Re-up: Fitness, augh
Things have been going well with the daily-habits-per-month-for-a-year (I mean, it's still Month One, so not a lot to report; but The Thing is Getting Done, so no complaints) - but I need to take on another thing.
This is a post about fitness.
About losing it, and getting it back again.
Some hard facts: I'm 37. I was always kinda active, or interested in active things anyway, but it wasn't until I was about 30 that I started to take up physical hobbies. Weightlifting at first, then martial arts, then underwater hockey and freediving…and for quite a few years there, I was disgustingly fit. I was also, surprising myself, WAY less depressed than my usual - and I wrote a lot about the shocking (to me) news that Hey WTH, if I get like an hour or so of real solid exercise per day, my usual brainspiders are like half their normal-for-me size.
Almost 2 years ago, I hurt my leg and had to stop playing hockey. My hockey friends drifted away, and when I went back last month, my leg was fine, but the fun was way diminished. I took up climbing a bit in the interim, but overall my impression of the sport and the community was "eh", so I haven't done it very much lately. For most of that time I just had kungfu - for a long time, lessons were 3x a week, and I taught classes or lessons another 1-3 times every week, so that was enough. Plus, needing to keep getting better at it kept me doing general workout stuff, as did life in general.
Well, life in general has failed me.
Even kungfu, which has kept me mostly sane for a decade, has failed me. I got into taking pretty exclusive, interesting, amazing stuff, and the one teacher in this area for it (who is astonishingly good) has gotten so good that he can no longer see me for the usual lessons - I'll be lucky to get one a month now, and I've barely gotten that for the last six.
And my body is starting to feel, and show, it. I wear the same size clothing, but much of the muscle-tone is gone; and there's a minor but noticable layer of flab that wasn't there before. I no longer feel good about wearing anything that shows me off, and I cringe when I pass a mirror. Not cool. Plus, predictably, my brain has gotten steadily harder to handle without its daily dose of energy-dump.
So this is one of those things that really needs fixing immediately. I have daily conditioning exercises on my list for several months from now, but we (my robot skin and I) can't do several more months of this - it's really unhealthy. And now that I've put two and two and two together, I need to also put my foot down, call it the unacceptable it is, and start fixing it right away.
So, I drew up a simple set of conditioning exercises that I know I can make myself do, that are best done at home but don't require being here, and that will be, if not 100% enough on their own, at least a start in getting things back on track. I'm also going to need to get both a kungfu and a swimming thing back in my life, but at least this way, those are separate tasks, and I don't let my mental and physical health deteriorate while they get figured out.
If you care, here's my daily workout. I prefer doing individual sets to failure, over doing several sets: I agree that high-intensity training is awesome, but it's also SOOOO DULLL. What I'm doing this time is doing one-set-to-failure (i.e. as many as I can) of what I know are good exercises, and tracking my numbers, so that I can watch them go up. :)
Every day, I'll do:
Pushups (I can still do "real" ones, yay)
Fancy crunches (I liked bicycle crunches best, from my swimming days)
Pull-ups
Leg-lifts (I can do these on the pull-up bar, or on the floor if needed - good lower-ab stuff)
Kettlebell squats (if not at home, I can omit the kettlebell)
…That gets all the muscles, and as I progress it should get and keep me back to at least a basic athletic level of fitness. The hard part is just going to be doing it every day, without the prior motivation of having all my fitness stuff be fun stuff; but come on, of course I think I can do it. :)
(And so can you!)
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.