Category: Self-Improvement

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But, How Will You Improve?

Yesterday I heard of someone expressing concern about my thoughts on exercise from yesterday.

The gist of the concern was, “If you don’t work to improve and have a goal of improving, how in the world are you going to push enough to get faster/stronger/fitter/whateverer?”

That’s a valid question, and I got an answer to that this morning during my swim.1 I’d been swimming between 900-1000 yards in my half an hour. I swam 1050 yards today. (That’s 42 lengths of a 25 yard pool). Now, I’ve mentioned that I refuse to do the tooth-gritting, by the numbers pushing to improve, so am I going back on deliberately not having time and distance goals?

Not in the least.

I swam that fast, and pushing very hard, for the simple joy of it. It felt good. My body felt good. I was taking a sensual delight in muscular effort. I was enjoying the sunlight playing off of the bubbles trailing from my fingertips as my hand speared the water. The simple hedonistic feel of being supported by and moved through water made me happy and I was pushing hard for the sheer delight of it.

Kids do this – run around a field just because, WHEEE!!!!!! It’s time to RUN! Remember when you were little and rolling around on the grass, or climbing a tree or speeding along on your bike just because moving felt so good? I was not an athletic kid. I was bookish and sedentary. And I can still remember that sensation clearly – the joy of just moving. It’s not a child thing. It’s a human thing. It’s why every culture in the world has its dance traditions. Moving your body for the joy of it is natural.

That’s not to say mobility and pain issues aren’t relevant. If it’s raining Monday morning, and my joint are achy, chances are slim I’ll feel the way I did today during my morning swim. Instead of getting my orca on, I’ll plod through a half an hour of swimming feeling a bit clumsy and maybe not swimming that whole 1050. I don’t want the pressure or responsibility to constantly meet my highs. They’ll climb naturally, and will be egged on during those moments when movement just feels good.

And when it doesn’t, moving at all will take me another day closer to a session when it feels wonderful another time.

 

1 Yes,I write more when I am swimming. I get a lot of thinking done moving in the water. When I was a kid, I seemed to write more when I was doing a lot of bike riding, before I got my Walkman. I guess forward motion without any distraction is just good for my mental clarity.

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Athleticism vs. Fitness

I am very tired of fitness writers applying competitive athlete solutions to the problems of everyday fitness. The fact the body needs to move is not an issue that only pertains to competitive athletes. As a corollary, just because a world-class athlete does something doesn’t mean that it’s needed for every-day fitness.

When you thumb through a swimming mag, you’ll see articles talking about how to shave fractions of a second off your time offering all kinds of advice. I’m not going to buy the special swimsuit made of Neptunium-coated fiber blessed by the Dolphin Gods because it will reduce my drag in the water by .001%. Nor do I think that for my daily workout, shaving off all body hair below the neck to reduce drag is necessarily crucial. That .001% might matter to an Olympic athlete a great deal. But I’m not a competitive swimmer. I don’t need to apply the problems of athletic competition to daily fitness. I need to show up daily for daily fitness. That’s a completely different problem, especially when being athletic is not generally the focus of my whole day.1

I recognize that many fitness writers are competitive athletes. It’s how they motivate themselves and they tend to like the mindset. There’s nothing wrong with being a competitive athlete, of course. It can be a good way to motivate oneself, if that’s to one’s taste. But what it means is that articles on activities are going to be geared to constantly improving athletic performance with a competitive mindset.

But I think the needs of people who have absolutely no interest in being competitive athletes, but are interested in making sure they get in enough movement to keep healthy are being completely underserved. It’s logical that it’s happening. Most people in the fitness industry do get there by means of having been a competitive athlete. Hellfire, I was as a teenager, myself.

What we need to see are more articles talking about consistency of exercise rather than training for competitions, or imitating training for competitions as a workout strategy. We need to talk about staying motivated when one hasn’t the slighted interest in treating exercise like a competitive activity. We need to talk more about modifications for physical issues. We need to talk about what being fit really means instead of implying you’ll be immortal if you’re thin enough, work out enough and take all the right vitamins.

