Category: Exercise

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If you want to be fit, you have to commit!

Did you ever have this conversation with yourself?

SELF 1: “It’s time to work out, but I have other stuff to do.”
SELF 2: “Sure I have other stuff, but I need to get my workout in!”
SELF 1: “Good point, but I already missed Wednesday, because of that big meeting. Might as well skip today, too, and get back into it on Monday.”

There are always things that can happen to take the place of your regular workout time. The boss calls a meeting. You get stuck on the phone with a client. Your kid is sick and you need to pick her up from school. Life gets in the way.

But if you are committed, what you do is shift the workout, do it anyway, earlier, later, whenever. If for some reason you really can’t get your workout in that day, you do it the next day.

And you never — never — use the fact that you missed the last workout as an excuse to miss the next one. That is a recipe for failure.

No matter how many days a week you plan to exercise — 1, 3, 5, 7 — you gotta stick to the schedule!

Have you seen the infomercial for Tony Horton’s P90X that includes the tagline/motto “Press play every day”? That is a powerful idea. The P90X program has something for you to do every day of the 90 days it lasts. Okay, well, one day a week is optional — you can either rest or join Tony in a stretching routine, so, really, they do allow you a day off every week, if you choose — and that’s a good thing.

But the idea that I needed to put that DVD into the player and “press play every day” — that little mantra — kept me going from time to time on those days when I was not so motivated, by reminding me of my commitment to P90X. In fact, it still reminds me now to get a workout in, long after having completed the program.

The financial gurus always tell you to prioritize your savings plan by “paying yourself first,” before all the money goes to bills.

Do the same with fitness. Prioritize it. Put your workout time above other things that are pulling at you. When you do that, you’ll find yourself truly committed to fitness, and that’s the only way you’ll succeed in the long run.

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Do you have fitness goals? They might be your problem.

I have always loved school. I enjoy learning. I wish I could just be a fulltime student, but that’s not financially possible. Still, even as a non-student, I read a lot, do tons of research, all in an effort to learn something new, or learn more about my favorite subjects and activities. I just really enjoy learning new things, processing new information.

I believe that most people don’t share my love of school. They look at school not as a way to learn, but as a means to an end, a way to get a piece of paper that will allow them to get a better job, make more money.

People who look at school like that focus more on completing tasks — getting that papers or project done — rather than learning. They really don’t care if they learn, as long as they complete the tasks that allow them to collect the prize at the end. Of course, some learning cannot help but happen along the way, but it’s coincidental.

They have an ultimate goal for school, and that’s to get a degree. Once the goal is completed, well, that’s enough of school. Why do you think many professions have requirements for continuing education? Gotta force people to do it, because they won’t do it on their own.

So what does this have to do with fitness?

The nice thing about fitness is that a goal-oriented approach can work — at least for a while. Staying focused on completing tasks — hitting it hard every weekday 10:00am to 11:00am, for example — can help keep you in good shape and get you to your goal, whatever it is: losing 50 pounds, getting down to a 32 waist size, being able to do 300 pushups.

But what happens when you reach the goal? What happens on the other side? Too often, the fitness training stops, and, yup, we all know what happens after that. The fitness level gradually deteriorates, and we end up where we were before we started … or worse.

This fitness goal orientation is easily illustrated by a phenomenon I have noted recently because of my participation in Facebook.

Facebook has allowed me to follow people as they announce “I’m getting married in 9 months,” then, quite often soon thereafter, “I’m on a diet” or “I’m working out”.

This is great! Anything that motivates you to get into shape is okay in my book.

But I wonder how many of those people, motivated to look good on their wedding days, continue their fitness quests after the big day.

The problem is the goal. Once the goal is reached, what is the motivation to continue the behavior that was geared toward reaching it?

Fitness really has no end goal, it is an end unto itself. Sure, you can — and I do — have targets that get and keep you motivated. My most recent one was a strong desire to finish Insanity. Did it.

Now what? … Exactly. I could just quit, knowing I finished Insanity, and feel pretty good about that. But that would not keep me in shape.

So, it seems to me that while fitness can and should involve goals, we shouldn’t focus on those goals as be-all-end-alls. In fact, we should guard against this mindset.

Fitness is really a lifestyle. The goals are short-term pieces of a lifelong plan to get into and stay in shape. Use them, but don’t make them the primary focus. Keep your eye on your goals, but try to focus instead on fitness for fitness’ sake!

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Fear of falling back into old habits

I wouldn’t call it exactly a “fear”, but, wow, I am really not interested in falling back into my old habits, which include:

  • overeating
  • overdrinking
  • oversittingonmyass

all of which lead, of course, to being

  • overweight

I may tend to obsess about this. I measure my waist at least once daily. If I go more than a day without working out, I get nervous that I may enjoy sitting around too much. When I indulge myself by occasionally feasting on crap food I used to eat all the time, I become concerned that this indulgence will become the norm.

And I think those “fears” are the key to keeping the old habits at bay.

