Fitting in Fitness

Insomniac Weekend Update: Walking Slowly and Taking Breaks

/ Bethany / 1 Comment

I have had trouble sleeping this past week, and tonight is no exception. Since my body doesn’t seem to want to sleep, I am taking a break from sleeping to check in.

I’m feeling better than I did last week, but I still have some anxiety going on. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I process feelings and have trouble going back to sleep.

Despite difficult feelings, I’ve had a pretty easy time sticking with my habit goals. I love the fall weather, which is making it easy and enjoyable for me to get walking in. I’ve taken 2 trail walks with kiddo this week, and today I walked to the grocery store with kiddo (30+ pounds) on my back, and then pushed the stroller full of groceries and kiddo home (probably 70-90 lbs total).

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Inspiration: Try Something Tuesday (or any day)!

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If you participate in any online health, fitness, or sports-related groups, you may be familiar with “Transformation Tuesday.” Group members often post “before and after” pictures, which tend to get tons of “likes” and congratulatory comments. I’ve seen some discussion that some people feel discouraged when they see these. Others find them motivating.  Others don’t like them because they find them overly focused on appearance and under-ly focused on the process and how sustainable the change is.  Others find them triggering of eating disordered behavior. I’m sure people have other opinions too. In fact, having an opinion about people posting pics on the internet probably means you are winning at life in general and don’t have bigger fish to fry. Go you! Or not. It’s totally okay NOT to have an opinion on Transformation Tuesday pics. This probably means you have bigger priorities in life in general and are winning at life, too.

My opinion? They are some of my least favorite posts I see in some of my favorite online groups. I don’t find them triggering from a disordered eating standpoint, but I do think they probably give false hope for many people. I think they put a more of an emphasis on looks and less on health, since you can’t always tell a person’s health by looking at them. They don’t bother me to the point where I would leave a group over it, but I wouldn’t miss them at all if they disappeared.

So, I was ecstatic this week on Tuesday morning, when one of my favorite groups on the internet decided to make them disappear. And the way they did it was just….so positive. Instead of issuing a “NEW RULE!!!! ALL TRANSFORMATION TUESDAY POSTS ARE NOW BANNED BECAUSE THEY MIGHT OFFEND SOMEBODY,” the moderators announced that they would be retiring “Transformation Tuesday” and replacing it with something amazing: Try Something Tuesday!

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Turning Back the Clock: Bringing Back an Old Habit

/ Bethany / 11 Comments

I am in my 30s, as are many of my friends. It seems like a common experience that some of us feel nostalgic for our younger bodies. We would appreciate them so much more, we think (never mind that we hated our bodies back in high school too….). We wish for the energy we had when we were younger and could stay out late all the time.

Of course, getting a past version of ourselves back is impossible. Even putting aging aside, so many of our environmental conditions and habits have changed.  The hormonal climates of our bodies are different. We have different habits, different pressures, different responsibilities, different perspectives, and different values.

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Refining Goals, Saving Money

/ Bethany / 2 Comments

This weekend I decided to skip barbell club and go on a trail walk instead with my local chapter of Hike it Baby.  Now that the weather is cooling off, I’m enjoying being outside again, and finally gathering some steam for my walking habit. I love going to barbell club, but I know my hiking options will be more limited all winter.  Kiddo and I enjoyed the walk! And thanks to the porch gym equipment, I was still able to get my weightlifting in later. I’m very grateful to have that flexibility. Between the hike and weightlifting, kiddo and I spent a lot of hours outside on Saturday and we both loved it! One hazard of training with a kiddo: he dropped a .5kg change plate between two of the porch floor boards. Barbell math just got a lot harder! Oh well.

Earlier this week I wrote about stumbles while developing habits. I’ve been thinking about another habit that was on my list. Or rather, it wasn’t a habit, it was a goal. The goal was to save $12,000 this year, thereby finishing our family’s emergency fund (we started the year with around $2200 in this fund). This is baby step 3 in the Dave Ramsey baby steps.

Well, we were making some progress towards this goal…..and then we needed to replace our car. That setback really took the wind out of my sails on this one, and the fund has been stagnating ever since, nowhere near the goal for the end of the year.

So, I’m tweaking this goal. As I talked about in the stumbles post, there have been other goals (walking, bedtime) that needed to be changed a bit in order for me to really take off and develop the habits. I’ve decided to make it a habit-based goal like all the others, instead of an outcome-based goal. Instead of saying “get to $12,000 in the account by the end of the year,” I’m now saying “deposit $10 or more in the emergency fund, at least 15 times by the end of the year.” This will help with developing the habit of saving. It doesn’t seem like much, but it is more than I am currently saving, and once I develop that habit, I can look into saving more aggressively.

Shana Tova, all!

 

Habit Cultivation: Adults Have Developmental Stumbles, Too!

/ Bethany / 12 Comments

Today I want to offer a new perspective I am learning in my habit cultivation practice.

Whenever we learn a new skill, we expect to stop and start. We see this all around us. Babies take a few steps, then fall down. Kids ride their bikes a short distance; they don’t ride all the way around the block on the first try. When I learned to play the clarinet, I first learned Mary Had a Little Lamb, not the Stravinsky 3 pieces.

This is all normal and expected. We don’t beat ourselves up every step of the way. We celebrate every step.