I’d be curious to know what people who aren’t into the athlete mindset, but who still work out like to do and how they keep motivated on a daily level.

 

1 I mean, come on, I’m a writer and a teacher. While the performance art of teaching can be pretty physical when you’re trying to keep your students interested and engaged, it’s not like being a lumberjack.

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Objective vs. Subjective in the Pool

I was looking up some material on working out and heart rates. Spinners, bless their hearts, aren’t even allowed to work out without a heart rate monitor. Back in the 1980s when aerobics was the thing, most classes would stop every so often to check your heart rate to make sure you’re working out in the target zone. I guess that sort of training rubbed off on me, because I do check my heart rate after a workout from time to time.

And according to some sources, going for the land-based target heart rate means I work too hard in the water. I generally match that ideal target heart rate for aerobic exercise just out of habit when I’m working out. But, the fact that you’re horizontal means your heart is beating 10-15 beats a minute less than for land-based exercise. I generally hit the land numbers and the theory is that this is pushing too hard.

Now this is nonsense. You know what working too hard feels like. It hurts, you’re gasping unpleasantly, and your heart feels like it’s going to pound out of your chest. You do not feel pleasantly mellow after such a workout with slightly elevated breathing and (if you’re fair skinned) a little bit red in the face. If you feel exhilarated and good, you’re probably not pushing too hard.1

I understand the desire to train by the numbers, and hit specific non-subjective goals. I prefer concrete goals, myself. Training myself out of doing that in favor of putting in that half hour working out is a lot more challenging than I would have believed. I still ask myself if I got in enough yardage swimming, or if I have pushed hard enough. Yes, in a way I’m teaching myself to tolerate being bored by exercise. I don’t tolerate boredom well, and I’m realizing that for some very limited things, it’d be better if I could just a little. I can be frenetically mentally active the other 23 ½ hours a day if I must.

It’s still hard because I want so badly to evaluate each workout beyond, “Did it happen for half an hour?” Even though I’ve gotten away from numbers, I’m still asking myself how I feel. Of course, that’s different every day, and often has less to do with how well I’m performing in terms of speed and heart rate, and more to do with how I feel emotionally about my form and power in the water. If I’m feeling clumsy in the water, I generally don’t feel like it’s been a “good” workout. When I get my Orca on, I feel fantastic, no matter what the numbers say.

 

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1 This is the average exerciser we’re talking about here. You adrenaline junkies who get off on extreme sports are another breed entirely.

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Clean All the Things

I am not particularly neat by nature or general habit.

I am neat by taste. I like order. You can see the conflict, yes?

I do have some habits to take care of this adapted from Flylady. We do have a slightly different approach, but the goals are similar. We’re messy packrats who really would prefer to live in a neat home, and frankly made a pig’s ear out of the attempt for most of our lives.

Part of what I do is daily routine. (Make my bed the minute I get up, make sure the kitchen is cleaned up once a day, etc.)

Part of what the household does is weekly routine. Clean All the Things. (Declutter, dust, vacuum, change bedsheets, give hard floors a quick damp mop). Depending on how bad things are, this can take from 20 minutes to an hour. It’s not enough for white glove inspections, but it keeps the house from degenerating into chaos, and getting used to piles of clutter in corners to the point where we don’t even “see” them as we climb over them. I’ve lived like that and I didn’t feel good with it. Hence the change.

This week was definitely a 20 minute week, especially as my son and I did a very thorough Clean All the Things last week.

In fact, so much so that when I commented it was time to Clean All the Things, my son objected, saying the house wasn’t very messy. (It wasn’t). I said that he was right. The house wasn’t all that messy, so if we did Clean All the Things, it wouldn’t take very long. Neither would it next week. Stuff wouldn’t pile up. He still disagreed.

We took a vote1, and his father and I carried by a 2/3 majority, so All the Things got Cleaned.

I talk a lot about the mundane keeping up of stuff, I know. It’s something I never learned as a child. Not that no-one tried to teach me, mind. It’s just that it was really difficult for me to learn, and I didn’t even really see the value of it. I was into epics, for pity’s sake! Heroic effort, I could value, and get into. Moderate, patient, long-term effort? Not so much. It’s why being able to keep my house clean on a regular basis was such a victory for me and one I still reflect on a great deal.

