Fitness Time – What method works for you?
Nov 5th, 2009 by Tim
Summer and Fall have run their course, and the calendar quickly filled up with weekend events, and projects to do, including some remodeling on the house, general up-keep and other activities that only left about 3 free weekends starting in June, and ending in October. Also, my freelance work, both web related and video work has spiked up sharply, some of the projects with deadlines that cannot be moved around. Also, with the start of a new job requiring a little farther commute and an earlier start time, my ability for an early AM workout is all but shot, unless I want to get up at 5:30am.
Getting home close to 5pm now, and wanting to eat at a decent hour is a little inhibitive of a workout right after work (however, that is what I am going to attempt to start doing) and be mindful of getting supper before 8pm. Also in this mix is the freelance work that is now requiring almost 150% of my free time.
I am lucky enough to have a weight system in the basement, and Wii Fit to utilize, so I think I have a good shot of finding a plan to stick to this winter if I get my schedule in order. My biggest issue is if I can see it, I’ll consume it, I’m a foodie.. Moving jobs has been good, as there are not a ton of treats around, and there is no on-site café or snack store to frequent (also helps to save money) If I can get in sync with both a feasible schedule, and forget that there are snacks in the house, I think I’ll be on a better path.
The other thought I’ve had, despite having the equipment, would I be more motivated to get to a local gym if I knew I was paying for a service, creating more of a reason to go. However, it’s hard to justify the cost when I have most of the tools at home. Possibly a bike trainer will be in order.
I really don’t want to seclude myself into a winter of working out, freelancing and shutting myself off from friends and food to avoid making bad choices, and I need to quit saying ‘next Monday’ will be the start. I’ve got a schedule, that maybe I need to resurrect and place at my desk again to hold me accountable for my time, that seemed to work before, albeit seemingly silly
My question is, what do you do in order to maintain a schedule or method for getting all of your things accomplished in a week, the balance between work, family and what needs to be done?
Hey Tim,
Over the recent course of time I made a personal discovery about orienting myself towards the goal of physical fitness: there are roughly two ways to go about it, and it’s not just “right” and “wrong”.
There’s a full “waste no effort” approach which you’d compare to a bodybuilder or athlete’s training, and then there’s a mindful “maintain my body” approach which I think is what you might consider adopting, when you’re successfully augmenting your body but not really carving out a piece of your life in self sacrifice.
Within the “waste no effort” approach you have basically the tenets that are advertised everywhere about the ways to a spectacular body: 5 meals a day, workouts in the morning, maintain glycemic load, and so on. All of this can consume a person’s day and it works spectacularly. However, because the philosophies behind this approach are sound means you can apply them to a less suffocating approach.
When I started seriously changing my lifestyle to lose some weight and sculpt a better physique, I knew my disciplined ability to work out isn’t something I had to achieve, I have that already and hopefully you do as well. I also know a lot about the “waste no effort” approach to physical training, and knew I wasn’t going to be able to adhere to a weekly routine very well– I party far too much to be reliably well rested on a Monday! Chiefly, what I knew that mattered was I knew my lifestyle did not give me enough physical activity for the kind of food I was taking in, and that’s why I gained weight.
Without going into too many unneeded details, using what I knew about the nazi workout, I applied the principles of what I knew worked to my life as much as I could think to tolerate, and just stuck with it to see what happened. So here are what I feel are the necessary details as far as what I did:
1. Food, portion control. I always ate whatever was put in front of me, like a good boy. But that also meant when I cooked for 1 person or even for 2, or when someone else was cooking, that there was always the propensity to overeat due to the portions of food that ended up available. I have admittedly been a bit “nazi” about my food intake lately, but to start off all I needed to do was keep in mind how much I needed to eat as opposed to how much I wanted to eat, and make a measured effort to determine the difference. So I try to eat when I’m hungry, and when I eat, I don’t eat so much as to be able to notice that I’m feeling very full (unless I was at the state fair or something!).
I also challenge people who are working on their bodies to push the envelope with their food intake to determine what exactly you NEED to function. I did this to a bit of an extreme, periodically eating so few calories in a day that I couldn’t complete the following day’s workout. I won’t admit to this being healthy, but knowing this threshold has been useful for me.
