Fitness Friday – Ringing in the New Year with Fitness

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It’s a new year so it’s going to be a new us. (Sensing a theme yet?) We bought new workout clothes, found a gym near the house/office, and we’re full of fire and determination. It’s gonna work. Now’s the time. Carpe Diem!

Of course, it will. It worked for us last year, right? We had the clothes and shoes and a gym membership or found the PERFECT app. We were ready to go. What happened? By February we had given up. Life got in the way. We didn’t adjust and got steamrolled. Maybe we went too hard out of the gate getting burned out quickly. Maybe one, “I’ll get it tomorrow,” turned into two or three and then it was all over. It could have been any number of things but the point is we didn’t keep it going.

But it’s a new year and another chance to start over. We want to be successful this year making it the best year ever for us. But where do we start? How do we ensure we don’t fall into the same traps we do every year? Here are a few tips and tricks I find helpful.

Make Goals Specific and Attainable: Inevitably, every year people create nebulous New Year’s Resolutions of losing weight, going to the gym, or getting healthy. While these are great in theory they are vague and unhelpful. There is too much wiggle room and no way of knowing if we meet or fail at our goals. These “goals” are not measurable.

We need to add specificity to our goals. Instead of “losing weight” make it “I want to lose 10 lbs by the end of February.” Change “I want to go to the gym,” to “I want to go to the gym 3 mornings a week for 30 minutes, rotating between upper and lower body workouts, for the next 6 weeks.” Go from “I want to get healthy” to “I will reduce my soda intake to 3 times per week for the next month,” or “I will cook 3 paleo meals a week, for dinner, for the next month.”

See the difference? We made them specific: losing 10lbs, going to the gym 3x per week, and making a specific lifestyle change instead of a general one. They are also measurable. We either meet our weekly goal or don’t. Lastly, we’ve built in a time frame giving us an end goal to shoot for rather than a vague time frame of… whenever.

They should also be attainable. Want to lose 30 lbs in a month? I’m sure it can be done for those who don’t like eating and are on the show Survivor. Planning on working out or running every day for 2 plus hours? Hopefully, we were a bodybuilder or marathon runner in a previous life. Deciding to go strict Paleo, cutting out all our favorite foods, cold turkey. I pray we have the willpower. The problem is these aren’t attainable for the average person. We need to start with smaller more manageable goals. Most people can lose 1-2 lbs safely per week, 30 minutes to an hour at the gym 3 times per week is sufficient for general health, and removing foods slowly can make the change more sustainable.

I know we aren’t working to be average or “most” people but we need to start somewhere and remember getting “healthy” is a marathon, not a sprint.

We Can’t Out-Train Our Diet: If we run one more mile we can go get McDonalds or ice cream or whatever tasty treat our hearts desire. The problem is we can’t out-train our diets. If we work out in the morning then eat like shit all day, we will likely have a surplus of calories which only adds to the scale. This can easily become discouraging making it easier and easier to give up.

Jeff Godin Ph.D., CSCS, SGX wrote a post for the Spartan Race website which highlights this concept perfectly. As he lays it out, it’s easy to see how many burpees someone would need to complete to work off these various delicious items. For example, to work off one slice of Domino’s Pepperoni Pizza I would need to do 161 burpees. I hate doing 1 let alone another 160 of them.

This doesn’t mean we need to give up everything we love but if we want to meet our goals, changes will need to be made. Trade a glass of water for the usual can of soda, or two. Make an extra healthy meal at home rather than eating out. Buy the small “hundred calorie snack pack” instead of the full-size container of the same snack. By making smaller changes to our diet we can set ourselves up for greater success than going cold turkey.

That being said, some of us might have difficulty with moderation. (I’m pointing at myself pretty hard right now). I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person. I know this about myself and I’ve learned to be okay with it. For those of us who need to go cold turkey to make these changes in our life pick one thing at a time. Remove soda, cookies, or ice cream one at a time rather than cutting out ALL sugar at once. Once we master the removal of one item we can move to the next.