Now, my pleasure centers still light up at the intensity of effort stuff, and I think that’s okay. I can pour everything into the few hours I’m in front of a class. That’s not hurting anything. In fact, it’s good. But then I need to go home and be patiently moderate about studying for the next class, writing the handouts, and dealing with the other aspects of my life.

I think the theme of this year is going to be learning to be moderately immoderate.

Though I swear, I thought you were supposed to have everything sorted out by the time you were in your forties?2 Goodness knows, my grandparents seemed to in their own minds. I wish I could ask them what they were working on personally (if anything) when they were my age. My parents had my brother and I to deal with. NO-ONE could possibly feel like everything was sorted with us as children. We were kinda challenging to rear.

 

1 Unlike many homes, that vote was not fake. If 2 out of the three of us voted not to Clean All the Things, None of the Things would have been Cleaned.

2 At least, it’s what I used to think at sixteen. Yes, I know, in many ways I’m mentally still a teenager. Stop laughing at me. It’s not nice to laugh at people who can’t help it.

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Go Hard, or Go Home

I have a categorical hate for the expression, “Go hard, or go home!”

It is categorical because there are situations in which the phrase is very appropriate. If you’re a competitive athlete, for instance, you do need that attitude to win your competitions. There, it is appropriate.

If you are someone who is just bloody well trying to maintain fitness, it’s a load of crap.

Now before you say, “No! No! No! I did a hard-core twelve week program and I was in the best shape of my life!” I want you to consider something: Did you continue that program for a period of more than three years, or has it been awhile since you’ve been active?

If you did remain regularly active, more power to you. You found something that works, and I think that’s great. Don’t mess with it and keep doing it.

If you didn’t, maybe you need to stop approaching exercise like a competitive athlete.

I didn’t swim today. My husband needed to use the family car and I chose not to walk to the gym when it was below 30F and still dark. I could have chosen to. I just didn’t. I did a 30 minute exercise video instead. Not my first choice, but the goal is 30 minutes of working out a day every week day, rather than a specific training activity. So, I forged one more link in the chain of habit.

In my competitive athlete mode, I would have been going to heroic efforts to get the right workout in. Friends, if I were training for something, that would be an appropriate choice. Right now, I really don’t want to spend heroic effort on exercise. Professionally, I’ve got a lot going on, and I’d rather pour energy for heroic effort into that.

That’s where the “Go hard, or go home” attitude can be non-productive. You might be pouring heroic effort into something, but if it’s not exercise, the “Go hard or go home” attitude says you shouldn’t be working out at all. That’s not very helpful, now is it? It implies that if you don’t want to be an athlete, you don’t deserve to move your body.

That’s nonsense.

It’s not that I never work out hard. Sometimes I do. I did yesterday. Well, okay, I did today. (Yoga is very challenging for the inexperienced, just sayin’.)

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Moderation: Harder than Dramatic Effort

I’ve mentioned before that my fitness goal is to show up every weekday for half an hour. Ideally this means a swim first thing in the morning. There is a class schedule coming up that means that either I swim after I teach, or I do something else before I open the gym. It may mean something else, because I tend not to want to work out after being around people a whole bunch. We’ll see.

So, the goal? Show up, get blood pumping for half an hour. That’s it. This is not to make myself work out, per se. It’s to contain my enthusiasm for days like today and prevent burnout.

After a couple of weeks, I’ve gotten to the point where I hit that endorphin high in a swim.1 I’m swimming about 1,000 yards in half an hour on more days than not, 2 and I got to thinking:

Me: Hey, if we could do 1,000 in half an hour, why not do another 20 minutes and swim a mile? We’ve got time this morning, because our meetings don’t start till later!

Myself: No. Half hour’s up. Out of the pool.

Me: Aw come on. Let’s prove to ourselves we can swim a mile.

Myself: You already know you can swim a mile. That’s not a great athletic feat for you; it just requires patience. Stop it. Out of the pool.

