Jan 13th, 2025: Wrapping up 2024

I didn’t write updates in the past 4 months, mainly because I was so busy doing things that it was hard to document it all. I can say that journaling about my health challenges brought a lot of benefits, because I realized that I was publicly committed about improving my health and I did, even though it didn’t seem like it. I learned a lot about myself just by applying what I do at work: learn, test, iterate. Strength Training I travel a lot, about a week every month, so I need to lift weights as much as possible, everywhere I can. And I did that.

I planned to pass around 60% of my workout time lifting weights, and I did do that for around 30%. If I didn’t have the small surgery in November, I probably would have reached around 40%, but now I know that I can comfortably workout for at least 2 days a week (2 days out of 7 in a week is roughly 30%), and I know that in 2025 I need to push to 3 days a week, so 1 day more. I can likely push that on a day between Friday, Saturday or Sunday, since I also reorganized my weekly work schedule to be better aligned with my training routine (more on this later). I spent most of the year training on the definition of my body with a low-cal diet and only in October switched to a hypertrophy training. I won’t see the effects of this training until end of Q1 2025, also because I stopped everything after I had the surgery in late November, and just started training again on December 23rd. —————— I’m writing these next lines after a couple weeks, after New Year’s. I couldn’t find the time to write and think about what I wanted to do with my health life, and now I reflected enough to make a few decisions: I’m going to use the data that I collected in 2024 to have a better fitness routine in 2025, here’s how. ## Planning a full week of workouts

I go to the gym to lift weights and I play tennis. I now accept the fact that I can’t do every thing I want, I need to choose. So I’m just going to lift weights and play tennis, for a total of 5 days a week: tennis on Monday and Wednesday, and weights on Tuesday, Friday and Thursday or Saturday, depending on my perceived and recorded effort during the Wednesday tennis training. I’ll also use the Saturday workout, when I do it, and extend the stay at the gym to relax a bit and maybe take a swim after the workout, or get in the sauna for 10-15 minutes. The goal is to not run or do any other sport, just focus on weights and tennis. My brain must not think about anything else, for as much as possible. It’s weird to think about this, but it’s the best way I know to be focused. And I say this because I actually have real data to support the fact that I am somewhat consistent, even though I travel for an average of a week per month. When I’m traveling, I won’t of course play tennis, but I will lift weights more, and generally enjoy whatever I have there, but not thinking about getting results. ## Check my knee During 2024, I solved many of my health issues: I had intestinal issues, and after many medical visits and a lot of tests, I found a new diet that helps me stay fit and healthy with no big effort. I found out that I suffer from IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the best diet I can take is a low fodmap diet. I downloaded an app called Fodmap4All that’s simply a low fodmap dictionary: I input the type of food that I want to eat, and it tells me if I can eat that how much I want, if I can eat but just a little bit, or if it’s bad for my stomach. I also got a few moles removed after I got a few visits with the dermatologist. And I found a way to grow my nails stronger over time, so that I don’t bite them and make them bad. I solved a lot of health issues, but I still have a few ones to go: first, I need to check my right knee and understand why it hurts every now and then. Then, I need to work on my muscle stretches, so that I feel more flexible and… ‘young’. While I do have plans for every other goal, I do not have plans on how to stretch more. I need to find ways to fit that in my routine, but I feel that it’s still too early. There’s one last thing that I worked on and that I’m satisfied with: my mental health. I had over 20 meetings with my psychologist throughout the year and they really helped me understand a lot about myself. I want to keep a frequency of one meeting every 3 weeks for 2025, while I try and achieve big and different things that I will talk about more in other places. ## Remove TrainingPeaks and double down on Gentler Streak While I worked a lot with TrainingPeaks in 2024, I realized that it’s just too much for me for what it costs (150€/year). So I cancelled my TP subscription, and kept my Strava one that I have with a company welfare bundle. I will use Strava as my public commitment display, while Gentler Streak as my minimal toolset to stay consistent in my fitness and don’t get sick. I didn’t use TP a lot because TP is useful when you can consistently plan your workout throughout a year and check how good or bad you’re doing. But my schedule changes constantly, and so does my health benchmarks. TP uses health benchmarks to adjust the calculated effort data points to reflect the best number, but I really can’t work so much to constantly measure every data point. This is not my job - I don’t train for work, but because I want to stay fit and have fun while doing it. TP is expensive because you also need to expensively commit your time and energy to make it work best. This is not a very well-made posts, I don’t know if all this makes sense - it’s just a way for me to download my thoughts about my health in a public form.