Figuring Out Where We Belong: I wrote about Fitness Communities a couple weeks back so I won’t beat it up too much here. The important thing I recently learned is, for most of us, it doesn’t matter what kind of fitness regimen we follow we just need to follow one. There are tons of different ways to work out and fitness sub-communities to belong to out there. It’s important to try a few to see which one sticks.

For years, I tried many different ways to get “in shape.” It’s was until recently I realized I wasn’t a fan of the cardio based workouts like running, spin, or high-intensity interval training (HIIT). They filled me with dread every time I needed to work out. This was why I found it difficult to stick with CrossFit. I enjoyed the lifting but the circuit training scared me so I would skip more classes than I’d go. Now I only lift and I love it.

In comparison, I have a friend who recently found HIIT training through a company called D1. She wanted to get her kids physically active and decided to join with them. SHE LOVES IT and can’t get enough! Every week she tells me how difficult it was and how much fun she had doing it. She’s figured out where she belongs and her life is changing because of it.

Another friend of mine is running a 100-mile marathon in April. He’s been training for the last year and can’t wait. He loves doing the long endurance training but could care less about lifting anything more than his bottle of kombucha. Both sound exhausting and unappealing to me but exciting to them.

We have a tendency to follow the new fitness crazy or go along with what everyone else says we should do. Unfortunately, we ignore our personal goals to follow other people. Take some time, experiment, and find the right fit to keep the fitness train running.

Keep it Simple Silly (Stupid feels so Angry): Every time I decide to get back into fitness I usually spend a ton of time looking through different workout routines. I delve into sites like BodyBuilding.com, Men’s Health, or individual fitness “leaders” workout regimens to see what’s out there and to find my new routine. It’s doesn’t take me long to get overwhelmed by all of the information out there and the complexity of each routine. Each workout programs about 5-10 exercises per day, 5-days a week. They take forever and soon I’m too frustrated to continue.

Everything changed when I found Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program. It was SO SIMPLE! Later I found Starting Strength and Stronglifts 5×5 which were even less complicated. I’m using Stronglifts 5×5 right now and I’m finished within 45 minutes.

This led me to realize how difficult we make fitness on ourselves. We believe we need to find programs with an unnecessary number of exercises programmed in them but it’s not true. There are better ways and, depending on the community, it can be really simple.

For those of us who are looking to work out at home or alone there are plenty of apps to choose. I’ve mentioned a few free ones before like Running for Weight Loss or Zombies, Run for runners, Hylete’s Daily Circuit for HIIT training, and StrongLifts 5×5 for strength training. There are plenty more of these in the App Store. Those of us who prefer working with a partner or with a group most gyms have free classes or Personal Trainers, there’s CrossFit or other functional fitness gyms, Yoga, or Fitness Boot Camps.

The point is unless we plan to geek out on fitness, letting someone else do the grunt work for us is a good thing. This way we can sit back, relax (but still get at it), and enjoy the fitness ride. By making it more difficult on ourselves, the less likely we are to continue.

Don’t forget to rest: When we start any new habit there is always the fear of backsliding. It takes 21 days for a habit to stick, right? Not necessarily. According to the author SJ Scott, it can take up to 66 days, depending on the person, for a new habit to stick with us.

When we start a new fitness habit we feel we need to go all in every day to ensure our routine sticks. (We don’t need a rest day. We just had 365 of them). Then what happens? After a couple of days of working out, we get too sore to continue. Then we take a day or two or three to rest and recover which turns into a week or more. Now we are in pain, pissed at ourselves, and quit. We figure this fitness thing isn’t for us and we move on with our lives.

We didn’t give ourselves enough time to rest. Our New Year’s vigor created an all or nothing mentality, which told us not to slow down and we listened. We need to remember it’s okay to rest. It’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to get our bodies’ use to this new level of physical activity. We should put our heart into our workouts and give it our all, but burnout is really easy to do, especially early in our training. Again we are looking for sustainability over the long run and ensuring our bodies successfully recovers is essential.

