Tag Archives: healthy living

Fruits of labour

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I started my current health & fitness routines in January, 2019. Six plus years later I can really see and feel the results. But if I go back 2 or 3 years, I’d have said that progress felt slow. It was.

Slow, and steady, and other than when I herniated a disc and was in pain for several months (unrelated to my working out), always in the right direction. In other words for almost the full 6 years I’ve seen steady progress. Now at 57, I’m the strongest I’ve ever been. My cardio was better in my 20’s when I was training in the gruelling sport of water polo, but even now my cardio is quite good.

My point is that too often we look for the fast results and the quick fixes. Seldom do we accept that healthy progress is built on good habits over long periods of time. The quest for instant results is unrealistic, and often results in inconsistent outcomes or fluctuations between improvements and losses of gains.

Good habits, consistency, and a willingness to keep going even when the results aren’t immediately obvious are whet leads to long term progress. In the end the real progress, the real fruits of your labour, are the lifestyle changes that keep you feeling young and healthy. You are on a marathon not a sprint. Work on your habits and routines and the results will come over time.

I’m back

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Just spent a week at my sister’s house visiting her family and my mom. I managed to get 4 nice hilly walks in, and a casual bike ride, but by far this was the longest I’ve gone without really working out in years. I’ll count the walks as exercise days, but now I’m home and about to hit the treadmill and weights for a nighttime workout session.

Usually I find ways to do way more exercise on holidays. I did do some pushups and leg dips one day, but if I’m honest, I had the time to do that or other body weight workouts on more of the days than I did… I just didn’t do it.

This isn’t me beating myself up for taking most of the week off. Rather it’s recognition that it can be easy to let things slide if I don’t pay attention. At home, my routines make things easy. I wake up, I get a workout done. It’s that simple. On holidays I need to either: build in a routine or make a conscious effort to workout. Or if it’s a week or less, give myself permission to have an easy week.

That said, I’m back home and my basement gym is calling me.

Morning walk

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I’m visiting my sister (and mom is visiting too). It’s great to be together with family, and to be somewhere where a morning walk doesn’t involve rain gear. My wife and I are continuing our tradition of going for morning walks while on holidays. I love that this little vista is just minutes away from my sister’s house.

Holidays can be hard to maintain fitness habits, and I likely won’t be visiting any gyms while here, so these morning walks are going to be a good balance to offset my sister’s awesome cooking and restaurant meals. They are a great way to start the day with something physical, and with some pretty nice views too!

Effort over output

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On my fitness journey, I’ve learned that building up my strength with certain exercises does not progress evenly. There are times when I get stuck on a weight and can’t seem to improve, and other times when I see surprising progress. I hit plateaus as well as peaks. And it can be a bit demoralizing when I hit a peak and then can’t replicate it for days or even weeks.

What I’ve come to realize is that the personal bests don’t matter, what really matters is the effort. Today I couldn’t lift nearly as heavy as I have in the past. For example, in my morning workout I struggled to get 6 reps of 185lbs once (with assistance) on incline bench. Yet I did 3 sets of 7 reps just a couple weeks ago, with no assistance.

However, I pushed myself really hard today. My muscles got a good burn, and I feel like I left nothing in my reserve tank when I did that heavily assisted last rep today. If I tried another rep my spotter would have had to do more work than me.

Effort over output.

Some days getting to the gym is hard. Some days in the gym are hard. Today was hard, but in a different way. Today was hard because I couldn’t lift as heavy as I usually do. I felt I needed more rest between sets, and everything seemed more challenging than usual… and yet I still pushed myself. I put in maximum effort.

So leaving the gym I felt good. I know that I put in the best effort I could, and I realized that it would have been easy to be disappointed if I paid attention only to my strength during the exercises. However it wasn’t the strength output that mattered it was the effort input… and with that as the measure, I rocked it! I kicked @$$!

Effort over output for the win.

💪😀👍

The script has flipped

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It has taken a few years.

I started my fitness journey in January 2019, and it has occurred to me that over the past year, it has become a challenge to give myself a rest day. It used to be hard to find the time and the motivation to work out. The challenge was wanting to, and doing the necessary work. Now the challenge is allowing myself a rest day.

I’m realizing that while I give most of my body ample rest, (primarily doing just one muscle group in a workout when I’m working under morning time pressure at my home gym), I still work my legs daily with my cardio. My legs are not getting any rest. I need to reevaluate what I define as a workout, allowing myself to skip cardio 2-3 times a week. I also need to take a full rest day more than once every 2 weeks or so.

I’ve gone from it being hard to workout to it being hard to skip a day. And while that’s a script switch I’d like to maintain, I’d also like to ensure that I actually do skip some days. Not enough that it feels easy again, but enough that I feel the benefits of rest between working out.

Still, this is a good place to be! I’d rather be on this side rather than the flip side.

