It’s rare for both my physical and social batteries to both hit empty at the same time. I’m there now.
Normally I can’t sleep for very long during the day without inducing a headache and feeling like I’ve messed up my sleep cycle. But I’ve slept for most of the day and I don’t think I’ll have an issue going to sleep tonight.
I’m in slow (re)charge mode.
It was a different kind of Thanksgiving this year, the first one where both of our daughters were not with us. We went to my sister and brother in-laws, who were also without kids, and we had paella. It was delicious, I can honestly say that I didn’t miss having turkey.
I want to take a moment and be thankful. Thankful for family and friends. Thankful for good health. Thankful to be living in a prosperous country by global standards, and thankful that it is a democracy. Thankful to live in a beautiful country that is very green and very clean. Thankful for a great job where I can contribute my services to a meaningful cause for a good wage. Thankful for access to delicious food any time that I’m hungry.
It’s when we don’t have these things that we miss them most. The fact that I do have them should not go without appreciation and thanks. I have much gratitude for the life I live, and the people I get to spend it with. 🙏
My Grandfather liked using the saying, “Kill a snake when it’s small.” He’d walk into your house and notice a loose tile, or drawer that didn’t fully close, or some other minor issue, and the next day he’d arrive with his tools and it would be fixed.
Deal with it while it’s a small issue. This is a great strategy, but one that’s often ignored in the world of health and fitness. Maybe ‘ignored’ is too harsh of a word, it’s more like not taken seriously enough… the small snakes are not payed attention to until they get quite a bit bigger.
Sore shoulder? It doesn’t hurt too much, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and stop later if it really hurts.
Hernia pain is back? I don’t need to go to the doctor, I’ll just monitor it for a bit and see if it goes away.
10 pounds overweight? I’ll watch my diet for a week before I go back to my normal routine.
Too busy to work out? I’ll just work out more when things calm down.
We ignore pain until it’s too painful to ignore. We watch our weight when it’s already a big problem. We give ourselves a pass on taking care of ourselves when we are busy, only to be busy more and more frequently. We ignore the small snakes, and wait for them to be bigger than we ever hoped they’d get.
The snakes we ignore come back to bite us.
I started doing Max VO2 training almost every Sunday a few months ago. I say ‘almost’ because my vacations this summer included a few misses, but as I head into the school year this will become the norm. However I’m struggling a bit with motivation right now because the Norwegian 4X4 Protocol I’ve been doing is really hard.
I always feel great having finished it, but dang it’s just not fun to start. 4-minutes at about 85-95% heart rate max, followed by 3-minutes recovery, four times. The total protocol is 28 minutes, but I can’t just get on a treadmill and go at 85-95% without getting winded and having to stop or slow down, so I add a 4-minute warmup which puts this workout at 32 minutes.
You might wonder, if it sucks so much why do it? Why do I bother? Because increasing Max VO2, (your maximum oxygen intake during exercise), is one of the absolute best things you can do to increase healthspan and lifespan.
See this Tweet by Dr. Rhonda Patrick:
Here is her podcast on The Longevity & Brain Benefits of Vigorous Exercise | Dr. Rhonda Patrick:
Writing this is my last bit of procrastination before getting on the treadmill… I’ve got to figure out a habit routine that makes getting this workout started easier!
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PS. I’m keenly aware that I’ve written about this a couple times already (here and here), but it’s what’s on my mind and it’s something I hope I can inspire others to do!
Inspired by Peter Attia’s book Outlive, I purchased a weighted vest. My buddy Dave and I have been doing the Coquitlam Crunch, weekly during the school year, for a few years now… and today we did it with 16 pound weighted vests.
I did a couple incline treadmill walks with the vest on before trying it on this average 10% grade over two and a half kilometres long walk. But I have to admit that for the 457 stairs section I was huffing and puffing at the end. Still, our time to the top was only about 20 seconds slower than last week’s walk, so overall it was an excellent workout that was well within our capabilities.
According to Dr. Peter Attia, the best things we can do increase our healthspan (not just lifespan) is to:
The biggest downfall (literally as well as figuratively) are falls and injuries that stop us from doing the 3 things mentioned above. Case-in-point: fall and break a hip and suddenly you aren’t likely to be doing any of the above for weeks if not months… and then getting back to it afterwards you probably aren’t going to be as able to continue where you left off. Inversely, doing the 3 things above make you stronger, more vital, and less likely to do things like accidentally fall and break your hip.
So, we put on our vests this morning and started up the hill. On Dave’s recommendation… which I like… for the next 6 months we’ll do our Coquitlam Crunch with weighted vests the first Saturday of every month. In 6 months we will re-assess and maybe go to twice a month. It was hard enough today that I don’t think I’d be motivated to do this every week (yet) and we aren’t in a race, so once a month seems like a good start.
So this is my public service announcement: Lift heave things!
Be the hero that carries all the grocery bags from the car to your house in just one trip.
Haul your ass up the stairs rather than taking the elevator or escalator.
Increase the weights you lift so that you are actually working you muscles to fatigue rather than finishing 3 sets of 12 at a weight where the last 2 reps are almost as easy as the first 2.
Find ways to push your body without being stupid about it. My vest came with 40 pounds of weight, but today I did 16, and I’ll keep it at 16 for a while, eventually increasing the weight on my treadmill first. Again, this isn’t a race, it’s more about making lifestyle choices and lifting heaving things is a choice that will help you be able to do things you want to do for much more healthy years.
