Another report from the exercise frontier
This is another in a sequence my occasional Rust posts reporting and commenting upon my late-life attempts (well, at 65 I don’t think I can qualify anymore as ‘middle-aged’) to improve the health-promoting aspects of my lifestyle habits via a self-devised dietary/fitness campaign.
Firstly, the statistics.
This month (October) I am so far averaging 16,306 steps per day – having set myself a daily target of 10,000 when I acquired a Garmin fitness device roughly eleven months ago.
At the beginning of the year I weighed 13 stone 12.2 pounds. For the last three weeks I have been hovering around the 13 stone mark, having reached as low as 12 stone 8 pounds exactly on the 4th of September – since when, despite all efforts to stay there I seem to have floated upwards to a norm of between 13 stone 4 and 13 stone dead.
All of the above has simply served to reinforce in my estimation some well-known facts about diet and fitness – and probably not a few myths as well.
Let’s start with the basics. You cannot get past the fact that a person’s weight is essentially a product of how much and what fuel (food and drink) you ingest and how much and what exercise you take. Over the past year I have tried to eat more healthily than before – cutting back on what I believe are ‘unhelpful’ carbs such as potatoes, pasta and rice whilst also eating more fruit and veg and rabbit food (salads), white meat and fish – and also to eat less.
The last of these I have managed by the straightforward expedient of ‘staying aware’ of what I’m eating. Hitherto, by habit, all my life I’ve always eaten whatever anyone (including myself) puts on my plate. It’s weird how much you can ‘improve’ not least your personal well-being and pride by just ceasing to eat whenever you begin to sense that you’ve already had enough.
At the risk of sounding anally-retentive, these days I sometimes leave 20%, 30% or (albeit very rarely) even 50% of the serving to which I’ve just helped myself. This may be a waste of good food, but it’s beneficial in every respect.
As regards exercise, as a matter of routine I have two activities: firstly, completing a road (pavement) walking circuit in my neighbourhood that equates to about 5.7 miles. Ordinarily I try to do this three or four times a week, sometimes undertaking it in a clockwise direction, and sometimes in the opposite.
Each time I do the circuit I feel better afterwards because of the benefits of walking – chief amongst these in my case being the simple act of standing upright and taking the exercise, which greatly improves my posture and tends to ‘free up’ the constant stiffness I tend to have in my lower spine as a result of spending far too much time in front of a computer screen over these past forty years and more.
Secondly, I go to my local gymnasium. After years of visiting it too infrequently to achieve any general benefit, about ten years ago I began to get into the habit of going two or even three times per week and thereby achieved some. At one stage I hired a personal trainer for four sessions – apart from getting me going on the stepping machine, he set me up with a series of exercises I could do in the weights room – and thereafter I religiously performed them during my gym visits.
It was about eighteen months later that I read in a magazine article (and then consulted a different personal trainer at my gym who confirmed the gist of its contents) that in effect I’d practically been wasting my time.
Apparently – although exercise does cause the production of ‘pleasure and reward’ hormones so that we always feel better for having taken it – the human body doesn’t always instinctively like what is good for it. Things like exercise, for example. In fact, if (as I was doing) you go to a gym and simply undertake the same exercises on the same machines in the same order every time, your body soon works out a way of doing the exercise as efficiently as possible … and therefore (over the course of time) uses up less and less energy the more you do the routine.
This applies even when you’re working up a fair old sweat, which ordinarily would enable you to kid yourself that you’re ‘making progress’. As I understand it, that’s a fallacy. The truth is that the body tends to ‘improve’ most when it is working beyond its natural comfort zone. Thus – when it comes to exercise routines – what you are now advised to do is continually ‘surprise’ your body e.g. by either ‘mixing them up a bit’ (perhaps occasionally do them in reverse order, or constantly switch the order in which you do them), or even doing different exercises altogether each time you go to the gym.
The same thinking lies behind the recent/current fashion for ‘HIT’ (High Intensity Training) exercising.
This takes as its starting point the new theory that jogging for six miles, or riding a bicycle for twenty miles, or spending an hour at a comfortable speed at a time upon a steeping machine is doing the individual far less benefit that he or she thinks.
On the contrary – and this chimes well in the modern world in which life is hectic and complicated and time available to take exercise is limited – what gives far greater benefit is a series of short but intense exercises that take the person beyond his or her comfort zone and (if you like) deliver them to the edge of exhaustion. In other words, nipping to the gym and effectively going flat out on a random variety of exercises and machines for even as little as half an hour in total can take the individual (over time) to a level of fitness far greater than if they had spent two or three hours in total exercising at a middling (lesser) degree of intensity.
To finish today, my last contribution is a comment upon my current state of mind.
When you are embarked, as I am, upon what I might grandly call ‘a fitness campaign’ it is notable how new (external) additions to your engagements diary can irritate.
If I begin a week with a relatively ‘free’ diary and then find it filling up with commitments – or indeed notice that in two weeks’ time I have commitments already scheduled for most days – in prospect it leaves me frustrated.
Why? Because these social or semi-work engagements will all prevent me doing what I would have been doing on any given day if they hadn’t come my way, i.e. completing my 5.7 mile walking stint (which takes approximately 100 minutes each time by the way) and/or nipping up to the gym for a session.
And – apart from all of that anyway – since by habit I am in bed by 8.30pm and then back up again by 1.30am – when am I going to get my opportunity (amongst everything else going on) to have my treasured hour’s snooze every day?
See here for an article by Professor Richard Wiseman, on the subject of aspects of sleep generally, that I spotted upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL
