Month: January 2023

fitness

Welcome to the Gym

Nicole P,2 Comments

“The gym is going to be so busy the first few weeks in January.” Eye roll.

“It will be nice when things are back to normal in February.” Head nod and smirk.

I have been guilty of thinking such thoughts or saying them aloud to regulars at the gym. I have been guilty of feeling smug because I am a REGULAR. I come every week, 2/3 times a week. For a long time. This isn’t a passing fad. I EVEN went during the pandemic when it was outdoor classes or virtual classes only.

How obnoxious of me. It’s not really because I am a snob. It’s just because I like my comfort zone. I enjoy seeing the people I see regularly at the gym who have become community, and even, friends. I enjoy coming to class and getting to be at my spot on the rig. I like knowing there will be room for me and I don’t need to come 15 minutes earlier because there are more people to share space with. Before my current gym, I frequented places as a regular. When I find a place I enjoy, I become a regular.

I’m also happy to see and meet new people. New people often become part of the community and also become friends. Some come and go but I still see the value in their being there. I am rooting for them. If that’s where they want to be. If they don’t, I wish them well and that they find a place that suits them better.

We’ve all been a newbie. I am still a newbie when I try new classes and experiences. We have all experienced unwelcome spaces. I never want to be the reason someone feels unwelcome. We all know how hard it can be to show up to a new class. Wondering if the unknown is going to work for you. If you are going to feel out of your element. Wondering if you will feel clumsy or will be questioning why you are there. We all have different reasons for trying out a new gym. Finding new strength, new experiences, new communities, new personal bests (PR)s.

I intend to welcome the newbies to my gym in January. I hope they have fun. I hope they find new PRs. I hope they feel welcome. I hope some of them stick around. I hope that those who don’t stick around, remember it as a welcoming and positive space. That is all.

Welcome to the gym, newbies!

Nicole P. lives in TO with her husband and two dogs. She enjoys running, walking as primary transportation mode, HIIT and strength workouts at the gym.
Reflective Fitness Journaling – figuring out what I want to know
ADHD · advice · fitness · planning · self care · Tools · trackers

Reflective Fitness Journaling – figuring out what I want to know

Christine Hennebury1 Comment

I’m trying to figure out what to include in a fitness journal.

I love the idea of recording my plans and ideas and then writing my reflections on my practices but I know better than to try to put all of that onto a blank page.

If I have an open-ended journal, I will feel like I have to write AllOfTheThings AllOfTheTime and I will start avoiding journaling.

Image description; A GIF of ​cartoon character Lisa Simpson exclaiming that writing is the hardest thing ever.
This is ironic, of course, because writing is one of the things that comes to me most easily…except when I start trying to do too much at once. Image description; A GIF of cartoon character Lisa Simpson exclaiming that writing is the hardest thing ever.

I looked for a fitness journal I could buy – thinking that a structured set of questions would be like ‘containers’ for my thoughts – but mostly I found fitness trackers.

Keeping track of the details may be part of my journaling but what I am really interested in is recording and reflecting on my physical and emotional experiences.

So, I am taking a DIY approach – choosing a set of 3-5 fitness-related questions to put on an index card that I will use as a bookmark in a regular journal.

I figure that if I have a set of questions ready it will not only help to structure my thoughts but I can also just number the answers in my journal and not create any obstacles for myself by having to rewrite the questions each time I journal.

I’ve found lots of suggested questions online (see links below) and I am mulling those over – not looking for perfect questions, just seeing what feels interesting to me.

But, speaking of interesting, I’d be interested to know what *you* think would make a good reflective question for a fitness journal.

What do find useful to consider about your fitness practices?

What do you wish you had made note of when you started something new?

What kinds of feelings or experiences do you think I should reflect on?

A GIF of Moira Rose from the TV show Schitt’s​ Creek dressed in black with a huge elaborate necklace and wearing heavy black eyeliner and dark red lipstick. She is asking “What?! I’m simply asking questions.”
Image description: A GIF of Moira Rose from the TV show Schitt’s Creek dressed in black with a huge elaborate necklace and wearing heavy black eyeliner and dark red lipstick. She is asking “What?! I’m simply asking questions.”