Yesterday I tweaked my back. It was not a full crash, but the pain was intense and my mid left back was giving me both pain and warning signals that told me I was in for a world of discomfort in the coming days. However, I have house guests, and Servaas Mes is a somatics expert.
What is somatics?
Somatics is studying the body from a first person perspective. Medicine is from the third person. It is about mobilizing awareness: both movement and emotions.
It is about moving from movement without awareness (somatic amnesia) to movement you are aware of. Somatic movements are based on innate movement patterns evolved when we were young.
Injuries, surgeries, stress, trauma, or habituated movements, are examples of things that create somatic amnesia in our bodies. So the process of mobilizing awareness is to recalibrate our authentic movement patterns. This is foundational for healthy aging.
But for me at this moment is was about injury recovery. Servaas put me through several gentle exercises to get me both moving fluidly and thinking about my movements as I did them. I’m used to deep muscle manipulation and focusing on individual muscles, but these movements were about using muscles in combination, and stopping myself from using my muscles in isolation.
I had a session yesterday and went from pain and limited mobility to discomfort and greater range. After a session today I was pain free. I won’t pretend I didn’t feel my back a few times during the day. I won’t tell you that I’m ‘fixed’, but I’m on a path to recovery that would usually take 1-2 weeks and it’s the day after I triggered my back crash.
Now it’s up to me to continue with the exercises. The hard part for me is twofold. First I need to connect physically, even emotionally, to the exercises, recognizing how my body wants to cheat and avoid full range of motion. I need to stay aware of how my body wants to move versus how it should move, and I tend to struggle with this kind of awareness.
Secondly I need to wrap my head around the gentleness of the movements. I feel like I’m not doing enough, or that these subtle movements aren’t worth doing because the effort is more intellectual than strenuous. Yet, I can distinctly see how one side of my body moves so much easier than the other during these stretches.
I am aware that I’m on a journey to move better; to improve not just my flexibility, but my ability to use my body more freely, more childlike, and less like an old man who can trigger a back spasm by taking a large breath. This is a somatic journey, and one I’ve only just started.
So often when a break in the school year comes my body crashes. Often I end up sick with a cold, because I’m too busy to let myself get sick, then the lull comes and my body lets go. Luckily that didn’t happen to end the year. But yesterday I was doing a leg workout and on my second goblet squat my right knee did a little buckle and I twinged a muscle in my mid back.
This morning I took a deep breath in and my back seized. It’s a brutal recognition of my age when breathing can be the trigger to pain. It has been several years since I’ve had a crash this bad, my whole back has seized to protect this one overstressed muscle.
The stress of the last 3 months got to me and now I’ve got to take it really easy. My Norwegian Protocol won’t happen on this Sunday, I’ll have to make it up next week. Today I stretch, hot tub, stretch, and rest. And hopefully my recovery is swift. I didn’t get sick, but my body still crashed.
A cough and low-grade headache are going to keep me home from work for one more day. I’ve noticed that the past few years I seem to get a headache as both a precursor to flu symptoms, and it stays with me while sick. This forces me to have less screen time, and frankly I get quite bored. Even ebooks don’t really work for me because I can’t concentrate on them and keep having to rewind parts.
So, I’m moping at home. The good news is, no matter how much my sinuses bother me, I seem to never lose my appetite and enjoy the taste of food. So, that’s my joy in the day, eating… and a hot tub.
I just hope tonight I can get more sleep because the last few nights have been really broken, and I’m wanting that to improve tonight. So away goes this screen and while I hope to be down for the night, I’m also hoping tomorrow and the weekend will rejuvenate me and get me ready for June… the busiest month of the school year!
The timing was perfect. I was not feeling well and took the day off. Then I saw this later in the day:
There was a bit of work that still had to be done, but I needed this day… and I took it. I think now of all the times I didn’t. I’m not sure I was my best, and it probably showed. We can’t be at our best when our own cup is empty.
When it comes to health and fitness, the two people I follow and learn from the most are Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Dr. Peter Attia. Recently I’ve been hearing them both talk about how important your Maximum VO2 is to improving you health. VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can absorb and use during exercise. It is a great measure of both your aerobic fitness level and your overall health.
Here, Dr. Patrick shares information about a VO2 study as well as the Norwegian Protocol, to help improve VO2 Max:
I usually do 20 minutes of cardio, but yesterday I tried this protocol, and did 31 minutes on the treadmill: 3 minutes warmup, followed by: 4 minutes high intensity and 3 minutes cool down, repeated 4 times. It’s challenging, but totally doable. I’m going to commit to doing this at least once a week.
I was not going to get a heart monitoring watch until I retired, but I think I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to get one because my tracking has not been great and I’d really like to ensure that when I’m trying to get my heart rate up past 80%, I’m actually getting it there and not just guessing. I also want to get my maximum VO2 measured so that I can have a baseline for where I am.
Today I’m not pushing like that again, my hips feel tight and I might just walk on the treadmill and increase the incline as I loosen up. One and maybe sometimes two Norwegian protocols a week will be enough. They aren’t fun. But if I’m going to commit to daily exercise anyway, at least once a week I should make sure I’m doing something to really push myself and maximize outcomes.
Watch the video above, and think about how you can exercise your way into being healthier… and quite literally younger at heart.
