Six down, none to go. My second time through the Velocity Diet 3.0 program was certainly a very different experience than the maiden voyage. Having some idea of what to expect was a large portion of that; differences in my conditioning and approach account for the rest. Some things were decidedly better, some were less so.

After six weeks of protein shakes, assorted capsules, pills, and a scosh more “everything else” than was strictly dictated by the program’s authors, how did the author, and the regimen, stack up? What does the large, boring spreadsheet have to say?  What about the mirror?

The first number folks are going to want to see is how much Earth sucks. The answer is, “Nine point eight meters per second, squared. Duh.”

As far as how much it sucks on Yours Truly, the answer is, “Less than it did six weeks ago, but not by as much as you might suspect.” The cold, hard facts say that I lost a total of seven pounds (from 163 to 156). Admittedly, I began the program after being a regular gym-goer for a couple of years, and having been pretty gung-ho about my fitness routine for the last nine months. Someone who’s newer to things and/or has more weight to lose to reach their goals will almost certainly see much more dramatic results, even with imperfect adherence to the plan. So, it’s a modest victory as far as the scale is concerned. I could have done better, but I’m not unhappy with the results (and even if I was, all the blame rests on the guy writing this anyways).

How about the rest of that spreadsheet?  Let’s check, as Nick Bakay is prone to say, the tale of the tape (measure). I don’t seem to have gotten any taller.  Rats. Arms are a little bigger, legs are definitely bigger, waist is a fair bit smaller, and chest stayed about the same. Without throwing myself in a full-on immersion tank to test my buoyancy (or get the most-accurate form of body composition done), this matrix certainly seems to support what the Virgin Health kiosk has to say — I’m dense.

Denser. Dense-er. Peanut gallery, don’t make me break out my Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator. In what passes for all seriousness, the electronic body fat analyzer says I’ve gone from 13% to 10% — again, decent progress towards my overall goal, probably hampered by my own slack.

Where things look a lot more positive, on the whole, is in the gym itself, with one notable exception.

That exception is the one you’ve all seen here the last couple of weeks — the relatively consistent time in the weekly “V-Burn Challenge” event. This is my biggest frustration, but it makes a lot of sense — my last time through, I’d just come off of training to run a 15k race, so my cardiovascular endurance was the best it’s been in several years, and, the intensity of the VD3 workouts aside, that’s hard to build or maintain in the weight room alone. In essence, this illustrated that at a more or less constant level of cardiovascular fitness, getting much stronger doesn’t necessarily make you faster when your weight stays about the same; last time, I got a little bit stronger but had the heart and lungs to really burn through things.  This time, I started out a bit stronger than I ended the first one, and made a fair bit of progress along that vector without a whole lot of change in speed.

Lasting changes for me include having the shakes as convenient meals, and a lot less tolerance for junk food as snack fodder (like Jalapeno Cheetos or Cool Ranch Doritos — the mouth says “Hell yeah,” everything else says, “Dude, no”).

On the whole, it’s a really well-designed program that rewards effort and dedication, and even if you can’t maintain 100% compliance, you’ll get results. If you want to do something that’s the fitness equivalent of Basic Training, where you are told what to do, when to do it, and how much you need to do in order to get in gear, or if you’re in a rut after going to the gym for a while and want a way to bust out of it, VD3 definitely fills the bill.

… but, man, the day after the program wraps up, that first beer tastes particularly delicious.

Related posts:

1. Monday Madness: Week Five
2. Monday Madness: Week Two
3. Monday Madness – Week Three