Author: steve

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Why I prefer to work out at home

Some of you — perhaps most of you — prefer to go to a gym to get a workout.

Either you are part of an organized class that keeps you feeling accountable, or the cost of the gym membership makes you feel that you need to go, or you just gotta get out of the house to get your exercise in.

If that works for you, great. Don’t stop. Keep going that way.

But there are those of us who find going to the gym too much of a bother, a hassle, and, perhaps, just too damn expensive.

I fall into that group.

I was a gym member once and went religiously. The place was walking distance, so it was convenient. Also, I needed to work out at 4:30am, so, given the small size of the house we lived in, going outside the house was necessary to allow my wife to continue sleeping while I exercised.

I no longer work out at 4:30am, and I no longer live in a small house, so my options are open. Given those factors, I prefer to work out at home.

There are a lot of benefits to working out at home, not the least of which is the savings on gym membership. I am not sure what it costs now, but when I was going back in the 90s, I paid $35/month, and that was with a military discount.

Here are a few more reasons to work out at home:

  • You can dress how you like without feeling self-conscious.
  • You are on your own schedule, so if you miss your usual 10:00 workout because something came up, you can shift it to 1:00 or whenever.
  • You can buy a fan and point it straight at yourself.
  • You can curse all you want. This is pretty important for me, because I like to cuss out Shaun T quite a bit ;=)
  • You can ogle the pretty people on the DVD without any negative repercussions — well, unless your S.O. objects.
  • There are so many workout programs to choose from and even the expensive ones are not expensive, when you compare them to the cost of a gym membership.
  • Cold water is not coming from a community water fountain.
  • You can pause the workout if you need to.
  • You’ll be showering in your personal shower, without other people’s nastiness all up in it.

Wow, that’s a lot of good reasons to work out at home.

There is some downside to working out at home — hmmmm, can’t think of anything at the moment, but there must be — so balance it in your own mind, but, again, always remember, the best way to work out is the way that keeps you doing it!

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Muscle Spasms and Ibuprofen

Back in early November, more than 3 months ago, I started having a sharp pain in my right center rectus abdominis (that’s the 6-pack abs). It only hurt when I moved a certain way, and to call it a pain is overstating the case — it was really just an irritation. But it was there.

I looked around the internet and diagnosed the pain as a pulled ab, not a hernia. I had recently done an abdominal routine that I had not done in a while, and I did it without warming up. On top of that, I really pushed it. That was dumb, but hindsight is 20/20, so there ya go. Won’t do that again.

Well, I didn’t do that again, but i did something.

Not sure what it was, but I started having an even sharper pain in that same spot of my rectus abdominis. Again, it was simply an annoyance, but I could feel it more intensely and more often than I had before.

I thought, “I’ve done it this time!”

However, my range of motion was still not affected. While I felt some discomfort, it wasn’t the type of pain that I associate with a severe injury, so I planned to do what I always do in that case — just work through it.

Fast forward to Tuesday, when I woke up with a terrible headache. Finally, that afternoon, I decided to take 600mg of ibuprofen. I don’t like to ingest drugs of any sort — okay, outside caffeine and alcohol — but I felt it was warranted here.

The headache soon went away, and I also noticed the pain in my abs had subsided.

When I woke up the next day, the pain in my abs, which I normally felt strongly as I got out of bed, was gone!

I did some googling and consulted my friend Donna, who has some expertise in the area, and concluded that I’d had a muscle spasm in my rectus abdominis. The ibuprofen must have calmed it.

This makes me rethink my attitude toward ibuprofen.

I don’t want to make it a part of my daily diet, because I can live with sore muscles, but it does seem a bit absurd to allow muscles to continue spasming when a small dose of a fairly innocuous drug will calm them.

Live and learn.

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Slow and Steady Wins the Body Reshaping Race

The reason many of us fail at having the bodies we want is that it’s hard work. There is no magic pill or patch. We have to put in the work and control what we ingest. Why are we so weak? We expect quick results, when, trite but true, slow and steady does win the race.

Lose 2 pounds a month for 2 years and you are 50 pounds lighter.

50 pounds lighter!

Can’t wait 2 years? Wow. You took a lot more years than that to put those pounds on. How do you expect to drop them so quickly.

And, look, 2 pounds a month is nothing. You could really go at it with diet and exercise and safely lose 4, 6, even 8 pounds a month.

How about this plan. You go “all in” for 2 months, get into the swing of things, but, then, at the point where you would normally just say “screw it”, and go back to being lazy and undisciplined, you simply back off a bit.

(NOTE: You may find that this time around, you don’t want to back off. You love what you are doing and the results are keeping you motivated. Keep going!)

If you’ve been really hitting the diet and exercise thing for a couple months, you should have a pretty good idea of what you can eat to be healthier. You should have a decent feel for how much exercise it takes to be more fit.

But if you’ve decided by the 2-month mark that this lifestyle is not for you right now, don’t go back to your old habits. Keep some of the good habits you’ve developed.

Maybe during your 2 months you gave up all fast food. Hey, now, that’s a great idea! You used to eat 7 meals a week at fast food places, now you are eating none. You could go back to your old ways, but do you have to?

Maybe during your 2 months you took a 2-mile walk every morning. Nice start to a fitness plan! You used to just sit and watch tv every morning before work, now you’re moving. You could go back to the tv, but do you have to?

It’s pretty obvious to me that fitness isn’t for everyone. All I have to do is look around to see that. But if you are reading this, you must have something inside you that wants you to improve yourself.

Maybe this isn’t your time to go “all in” for fitness.

