When you’re trying to make a habit of something, it’s often a good idea to have some simple way of targeting what’s a good minimum for you having fulfilled the requirements of the activity.<\/p>\n
I was thinking about it this week because I’d been on vacation visiting my parents. My parents do have a pretty nice home gym, with a really nice stationary bike, a pretty complete weight set and a couple of other bits of equipment (including a television for relieving cardio boredom).<\/p>\n
I only used it twice in the three full days I was there and was trying to decide how much “counted” for exercise. We did spend all day one day touring historic sites and did a whole bunch of walking — the day I didn’t wind up using the gym.<\/p>\n
Because of 12 hours of sitting on a train, I came home to more joint pain than I’ve experienced in some years1<\/sup>.\u00a0 I actually blew off my Saturday weight session yesterday.\u00a0 I chose to go ahead, take some painkillers and do my normal Sunday walk today and found that getting the blood flowing was helpful and made me feel better.<\/p>\n Which is where “minimum compliance” comes in.\u00a0 Many people really do, no kidding, have mobility issues, pain issues and what have you.\u00a0 Now for me, I don’t like to do without my workouts because if I do, I just plain don’t feel<\/em> very good.\u00a0 But, do I ever hurt too much to do a planned activity?\u00a0 Hell yes!<\/p>\n I’ve decided that for me, my own minimum compliance will be quite small — 14 minutes of activity that’s strenuous enough to get me sweaty.\u00a0 I picked that because if all I have in me is 14 minutes, I’ll likely be doing a Shovelglove <\/a>workout.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not really strong enough to go much longer, and that’s the “official” workout anyway).\u00a0 But if that’s all I have in me, that’s okay.\u00a0 It’s enough.<\/p>\n Now my usual workout is more like 30-50 minutes, depending on what I’m doing.\u00a0 But I think that for me, having some small minimum that’ll “count” as having worked out will be helpful in the workout habit building.<\/p>\n I’m not beating myself up for blowing off yesterday, mind.\u00a0 But habit is powerful, and I think it’s important.\u00a0 I notice I’m very bad at maintaining habits when traveling and I’m looking for good, workable intelligent solutions for that.<\/p>\n However, I’ve improved.\u00a0 Instead of allowing the change in schedule to throw me much, I was able to jump back into my proper routine fairly quickly.\u00a0 There have been times when being thrown off schedule for a week meant another week to get back into my groove.\u00a0 Reducing that to one day is a definite improvement.<\/p>\n 1<\/sup>Memo to me: If you ever take that long of a train ride again, remember that walking the length of the train every hour will help prevent that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you’re trying to make a habit of something, it’s often a good idea to have some simple way of targeting what’s a good minimum for you having fulfilled the requirements of the activity. I was thinking about it this week because I’d been on vacation visiting my parents. My parents do have a pretty … <\/p>\n