SHOUT OUT TO ANYTIME FITNESS
Anytime Fitness doesn’t need me to toot its horn, but after using one of its clubs for the first time I’m tooting, loudly. At face value it’s a gym like any other. A hodgepodge of cardio and weight equipment, and clientele equally as diverse, some uber-fit, others new to fitness but realizing the magic unique to a 20-minute treadmill walk.
Deeper than face value is the primary pillar of its operating philosophy – members have 24/7/365 access to the club. 2am – yep. Holidays – yep. Anytime is your time to work on your Iron Footprint at Anytime!
To that, safety appears to be priority one, especially/obviously for patrons working out alone when the rest of us are sleeping. I imagine it’s the same across all clubs, but notices are posted to NOT open the door for anyone, and lanyards with an alert sensor are provided so members can summon help in an emergency.
Since I wasn’t part of the business development team I can only speculate about the model’s premise, but three messages about the approach stick out to me:
–We trust you (members) to use the facility safely and respectfully
–Fitness is so important we will eliminate the barrier of scheduled access
–Fitness is about you, not about us
Thanks, Anytime, for trusting me, eliminating the number one barrier to engagement, and sagely realizing you are a true conduit to my relationship with fitness, but not its definition.
MARCH – WINTER’S HUMP-MONTH
If you live in a snowy climate—this year who doesn’t!—March 1 is sort of like winter’s hump-month. Ever so slightly (especially since yet another widespread snow dump is in the forecast) the anticipation starts to grow about resuming outside workouts. Of course, some just ignore the elements, but many more prefer the forced heat comfort and stable footing of the great indoors—until right about now when with help from spring training being in full swing and the professional golf tours broadcasting from 80-degree courses, the outside itch starts to creep in.
Best of all, daylight savings just a day away – literally a light at the end of the tunnel!
Ride the March adrenaline uptick and allow yourself to get excited about the great outdoors again. But while you are at it, take the time to think about how you are going to re-purpose your snow shoveling time. Train for a distance running/cycling race? Recommit to tennis/golf? Get to the batting cage and join a softball team?
It’s pedestrian to mark the shift as the end of hibernation, but with the epic winter so many have endured it seems appropriate. A quick review, that bright thing in the sky is the sun and that green stuff under your feet is grass.
ACHIEVEMENT-PURPOSEFUL EXERCISE
Any activity is better than no activity BUT the more it is achievement-purposeful, the stronger your motivation to keep doing it.
Purposeful exercise provides a backbone for our effort by targeting intentional fitness or motor skill improvement. The opposite is ‘just’ exercise, risky since ‘today I’m just going to do some cardio’ or ‘today I’m just going to lift a few weights’ doesn’t give our motivation anything solid to sink its teeth into. Weightless and without definition it’s impossible to recognize progress, other than just doing some cardio or just lifting some weights. Over time, our stick-to-it motivation erodes because we just don’t remember the point.
Life may dictate occasions of time-limited exercise, but this kind of ‘just’ is benign for being temporary. Not knowing how to frame achievement other than radical body transformation causes the dangerous kind. The (unrealistic) results we don’t realize bring disappointment we protect ourselves from repeating by conceding to a ‘just’ approach—but generic intent drains already shallow motivation by not providing the solid footing that purpose cements.
Don’t short change your life quality by approaching activity from anything less than what purposefully (and optimally) strengthens your heart and muscles and improves your motor skills, and frames your achievement accordingly.
Dare I say, just do it…purposefully.
IS IT OK THAT IM DOING THIS?…
Asked the new gym member to his trainer about being on the treadmill before their session began.
Yes!
Knowing that some is good and more is better, this physical activity thing is pretty failsafe. Safety considered, the only mistake in doing it is not doing it – the more of this (and that!) the better.
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY: SOME IS GOOD – SUM IS BEST
Chunking activity minutes – even 10 minutes at a time – prevents disease, enhances life quality and helps sustain balanced energy (weight management).
