Pay It Forward

I’ve been a long time proponent of asking people for help. I advocate it as a way for beginners to learn. If you’re lost at the gym, if you’re unsure of what to do, if you need help or if you just need some support, never be afraid to ask someone even if they are a complete stranger. Yes, you’ll sometimes get no response and sometimes people will be too busy to help, but most people are more than willing to help out and share what they’ve learned.

Today though, I want to talk to someone else.  I’m not reaching out to beginners today and telling them to ask, I’m reaching out to all of you who are more experienced.  I’m talking to you folks out there who can run for an hour without breaking a sweat and all of you who can easily tell me the difference between abductions and adductions.  I’m talking to the folks who eat healthy and to the ones who are fit.  All of you who, like me, understand your bodies and what it takes to be healthy.  I’m asking you not to wait for the beginners to reach out with a question and instead reach out to them with support and encouragement.

Love One Another

No, I haven’t entered some kind of hippie phase :)  I’m not asking you to start a new movement or write a book about love at the gym.  I’m just asking you to be proactive.  If you see someone at the gym struggling with weights, offer to spot.  If you know of a friend who’s taking the first steps towards fitness, offer some encouraging words.  If you know someone who just started jogging a few weeks ago, tell them how great they’re doing.

No Preaching!

One rule though, no preaching.  You do not in fact know that person better than they know themselves.  Don’t start telling them what they can do better or what they’re doing wrong.  Don’t offer to become their personal trainer.  Just be a friend, even to a complete stranger.  Smile, say “great job”, “you’re doing great”, “wow, you’re making progress fast!” or something along those lines.  Those little words of encouragement mean a lot to people, especially because it’s hard for them to see the progress sometimes.

Memories of Gal2k

It was very difficult for me when I first started out.  I had no clue what I was doing and I felt discouraged and demoralized quite frequently.  It seemed like I was making no progress and quite often I was on the verge of quitting.  It was my coworkers who really came through for me back then.  They did little things like compliment me on how I was looking or sharing their own fitness issues.  Several of them even took me shopping for new clothes as part of my Gal2k project.  It was such a wonderful support system and I doubt I could have kept going without it.  So first of all, thank you to all of you who helped me back then, you know who are!

But now, I’m going to ask all of you to do the same thing.  Take some time this weekend or next week to encourage those around you.  Tell them how proud you are of them, tell them how well they’re doing.  Pay it forward folks, because those people need our help.  They’re struggling and they need the same help we got when we went through all this.  Besides, if we let them fail, who will we work out with?

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Thank you to Stretchy Dollar for including a 60 in 3 article in their latest festival of frugality.  There’s another example of paying it forward, blogs like this helping out each other.  Why don’t you support them by going over to them and reading their articles? Who know, you might learn something important

Is Improvement Necessary?

When I first started working out, I couldn’t lift anything other than the bar and I couldn’t run for more than 5 minutes at 4.5mph.  That’s pretty bad no doubt about it.  Slowly but surely I improved to the point where I can lift a respectable amount of weight and maintain a 6.5mph pace for over an hour without feeling tired.  I’m very proud of these accomplishments and I’m happy with the way my body performs these days, but now I wonder, should I keep trying to improve?  Should I keep pushing myself to lift more, run faster, go longer?  Is there a point to improvement beyond a certain level?

Let’s take weight as an example.  Clearly there is an “ideal” weight that I should be aiming for.  This weight should not be too high nor too low.  Once I get to it, I should stop trying to change my weight and just focus on maintaining that level of weight.  It’s a bit difficult to figure out that ideal weight but with the help of a doctor, a trainer or any of a number of websites, you can come pretty close.  So in terms of “improving” my weight, I know exactly what I need to do.

Unfortunately, workout performance isn’t quite the same thing.  I am running today at 6.5mph.  Should I try to improve?  Will there be benefits from improvement?  Will those benefits be worth the effort needed in order to improve?  This isn’t as clear as the weight issue.  Theoretically, performance can always be improved but realistically there’s going to be a point beyond which I cannot progress.  Also, what’s the point of running at 6.6mph compared to 6.5mph?  Sure, I’ll be running faster, but is there any benefit to my body?  My heart rate and blood pressure are excellent.  Will improving my cardio performance help my body?

What about weights?  If I bench press more weight will it really help me?  I already have very good muscle tone and I’m lifting a considerable amount of weight.  Will trying to improve that improve my health or will it just increase my risk of injury?