If you’re interested, here are some of the articles I found online. (I think Sam suggested the first one in a previous Facebook post.)

Why an end of the week fitness journaling practice can help you stay motivated.

Wellness Through Words: Health And Fitness Journal Prompts

Inspiration For Your Journal

51 Prompts For Good Health and Wellness

advice · fitness · goals · habits · motivation · new year's resolutions · planning · self care

Go Team 2023! Decide on Something Small

Christine Hennebury

Before I begin today, I’d like to remind you that you do NOT have to make changes, start resolutions, or make new year plans. If you feel drawn towards those kinds of things, that’s cool. If you hate those kinds of things, that’s cool, too.

And, if you are a resolutions type of person with your plans for the year all set up and you’re working away at them – go you! We all need to find a way that works for us and keeps us feeling good about ourselves as we move forward. In your case, today’s post might be good to have in your metaphorical back pocket in case you need it one day.

Meanwhile, I’m over here with no actual plans yet, just a vague sense of wanting to improve my overall well-being through movement and rest this year.

I know that will take some planning and some up-front work and experimentation but I need to do some thinking and writing and research to figure out the details.

And I’m ok with that. In fact, as I noted in a recent post, I am in Planuary not January right now.

If you are also in Planuary, or just if you are still deciding what you want to do, or if you know what you want to do but are still getting in gear to do it, I’d like to invite you to decide something small.

By that, I mean to pick a little something that is at least somewhat related to a direction you may want to move in. (That might be the vaguest sentence I have ever written. Bahahaha!)

This isn’t about deciding on Step 1. It isn’t about keeping yourself busy. This is a way of anchoring the space you created yesterday.

So, for example, I know that I want to strengthen my core this year. And I know that any exercises for my core will help. I also know that I will need to get specific at some point or I won’t actually follow though.

But I don’t have a plan or strategy *yet.* Right now, I just have a sense that this is a direction I want to move towards.

So, yesterday, I decided that since on most days I can exercise in the evening, I would create mental space in my evening routine for exercise.

And since I don’t have a plan in place, anything would do for now.

So, I picked 5 core exercises I like and did 5 reps of each one.

It was a manageable amount. It had defined parameters (i.e. it was clear when I was done.) And it felt like I did something useful for my eventual plan.

I didn’t have to overdo it. I didn’t have to create a huge framework for future fitness. I could just decide on something small that would move me in the right direction.

And it is something I can keep doing while I decide what ELSE I want to do.

And I’d like to invite you to give this a try.

Whatever you are mulling over right now, decide on a small version to try. See how it feels, physically and mentally.

If it felt good – stick with it while you figure out what’s next. If it was too tiring or if it felt bad – adjust things for next time.

Note: Judging from my personal past experience, there’s a decent chance that your ‘something small’ will only seem small in comparison to your envisioned future result. When you try it, you may find that your ‘something small’ was actually fairly big. If that’s the case, don’t despair – just go smaller.

And, of course, please be kind to yourself in the process. Making plans, making changes, and trying new things can all be challenging, tricky, stressful processes. If you find these things hard, try to give yourself time to adjust and to recover – you need what you need and trying to ‘tough it out’ may just make things harder. Sure, we all need to persevere and push through sometimes but we can’t stay in that mode all the time.

Here’s your gold star for your efforts today whether you are working your plan, working on a plan, or working towards considering working on a plan.

A drawing of a gold star on a blue background
Image description – a cartoonish drawing of a happy face gold star with big eyes and blue eyelids. The background of the image is overlapping blue lines and the corners are blue blobs.
fitness · habits

Habits and routines: What do you do first thing in the morning?

Tracy I5 Comments
Image description: early morning scene on a country road winding to the right, big sky, mountains in the distance (Photo: near Salida, Colorada, July 2022, Tracy Isaacs).