2. Food, you are what you eat. This one is easy (stop getting value meals, e.g. when I go to culvers I just get a deluxe single burger with as many pickles, onions, and other accoutrements as possible instead of a combo with fries), but it’s absolutely useful in one of the most critical areas of my progress: snacks. I snack. I snack all the time, and so should everyone else. But what I snack on is a granola recipe of me and my mother’s design. Unlike traditional granola, it contains germ and other incredibly high fiber elements. Unlike traditional granola, it has no saturated fats with only a tiny bit of olive oil needed to roast some ingredients. The almonds and other grains have a bit of oil in them by nature, but those oils are frankly so beneficial for what calories they do provide that they’re never something I worry about. I use honey and dried cranberries (not too much of either) to sweeten the deal. The result is something so high in fiber that coupled with my water intake I am always given a strong sense of “hey, I ate something” in my stomach. Eating something with nearly zero fat, low carbohydrates, no refined sugar, something I can appreciate the taste of, and something that more than exceeds my required fiber intake… the health benefits are all over this.
3. Food, you drink water. Unless you’re me and you’re drinking beer or gin on the weekends (or necessary weekdays). My water intake is between 100 and 160 ounces of water daily. Keep a BIG jug of water at your desk and this shouldn’t be a problem.
As an aside to the “duh, water” knowledge we all have, I’d like to note to you the surprise I had when monitoring my weight with regards to how much retention affects you. I “let go” from weekend to weekend lately and I’ve seen my weight fluctuate by 9 pounds between Friday and Monday, nearly all of it water retained by the diet I sustain while out partying. With each day of proper hydration (reducing sodium levels) and food, I can observe my weight drop by about 1.1 pounds each day until I hit my ‘actual’ weight! This is not typical for people as I do have more lean mass than the average person but it’s still remarkable!
4. Exercise, get SOME! It doesn’t have to be every day. It doesn’t even have to be every other day. Doing cardio 3 times per week is the beginning of the sweet spot for fat loss, up to an hour per day (or slightly more if you have a trainer). This is an undisputed truth for me and my “camp”. However, the following statement is not going to sit too terribly well, but it’s the absolute truth: I participated in nearly zero good cardio workouts for at least 50 pounds of my weight lost. Only this summer did I really do many big runs or bike rides. I DID however stay as active as I could, playing disc golf as often as I could for an hour or so (this is anaerobic) each session and also I kept to some resistance training, which I’ll mention next.
Given that I’m claiming that cardio exercise isn’t necessary for realistic weight loss I will say once more that SOME resistance training has given me some awesome results. Allow me to pimp now http://www.hundredpushups.com. Pushups are AWESOME; they work more muscles than you think, and this pushup workout in particular is nothing short of a huge part of what I needed to keep committed to a better existence. You can do pushups anywhere, and given the little data required, the workout for a day is easy to follow and doesn’t take more than 20 minutes. And your results are real and fast. My chest, arms, abs, shoulders, and lower back all get a workout at the level I’m doing these now. One note is that due to my lifestyle and my larger frame I haven’t been able to complete the program in the 6 weeks they claim– I don’t even think if I were only training for this particular workout that I could to it in the 6 weeks they claim, my frame is just too big! But as a part of knowing my energy level thresholds and knowing I abuse my body on the weekends, I generally rehydrate and eat my vitamins on a Sunday and do pushups on mon/wed/fri. But with the advent of the NFL and the Sunday drinking that comes with it, I am periodically only able to do 2 pushup workouts a week, and frankly I’m OK with that right now.
The gist of this isn’t that you need to be doing pushups but that you should be doing SOMETHING physically that your body has to recover from. Weights are obviously something you can use and something I come from a strong background in, but haven’t used them lately since I am not really attempting to build mass quite yet.
Wow! Apparently I had this on my mind more than I anticipated!
To wrap this up I guess I’m trying to say that I’ve been able to see the results of hardcore training and know a good deal about what comprises those results in the past, but I was surprised at the kind of results just a fragment of that sort of effort can achieve– I’ve lost like 70 pounds over the past 18 months!
I do have a routine, but it’s very flexible and I don’t feel guilty about making adjustments to it when real life has the chance to give me something social to do, or when a career demands otherwise of me. I did sacrifice eating whatever I wanted but provide for it when it’s always the most fun–when you’re with others. I know that I can drink like a fish so I do personally make a more strict tradeoff by keeping my week’s food intake respectable, and it seems to be working out pretty good for me. And I don’t do a terrible amount for my physical workouts all the time, but I do continually do something. And I guess I DO try to do more cardio now but that’s because I’m at a slowing plateau in my level of fitness.
So I hope this helps! Talk to me any time and by all means we should hit each other up for a bike ride one of these days!