With children, we also expect that each child will develop different skills at different times. Most children start to walk around the time they turn one year old. But there are some who walk at 10 months old, and fall down every few steps while they are learning. Other children crawl until they are 14 or 15 months old, and then start walking and almost never fall down.  The same is true for every milestone. Some kids meet a certain milestone early. Some late. Some kids meet one milestone very early and another milestone very late. Some kids meet most of their milestones right around the average expected time, without fail. This is all considered normal and we expect these variations. We also expect that most children will stumble many times while learning new skills.

When adults try and form new habits, it’s often the opposite. Instead of starting small and expecting to stumble a little, we start with big goals, then declare our attempts a failure and give up when we stumble. Then we beat ourselves up (either internally or to our friends). In the case of health-related habits, we talk about the fact that we started and stopped multiple times as though each attempt is isolated and separate.

What if it wasn’t? What if each attempt wasn’t an isolated and separate, but a normal part of the process of learning something new?

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Active Listening and Active Rest

/ Bethany / 5 Comments

This has been an active rest/recovery week for me. Last week I was pretty tired a lot, and on Saturday I went to barbell club and was missing pretty much every lift. The training program I was using was on a competition mesocycle with lots of heavy singles. That wasn’t really what I needed at all – I still have so much technique development to do.

My coach looked at my program last weekend and agreed that it was way too much volume. He put together a new one for me to follow. I went to start it on Tuesday and my body basically laughed at me.  I knew then that I needed a few days off to recover. Even though I haven’t done any squats this week, my legs still felt like I had. I’ve been feeling a little run down in general too. Kiddo and I both have a slight cough – I think we might be having some allergy symptoms. Appetite-wise, nothing sounds good. I’m  having zero desire to cook anything. My CSA veggies are looking sad in the fridge.

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Balancing Priorities (Weightlifting, parenting, and enjoying the process)

/ Bethany / 4 Comments

Earlier this week I visited a new gym where I am considering training this winter when it gets too cold for the porch gym.  Even though it’s a bit of a drive from my home, I was tempted to try it out, because of the weightlifting expertise of the coaches. After trying it out though, I decided to hold off on joining,  for a couple reasons: parenting, and enjoyment of training. Both of these are high priorities for me, so it is important for me to balance these priorities with my weightlifting training.

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Mastering Walking Before Trying to Run

/ Bethany / 3 Comments

Lately I’ve been feeling as though I am losing some of my cardio conditioning. And I probably am! I’ve dropped metcon workouts, and my health has steadily improved since. But I’ve also been pretty sedentary, other than weightlifting workouts, if I’m being honest. Something about all the heavy squats makes laying around very appealing. And it’s been hot. I’m not a summer person. My favorite season is fall. I like milder weather.

So, when I noticed getting more winded when walking up steep hills, it was tempting to mentally examine where in my schedule I could fit some metcons in. And then I realized I was jumping from two to one hundred in one fell swoop.

Why not try an in-between step? A month or so ago I added a healthy habit goal to my list that involved going for walks. If I was having trouble motivating myself to go for walks, which I actually enjoy, what made me think adding metcons would be any more successful? So, I’m choosing to focus more on the walking habit. As they say….”you have to learn to walk before you can learn to run.” Or something like that.

Anyway, I took a trail walk with my kiddo the other day, and walked him to the babysitter’s house yesterday instead of driving. Both times I really enjoyed the walk and the bonding experience. I was tired yesterday, but I felt better after the walk than I did before. That should tell me something.

How else can one apply this principle? I hear friends talk about overhauling their diets all. the. time. And then getting down on themselves when they can’t maintain the restrictions for more than a few hours/days/weeks/months. Why not change one meal at a time? Set a goal to eat (protein for, veggies for, fruit for, or just plain eat) breakfast? Or to eat enough at lunchtime so you aren’t starving at night? One goal at a time. Walk before you run.

Have you used this principle to make any habit changes in your life? I’d love to hear about some other examples!

Nervous for Clean and Jerk Day

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I felt nervous about today’s training. I’m still don’t feel incredibly solid on my clean and jerk form. Last Thursday was such a frustrating day and form just wasn’t happening. Saturday was a better day. I am still working on my speed in the clean, and on catching the bar in the correct position. So, I’m usually a little nervous for clean and jerk day.

Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day for me. I felt tired and slow. Then I unexpectedly had to fill in for someone at work at a CSA pick up and farm stand. Lots of heavy lifting and restocking in hot weather. My back did not want to do that stuff at all, and my lower back muscles kept cramping up as if to say “you said this would be a rest day!”

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Just What I Needed

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Yesterday was a much better day than Thursday. I woke up feeling emotionally drained from the week and I decided to spend the day in a way that would renew and refresh me. It was my day off from work, and I wanted to have a relaxed day with my kiddo.

Last year, after an emotionally draining week, I’m sure all I would have had the energy to do was sit and watch movies with my kid. We both would have been bored and cranky by the end of the day.

However, yesterday I decided to get us out of the house first thing in the morning, before it got too hot. We would go for a walk on a trail in the woods. Then possibly hit the library on the way home for some books and movies. Then have lunch and a nap, and then I would put on movies in the afternoon while I sorted through and discarded paperwork in my house.

The day went even better than I had planned. I never even put on the movies for my kiddo. He played happily for hours while I sorted through the paperwork in the afternoon. And, for the first week since I set the goal of adding more walking to my week, I actually got three walks in.

When my husband got home, I went food shopping by myself.  Kiddo didn’t fall asleep until 10:30, but it was worth it.

Just what I needed.