Keep Taking Out the Garbage

Not surprisingly, as a person embedded in our culture, I have too much stuff.  We all do unless we have consciously decided to go minimalist.  I don’t aspire to having only 50 possessions, or 25, or none, but I do want to have less clutter.  Some time ago when I was creating a goal list, I found that I could summarize pretty much everything I wanted in this phrase:  keep taking out the garbage.

This applies to fitness, of course.  I am sure I am not the only one who needs to think, continually, about taking the garbage out of my food choices.  Changing our body fat percentages comes down to taking out the excess garbage from our bodies by building muscle.

Taking out the garbage is work.  Sometimes it’s smelly and messy.  But if we keep doing it, we find ourselves in a much more pleasant place.

When adding water is not a good idea...

I have spent the last week or so without my trusty Fitbit.  It was my own fault for assuming it was more waterproof than it was.  I took it swimming and it became unhappy.  My replacement model, one that is allowed to go swimming, should be here soon.

Being a little old-school anyway, I use a combination of old and new technology to track my activity.  I print my workout sheets and make notes with an actual pen.  But I found that I missed the small accountability of steps.  As I’ve said before, there is nothing magic about 10,000 steps per day, but it remains a useful guideline, especially if it is easy to see whether or not it has happened.

Whether or not we choose to use a fitness tracker, we can be healthy and fit people.  Do what works, which starts with doing things.  (If water is involved, we might want to check for tolerances!)

Monday Work Out: The whole thing!

This week, we are working the whole body.  Notice how much we involve our abdominals when we do compound exercises like lunge to curl, ball slams, and deadlifts.  We also use them to do brains, of course.  If we want to make sure to use them on the bench press and flies, we can do those exercises on the ball instead of the bench.  Keep in mind that when we add instability like that, we may want to choose slightly lighter weights.  Four rounds.

1 min cardio
lunge to curl	20
ball slams	20
bench press	20
deadlift	20
flies	20
brains	10