I went through many stops and restarts on my way to being fully involved in my own fitness. Finally, something clicked in my mind, and I know now I will never go back.

If you are not there yet mentally, take your move to fitness in smaller steps. Slowly, steadily, you will win this race.

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Day 30 of my High Fat Diet and more about Yoga!

Here I am in day 30 of my high-fat diet, and I was just telling my friend yesterday how I feel that my body is undergoing some kind of positive transformation. I feel leaner and more energetic. I feel as if I am getting stronger.

It’s not as if this is a change that is overwhelmingly better than any of my previous changes, but it’s something, which is better than nothing, which is what I had before. I was stuck. That’s why I kept changing things up until I found something that felt as if it was getting me out of my fitness rut.

But it’s not only about the diet. In addition to eating high fat — 2000 to 2400 calories with targets of 70% fat, 20% protein, and 10% carbs — I had also been doing yoga, and only yoga, for 24 days (with a few days off in there).

I broke the streak on Monday with a round of Insanity Pure Cardio — and, yeah, my glutes were sore the last couple days — but I am sticking with yoga as my primary workout. I’ll do another aerobic workout on Friday, then increase aerobics to 3 times a week starting next week, in addition to my yoga.

I had not meant to be so much into yoga for so long. I meant only to use it as a transition workout after I tweaked my back, but the way I feel makes me want to stick with it for a bit longer.

You may or may not recall, depending on how often you read this blog, that I was introduced to yoga through Tony Horton’s P90X. Tony is not a yoga master — he’s just a guy who likes to stay fit and enjoys a yoga workout from time to time. Because he was my gateway to yoga, I really didn’t know much more from a practical standpoint than what he covered during his workouts.

But I knew if I wanted to advance in yoga, I’d need to find a better teacher than Tony. On Amazon, where I buy almost everything, I found Rodney Yee.

Rodney Yee has a ton of yoga DVDs, but I bought one called Ultimate Power Yoga just to check it out. That DVD has five 15- to 20-minute workouts on it, each with a different focus. And my world opened up.

Let me backtrack a bit.

When I saw yoga was part of P90X, I was intrigued, because I had always thought yoga was a good all-around fitness program, but I had never gotten around to trying it out. It was always so much easier to run or lift weights or do something else I understood better. Yoga, after all, is kinda weird for us euro-americans. You have to learn a bunch of poses. You have to stay still in those poses for what seems like a long time. There is a lot of balancing. It all seemed a bit much.

But Yoga X showed me that once I learned the poses and understood a bit about the rhythm and flow of a yoga workout (I know the yoga people call them “practices”, but I’m sticking with “workout” for now), it was really quite enjoyable, and I always felt great afterward.

So I bought Tony Horton’s two One on One yoga DVDs. I used them extensively, and it was exciting when I could finally do them both all the way through! (Yoga is not easy — it’s definitely a workout.)

As I added more and more yoga days into my program, I felt that I needed to get some new DVDs to keep from getting bored. Enter Rodney Yee.

I now have more than 20 yoga DVDs by Rodney Yee and others. I haven’t tried the workouts from others yet, because I really do enjoy Rodney’s workouts, but I’m sure I’ll give them a go sometime in the future.

So, let me see, I guess I got off on a love song to yoga, so what is the point of this post?

1) High Fat Diet – After 30 days, it really seems to be working for me. As someone whose blood-sugar continually flirts with “too high”, I suppose that makes sense. After another month or two on this diet, I’ll see about getting my blood tested and judge it from there. If I am judging solely based on how I feel, though, I give it thumbs up at the 30-day mark.

2) Yoga – I love it. Perhaps you’ll love it too. (Thus ends my song.)

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Getting to your Fitness Tipping Point

It’s the middle of February, which means you should be about 6 weeks into your 2012 fitness plan.

You are still on your fitness plan, right?

Hey, I’m not here to nag you and I’m not here to motivate you. Only you can motivate yourself, and with every plan to do something good for yourself — something good that involves discomfort or denial of pleasure, like getting fit (or more fit), quitting smoking, abandoning sugar —  it takes some getting used to.

Every plan also comes with a Tipping Point.

What’s the tipping point? It’s that place in your life when you are striving for a goal and … suddenly … you realize this is no longer a part-time thing, but an actual regular part of your life.

Sometimes the tipping point comes abruptly. That’s how it was for me and sugar. I really had nothing against sugar, although I was consuming less of it, because I was well into watching what I ate. But I would still go on the occasional donut or cupcake or half-a-okay-who-am-I-kidding-whole-German-chocolate-cake-with-coconut-pecan-frosting binge.

Then one day I just said to myself, “Wow, sugar really is poison for me,” and that was it. I stopped eating it.

Most of the time, though, the tipping point comes more gradually.

I am not sure when my gotta-get-a-workout-in tipping point occurred, but I was reminded yesterday that it had occurred. I was emailing with a friend of mine, and I was describing the particularly busy day I’d had. She asked, “Did you get your workout in?”

My answer was that I had, because at some point in my life I had prioritized my workout, so it would take a lot for me to miss it. I had passed the working-out tipping point.

I really don’t know when that happened, but I am glad it did.

We often, in our lives, respond to a lack of action with a curt, “I just don’t have time.” But the old adage is true: We all have the same amount of time, it’s just a matter of how we decide to fill it.

If it is truly more important for you to do something else in place of getting fit, then you have not reached your fitness tipping point. I only hope that you’ll get there, though, before some kind of serious health issue makes you re-examine your decisions.