Purpose

As I was struggling with some of these questions, I noticed a few things.  Look at the way in which I phrase these questions.  “Will doing X improve my health?”  That’s important because it clearly shows what my goals are.  I didn’t say “will doing X help me win the race” or “will doing X give me bigger muscles”.  I am concerned with health and that’s it.  I’m not trying to imply that winning races or building muscles are bad goals, I’m simply saying that, for me, the goal is health.  We all have our own reason for working out and recognizing those reasons is important when it comes to making decisions.  Without knowing WHY we workout, we’re going to make bad decisions about HOW we work out.

Let’s take the running question as an example.  I have no intention of becoming a competition runner.  I don’t need to run very fast nor am I looking to beat some specific time goal.  I run because I enjoy running and because I want to keep my body in shape.  So my decision on improvement should take these factors into consideration.  Will improving my speed improve my health?  The answer is yes but only slightly and only up to a certain point.  Improving my endurance by running for an hour at 6.5mph as opposed to 5 minutes at 4mph was clearly a huge change.  Improving from this point will only provide me with a marginal health benefit at best.  Plus, at a certain point, I might actually be decreasing my overall health since training at these levels might increase my risk of injury.

Deciding where to stop improving is harder then deciding when to stop losing weight.  There is less science around the “optimal” performance level.  So I’m going to use a few factors to decide this.

• Personal comfort - I want to run at a good pace but I don’t need kill myself.  So speeds that are too high for me to enjoy my run are out.
• Injury Risk - I have no desire to go through the repeated and frequent injuries that high end athletes go through.  With running, I want to minimize the impact damage to my legs.
• Cardio Performance - I do want to keep my heart rate and blood pressure in a good and healthy range.  That means working out hard but it also means not working out too hard.  A heart rate above 85% to 90% of max is not good.

With all this in mind, I’ve decided that my current running speed is fine but I would like to go for a slight improvement.  I have no desire or need to go faster or longer but I think moving up to 7.0mph would give me a better health benefit without any downsides.  So I’ll keep working on some improvement in my running speed.

Weights

For weights I am making a similar decision with similar considerations.

• I like the feeling of lifting more weight.  There’s something very primal about it.  Yes, it might be shallow and vain, but that’s ok
• I am getting to the point with several exercises where increasing weight might increase the risk of injury.  For example, I can already feel the strain on my joints when I do something like overhead triceps extensions.
• In terms of health benefits, there’s very little else that I can gain from more weight.  I already do enough weight, enough reps and enough times a week.

So I’m going to try and improve in a few specific exercises where I think I can still benefit from improvement, but for the most part, I’ll keep my weight levels as is.  I might sub in some new exercises just to keep things interesting and to keep my body challenged, but I’m not going for as much raw improvement as I was before.

You!

Are you trying to improve?  If so, why?  That’s not a joke.  I honestly want you to know WHY you should be improving.  What are your goals?  Do you need to improve in order to achieve them?  In what ways?  Make sure your goals are aligned with your plan or else you’ll find yourself lost along the path.

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Remember, a bit of time spent upfront thinking about goals will save you a lot of bad decisions down the road.

Approaching Fitness With An Open Mind

Someone recently asked me why I bothered trying out intermittent fasting.  Couldn’t I see that this is something that wouldn’t work for me?  During their conversation they said “sorry, but that kind of thing would NEVER work for me”.  At which point I asked “How do you know?  Have you ever tried it?”  Of course they had not.  In fact, they never even considered trying it and yet they had such a strong opinion of it.  It reminded me of myself a few years ago.

When I first started thinking about exercise, I had a very narrow image of it in my mind.  Exercise essentially fell into three categories.  First, I thought of weight lifters in the gym.  That’s exercise, right?  Large men with huge muscles popping steroids and bench pressing a ton of metal.   Second, I thought of jogging.  That was clearly exercise in my mind, after all, everyone was doing it and they all seemed so fit.  Finally, I thought of calisthenics of the sorts I would see in the movies.  Drill sergeants telling people to “drop and give me 20 push ups!”  That was exercise to me since those people would always start out of shape but would finish basic training in style, after some sort of musical training montage of course.

So yes, my image of fitness was very limited and that limited my starting point.  It was no surprise that the workout regimen I picked out included a lot of weight lifting, jogging and some calisthenics.  I would lift weights five times a week, jog five times a week and do an army style workout on the weekends.  First of all, that was insane.  There was no way I could keep that workout up both in terms of time and the toll it was taking on my body.  Second, this workout got boring really quick.  I was doing the same thing over and over and over and over.  By the second month I was ready to quit and go back to eating cheetos while sitting in front of a computer screen.

By the way, this monotony also extended to my diet where I thought a healthy meal should consist of a small piece of chicken and some veggies on the side.  Sounds funny now but I ate chicken and veggies for every meal for about a month.  By the end of the month I hated chicken and I couldn’t even look at steamed vegetables.

