This is a tiki for no reason

I didn’t blog yesterday because vacation and because I spent the day snorkeling at Molokini crater.  Just because I am on vacation doesn’t mean I am not thinking about fitness, however.

Snorkeling, as demonstrated by one of the lovely crew members of the snorkeling boat yesterday, is not a labor-intensive sport.  Pretty much we lie face down in the water staring at fish and flapping our arms and legs a bit when we want to move from place to place to see other fish.  The fitness component comes at a different point in the experience.

The particular boat we took was a catamaran that pulled up to the beach.  No easy walk down the gangplank.  Getting on and off required wading through waves.  While the crew helped out, a certain basic stability was required. 

We may not need to be strong to do the things we really want to do.  But we may very much need to be strong to get to the point where we can even try to do those things.  I saw beautiful fish and floated in clear water and tasted salt and got a little sunburned yesterday because I could get on and off the boat.  I know people who can’t do that.  Let’s stay strong so we can be amazed by life.

Why?

Perhaps I write the same things over and over.  Maybe it is because I need reminding and maybe I am not the only one.

Fitness is not an end in itself.  Fitness is for doing things.  While the hours we spend in the gym can be fun in themselves, the point is to enable fun in other contexts.  All those elliptical workouts translate into victory on the hill hike.  The work on the agility ladder turns into good foot placement between roots and stones on the path.  The view can take our breath away instead of the journey to get to the view.

Work out and enjoy it, sure, but let’s figure out why we want to be fit.

Monday Workout: Even on vacation

On vacation, you say?  Workout, you say?  Of course!  But all body weight exercises because who packs weights on vacation?  It is vacation, so only 3 rounds.  And we’ll try to get some cardio swimming or hiking or something.

squats	20
1 leg squat	10
lunges	20
pushups	10
plank
side plank with rotation	10

Friday Book Report: Sugar Impact Diet

One of my clients passed J.J. Virgin’s book Sugar Impact Diet on to me.  In general, I am not a fan of diet books, or of diets.  I dislike motivational stories.  I distrust claims involving losing x amount of weight painlessly in y days.

This book has all the things I don’t like in it, plus the kind of women’s magazine prose that makes me want to go out and stab people, except that I don’t believe in stabbing people.

In spite of this, it is not really a bad book.  Sugar is definitely the major problem in most of our diets.  It contributes to every health problem we face personally and culturally.  Virgin lays out the evidence and calls out labels.  She provides useful lists of swaps we can make.  I tried one of the recipes (many of the recipes are non-vegetarian, so that took a lot of them right out for me) and found it delicious and the other people around here liked it, too.

Those of us who know we benefit from structure could use the system.  Those of us who like to be presented with information to figure out how to apply on our own can parse out some helpful things from this book.

And still more on goals

Sometimes when we get started on new goals, we get over-excited.  We decide to do All The Things right now.  That can be very empowering and we can often take out a large chunk of the to-do list by massive effort.  And then we get tired.

Getting tired is all right.  We are allowed to get tired.  We are allowed to rest.  We are not allowed to quit.

Let’s listen to our lives a little.  When we need a break, we can take one.  And then we can get moving again.

More on goals

Fitness goals come in many guises.  We all know the obvious ones:  lose weight, run fast, go far, lift heavy, collect compliments.  I would like to suggest that there are some other areas that contribute to our fitness goals.  Here are some questions to consider:

What do we want to learn this year?  Our brains are crucial to our fitness goals.  If we are not learning and growing, we are dying.  Let’s think about skills we want to develop, books we want to read, experiences we want to create.

How do we want to connect?  What sort of relationship weight lifting do we need to do this year?  When we strengthen the bonds between people, we create healthy communities and happy humans.

What feeds our souls?  We spend lots of time thinking about what to eat.  What do our hearts crave?  Maybe we need to go outside, or go to church, or hug a dog, or laugh really hard.  Whatever it is, we need to do it to avoid soul anorexia.

Fitness is holistic (I am allowed to use that word; I lived in Berkeley for 20 years.).  Let’s make fitness goals that address our whole selves.

On goals

We can set new goals any time we want, but at the new year, it seems especially appropriate.  My unscientific guess pegs the number of articles about how to set good goals at about ten gazillion million.  I will offer only two suggestions.

First, make a process goal.  Process goals are the kind where we decide to show up.  We make it a goal to do cardio every day, or to lift weights twice a week, or to floss our teeth on Tuesdays (got to start small, right?).  Maybe the thing we want is better endurance, or more shapely muscles, or gingivitis avoidance, but our goal is to do the activity that will produce the result, not the result itself.  Process goals have the advantage of being concrete and incremental.  It is easy to tell whether we have done them or not.  And, if it turns out that the process goal does not move us toward our desired outcome, we have at least built our ability to accomplish things.

Second, make a big goal.  A big goal in conjunction with a process goal can create great things.  If, for example, we set a process goal of riding our bike every week, we can set a big goal of doing a century ride.  (Guess what I want to do this year!)

We will, God willing, all experience this next year together, whether we set goals or not.  Let’s try to make it the best year ever.