As soon as I don’t care any more, the moment I no longer feel at least a twinge of guilt for engaging in relatively unhealthy behaviors, that is when I will have a problem.

But as of right now, it’s all good.

I can have that night where I eat every carb in the house, knowing that the next day I will scale back to meat and veggies only.

I can go to the occasional party and drink too much of my homemade limoncello, knowing that I will not drink again for a week after that. (Well, unless it’s a multi-day party, in which case, all bets are off ;=)

I can skip a couple workouts in a row, knowing that I’ll be at it hard the day I come back, probably with an extra few minutes for good measure.

And all this is based on a fear of falling back, a fear of being fat again, of being out of shape again. Yes, it is, I think, after all, a “fear”.

But it’s a healthy one that I think I’ll keep at the front of my mind.

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How Does Insanity Affect Upper Body Strength?

When I started Insanity in early May, I was concerned about what it might do to my upper body strength. After all, the workouts really emphasized lower body and abs, and while there was some shoulder work, there was not a whole lot of concentration on the chest, arms, and lats.

I had toyed with the idea of adding some pullups to the workouts, but, what the heck, I figured I’d go ahead and experiment on myself yet again, and see just how Insanity affected my upper body.

And let me caveat this for any of you who think I am knocking Insanity — I’m not. I loved Insanity and recommend it to everyone!

Shaun T's InsanityNow, as you may know, I completed Insanity a couple weeks ago, took last week off to do only yoga, and started today with my favorite gauge of upper body strength: 30/15 from Tony Horton’s One-On-One workouts.

30/15 is a workout that alternates 12 sets of various pushups with 12 sets of various pullups, so it was measuring what I wanted to measure.

The results?

Pushups were barely affected. Prior to Insanity I was doing 26 pushups per set. Today I cut that back to 25, expecting to have to cut it further as the workout progressed toward the end, but, happily, I didn’t need to drop below 25 at all.

I did have to cheat a bit during the last couple sets, not going down quite all the way, to get to 25, but finish I did. I was pleased with that result. It won’t take long to get back to 26, and, in fact, I expect to be fully back next Monday when I do the 30/15 workout again.

I suppose this was to be expected. After all, Insanity does incorporate quite a few pushups in month two, so the chest and triceps are not totally ignored.

However, let’s talk about the lats.

During the pullup sets of 30/15, I do as many reps as I can do in one minute. Pullups are my weakness, so I try to maximize my workout by putting a time on it, instead of just doing them to simple failure.

My pullups were off 20% to 30%!

Again, this was to be expected. There are no pullups and no real lat work in Insanity, plus, my pullup numbers were not that impressive to begin with. Still….

To anyone who is concerned that Insanity will affect your pullups negatively, I can say that, if my experience is any indicator, then, yes, it does. You should add pullups and chinups to your Insanity workouts, or else expect to lose back strength.

Pushup strength is only mildly affected, so no worries there.

As I read through the literature that came with my freshly delivered copy of The Asylum, I saw that there is a pullup bar incorporated into those workouts, so I’ll be looking forward to that. My current plan is to start The Asylum in about a month, but we’ll see how that schedule holds up.

Right now, I am enjoying developing a Tony Horton’s P90X and Insanity hybrid, because the ones I’ve found online that others have created aren’t floating my boat. I’ll be incorporating Tony Horton’s One-On-One workouts into my hybrid. Look for that program here soon!

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Be accountable to yourself!

A fitness friend of mine recently retweeted something along the lines of “Write down your fitness goals, then share them with someone. That way the person can hold you accountable.”

WHAT?

I am familiar with this concept, and I guess it helps some people, but what is going on in the world when we need to make someone else hold us accountable for our own fitness? I am the one who needs to be fit, these are my goals.

I am accountable only to myself!

As a matter of fact, the only reason anyone besides my brother and my wife knew I was doing Tony Horton’s P90X when I first started it, was because my wife had told people at work, when P90X came up in conversation. I didn’t tell anybody. None of their business.

Now, I didn’t mind that my wife had told people, but I’m less social. Honestly, I never brought it up to people, because I didn’t want to have to converse about it. But I certainly didn’t need them to hold me accountable. I knew I was ready to get fit, and that I was going to get up and press play every day for 90 days. And I did. Accountable to no one but myself.

I am not on a soapbox here. Different strokes for different folks. If telling someone else about your goals helps you, please, by all means, do that. Anything that helps you stay on track is great!

But I will share with you my response to that original tweet from my fitness friend: “Grow the f*ck up Hold your own damn self accountable!”

At some point in our lives, we all need to figure out how to hold ourselves accountable. If we don’t, well, that’s how we get into trouble. We try to get away with stuff. We figure no one will ever know if we [insert something you should not do here]. Then, of course, at some point, someone does know, someone does find out, and … trouble. Divorce. Financial struggles. Legal problems.

I guess this has ended up being more of a rant than a fitness lesson, but, seriously, think about how well you hold your own self accountable for your actions. Live a strong life, hold yourself to high standards, and you will certainly sidestep a multitude of life’s problems.