Review - Week 3 - Jan 15 to 21

Work have arranged a medical so I can go back in to the office, but it isn't until next Monday so I still have this week at home. That did at least give me time to do some rehab work. I am now able to walk / hobble from the bathroom to the kitchen and back without the boot or the crutches. If I want to go more than 20ft or take some stairs I am still using the boot and a walking stick. 

I should be back swimming by now. I am sticking with the consultants advice (and Mrs M telling me off whenever I ignore or bend that advice) to give it more time. And by 'more time' I mean until my fracture clinic appointment on Wednesday. My new aqua-jogging belt has arrived and I have resisted the urge just to go straight to the pool with it.

I am back on light weights and core work on alternate days so at least I am doing something. 

I am up to about 3,000 steps a day. Not exactly charging about the place but still double what I was covering in previous weeks. I have gone from 6,000, to 10k, 16k and now 24k steps a week. That should put me to about 34,000 next week if I keep that progress but I actually expect to see a bit of a jump once I return to work. Even if I keep that as lazy as possible I run up against practicalities like the toilet will be ~100 steps away from my desk rather than the ~10 from my sofa, and no-one is going to fetch me tea like Mrs M has been doing for the last month.  

I am back to burning over 2,000 calories a day. That is still a long way from the 3,000 I would normally do and, despite my diet changes, that is starting to show a bit. While the scales only show a 0.4kg increase, the muscle loss is now visibly trading for belly fat. 

My right quad circumference is down to about 48cm as it continues to sacrifice muscle to build bone. For comparison my left quad is down to 56cm just from lack of use. I don't know exactly what they started at, but judging by rate of loss on the left, they were somewhere around 60-61 cm pre-fracture. 

Some simple maths and some very broad assumptions of bone size, veins etc, suggests that works out to about 34% muscle loss. For which I could have completely skipped the time I spent reading 3 scientific papers on lower limb physiology to figure out how volumes of bone vs muscle vs other tissues compare, and I could have avoided the maths of converting circumferences to radii and then subtracting volumes of estimated concentric cylinders and I could have just gone with Mrs M's eyeball guess of "about a third". 

Target totals - Nothing.

Actual totals - Weights sessions 3, Core sessions 2.