Fitness Obstacle: Boredom May 6, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
Any kind of repetitive exercise just gets boring after a few sessions. This is a killer for many people, and they can’t ever seem to keep themselves motivated to keep up with the exercise. That’s certainly the case for me.
In the past I’ve tried swimming laps, walking/jogging, going to the gym, stair climbers, treadmills, exercise bikes, aerobics and more. But none of them occupy my mind or have any apparent purpose, so I always feel like there’s something else I could be doing that’s less boring, more fun, or more productive.
We know in our minds that the exercise is doing us long-term good, but there’s no immediate payoff to each activity. It just feels like something to be endured, which certainly doesn’t help with getting motivated before each session. It’s easy to just skip a session because there are better things to be doing. And while skipping individual sessions probably doesn’t make much of a difference to your overall fitness level, it’s a habit that eventually leads to giving up on exercise completely.
Consequently, many of us never reach the stage where exercise has become a part of our weekly routine. We give up before it becomes an ingrained habit. Because we don’t stick with it for long enough, we never get good enough or fit enough with any of these activities that we feel like we’re achieving anything. We’re was just filled with dread beforehand, and the session is uncomfortable, painful and exhausting.
Thinking back, the fittest I’ve been was when I was involved in several social sporting activities many years ago. For a few years, I was playing various combinations of roller hockey, indoor hockey, outdoor hockey and netball on different nights of the week. So I was doing a lot of running and moving around, enjoying myself, and getting quite fit. I didn’t get bored with these sports, as we were always working to achieve some outcome – scoring, stopping the other team from scoring, winning the game, getting the ball to our shooter, etc.
Team sports are great for putting the fun and motivation back into exercise, but for people with young families they’re not really practical. Problems include:
- You’d need to be involved in at least two or three different activities in order to get a decent amount of weekly exercise, and most of us simply don’t have that much free time in the evenings.
- Social sports come with various extra commitments (training, umpiring for others’ games, etc) that we don’t have time for.
- Game times tend to vary all over the place – one week you’ll be playing at 6:30pm, and the next you might be playing at 8:30pm, which doesn’t fit in with the demands of a young family very well.
- You don’t feel you can make a commitment to the other team members to be able to play every week for the whole season – for various reasons, there would be times that you couldn’t make it to a game and you’d be letting the team down. You need flexibility, or at least some control over the schedule, which you simply can’t have when other people are involved.
- If you have a partner, you’d probably feel guilty going out and playing games while your significant other has to stay home with the kids.
All this sounds like a list of excuses, but boredom is a genuine demotivator for many people (including myself). If that’s true for you, it needs to be addressed if you want to start a regular exercise routine and be able to stick with it over the longer term.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, boredom, exercise routine, workout, excuses
When To Weigh Yourself May 5, 2006
Your body weight probably fluctuates more than you realise throughout the day. Mine can vary by up to 4 kg (9 lbs) over a single day, depending upon factors like:
- food intake: Did I just eat a big meal? Or have I had nothing to eat since breakfast?
- fluid intake: Have I just drunk lots of water? Am I slightly dehydrated after some heavy exercise? Am I ‘retaining water’?
- digestive system: OK, it’s not very glamorous, but your stomach, bowels and instestines can hold a lot of waste which is only ‘removed’ relatively infrequently. Also, different kinds of foods produce different amounts of waste products, so diet can affect this factor.
- health: If you have an injury or get sick, you might get some fluid build-up that would temporarily increase your weight.
- medication: Some medications can cause you to retain or lose fluid for several hours after taking them.
- other stuff: I don’t know, there must be other factors! If you donate blood, for example, you must weigh less afterwards
.
So when is the best time of day to weigh yourself in order to track your weight loss progress?
I like to weigh myself every morning before breakfast, for a number of reasons:
- It’s probably the lightest I’ll weigh all day. Let’s face it – I want to see low numbers! I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, I’ve just gone to the toilet, and I haven’t had anything to drink, so many of the variables that can add ‘noise’ to your weight statistics are taken out of the equation.
- It’s convenient. I take off my pyjamas, weigh myself, have a shower, then put on my clothes for the day. It’s a nuisance to weigh yourself later in the day, when you have to disrobe first, and then put the clothes back on afterwards.