So chunk away! But accumulate as many chunks as possible for optimal benefit and to develop resilient motivation. It’s no more complicated than the more activity you do the greater the benefit, and since your motivation feeds off achievement, this means the easier it becomes to do more, more often.
Chunking activity itself is achievement because it means you have completed the daily activity engagement directive. Add to it the achievement of (multiple examples of) self-improvement that results from engaging in more activity and your motivation pumps to new heights.
Sustain getting some activity by tracking your sum. But dont be surprised when this leads you to getting some more, and more after that. No doubt, some is good, but sum is best.
HIT A PLATEAU? – CHANGE YOUR ACTIVITY JOOJOO
Awe, it happens to the best of us. One day we are on top of our workout world feeling and seeing gains, then the next and next few after that it’s as if our body declares war on itself and logjams any/all progress. Ugh!
Don’t panic – hitting a plateau is perfectly normal. Our body’s adaptation to the work we ask of it means energy efficiency catches up with workload leading to fewer bangs from the buck, if you will, from exercise. This doesn’t mean we are yielding less health protection, but it can mean the rate of weight loss, strength gains, or motor skill improvement slows. Frustrating for sure, but find the sunny side of the street again with just slight adjustments to your routine AND your approach to your routine.
First, ensure your engagement is achievement-oriented. This means doing cardio within your target heart rate zone, and using enough weight in strength training to overload your muscles. Any slips here are easily correctable.
Second, adjust the energy demand of your workouts by adding sprint bursts to your cardio and burn-out sets to your strength training. Sprint bursts are short intervals where you (safely) ‘sprint’ during cardio exercise. The length of bursts depends upon your fitness level, but even 10 seconds can be effective. After doing cardio at your usual intensity level for a specified time duration add a 10-second sprint (by increasing the mph if you are on the treadmill, for example), e.g., after each 5 minutes. The burst requires your physiology to kick in differently than what is required to sustain your usual intensity, and this different draw of energy catalyzes your metabolism – wakes it up, if you will.
A burn-out weightlifting set is completing as many low weight repetitions as possible of a particular lift, e.g., bench press, lat pull down, bicep curl. For example, on a day you have focused upon chest exercises, select a low weight you know you can successfully lift for several repetitions, and do as many presses as you can. For optimal safety, use a weight machine rather than free weights, especially if you don’t have a spotter or are a beginning lifter. Add one burn-out set at the end of each day’s lifting (for each muscle group focused upon that day).
Like cardio sprint bursts, burn-out sets draw upon energy differently than routine lifting, which can remind your physiology to keep growing your muscles.
Third, create different energy around your routine to re-charge your activity joojoo. Really!
Wear mis-matched socks…put your clothes on in reverse order – right to left rather than left to right…run your route in the opposite direction…listen to a different type of music…ask a chatty friend to join you then focus on your conversation…begin your routine 10 minutes earlier or later…obtain a free pass to a different gym for a week…leave your shoes outside overnight preferably tied to a tree…park in a different section of the gym parking area…switch out your shoelaces…
And, don’t for a minute think the power of joojoo is any less scientific than sprint bursts or burn-out sets. After all, the Sir of energy himself, Isaac Newton, confirmed as much in his ‘Energy can be neither created or destroyed, but can change form’ discovery. Said simply, energy is permanently accessible, but we may need to use different means to draw it out of hiding.
QUICK CHECK-UP
Don’t worry, you don’t need to change into a gown.
A quick resolution check – a month into the New Year how is your exercise routine? Grooved? Stalled? Grounded? What’s going well, what is a challenge?
If you are grooved, feed the momentum by tracking achievement across your Iron Footprint and especially, regularly adding new FitBEST trials into your routine. Mix ‘traditional’ events (1-mile run) with novel ones (how long it takes to reach 1000 strides on the Eliptical) to gain the most benefit from this aspect of your ‘Footprint achievement profile. Remember, doing FitBEST trials pulls on your adrenaline differently than when you do your daily workout. This prevents your energy from lulling to sleep as can happen when your routine becomes too routine. ‘Routine’ needs to mean engrained as a daily occurrence, not the same over and over.
