I am the tortoise in this scenario and that's just fine

[clevermanka]

Seen on Breaking Muscle:
When your efforts are extreme, they will also be temporary. Intensity is meaningless if not consistent. It's not what you do today, it's what you do day in and day out. Training is a process, not an event or an experience. Like a farm, today’s yield is the result of yesterday’s work. It’s much more about everyday habits than occasional stunts.

It's important to understand and internalize the notion that something we do a couple times a week isn't going to make lasting, healthful, and beneficial changes to our lives or bodies. Fitness isn't a goal. It's a path, and it's one we've gotta walk, even briefly, every single day. If I desire a certain level of fitness, I need to walk that path for as much of the day as I can.

Going all out for forty-five minutes (or an hour, or even two hours) at the gym every day is great, but if I immediately after go sit my ass down in front of a computer for the next eight hours, I'm not doing my body many favors. I might increase strength, but I also allow my muscles, damaged and torn from the weight-lifting, to mend and heal in a sitting position--one of the worst postures for the human body--and that will inhibit my progress past a certain state.

This doesn't apply only to high-intensity activity or lofty goals. When it comes to long-lasting, life-changing habits and achievements, consistency is key. This is why I committed to something that might seem small--30 minutes of intentional movement five days a week. In a month (depending on how well I do and how well I feel), I might increase that to 30 minutes of intentional movement six days a week with two days a week incorporating higher-intensity resistance training. After a successful month of that, I might find ways to further build strength and stamina. If it's too much, I'll fall back and resume the previous practice. Regardless, I am participating in a regular healthful habit and not treating that activity as an event separate from the rest of my life.

Regular application and commitment to constant (if slow) change is necessary for improvement. Yes, of course one's health and fitness isn't always going to be the driving force behind every single action. But if fitness is your a priority (and fitness is a matter of setting priorities), consideration of the healthful aspects of an action must at least be considered. Everything we do makes us more or less healthy in one way or the other--physically and emotionally. It's crucial to remember that when we make decisions about what we're doing and how we're living our lives.

And that doesn't apply to just exercise.

Comments

[redheadfae.livejournal.com]

I've done a lot of thinking about the whole "sitting kills," and while I find it interesting, I think a good many bloggers and fitness activists are taking it to an extreme where it doesn't need to go. For one thing, I got into quite a heated discussion with someone who can't see past their own experience to consider that many working people simply don't have the luxury of being able to "just get up and move around every 20 min", and then I wanted to have further chats with friends who use wheelchairs and ask if they find this to be "ableist".
I thought about my mum, who worked as a secretary nearly her entire working life; how she was known as "Ferrari" at the hospital, because when she was up and delivering reports or such, she walked at such a fast clip that no one could keep up with her. She only did yoga, and very gentle yoga at that, for "exercise" until the 80s when she started dancing. She's also a fidgeter, and so am I, and I started looking at articles about that.

I found this mention of studies on astronauts really interesting! (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/06/23/vernikos-sitting-kills.aspx#!). Like you said, it's the continuous awareness in daily life, not just a dedicated "make up for it" session here and there.

It's small actions that pit us against gravity that make the difference.

Standing up once every hour was more effective than walking on a treadmill for 15 minutes for cardiovascular and metabolic changes
Sitting down and standing up repeatedly for 32 minutes does NOT have the same effect as standing up once, 32 times over the course of a day. To get the benefit, the stimulus must be spread throughout the day


Thank you for this post! It led me to some very useful information.

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

To get the benefit, the stimulus must be spread throughout the day

YES! Precisely.

I do think the notion of getting up to move regularly can be beat to death a bit, and over-emphasized. Also, shaming should never be a part of any effort to change oneself. However, I do think that the culture of sitting for a living is a horrible thing. There are people in my office who send me an email about something (say, asking me to pull a file) rather than walk the twenty feet down the hall to my office. And I rather doubt it's due to the fact that they don't want to interrupt me.

[redheadfae.livejournal.com]

Oh yes! I'm grateful to have a supervisor who even suggested that I get a medical accommodation so that I can walk about more often than on the assigned breaks, and she doesn't mind if we take our calls standing up either. She says that she always had an accommodation when she was a CSR because she found that her blood pressure stayed high when she stayed seated all day.

(In fact, she's exploring gluten-free living as a way to work on her own inflammation issues! so we have a lot to chat over)

[write-out.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this; it was just what I needed to read at this moment. I'm struggling with the consistent movement- I sit at a desk all day and then I tend to go home and sit all night. The 30 minutes of intentional movement is in there somewhere, but there is mostly sitting.

I used to have a printer in my office and when it finally shit the bed, I started walking down the hall and around the corner to the main printer. That has made a big difference for me; we're a paper-intensive office, so I have to get up a lot. That said, I need to get up a lot more. When the weather is bearable and the parking lot safe, I can walk around that but I do have to find other ways to move.

At home, I need to work on not sitting on the couch the entire night. That's going to be the hardest habit for me to break.

But anyway, thanks again for this.

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! It makes me feel really good when I know I'm helping out other people as well as myself with my discoveries and insights!

[gansje.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful post -- thank you for all of the great insight!!

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

Yay! Thank you for letting me know you got something out of my mental wanderings!