Bringing it Home: Phew… Still with me? Alright! I’m going to end it with this recap. First, we need to make specific, yet attainable, goals we can measure to know we are making progress, not go off our feelings. Second, our diet is more important than physical exercise. If we are consistently eating like garbage we won’t be able to burn off enough calories to make see a difference. Third, we need to find the type of fitness which makes us excited to get out of bed. Don’t know what it is yet? Experiment. Fourth, KISS it! We want to make it as easy as possible to get excited about exercising regularly. Fifth, do not forget to rest. Our body’s need time to heal and recover to maintain progress. Lastly (and a bonus), slow and steady will win this race. We are participating in a marathon, figuratively but possibly literally, not a sprint.

There it is. I hope you are as excited as I am to start the new year off right. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Are you planning on using any of these? Were these tips helpful? Keep me posted and good luck.

*Didn’t get enough in this article and want more ideas to make your fitness goals stick? Check out these Nerd Fitness articles: The 10 Key Differences Between Weight Loss Success and Failure, How to Build Healthy Habits that Stick, How to Build a Batcave for Habit Change. Enjoy!

Experimenting in the New Year

Image Credit: Pixabay

Happy New Year and welcome to 2019. It’s a whole new year of possibilities. Out with the old and in with the new, as they say. We’ve done our past year review, made plans, and thought to ourselves, “but what about all of the new things I want to do this year?” Maybe it’s time to learn a new language, become a writer, or the ever-popular working out. I know I have about a million different things I want to do and I want to do them all at once. Here are just a few:

Start another blog
Write Short Stories
Workout 3x per week
Drop 30 lbs
Meditate for 10 minutes every day
Keep a personal journal I write in each day
Learn another language (because who doesn’t)
Learn to code

You know… just a few easy goals to get me through the year. Right? This isn’t even everything and doesn’t include things I’ll want to do later on in the year.

These lists can be daunting? There’s so much on them and each one is the “most” important one to start right now. How to choose? How do we know which ones are right for us? We could start learning a language and realize it sucks but are we stopping because it’s hard or it’s not right for us?

First, we need to realize “we can do everything we want, just not all at once.” We have to understand we will need to create an order of precedence to figure out what we care about most. If we find a new, shiny object, we add it to the list to try next but don’t stop what we are working on now. One at a time. Slow and steady.

Once we know what we want to do we need to start executing. So what next? We start by thinking about life in 2 Week Experiments and 6 Month Projects. Again, this idea comes from Tim Ferriss (yup I’m talking about HIM again) in an episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast where he’s being interviewed at Google. Let me explain. In episode 175, he was asked about his 5-year plan or goals. He told the interviewer he breaks things up into 2-week experiments and 6-month projects rather than having long drawn out plans. This allows him to try new things to ensure they are worth his time and to keep an open mind when new ideas or projects come along.

What does this mean for us? It means we get to be both the scientist and the test subject. We are both dart thrower and dart board. We are putting ourselves in control with our own destiny and giving ourselves a nice, easy window for testing. Want to start a blog but haven’t written in years? We can start journaling every day for two weeks to ensure we want to continue writing. How about completing a Spartan Race? We can try HIIT training for two weeks to see if it’s something worth pursuing. After the two-week experiment is over, if we are still excited, we can turn it into a 6-month project. Go out to get a free WordPress website (*cough* *cough*) to start a blog or sign up for a gym membership to take their free classes to move forward. If, however, after the two weeks are over, we don’t want to continue, we quit. No harm, no foul.

There are two important things to remember when starting these experiments and projects. First, there needs to be some criteria for success or failure. Something specific and attainable. Start by journaling every day for 10 minutes instead of planning to write for 30 minutes or an hour. Try this 20-minute bodyweight beginner’s workout by Nerd Fitness 3-4 times a week instead of paying for a gym membership and planning to be there every day for hours. Specific but attainable.

Second, develop a plan before each experiment. We have success criteria but now we need to figure out how to execute. It’s important to carve out specific time to work on our experiment and not assume (it makes an ass out of “u” and me) we’ll get it done. Figure out when we have the most energy to help ensure success. (Some people are morning people while others get there second wind in the afternoon or evenings. We know ourselves better than anyone else.) Also, ensure consult plans with spouses or children whenever necessary to increase the possibility for success. As Ben Franklin said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail!”