Me: But it’s cool and intense and stuff! And we feel good.

Myself: Yes it is, and yes, we feel good. You’re not here for cool and intense. You’re here to learn consistency. Get out of the damn pool, right now. You’ll feel good from a workout again, I promise.

Me: But lots of people here are working out for a whole hour and do every day.

Myself: OUT. OF. THE. POOL.

Me: Fine! (Gets out of the pool).

Myself: (Softening a bit) Your problem isn’t whether or not you can swim a mile or work out for an hour, or reach an athletic goal or any of that. You’re pretty good at dramatic, short-term effort. Your problem is consistency of moderate effort. You have not yet proven you will be consistent over the long term with exercise. That’s your goal. Giving in to swimming that mile would interfere with that. After you’ve solved the consistency problem, and that’s going to take at least a year, we can revisit athletic goals. (Muttering) As if you won’t be swimming a mile in half an hour after a year of this, anyway…

 

I’m not by nature a moderate person, nor do I really have any middle gears. I’m intense. I have a bad temper, and I throw myself into joy with absolute abandon. While there are advantages to this in many ways, in terms of the dailyness of life, it can interfere.

I also got to thinking about this for people with a lot of the “invisible” illnesses people can have (CFS and its derivatives, and so on). I have one – arthritis, and swimming is a fine work-around for me on that one. But I got to thinking about small consistencies. And I mean really small, like 5-15 minutes of a workout routine each weekday. (Strength, stretching, whatever).

I know for a fact that there are healthy people who do this and have seen fairly dramatically positive results over a period of several years. Of course, I don’t live in other people’s bodies, but I wonder if it’s anything anyone who has one of these invisible illnesses has tried it over a period of a year or more and liked the results.

 

1 Swimming is the most reliable way for this to happen, because it doesn’t hurt like many land-based exercises do.

2 I’m not permitting myself specific distance goals. The goal is to swim half an hour.

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Health and Fitness Lies

I really wish that health publications would quit lying when trying to encourage people to be more active. Many say that feeling tired when you exercise is a myth and that you feel wonderful and energized when you work out.

That’s not what’s going to happen when you start out sedentary – not right away.

At first, maybe the first week or two of starting a daily exercise program, you’re going to be tired. Depending on other factors you might actually want to sleep as much as an hour and a half more each day. The good news is that this phase is pretty temporary.1

The next week or two, you’ll gradually start feeling better. Probably you’ll be sleeping a lot harder than you’re used to, and won’t toss and turn quite so much.

It’s when you’ve been doing it three to six weeks that that energy burst kicks in. And yep, that does feel really great.

It drives me crazy when people are told that they’ll feel great right away. Many people, maybe even most, don’t. The thing is, we’re not stupid, we’re not children and we know how to endure a certain level of discomfort to get to a desired goal. Why don’t you idiots pushing the exercise tell the truth about this? It’s really okay. But when you tell someone that if they exercise they’ll feel great right away, and they don’t, you’re killing your credibility!

 

1Barring some autoimmune issues, mind. CFS and related diseases are outside the scope of this article. They’re real, they exist, and I don’t know enough about them and exercise to give any sort of moderately useful advice about it.

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Let the Minimum Be the Maximum

I have a bad fitness habit. I will get into working out, go hammer and tongs at it, pushing to improve performance till I get tired of it or obsessed with something else (knitting cables, learning to do a French manicure, learning Klingon – it really varies) and quit with working out as my main obsession.

If I were training for a specific event or competition, this pattern would make sense.

That’s not what I’m doing, or what I need to do. What I need to do is just to have a habit of working out on weekdays. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?

I choose swimming as my activity for several reasons. It’s easy on painful joints, it really is good cardio, and it does provide for a full-body workout in terms of muscle use. ‘Course the major advantage of swimming is the simplest. I’ll do it. There’s a great deal to be said for the exercise that you’ll do for all the cheesy adverts about Ultimate Workout Secrets that Top Athletes Don’t Want You to Know. The real secret is simple.

Do you do it?

