doing them wrong.

Here's my Garmin showing the stats. The top graph is my pace, the bottom is my heartrate. You can clearly see when I stopped walking due to the pace reduction. What interests me is the recovery rates. After walking, it took me nearly 7 minutes to recover from a low intensity, relatively long aerobic activity.

Clearly one can see my pushups starting at the blue marker and ending at the red. The recovery rate was nearly 3 minutes! Short anaerobic, bursty, high intensity exercises seem to recover (for me) at twice the rate of aerobic activity. I would not doubt the human body has some efficiencies built in for survival. In a fight, or hunting a cave bear, one needs to blast a huge amount of energy, then recover quickly. As we know from countless UFC fights, schoolyard brawls, hunting with spears and police video cams, the vast majority of engagements are high intensity and short duration. Recovering quickly from each sub-engagement, such as a clinch, handcuffing a scumbag or pulling your spear from the side of a very pissed off wooly mammoth for a second stab is HIGHLY important to your survival!

A few tiny interesting bits:
 - The tiny peak just before I start my pushups is a psychosomatic response to activity. Fight or flight response. It's the same exact peak one gets just before the referee says go!
- At the very end of the graph it spikes to about 120 bpm. That's me getting up off the mat, stretching and cooldown.

On the wall of The Bat Dojo is a big ass piece of 20x30 inch paper. On it I scribble stuff... Today I scribbled this:

Nearly half my original record :)

Mark
p.s. Public service announcement. I'm a computer geek hacker guy. I don't break into stuff, I secure thing so people don't do it to others. If you have a blog and you use your cellphone to post images...make sure you view the EXIF data of the jpgs(BEFORE YOU POST). Modern GPS enabled cell phones will add EXIF data to your pics with your coordinate location! There are plenty of EXIF readers out there which will remove this crap. Or you could change it to somewhere in the middle of the Antarctic :)
p.s.s. Also it may be a good idea to remove phone OS, and type from the EXIF if you're extra paranoid.