Stalled or grounded? Take a deep breath and think about the cause. It’s usually no mystery or hard to figure out so insight is likely by the time you exhale. If the barrier is logistical, is there a realistic solution? Or, do you need to think about adopting a new exercise mode? E.g., joining a gym if home-exercise isn’t working, or vice-versa. If the barrier is motivation, two reminders. One, ANY activity is always better than no activity so chunking 10 minutes IS health-beneficial. (Re) Start knowing any and all you do adds to your ‘Footprint, and oh yeah, enhances your wellness. Two, take the time to track your achievement across all of the ‘Footprint dimensions. Allow yourself to ‘see’ ALL your activity your success. Getting past radical body transformation as the end all/ be all success measure can be a challenge, but can be done!
This concludes the check-up. I told you, no gown…
RED WAGON FITNESS
Alternate title: Red wagons – great exercise machines that don’t ding your credit card each month
Time too crunchy to get to the gym? No babysitting available for you to go for a run? NEED exercise?
No worries, the red wagon in your garage—yes, that red wagon—solves your problem, especially if you also have kids to ride in it.
I’m not sure an exercise machine exists that can match the cardio and muscular demand of pulling kids in a wagon, not to mention the intensity that is added by pulling through wood chips or sand on the playground. It’s full on target heart rate zone heavy breathing and singing legs/core/upper body muscles, all the while your little darling is happy as can be taking in the sights or playing with the sticker book brought along for the ride.
From our mission to encourage anytime/anywhere/anyhow exercise, ANY physical activity that (safely) elevates your heart rate and overloads your muscles enhances your fitness. Sorry to say to your bank account that absorbs a monthly gym charge, but your heart and other muscles don’t care the venue, to them red wagon fitness is the same as group fitness boot camp or Zumba.
So be it. But if red wagon-as-weight machine is the best exercise plan for you, OWN it like any other. If you pulled two kids last week this week go for three – and conquer the !@#$% hill. Oh, and expect that this is just the start of substituting garage items for weight machines. It’s only a matter of time before you are pushing the car backwards and forwards on the driveway…
SEASONED FOOTPRINTS
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”
Any Days’ fans? I was hooked one summer when Jessie and (?) were getting ready to marry. When I briefly picked it up again later, I remember being amazed that even though the story line had densely webbed, the characters hadn’t aged. In two years of real-time the characters aged about one week — not much sand passed through their proverbial hourglass…
Nice, right! But, we all know better, ageing is inevitable and along with it the creeks and cracks as our body adapts. What does this mean to our Iron Footprint? Two points – one, while we cant deny time’s march we can influence HOW we age and the degree to which it impacts our movement capacity; and two, while the Iron Footprint achievement dimensions are stable across the lifespan, the FitBEST contour will change over time—and that’s ok.
(To note, ageing is complex, and variable factors can influence lifespan wellness.)
That we age, out of our hands; HOW we age, influenced by lifestyle choices, namely our exercise habit. Movement begets movement. The movement capacity we retain is influenced by the movement we sustain. True – we lose what we don’t use, but also true – what we use we lose less quickly; and as well as physical vigor, exercise also promotes optimal cognitive and emotional wellness. Sustained regular physical activity can uniquely and profoundly enhance lifespan life quality, including the likelihood of remaining independent as we age.
Ageless ‘feeling good’ is more likely the more sustained our exercise habit, but matching the sub-20 minute 5K run we did as a twenty-something is less likely with passing time. While the Iron Footprint achievement dimensions are lifespan-fixed, our FitBEST contour IS going to change over time. Our performance capacity diminishes as our hairline recedes, and there comes that point when we can’t quite run 440 intervals, or snap the throw from third to first, or bench four plates like we used to…so be it, and a big so what! Not to disqualify what can be disconcerting, but the change is (rarely) not overnight, and different just means different, not bad.