Reinhard Engels of Everyday Systems fame has an interesting point of view about habit and self-discipline. Paraphrased, it’s that when you want to develop a long term habit, don’t clutter habit and progress. Track number of days you exercised v. how well you did during the exercises. Days on habit are ultimately more powerful, and oddly enough generate more long term progress, than the training mentality.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with training for a sports event. But if you’re not thinking of yourself in terms of being an athlete, and just want to work out for good body maintenance, being able to be faster and stronger in intervals of less than a year aren’t even all that useful. When you’re going for that life-long habit, high-velocity momentum just isn’t where it’s at.

Engels has a phrase for this. “Let the minimum be the maximum.” Choose a specific amount of time you want to work out. Work out that much1. Don’t do more when you’re feeling macho and don’t do less when you’re feeling like a slacker. Go for consistency. Think in terms of years. What can you put up with for ten years?

For me, the idea of swimming half an hour a day for ten years doesn’t make me freak out. It even seems a little small. But in ten years’ time, I’ll be in considerably better shape than if I did the stop and go thing of pushing myself to increase my pace, then losing the obsession, rather than just accepting that this isn’t worthy of obsession, but is just something I need to do without throwing in a lot of emotion or intensity.

 

1He choose 14 minutes a day for intense work, and then does his best to walk everywhere he can otherwise. His pictures over the long term support his theory that this works.

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Putting Brainlessness to Work

I’ve spent the last couple of months being lousy about exercise. You name it, I found excuses not to. But I also learned something about myself.

I’m a morning exerciser. There’s just no way around it. By the end of the day, I’m done and I want to be comfortable, quiet and at home.

Oh, I’ve tried evening workouts. “Sure, honey, when you get home from work, we’ll go work out before dinner.”

It doesn’t happen.

However, if I get up, go work out and don’t give myself time to think or decide about it, I’m up and at ’em at 5:30 in the morning.

I think for me, it’s that my imagination and ability to visualize works against me. At 5:30 in the morning, morning person though I am, my brain isn’t engaged yet. I’m not thinking about cold, or physical effort or anything like that. I’m just following through on what I’d preprogrammed in my brain the night before. I roll out of bed, make it, and throw on my bathing suit and sweats without any real conscious decision because that’s what’s laying on my bedside table for me to put on. I’m at the gym before I’m thinking about the fact that I’d rather be in bed.

For all that many of my readers are intellectuals and value conscious thought, it’s important to remember that we’re learning that conscious thought is expensive in terms of energy – even when we’re really smart. There are things that don’t deserve conscious thought, once you’ve decided you want something in your life to be a habit. If we had to put conscious thought into wiping ourselves and washing our hands every time we went to the bathroom, there would be some subset of the population that would find themselves struggling with these very basic and ingrained habits. But it is habit and we don’t think about it, or decide to do it. We just do it.

I think it is helpful to put the habits you want into these sort of pre-programmed subroutines. I’m not talking about necessarily exercise. I mean any desirable behavior that you want to do, you think would be good for you to do, but you don’t and you struggle with doing it. Placing it in your day where you’ll be more likely to do it without conscious decision means that you can apply the conscious mind to more important things in your life that deserve it more.

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Back in the Pool

I’ve been psycho busy today. Taught a class this morning; had a meeting this afternoon. Fortunately it was at the gym and right before lap swim started for the afternoon. So I wore my bathing suit as my underwear before the meeting at the gym and brought my gym bag. You see, I was feeling grumpy and stressed and achy, so I thought I’d go ahead and work the kinks out in the water. I’ve been trying to get in more exercise and my joints were hurting. Hence, the swim.

Ahh, swimming, why I have neglected thee?

It’s been too long since I’ve gotten my butt into the pool. I’m weak as a cat. It took me half an hour to swim half a mile. That’s really kinda slow for me. My upper body isn’t as strong as once it was. That’ll change soon enough, though I expect I’ll be sore in the morning.

But, oh swimming feels so very good. There’s something almost magical about slicing through the water, concentrating on the breathing rhythm, and feeling the bubbles slide past. I generally get out of the pool after a good swim feeling an enormous sense of satisfaction, bordering on afterglow.

Now why was I not swimming again?