- It motivates me to exercise in the mornings. If I go out for a run before weighing myself, I know from experience that I’ll lose maybe a half to one kilogram (1-2 pounds) from sweating. Some might call it cheating since you’ll put that weight back on as soon as you have a drink, but if it motivates you to exercise so that you can clock up a slightly better score, it can’t be all bad! I find this motivation is especially powerful if I gained weight on the last weigh-in.
- It puts my day in perspective. If I score a new low, I feel good for the rest of the day.
- It keeps me on track. If my weight has gone up slightly, it makes me conscious of my diet and activity for the rest of the day, making sure I get things back under control promptly.
How about you? What time of day do you weigh yourself, and why?
Technorati Tags: weight loss, scales, body fat, weight loss tips, motivation
Fitness Obstacle: Time May 4, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
If you have a family, run a business, or have other important commitments, it’s hard to find regular time in your schedule to devote to exercise.
I have three daughters, aged 3, 2 and 8 months (hereafter named G, S and H respectively). Any parent will understand the workload that involves, and the difficulty I have finding time for any kind of regular exercise. In addition to that, my eldest daughter has Down syndrome, so she develops slower than the others and needs additional care and attention.
Besides our families, most of us have a bunch of other commitments and responsibilities. We need to earn a living (either at a job or running our own business), we’re involved in community service or charity work, and we have hobbies and pasttimes. In addition to my day job as an engineer, I’m a keen photographer, I’m the librarian and webmaster for my local camera club, I’m the webmaster for my state Down Syndrome Association, I’m an occasional weekend wedding photographer, and I run several other web sites.
My typical weekday goes something like this:
- 6:00am – wake up, get G up and dressed, get ready for work
- 7:00am – leave for work
- 7:30am – working
- 12:00pm – lunch
- 12:30pm – working
- 4:00pm – leave work
- 4:30pm – family time, dinner, getting girls fed/bathed/to bed
- 7:30pm – cleaning up after dinner, housework
- 8:00pm – watch TV/DVDs, do stuff online, dabble with digital photos/video, etc
- 11:00pm – bed
I just couldn’t seem to fit regular exercise into that routine, despite a few attempts. I thought of all my options, and couldn’t see any that would work:
- Before work: Getting up at 6:00am is already very early, and I’m tired enough as it is.
- During my lunch break: I only have a half-hour lunch break, so I can’t fit in changing clothes, exercising, showering and changing back into work clothes, and getting something to eat in that time-slot.
- After work: I need to get home to help with the girls’ night-time routine. I also don’t want to sacrifice family time, since I get precious little of it as it is.
- At night: After a long day at work, the last thing I feel like doing is going out in the dark for some exercise. Including showering afterwards, any form of exercise would take at least an hour out of my evening, leaving even less time for relaxation, time with my wife, and all my extra-curricular activities (which I’m already behind on!).
Most people have similar difficulty finding a regular timeslot for exercise in their daily or weekly routine. It seems impossible without sacrificing some other aspect of your life.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, free time, finding time, exercise routine, workout
Fitness Obstacles
Way back in December 2005, I wrote a post about problems I’ve had with maintaining a regular exercise routine: I Want To Be Fit. I’d been planning to come back and flesh out each of those obstacles, but I’ve only just now gotten around to it. I’m sure most readers will be able to relate to at least a couple of these problem areas.
I’ll explain what I mean by each of the problems in a series of blog entries over the next week or so, and after that I’ll write a series of posts about strategies I’ve tried to deal with each of them, what worked, and what didn’t.
It’s now 5 months later, I’m 15 kg (33 lbs) lighter, and I’m still exercising regularly, so it goes without saying that these strategies are working for me. Maybe they’ll work for you too.
This entry will serve as an anchor point for the posts to come, and the links below will be updated each time a new entry is posted.
If you can think of any other obstacles I haven’t covered, please do add them as comments below and I’ll write them up too.
Technorati Tags: fitness obstacles, fitness motivation, fitness, exercise, time, boredom, guilt, laziness, feedback, weight loss, workout, motivation
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