I love rubrics because
they are an efficient way to know how I’m doing. They also help to keep my perfectionism in
check. To give a non-fitness example, my
rubric for housework is that the end result needs to be better than when I started. If the house looks better at the end, I’ve
done enough and I can declare success.
(If that doesn’t work and I still feel less-than-successful, I employ my
second-tier rubric: if what I did was
more than anyone else around here has done recently, I win!)
Rubrics for fitness come
in many flavors. Some are
traditional: aim to increase cardio time
by about ten percent a week, add more weight when 12 reps are easy, work out
hard enough that we can talk but not sing.
One of my favorites is that we need to be sweaty at the end, although it
doesn’t work for swimming. Another is
that we should stop before discomfort becomes pain.
We can make different
ones for the various things we do. Maybe
the rubric for cardio is that we need to spend at least half an hour doing it
each day. Maybe the rubric for weights
is that on the day we have to do deadlifts, we don’t have to do any other lower
body exercises because we’ve exercised our character, too.
There are not too many
outlets for our creativity when we’re working out. We can take this opportunity to experiment
and play and find the rubrics that keep us moving along toward our goals.
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