What Was Wrong?

I made three mistakes which led me down this path.  First, I did no research.  Second, I underestimated the cost of monotony.  Finally, I approached fitness and health with a closed mind.  The first two mistakes were easily fixed but the third took more time.  I’m not going to discuss research and monotony today, those are topics for a different post, but I would like to go over the benefits of an open mind vs. the costs of a closed one.

A Closed Mind

When I thought of exercise, I thought only of weights, jogging and calisthenics.  When I thought of healthy eating, I thought of steamed veggies and chicken.  It’s not that these were the only things I knew, it was more that they were the only things I would accept.  For example, I knew about swimming and had done it in high school, but I thought it was boring.  I knew about the elliptical but I thought it wasn’t as good as jogging, even though I had no real reason to think that.  I knew about salads but I considered them “rabbit food” and didn’t think I could ever like them.  I knew about hiking but thought it was only for nature nuts and didn’t really count as exercise.  What I’m trying to say is that I had a completely closed mind.  I knew what I knew and I refused to consider any other option as viable.

Note that I actually had a lot of experience with some of these things in the past and in some cases I had actually liked them.  When I swam in high school I had always enjoyed it.  When I hiked as a child I considered it a lot of fun.  When I ate salads in the past I always considered them very tasty.  However, my mind was closed.  I KNEW what fitness was and I didn’t think of including anything else in my definition.

Common Mistake

We all do this by the way, not just me.  We all KNOW what’s right for us and we often discard other options without even considering them.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people and heard “Oh, I could never be a vegetarian” from people who had never tried it,  “I could never jog” from people who had never jogged a step or “sorry, I just hate gyms” from people who had never set foot in one.  For some reason, people have preconceived notions of what they like and dislike.  They are unwilling to try new things and they are unable to imagine the possibility of changing their habits.  They are set in their ways and refuse to change.  In fact, they refuse to even consider the possibility of change.  Their minds are closed.

A Life Not Lived

What would my life be like today if I had retained this mindset?  My guess is that I would have stopped my experiment with health sometime in the second or third month.  I would have gotten bored with lifting weights, tired of the chicken with steamed veggies and sore from all the running.  I would have quit and gone back to my unhealthy life.  Still, it’s even worse than just being unhealthy.  If I had kept a closed mind I would have missed out on experiences like hiking to the top of Masada in Israel and watching the sunrise over the dead sea.  I would have missed out on wonderful dishes and recipes that I now know and enjoy.  I would have missed out on the thrill of a boxing workout, the rush of dancing and the exhilaration of mountain biking.  So many things that I enjoy these days would be missing.

What Saved Me?

For me, the thing that opened my mind were the people in my life.  It was the coworker who took me trail running.  It was the old friend who took me hiking.  It was the girlfriend who took me dancing and the mom who made me salads.  It was all of these people and quite a few others who introduced new ideas into my thinking.  I resisted as best I could.  I said no many times, I didn’t show up to things, I complained, I rejected.  I did everything I could to avoid new things but they persisted.  They kept asking and I’m really glad they did.  Eventually, I opened up my thinking and I’ve never gone back.

A Simple Plan

it doesn’t take much to open your mind, just two little things, a willingness to try and a persistence to try again.  First, say yes.  If someone asks you to try out something, say yes.  I know, you think you’re going to hate it.  You think you’re going to dislike every minute of this new experience.  You don’t want to try it and you have no intention of enjoying it.  Still, say yes.  Try it just once.  Then, once you try it once, try it one more time.  It takes more than one time to really get to know something.  It takes more than a single experience to see if you’re really going to enjoy a new experience.  The first time you do something you’re brand new at it.  You have no idea what you’re doing, you feel like an amateur, you feel self conscious and you’re not quite sure how to behave.  That’s normal.  Just keep trying.  Try it twice, try it three times and don’t give up until you really know something.  At that point, if you still don’t like it then maybe you should stop, but don’t stop trying after the first time.

If you’re interested, take a look at Steve Pavlina’s 30 day experiment idea.  It’s one way of trying out something new and seeing if you like it.  However, that’s just one possibility.  Bottom line, don’t be afraid to try new things and don’t give up after your first attempt.  Sure, there are some things that are clearly too stupid to try.  Smoking will make you lose weight but I wouldn’t recommend you picking it up just as an experiment.  There’s a difference between having an open mind and being an idiot who’ll do anything without any thought.  However, there’s a whole big world of ideas out there.  Hundreds if not thousands of recipes, exercises, workouts, activities and sports for you to try.  Don’t rule them out just yet.

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What new thing are you going to try this week?  What about next week and next month?