Pro-Sports

Did you ever watch that 1990 movie “Total Recall” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger? If you did, you might recall a scene with Sharon Stone practicing her tennis serve using some kind of virtual reality simulator. Well, the day for such simulators are fast approaching. With the Nintendo Wii allowing you to play tennis, golf, bowling and a whole host of other sports using similar actions that you would out in the real world, you can now break out a sweat playing “computer game” sports. Heck! You can even get injuries (as the hubby discovered when he developed a tennis elbow from playing tennis on his new Nintendo Wii).

Hmmm… I wonder if they could create a Nintendo Wii game for rock climbing?

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Something I wrote some time back about falling into the trap of chasing grades:

It’s amazing how the utterance of a number and a letter in association to climbing can have such an effect on climbers. Before the days of numbers and letters significance, any route goes as long as we think we can make it by looking up at the holds. As the awareness grows, we begin to fall into that encumbrance that afflicts many minds where decisions are made based on the meaning derived from a set of arbitrary numbers and letters.

A spectrum of divergent outcomes emerges. On one extreme the decision to climb a route is hinged upon a number and a letter – this limits the realization of our full potential. On the contrary, the resolution to project a route based on its grade, the importance of that level among the climbing community and the resultant puffery leads to an explosion of the id. Hopefully, most of us will fall within the middle band of moderation, but I suppose in the end, it depends on what tugs your cord in climbing.

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I know this is primarily a sports blog but occasionally, when I come across conversations about weight loss and listen to the unrealistic expectations many people have, I feel compelled to put forward my ten cents worth and here it is…

Whenever I talk to friends about losing weight, I find there is a common expectation – a desire to lose a lot of weight in the shortest time possible. This expectation has been moulded by our society of rapid results and instant gratification – we want everything and we want it yesterday.

Unfortunately, if you want to lose weight and successfully keep it off, this is exactly the wrong way to go. Excessive and rapid weight loss is accompanied by rebound weight gain that sometimes surpasses the original weight that one began with. In such a case, the old adage of “slow and steady wins the race” is rather apt.

In a recent conversation with a friend, it was revealed to me that this friend had lost four kilos in one week. While she had been proud of the achievement at the time, she lamented in the following week that two of those four kilos had been “gained” back despite maintaining her current level of activity and diet.

Let us examine this example. My friend, while on the larger side, is not to say particularly overweight. To lose four kilos in one week is therefore an unrealistic expectation. A more realistic and healthy approach is to work at losing 0.5-1kg every one to two weeks - the slower, the better because your body requires time to adjust. Also, instead of weighing in everyday and tracking her weight on a daily basis, she should ideally weigh in once a week at the same time of the day. Weight fluctuations of 1-2kg within the day and from day to day (most often due to water loss) should be expected and cannot be counted towards actual weight lost.

While I applaud her for not relying on weight loss gimmicks and diet pills to hasten weight loss, I feel she needs to review her expectations and her dietary and exercise regime. Her methods for losing weight are exercise and calorie restriction through dieting.

Why Exercise?

The primary reason for exercising while dieting is to help maintain the basal metabolic rate (the amount of energy our body burns in order to maintain our normal body functions at rest). Our body is designed to react to calorie restrictions by turning on famine mode (although our lives have been modernised to the extent that access to food is so readily available that fear of starvation is a thing of the past, our bodies still maintain the need to preserve body stores in the event that food has become scarce). This in turn lowers our resting metabolic rate, so if we wish to continue losing weight, we then have to reduce our caloric intake even further.

The purpose of exercise is to increase muscle mass and raise our resting metabolic rate (to counter the metabolic rate reduction due to dieting). This is because muscle at rest utilises more energy than fat. This is also a reason why measuring weight loss with a weighing scale can sometimes be deceiving. When you exercise and diet at the same time, you may find that your weight remains stagnant because muscle is dense and weighs more than fat. As you progress through your weight loss regime, your body gains muscle and lose fat, resulting in a leaner body which may or may not lose weight. Therefore a better way of measuring weight loss is to measure body proportions with a tape measure, such as waist circumference.

