Having a healthy and fit body is not optional.

You’re making a concious decision to make exercise a daily part of your life. You’re saying that exercise is as vital to the body as food, air, or water. If don’t eat or drink, eventually I’ll die. You’re raising exercise to that level of importance.

The mistake that most people make when they begin an exercise program is that they try to do too much. They’ll go all out, hit the gym, work really hard… for about a week. Perhaps two. They begin they’re exercise program too quickly and usually burn out.

I’m approaching things differently. The idea is to make consistency your goal. You’re trying to develop a lifetime habit. You’ve decided that you want to exercise and be healthy 365 days a year. (Or as close to it as possible…).

Is it possible to do 2 hours of weight training 7 days a week, 365 days a year?

Of course not. You’d burn out and you’d hurt yourself.

So what’s the happy medium? How do you exercise daily and not burn out or hurt yourself? The way I figure it, a healthy exercise routine needs to meet the following criteria:

• It should have enough variety so that you don’t get bored
• It should be challenging (again so that you don’t get bored).
• It should develop both your strength and your cardio fitness.
• It should be flexible enough so you can exercise in some form or fashion everyday.
• It should have built in “down time” for each body part.
• It shouldn’t be too complicated.
• There should be lots of ways for you to succeed.

When I started my first 30 Day Exercise Challenge, I made it really easy for myself to succeed. Basically, if I did one of the things on my list of exercises each day I considered that a success. Some days I did more, some days I did just the one exercise. I did this for 60 days. What I found towards the end of the challenge was that apathy began to set in. I did alot of the minimum number of push-ups, those last couple of weeks… simply because it was easier. The challenge had grown a bit stale. Come to think of it, the daily things began to be abit blah soon after I finished my 7 Day Bikram Yoga Challenge. (There’s probably something to that…).

So, how do you make it more challenging without getting too rigid? (With the last challenge, if I had a really busy day, or was out of town with no access to anything but my own body weight, I could always walk, or do push-ups, or crunches.)

I think the answer is to increase the minimum amount of daily time I’ll spend exercising to 20 minutes a day. This will force me to choose more of the exercises off of my list to fill the time. I’ll also give myself the “out” of allowing myself to choose walking one of my routes as an accepted exercise for the day.

The rules:

I’ll check in 30 days from now.

—
New 30 Day Exercise Challenge
Start date: Friday, 7/21/06
Next check-in date: Saturday, 8/19/06

While I think that this challenge has been valuable for me, I think this will be the last day of the challenge in it’s present state. I’ve found that I’ve become complacent over the last week or so in my exercise. I’ve still exercised everyday, but I need something that is going to challenge me to a new level of fitness.

I love the variety that I’ve created for myself, but the bar has become too easy to jump over. If I were to continue at this current level, I’d probably get bored and eventually just quit.

The challenge of my next “30 day fitness challenge” is going to be in answering this question:

“How do I create a workout that is more physically taxing, flexible enough for an active busy schedule, and yet still able to be done every day for 30 days?”

We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve also revamped slightly the layout of how I’ve been tracking my progess. I flipped the Monday-Sunday format I was using so that it’s now laid out like this:

Su:
Sa:
F:
Th:
W:
T:
M:

This way I can more easily see the progression of what exercises I’ve done over the past week. I also set up a Fitness Tracking Archives page to make it a bit easier to edit the main tracking page each week.

Having the large variety of exercises to choose from assures that you’re not going to overstress or injure a specific body part by overtraining. The other thing that helps is knowing that it’s so easy to be successful. If my schedule only allows me to walk one of my walking routes, then I’ve successfully exercised that day. If it happens to be raining that day I have alot of other indoor options to choose from. The key is choices, choices, choices and structuring those choices in such a way that “exercising” can mean spending 4 minutes doing crunches on the ball.

I think the thing that most people miss about exercise is that the effects are cumulative. A little bit of exercise every day goes much further than alot of exercise engaged in sporadically. Exercising every day is more of a philosophical life choice. We often hear ourselves saying “I don’t have the time to exercise”, but that’s just not true. More specifically what we’re saying is “I don’t have 2 hours to spend going to the gym”, which might be absolutely true. By making their definition of exercise so rigid most people rob themselves of an opportunity to be healthy and fit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making gym membership a part of your life if it’s something that you can afford and have the time to do. But it’s much more difficult to fit that two hours into your life consistently if that’s your only exercise option.

This exercise might not work for the long term but I want to include it as one of my choices now. I need to find things to do that raise my heart rate without pounding the hell out of my knees. This seems to fit that criteria. I broke a sweat, my heart rate definitely went up and though I could feel the workout in my quads and hips my knees seemed to do ok. We’ll see how it goes.

The main thing is that it gives me one more exercise choice.

For the purpose of this challenge “exercise” is defined as anything found here.

My target date is Tuesday, June 20th. That’s 30 days from today.

I can do push-ups. I can walk. I can do pilates. If it’s on my list it counts. I’ll continue to track my progress on my fitness tracking page.

—–
30 Day Challenge guidelines can be found here.

30 Day Challenge: Exercise
Start date: Monday, May 22nd
Check-in date: Tuesday, June 20th

I’ve created two new pages: Fitness Tracking and Walking Routes. “Fitness Tracking” will be a static page to keep track of my weekly exercise goals. With “Walking Routes”, I’ve used an online tool called G-Maps Pedometer to map out routes of varying lengths around the neighborhood. When I set a walking goal for the week I’ll have a clear idea of where to walk, and how far I’ve walked. With this information I can then track how fast I walk the route, the idea being that when I walk it faster I’m raising my heartrate and improving my overall cardio performance. This also will help with the boredom factor, because I can always map out a new route of the same distance. I think that the reason I’ve burned out on running in the past is because I really had no way to track what I was doing. (Though I’ll only be walking these routes… running’s too tough on my knees…) Hopefully this will help.

I’ll also have my list of exercises to choose from when I’m planning my workout for the week. The goal is to add as many different things as possible to this list so that I don’t hit the wall of boredom and stop working out. Also with this list I want to add as many things that I can do that don’t require alot of equipment. Hopefully I’ll also add a yoga practice and dance classes to this list as funds permit.

Having “Fitness Tracking” on it’s own page will make editing it from week to week much easier. I’ll also have a single .html file that I could archive later if the page becomes too unwieldy.

And here’s the plan:

• Each Sunday I’ll create a new entry for the upcoming week on my “Fitness Tracking” page by copying and pasting the previous week, just as I’ve been doing in the past in the blog post format. This is pretty quick to do.
• I’ll look at the previous week’s exercises and come up with my planned exercises for the week, using the choices from my Exercises page.
• I’ll take a look at my calendar and pencil in where I want to do these exercises. For example, I might look at my week and see that I have a heavy teaching day on Wednesday. This might be a good day to schedule as an off day. This would have the option to change as things come up in the week, but at least I’m starting with specific goals (eg. “Walk on Monday and Thursday”) in mind.

That’s it. That’s the plan. It might not be much, but at least it’s a start! : )

Core / Strength / Cardio / Flexibility
M: pilates – modified flow
T:
W:
Th:
F: ball crunches – 2 sets
Sa:
Su:

In bed by:
M: c
T: 12
W: 12
Th: 1
F: 2ish
Sa: ungodly late because of gig
Su: c

Exercise descriptions can be found here.

–Update: 5/28/06–
I’ve decided that weekly posts aren’t the best way to track my exercise and sleep patterns. As of this update, I have about 6 weeks of “sleep tracking” posts that I’ve deleted, and aggregated into a single page. Fitness tracking is now here.

time: 16 minutes