It’s hard to walk with a coffee
My wife, 4 September 2022
It turns out you can’t walk at your normal fast pace when you are trying to sip a coffee.
I consider keeping yourself fit and healthy to be one of the basics for living a good life. By doing so, we can ensure that we are able to engage in adventurous activities, give our kids piggy backs, play tag with friend’s kids, and ensure that we remain mentally alert as we age. Granted, none of this is really in our control. We can only go to the gym, stretch, walk, and eat well. That will influence the outcome. We can’t control if we get cancer, or suffer a permanent injury. Nonetheless, we have to regularly move, stretch and eat well.
Health has always been a mixed bag for me. I desperately wanted to gain size when I was a teenage and in my early 20’s, and when I hit the gym, I failed to grow. Hindsight makes it obvious – I wasn’t doing the exercises well, nor following a workout routine, and I just wasn’t eating the volume of food that I needed. My interests also kept changing. After I got tired of the gym (due to the failure to grow), I started running for a few months. Then I stopped all exercise. Then I started walking around the block for 20 minutes in the morning. Then I went back to nothing. The truth is that I wasted years of what could have been transformative time to build solid muscle that would enable me to hike and climb much harder than I can today, and to have a body that is much more flexible and in alignment than today. Those truths are always tough pills to swallow.
It was only once I discovered hiking and climbing in my late 20’s that exercise became a normal part of life, and only in the past two years that I’ve been able to make substantial and sustained progress. It’s difficult, that’s for sure. For me, I found it to be much easier once I was able to implement habits into my life.
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks… It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits
Part of this is the establishment of a morning routine or rhythm. Thinking of it as a a rhythm allows for more flexibility – that things need to happen, but if you get a later start because there was traffic on the way to the gym, you can still adjust and adapt. And you can move things around as life happens. Perhaps tomorrow you need to go to the gym and then do some stretching, rather than the other way around.
By thinking about why I want health and fitness and coming up with some examples, I was able to design actions that are relevant to me. I can do to the gym four days a week in the morning before work. I can do some light stretching whilst watching TV. I can gain muscle by following a fitness program (thanks Centr!) and ensuring that my form is correct – rather than throwing heavier weights around, using lighter weights for a full movement and a contraction or squeeze at the top of the lift.
I can eat well because we have recipes that take out a lot of the guess work and result in delicious meals that also contain the ingredients that we have decided are important to us. I can also eat the amount of calories and protein needed for muscle growth. For me, that’s lower carbs and more protein and fats. To be clear, lower carbs still means carbs. It means not having donuts or cookies every day, and treating them as a treat. It means small amounts of fruit and yoghurt each day as the dessert type meal, although it’s after lunch. Sunday nights is soybean/edamame pasta night and a movie. Wednesday nights are frittatas. Again, we still allow flexibility, so we will go out on a Wednesday night for a social outing.
We will still have days where we treat ourselves. My sweet tooth was working overdrive the other day – a cookie and a donut was my treat after lunch and I still wanted more.
Walking is a great way to keep active and fit. My wife and I use walks as a great time to check in with each other, to talk about our ways, what is on our minds, and plan ahead for the coming days/weeks/months. Thursday mornings I also go for a long walk with my mum, and it’s time with her that I cherish and look forward to. We are so fortunate, my wife and I, and our families, that we have so many opportunities to see each other, laugh, build memories, and also partake in active activities. It’s not just luck though. A large part of it is design, commitment, and having habits so that these things automatically happen. We are working hard t making the fundamentals of life easier. Our health and fitness operates on a lot of different habits, and it helps. In fact, it is a huge advantage. I might take up mornings not wanting to go to the gym, yet it happens because the habit is there. It’s anchored to other things. During the rest break I can listen to podcasts, I can review my notes. Therefore, when I don’t feel like experiencing the muscular pain of a workout session, it’s easier to still go.
In summary, habits have been instrumental in allowing myself to aim towards the health and fitness goals that I want:
- regular and consistent gym workouts
- regular walks
- climbing as a social activity with friends
- foam rolling and stretching to improve mobility
- sitting on the floor to eat at times for posture
- eating well – lots of vegetables, good protein sources, beans, some coca chocolate, berries and yoghurt