There are two reasons why people on diets gain weight after they “complete” their diet (especially those who do not exercise as part of their weight loss regime). The first is because they return to their original eating habit which is exactly the reason why they were maintaining their original weight in the first place. The second is because they have lost muscle mass and their resting metabolic rate has dropped. That means they are now utilising even less energy at rest and increases their likelihood of gaining the weight back and then some.

Exercising to Lose Weight

You can also exercise to help you lose weight, but you need to observe the kind of activities you take on. For instance, you want activities that help you burn fats, such as walking or swimming – anything that is aerobic in nature. Activities like running do not help you lose weight because they utilise the glucose stores in your body rather than the fats because running requires a rapid source of energy that can only be provided by burning up the glucose stores in the body – it simply takes too long for the fats in your to be converted to energy.

Anyone who knows me will know that I generally recommend activities that you enjoy when considering what sort of physical activities to take up when attempting to lose weight. Losing weight and keeping it off is a permanent lifestyle change – not a temporary measure you maintain until you lose the amount of weight you desire. The more you enjoy the sport or physical activity, the better because you’re more likely to maintain the activity on a long term basis.

Dieting Appropriately

Likewise, I also don’t believe in relying on diets for losing weight. My philosophy has always been: if you cannot imagine yourself eating the foods you eat while on your diet for the rest of your life then don’t even bother getting started on the diet. A successful diet is one that results in a change in your eating habit that you will maintain for the rest of your life.

In a nutshell, when exercising and dieting, you need to look for activities and foods that you can incorporate into your life for the long haul. What you don’t want is something you’ll drop like a hot potato the moment you have achieved your weight loss. This is exactly the reason why fad diets are a complete waste of time (in addition to being extremely unhealthy).

Dietary Calorie Restrictions

Let me take a moment to digress a little with the experience from a friend of my brother’s. When I first met him, he appeared nine months pregnant and had been trying every weight loss trick, gimmick, plan, device – you name it – under the sun. He had used those weight loss devices that were designed to help your muscles “exercise” while you watched TV and he had even used the drug Xenical to curb his fat intake with embarrassingly, disastrous results that I will not elaborate on here. When I finally met him again some years later, I saw a much leaner person and had to ask what his secret to success was. His reply was, “It’s all about starvation…”

To a certain extent – yes, losing weight is a little about “starvation”, but we’re not talking excessive starvation. If you cannot manage your hunger pangs, then your caloric is too excessive. There are two ways to determine exactly how much you need to reduce your diet by.

Calculating Your Caloric Intake

The first method uses the average calorie intake required by a person of a specific mass in order to maintain their body weight. You can find charts to determine this figure based on your average level of activity.  If you are an active person, you will need to add the estimated calories expended during those activities.  To determine how many calories you are allowed to consume in a day in order to lose weight, you should then reduce your calorie intake by 510 calories or 2100kJ.

The second method for calculating how many calories you need to consume a day to lose weight appropriately is to calculate how many calories you eat in a week and divide it by seven to find out how many calories you eat in a day. Assuming your weight is stable, this is how many calories you require to maintain your current weight. To lose weight, you then subtract 510 calories or 2100kJ from your current level of intake.

You can calculate your calorie intake using calorie counters which provide you with the estimated number of calories a specific quantity of a certain type of food provides you with. Calorie counters are available on the internet or in books.

Conclusion

To lose weight effectively and healthily, you need to pick up an activity (or activities) you enjoy and incorporate them into your weekly schedule. If you haven’t been exercising on a regular basis, then be sure to start off easy. Try half an hour, two to three times a week to begin with and slowly work your way up.

Find out how many calories you need to maintain your current weight and reduce your daily intake by 510 calories. Continue with this plan until your weight plateaus and then reassess how many more kilos you wish to lose before recalculating you new calorie requirements.