Remember the idea is to figure out what we want to learn or do, then break it into two-week tests for ourselves. This is long enough to either start building a new successful habit or realize it’s not our cup of tea. Then if a new shiny object does come along we don’t feel like we are giving up anything to try something new. This way we aren’t trying to pull ourselves in a thousand different directions and instead, working to be more productive with our time. Sure we might experience bumps in the road but with some practice I know we’ll get to do everything we want in life.

Let me know what experiment you are looking to try first this year. I’d love to hear from you.

A New Year and A New You: Past Year Review

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It’s that time of year again when we say, “Fuck you!” to the previous year and warmly embrace the new one. It’s a time when we look at our past failures and try to fix them in the year ahead. It’s a time when we set goals for ourselves with milestones to hit to become a better person. It’s a time for New Year’s Resolutions.

Except, should it be? Should we be setting goals for ourselves for things we don’t necessarily want or won’t to do? Is there a better way to make next year better than our last? I think so thanks to Tim Ferriss. (What can I say? I’m a huge fan).

Tim recently posted his article called “Forget New Year’s Resolutions and Conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ Instead.” It’s a quick article describing the five steps for a successful PYR (Past Year Review), which you can find in the link. Basically, you go through the past year and write down, in two columns, all of the Positive or Negative people, activities or commitments you dealt with. Then you find the 20% of people and things you enjoyed and schedule more time for them now, today. Plan trips, activities, or events now to avoid the last minute “what the hell do I do now?” Then take the Negative column, write “NOT-TO-DO-LIST” and keep it in a place where you can look at it regularly. This helps avoid “forgetting” how much frustration was caused.

There you have it. Do more of the things we enjoy and less of the frustrating stuff. Simple right? Now we can be unencumbered of our boredom and monotony to start living a life of adventure and freedom! So good luck and have fun on your life of leisure.

“Hey, Joe… Aren’t you forgetting about a little thing called life? It kind of gets in the way.” Sure, life can be unpredictable and chaotic at times but why is that the case? Why do we tend to feel like we are a first class passenger on a runaway train with no time for fun? If you’re anything like me it’s because we tend live life by the seat of our pants. We don’t plan anything and become wishy-washy with commitments. Then when something comes up we don’t want to do or it’s someone we don’t want to hang out with, we get frustrated we aren’t doing something fun.

Thanks to Tim’s article, I’ve come to realize I need to be more assertive with the things I want to do and deliberate in the planning. I know things will come up and plans might change but if I don’t make time for the people and things I want to do, I’m headed on a one-way trip to miseryville. Here is a list of some of the things I’ve realized I need to add onto my calendar for the upcoming year.

Spend time with my family (both immediate and my extended family)
- Visit my parents and sister/Brother-in-Law/Nephews more
- Have more “Date Nights” with my wife
- Spend specific time with my kids but together and individually
Spend more time with my friends (other than the monthly poker game)
Play more Dungeons and Dragons (Yes, I enjoy Roleplaying Games)
Invite out of town friends for the weekend
Take more trips to my in-law’s cabin in Boone, NC
Have more get-togethers at our house.
Make time to write
Make time to play video games

At first glance it feels a little overwhelming but by understanding the things I want to spend more time doing, the more I can do. By planning fun things ahead of time I can ensure I am more deliberate with the necessities as well. I also believe it will allow me to be more present in my life which is something I desperately need to work on.

“Joe, I’m not going plan every minute of my life.” Of course not. The idea is to be more deliberate with our actions and time not to ensure we schedule our life completely. We want to ensure we add more positivity into our lives and avoid as much of the negative influences weighing us down. We want to get away from the feeling of being out of control. Stoic philosophy explains the only thing we have control over is our emotions and our actions. If treat our lives with ambivalence, we will continue to repeat the same shitty patterns each year. When we take time to care about who we are spending our precious time with and how we are using our time, our lives will improve.

Life will throw us curveballs and things won’t always go as planned. We may miss out on fun, spontaneous opportunities which come about but in the end, I believe, we better in the long run. So this year, let’s take some time to think about the positive and negative in our lives and be deliberate with what we want for the upcoming year. Make a plan, schedule it out, and defend it at all cost… especially from ourselves. Happy New Year, Everyone.