Project Buff

Published: {ts '2010-09-18 00:00:00'}
Author: Steven Neiland
Site Url: http://www.neiland.net/article/project-buff/

As a programmer I dont get much exercise and my wife will attest that I eat like a horse, however I am blessed (or cursed) with a metabolism that makes it almost impossible for me to put on weight. The only way I seem to be able to put on weight is as muscle, but I am lazy when it comes to working out. I know that sounds great on paper, but being too thin is almost as bad as being too large.

However I have gone through some major changes in my life over the last year (moving to a new country, getting a new job, buying a house), and this has made me realise that if I am ever to change my physique that now is the time to do something about it. So last week I purchased some gym equipment and setup the spare room as a home gym.

The Plan

Now I dont expect results over night, In fact I think I need something to keep me motivated to keep with what I see as a boring monotony, so I have come up with a plan. I will combine my workout with Coldfusion Programming by keeping a workout log on this site and create a graph to show my progress. This should help keep me motivated as it will show my progress and more importantly (for my nerdy brain) generate data so I have an excuse to use Coldfusions graphing to spice up this site, not that I actually expect anybody will care but at least the graphs will look nice :-).

So over the next 2 weeks I plan to build a simple data entry system to record my workouts, a few nice graphs and spend some time learning the right way to exercise without killing myself. After that I will start logging my progress. Hopefully in a year I will be able to look back and see a slow but steady upwards trends on my graphs.

My Goal

Despite the rather optimistic title for this posting I dont expect to ever be a muscle bound stud. What I do hope for is to lead a healthier life and I thinks thats a goal everyone should have.