Ideally, once you achieve a weight loss of about 5-10kgs, you should take a break from dieting (i.e. stop reducing your calorie intake) and focus on maintenance plan to stabilise your new weight. Once your new weight is stable, you can begin a new dietary regime and work at losing another 5-10kgs.

Excessive weight loss is also not recommended. If your BMI (body mass index) drops below 18, it is too low. You can calculate your BMI by dividing your weight in kilos by your height in meters squared (BMI = mass (kg) / height2 (m) or you can use a BMI calculator).

N.B. This is the blog author’s recommendation only. The author is not liable for any manner in which you have interpreted or utilised this information. You are advised to consult your doctor before embarking on any weight loss program to check if it is suitable for you.

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As part of my efforts to encourage my son to increase his repertoire of healthy foods, I have started buying more easy-to-consume, healthy foods like bananas, avocados, and yoghurt.  Unfortunately, Gavin balked at the bananas (who would have figured I would have a kid that would dislike one of the most kid-friendly foods around?) and avocados.  The yoghurt has been sort of successful when I tell him it’s “ice cream”.

Since they say that flavours of the foods nursing Mums eat tend to come out in their milk, I have been running a little experiment on Gavin.  Over the last week or so, I have been consuming more of these foods myself.  I’ve been blending avocado “milkshakes”, banana smoothies and yoghurt oatmeal puree for breakfast.

My MIL observed me doing this one morning and said to my SIL2 that she should do the same thing to help her lose weight.  Although my original intention was to increase the flavours of healthy foods in breastmilk in the hopes that Gavin would familiarise with them and start eating them on his own, I’ve discovered that the beneficial side effect was that I have lost weight!  At least I think the cause of the weightloss is related to the fact that I started having these smoothies for breakfast because everything else has remained the same - level of activity during the day and consumption of food during lunch and dinner.  Admitedly, this is hardly an exact science since I am not in the habit of monitoring my activity levels or food consumption.

However, if you are looking for a relatively easy way to lose weight, you can give this a go.  I must warn you, though, this doesn’t appeal to everyone’s tastebuds.  Personally, I really like stuff like this so I love it.  My SIL2, on the other hand, took one look at what I was making and decided that she really wasn’t that desperate to lose weight.

I’ve got to add that I’m a person that doesn’t really believe in diets.  I believe that if you want to lose weight by altering your food consumption, then it has to be a sustainable change.  That is, if you can’t imagine yourself eating the sort of food you plan to diet on for the rest of your life, then don’t even bother trying that diet.  It is not for you.  Look for another diet plan instead.

Although I can’t guarantee that you’ll lose weight following this plan, at the very worst, you’ll be a little bit healthier because the smoothies make for a pretty healthy breakfast. 

So this is what you have to do:

Instead of eating your usual breakfast, make yourself a smoothie.  These are the recipes for the smoothies I’ve been drinking/eating (sometimes the consistency is quite thick so it’s almost like eating oatmeal).

Banana Smoothie

• 1 Banana (I’ve been using the large bananas, not the small, local, finger bananas)
• 5 Tbsp Ski Divine Yoghurt (yeah, this is the good stuff, not the diet d’lite stuff)
• Add enough milk to bring it up to about 350ml

Blend everything together and pour it out into your cup for breakfast.

Oatmeal Smoothie

For a thicker shake, you can add 4 heaped tablespoons of rolled oats.  When I ran out of bananas, I started adding the oats plus another 4 heaped tablespoons of Nestum original flavour cereal.  This makes a pretty thick consistency, so if you don’t like it too thick, then add more milk to thin it out so it’s drinkable.

I generally find that after this thickshake, I’m usually too full to eat anything else.  It also keeps me pretty content up to lunch time and sometimes even up to a late lunch.

For the rest of the day, just eat what you would normally eat.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I was looking through my old files for the trip report of Gua Musang, when I came across another TR from Simian Boy that I thought was pretty interesting. It detailed a climbing session they had at Nyamuk one weekend - don’t know where I was, probably working or climbing somewhere else because it doesn’t sound like me to miss a climbing weekend.