First, the official FitBEST rules state that you can add new events to trial whenever you want, in fact, the more you trial the better. Remember, it’s not the mark that is important rather THAT you mark; so if decreased mobility necessitates, create events that align to your reality. No big whoop if it becomes time to move away from unassisted pull-ups to assisted pull-ups due to funky elbows, or using the arm-bike instead of the treadmill, or any other adaptation or modification.
Second, if you want to take competition one step further (or continue) ‘Senior’ organized sports are booming, no pun intended, with baby-boomers trending significantly more active than previous generations. For example, The National Senior Games Association offers competition in 19 different sports that culminates with an annual national championships festival. Then there is Senior Softball, among the most competitive of any sport league of any age group, complete with notorious cheating scandals. Tell me someone who goes so far as to shave a bat to hit 20 feet farther doesn’t still have fire in their belly! It goes to show the fire doesn’t go away even if the woodpile gets stacked differently than before.
Don’t dwell on what you can’t do anymore, sustain regular activity to retain all that you CAN do, and realize that a changing FitBEST shape is just that – a changing shape.
The Morning Glories in my flower boxes are going strong in their second year but the new generation sprouts are growing at very strange angles compared to the originals. I think they look great and will ride their wave as long as possible. Embrace your new quirks, creaks/cracks, wrinkles/ lines, hair everywhere but your head, and think of the evolving contours of your FitBESTS as new sprouts.
A QUICK REVIEW
Physical activity terms are sometimes erroneously interchanged, especially now with obesity/overweight’s global struggle streaming volumes of articles. Kind of like the telephone game where the finishing word/phrase is nothing like how it began, modifications can significantly alter meaning. This is all innocent fun until the alterations roadblock motivation to engage. Understanding basic terminology needs to be spot on considering physical activity’s importance to wellness, so here goes, an easy-peasy review.
Physical activity is body movement behavior that can be described for its frequency (how often?), intensity (degree of exertion – energy expenditure), time (how long?), and type (what was the form? e.g., formal exercise, dance, football, pilates, canoeing).
Physical activity is health protective and contributes to life quality especially when it includes regular, moderate-vigorous engagement in activities specific to Health-Related Fitness – cardiovascular strength, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, and body composition. Health-related engagement strengthens our bodily systems, prevents certain diseases, and optimizes physical, emotional and cognitive functioning. While any physical activity is better than no physical activity, more activity yields greater health-related benefit.
Physical activity also results in Physical Fitness, performance measures in aspects like speed, power, strength, and endurance (e.g., how fast you can run, how far you can throw, how much you can lift). While training can improve performance, genetics ultimately predisposes the outer edges. If you are like me, this means hard as I try I will forever need to use blocks during yoga. Thanks mom and dad for NO flexibility capacity.
Important to understand is physical fitness prowess may or may not align to health-related fitness. By itself, the ability to skillfully throw a Frisbee isnt health protective, but in the context of playing cardiovascular-intense Ultimate Frisbee it sure can be. Similarly, you may win races being a fast runner but unless you also regularly strength train, stretch and sustain healthy body composition your blazing speed alone will not bring about optimum health protection.
More important, high capacity physical fitness is not required to attain health-related fitness. Said differently, physical fitness limitation does not limit health-related fitness capacity. Anyone can, and will (precluding circumstances), yield health protection from physical activity engagement regardless of their performance edges. (Perceiving) Deficiencies in strength, speed or motor skill proficiency doesn’t diminish your health-related benefit—which leads to the grand finale.
As a fact we all have to face, perhaps more significant to those who enjoy the physical fitness side of engagement, there simply IS that ceiling of how far we can jump or how fast we can run. However, Health-Related Fitness has no such boundary. Net/net, EACH engagement can yield activity’s unique and profound health protection.
No matter how it might seem, health-related fitness AND physical fitness happens in the back of the class same as the front.
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