The double dip

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A few months back I started doing my meditation on my treadmill. It started because I was in a writing slump and my blog post writing was taking too long to write… Not leaving me enough time to do 20-30 minutes of cardio, meditate, and do a full weights workout on one body part before work. So I started to double dip and do my meditation on my treadmill. (Yes, I close my eyes, I hold the handrail and also wear the emergency stop clip… not that I’ve ever needed it.)

I actually find this a great combination. I do a walk with a weighted vest on incline, so holding the rail I’m very stable. I get a really good (Zone 2) workout, it’s not like I’m taking it easy. And I find that with my body busy, I’m better able to focus my mind on the guided meditation. And the bonus is that I’m getting two great things done.

Today I was struggling to write, very distracted, and decided to exercise first. I thought I’d double dip and write while on the exercise bike rather than treadmill, where writing would be awkward. 15 minutes into a 30 minute ride, I realized I wasn’t going to write anything while riding so I put on a 15 minute meditation to get me to the end of my cardio workout.

Five minutes later this post came to mind and I spent the next 10 minutes of my meditation and ride bringing my thoughts back to the meditation and away from writing this in my head. Essentially I made the meditation almost impossible to focus on.

This is the first time in a couple years that I’ve tried to meditate before writing, and I totally remember now why I do them in the order I do them. I can’t meditate knowing that I still have to write. I need the sense of accomplishment of my post to help clear my mind for meditation.

Essentially, I can only double dip in the right order, with a physical and a mental activity, but there is no triple dipping! Nor is there double dipping of two mental activities. I’m the poster boy of ‘there’s no such thing as multitasking’. For me meditation while I’ve got a blog post to write is an invitation to completely ignore meditation, or to inconveniently and ineffectively task swap so that I do neither task well.

Write first, then double dip exercise and meditation. That’s my lesson for the morning.

Tiny improvements

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I’ve been noticing a few improvements in my workouts recently. Last week I benched a weight that I haven’t done since my late 20’’s… half a lifetime ago. I’m doing a push-up challenge with my buddy but keep forgetting to do them, so the days I do end up needing to catch up I have to do a lot more push-ups to reach my goal. I can do sets of 30 now as easily as I used to do sets up 20. I’ve added 8 pounds to my weighted vest that I wear on my treadmill to walk on an incline. And my leg workouts I do now would have left me painfully sore for days! (That said I still feel the pain two days later, leg soreness after workouts is something I’ll never fully escape.)

My point is that I can’t pinpoint a time when this progress happened. It’s not like I woke up one day and added 50 more pounds on the bench press bar. Instead, I’ve been making slow and steady progress. I don’t spend hours in the gym, I just commit to cardio and working one muscle group, often for just 3 sets, sometimes two different exercises for 3 sets… if I can write fast enough in the morning to give me that time.

So, I haven’t really added to my workouts significantly at any point. I’ve had no big jumps in progress. I’ve had plateaus, and times when it seems that I’m just in maintenance mode, but recently the tiny improvements have accumulated and I’m noticing the difference. This has been a really positive aspect of my life in the last few years, something that keeps me in a positive frame of mind. It certainly helps to see my own progress, as slow and incremental as it has been.

It’s good for you

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A new study shows the benefits of creatine for women, (Study, TikTok summary). We already know the benefits for men, it’s nice to see specific research for women, and specifically menopausal women, who tend to be under-researched.

I’m not a medical doctor, I don’t pretend to be one. But I’ll share three suggestions that I have followed, based on my research, that can improve long term health.

  1. Take creatine.
  2. Take far more protein than is suggested in daily recommendations.
  3. Exercise regularly, for both cardio and strength.

These are all things that are good for your health… and the health of your brain. But don’t take my word for it. Look into to these things yourself. Check out doctors Rhonda Patrick, Peter Attia, and Gabrielle Lyon. Oh, and when I went to Instagram to make sure of Gabrielle’s first name, the first video that came up was her talking about women increasing protein intake.

I love seeing how the science of healthy living is becoming mainstream.

Remembering Rest Days

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I looked at my workout tracker yesterday and realized that I haven’t missed a day of exercise yet this year. While that’s great, it is important to recognize the importance of rest. Sure I don’t do long workouts, and I usually focus on a single muscle group after cardio, so my muscles do tend to get rest days in, (other than my legs for cardio). But there is something to be said about the value of a full rest day.

It’s a busy week and I’m getting up an hour later than usual. Today I give myself permission to take a well deserved rest day. And I need to remind myself not to wait this long to do it again. It’s easy to forget to take a day off when you’ve built a daily exercise habit. Instead of feeling like an important thing to do, it feels like cheating.

There is something really psychologically sound about internationally taking a full rest day. It’s medicine for the soul. There is a significant difference between choosing a rest day and slacking off; between being lazy and choosing to take a healthy break. But the framing of it (like o just did) is important. Because if I feel like I’m just slacking off then it feels more like a cop out than an important and valuable break.

It feels good to have such a healthy routine that I actually have to remind myself to take a break. That’s such an empowered frame of reference compared to having to convince myself to workout. And I know with full conviction that I’ll work out tomorrow. After all it has been over a year since I missed two days in a row.

But today I rest.