One of the reasons I enjoyed climbing with the Rockrats was not only because of the fun we had in each other’s company but what we were able to learn through each other’s experiences. We often wrote trip reports after every rock climbing session and each member would contribute with jokes and personal thoughts about the session through mass group mailing.

Although we ragged each other a lot, there were also times of seriousness when we discussed climbing techniques and safety - for instance, learning how to detect core damage in rope. With each climbing session, we were not only improving our climbing abilities, but expanding our knowledge base on rock climbing in general. Of course, it also helped to have a gear-head like Lelek Le Grunt in the group who knew all the technical details of just about everything you might want to know. And if he didn’t, you could bet he would be able to tell you all about it the following weekend.

I digress, below is a copy of one of Simian Boy’s TRs, which, as always, was spiked with his tongue-in-cheek humour (with my annotations in purple italics). I thought this was a rather significant TR to include because it prompted some good take-home lessons which follow after the TR, when some of the other more experienced members of the Rockrats shared their knowledge on how to climb more safely in future.

Simian Boy:

Had an interesting day out with the FYC bikers, formerly climbers, at Nyamuk yesterday.

While we were getting gear out of the cars, I saw Ooi pull out his helmet and I immediately realised I had left mine sitting safely out of harms way at home, on top of my desk. I half-jokingly said that today was going to be the day I knocked my head on something and sure enough, I did on the first warm-up climb (Patrick’s 5b climb with the nasty layback - it’s called “Firestarter” in the area called “Fumakilla”). Since I figured Murphy’s law was already satisfied, I didn’t think too much about falling rocks and smashing heads for most of the remainder of the afternoon.

Ooi led the warm-up climb with no major problems, except for a short detour when he got distracted by some jugs on a neighboring climb. I went up 2nd on top-rope and hung like a horse, much to Mike (P) and Penn’s disappointment. For some reason, they had the idea that I had turned into something of a Spiderman during their short abstinence from climbing, able to scale single buildings in a single dyno. Mike went up the climb after me with no problems neither. Penn didn’t even try because Hong, Tung, Bird, etc were trying some 7As and they roped him in.

Anyway, Ooi offered to lead the 2nd climb of the day as well, the short route on the far right with the mantle crux before the anchor (this one is called “Because I Got High“). He had never climbed it before and he had no beta so he tried for half an hour at the crux and finally gave up. I went up and finished the climb with a little help from memorised beta. Mike, that f***er (sorry, sensored, we’re a family-oriented blog here), was belaying me and talking to Ooi the whole time and I had to fight sweat, gravity as well as him after I committed to a big highstep on the ledge. My left foot was right beside my left hand and my knee was almost touching my face but I couldn’t step up. I wasn’t tired and so I yelled for slack. No slack. Can’t move. Maybe it’s time to head back down and try again. “SLAAAAAAAACK!!!!” Ah, some slack this time. With his weight off the rope, I realise again how light I am, so I step up, set up the anchor, smile and get lowered down. Mike went up next and wanted whatever beta I could offer. I told him to just do what I did. I know he wasn’t watching. Nyah.

Mike got stuck at the crux for half an hour or so as well and Ooi was getting stiff-necked from belaying him and was standing near the edge of the ledge. I anchored myself to Ooi and sat with my back against the wall underneath Mike and braced my feet against a big rock on the ground. It was a comfy spot with a nice view of the town below and the rolling hills beyond it. Finally Mike gave up. Richard came along by then and had a go at it, conquered it and declared it a 5C climb, much to Mike’s chagrin.

