My stats: Navel Waste 25" Height 5'9" BMI 24.8 Body fat: 19% 167.5 pounds.(from an online calculator) This is from a body weight of 147 pounds 2 years ago, and a Navel waste of about 33".
I have just come out of a period where I found it difficult to find time for exercise. Previous to this most of my exercise came through my main hobby - whitewater kayaking. While I have never had particularly good cardio fitness, I have never had as high a body fat percentage as I do now. Also I had no belly!
So I have a few questions: my body fat percentage of 19% is just below unacceptable for my age (25), and I would prefer to consider myself healthy, rather than just about avoiding heart disease.
Things are far from critical for me, and I would prefer and gain fitness doing things I enjoy - namely mountain biking, cycling and kayaking.
I also don't particularly want to change my diet, which is high carb, reasonable amount of protein and not a lot of fruit veg (apart from a banana in the morning with breakfast) So I have two questions:
1: Is it possible to become relatively fit without going for runs? If this isn't the case, then is it possible to run without knackering all of my joints? How would swimming be as a substitute? (if needs be)
2: I plan to track my progress on a weekly basis using RunKeeper. I would be interested to know what kind of gains someone who was taking the traditional approach to fitness would expect? I'd like to see if my progress is anything close to comparable. At what point should I decide that what I am doing is not working?