Climbed up a mountain, and fell back down again

Hello and welcome back to Tobias Talks.

Ouch! I spent last weekend hiking around the Lake District in the UK, culminating in an ascent of Scafell Pike, for those that don't know, Scafell Pike is the highest mountain in England at 978m high. Unfortunately on the way back down, only a few hundred metres from the summit, I lost concentration and tripped and landed very heavily, my knee taking the brunt of the fall.

At the summit, before the fall.

After the fall, I then had the unenviable task of making my way down the steep mountain steps, luckily it was more of an established path than the route we took up. My knee was painful but after a 3 hour slog, I made it back to the car park for the journey home. 6 hours later my knee was almost entirely seized up causing a lot of pain to put any amount of weight on it, I had to hop to my front door.

I have spent most of the week resting my knee and working from home. Luckily I am now able to walk again on my knee with some pain and instability. I wasn't able to shop so I ordered takeaways 3 nights in a row, subsequently I am now back up to 280lbs.

This is just another hiccup on the journey of my physical and mental fitness. It's an annoying step backwards but I won't let it get to me.

My plan now is to include some gym work into my fitness regime and hopefully I will build some more muscle to help increase the amount of calories my body burns during the day. As always I will be tracking my diet and will be attempting to eat 2000 calories every day, aiming to keep my carbs low and proteins high. Mixed with cardio and resistance workouts should put me right back on track with my fat loss.

For this first week I will subscribe to the "Push, Pull, Legs" protocol of weight lifting AKA "PPL". I will be utilising PPL as it is a good way to work your entire body during the course of a week. I would normally make Leg day the first day of the week to benefit from the increase of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and Testosterone that is linked to heavy lower body workouts. However, due to my injury I will assign legs to the last day of the week to give my body as much time as possible to recover, so I will be attending the gym for Push day on Monday, Pull day on Wednesday and rounding of the week with Legs on Friday.

For more detailed information on the exact exercises, reps and rest periods I will utilise, you can read our PPL article.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Your friend, Tobias