Ooi went up again, and this time around, noticed some big holds about a meter to the right of the route. As always, he took the artistic license to chart his own course before rejoining the route a little higher up. I think somewhere in the middle of this side-adventure, he yanked out a small slab of rock about the size of a dinner plate, yelled “Rock” and threw it safely behind us. It landed with such a loud clunk before shattering into tiny bits, that his belayer (Richard) jumped a little further out of the way from the bouncing bits, which as it turns out, was a fortunate thing because immediately afterwards, a big slab of rock about the size of a 48-inch flat screen tv loosened itself just to the right of Ooi. What happened next, as far as I can remember was this - it came down the wall, smashed itself to small bits of various sizes its as it rolled and rubbed against the wall, like an ice block being chipped apart. Then the bigger pieces just sort of rolled and bounced around where me and Richard had been sitting and standing a few minutes earlier. Fortunately, that was one of the few minutes of that afternoon when nobody was standing at that spot. Mike, Ooi, Richard, me, Penn, 2 Singaporeans and 1 German were pretty much standing around there up until minutes before then watching the climber. Most of the rock that fell ended up landing onto the rope that Ooi was being belayed from.

(Please don’t follow the advice in this next section about detecting compromised ropes - you’ll read later in Lelek Le Grunt’s - our walking rock climbing manual - reply the proper way to detect core damage to a rope) Ah Loong came over and inspected the rope and pretty much gave us a crash course in rope-inspection and we found many weak spots on that new FYC rope. Basically, the weak sections go limp when we curl them into a loop. The more we looked, the more weak sections we found until we came to the conclusion that the rock probably couldn’t have done that much to that many different sections at once. We suspect it might be manufacturing defects or damage sustained during storage at All-Sports. Another thing about safety that I never knew about and just always took for granted. I wonder how many more there are.

Anyway, we lowered Ooi and retired the rope. It is the Beal Top-Gun pink 60m that was bought from All-Sports. It’s the same colour and possibly cut from the same original 200m as Adrian’s. Might be an idea to check that rope too, dude.

Anyway, I’m still a bit of a wreck. Weak ropes and breaking rocks.

Happy Climbing.

I don’t have any photos from that trip since I wasn’t there, but this is a shot of the belay area of Fumakilla.  This is a top-down view of the route “Firestarter”, while “Because I Got High” is off to the top left of the photo.

Rock Climbing Safety Lessons from our walking tech manual (edited by me because of Le Grunt’s excessive usage of colourful language which wasn’t really appropriate for this blog):

Lesson 1: Detecting weak spots and core damage in the rope

What Loong is talking about - where you fold a bight of rope and look for “roundness” – that’s (rubbish) dude.

What you should be looking for are flat spots, which means the core has ruptured a few strands. To do this, press the rope with your fingers and feel along the length of it. If it feels uniform along the entire length, the core is fine. If you feel a sudden flattening of the rope, let the rope owner know. It doesn’t have to be completely flat, as in sheath touching sheath, but anything that feels irregular or like a slight depression is suggestive of core damage.

A lot of ropes exhibit the characteristics that Loong described. Mine does, so does Shen’s. So does his own (sensored) rope! Did he retire it? Noooooooooooo…

What Loong described indicates slight sheath slippage. All ropes will experience that. Better ropes have less of it, not so good ropes will show more of it.

Lesson 2: Staying ON ROUTE

When you climb off route, you run the risk of venturing into areas that see virtually NO traffic and the consequences (as Ooi experienced with the rock fall on the rope – lucky no one was hurt!) - Rockfall, pendulum swings, etc.

Always stay on route and no cheating. Aside from the safety issues, it’s just bad form. It doesn’t help your technique or skill building at all, not to mention, can be downright dangerous.

Lesson 3: Belayers pay attention to your climber!

Please always be aware of your climber. I feel I shouldn’t have to say this again, but I will. When you are belaying someone, you hold that persons life in your hands. Your climber is bestowing a most sacred trust in you. NEVER belay someone because you feel pressured into it. Never do so because you feel you should. Do it because you WANT to. And when you do it, do it with free will and with full responsibility.

More tips from Holdbreaker (particularly apt from one who tends to break a lot of holds):

As to falling rocks - try to test the holds as much as you can before loading it. You will probably notice that whenever I move up and grab something, I tend give it a generous tug before loading it further..

Although, as Mutant Man later pointed out, some holds will still break because the force you exert on it when climbing is not quite the same as the force applied when giving it a tug.

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