In the spirit of the new year, blank page, fresh start mindset that many of us find ourselves in every January, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes it easy to establish habits and routines. We’ve all read that it takes 21 days or 30 days or 66 days (“they” are undecided). Regardless of how many days or weeks it takes, one thing is certain, it takes some time, and it’s hard to make a habit stick.

My main focus this year, for myself, is to establish habits in the form of regular routines. Here are the things I want to do regularly: work on my book 5x/week; yoga daily; meditate daily; run 3x/week; strength training 2x/week. There’s a lot of advice out there for how to make habits stick. The advice involves things like making a plan and sticking to it (seriously, this is not helpful since making a plan and sticking to it until it becomes habit or routine is the entire challenge), start small (my favourite, and I’ll be posting about that on Saturday), have an accountability partner (besides your smart watch), roll with setbacks, track or log your progress. It’s all helpful and I’ve used all of these tips at various junctures in my life to establish habits and routines.

But the one thing that has been most helpful, especially with things that I am likely to avoid (like working on my book, which always seems to take a back seat to everything else) or forget about once my day starts (like meditation, which is not something I tend to think about other than first thing), is the advice to do whatever it is first thing in the morning upon getting out of bed.

This approach has been so effective for me that I am often engaged in an inner struggle about which thing to put in that cherished spot of being the very first thing. Clearly, I can only choose one. Before January came along my morning routine immediately upon getting out of bed looked like this: play with the cats, give Lily-cat her meds, feed them, meditate, do the wordle (and 3-4 other word puzzles!), and after that it was anybody’s guess because I’ve been on sabbatical. What was missing from this regular routine were regular yoga or workouts (which I fit in as desired but somehow became very haphazard in December) and writing/working on the book (which I just avoided, catching me in the downward spiral of procrastination and self-reprimand that goes along with it).

And what had an undeserved place in this routine is the word puzzles. I have no objection to word puzzles, but they are not more important than writing my book. I feel pretty strongly that the morning hours are a precious time of day that hold a lot of promise. What I choose to do first thing in the morning is in some ways a reflection of my priorities. I wouldn’t, for example, pick up my phone and start scrolling through social media before I’ve done anything else. What a horrible way (for me) to start my day. And yet when I reflected on how my mornings go, I had to admit that I was giving these puzzles, and then some reporting on them on various friends’ social media feeds, pride of place immediately following my meditation.

So, starting today I have rejigged the order of priority of the first-thing-in-the-morning task list as follows: cat care (can’t really put that in any other place because they will torment me until they’re fed anyway, and Lily needs her meds), meditation, working on my book for a specified time (exceedingly short but the goal is to establish a routine, so it has to start off short and attainable), yoga (this month it will be Adriene’s January practice), and a short stint downstairs in my building’s fitness centre. Puzzles can wait until later, and are a great reward for successfully making it through my “first-thing-things.”

I did it all today partly as a test run to see how long it would take me. Not being on sabbatical anymore, I need to be more attentive to the timing. That all took about two hours, so when I actually have to leave to be at work by 8:30 or 9, it’s not really going to work. I mean, I didn’t even include showering, getting ready, and breakfast in that. Noticing that, I am moving yoga to the afternoon since I am much less likely to skip it than I am to skip, say, running at the end of a long day.

If there is any advice lurking in this post, it’s that deciding which things will go first is a great way of establishing at least some things as routine. Clearly this won’t work in the case of everything (for example: bedtime routines. But I have even noticed that in order to stick to my morning routine I need to have a closer look at my winding-down process at the day’s end). I do believe that the choices I make early in the day are an indication of what I think is important. To me, though I realize others might have different perspectives on this, the idea of starting my day on an activity that feels like a waste of time (such as scrolling social media or watching tv) makes me feel as if I’m off-kilter with what I care about. This feeling is compounded when I am struggling to find time to incorporate the things I say I care about into my day.

What do you prioritize in the morning? Do you think it reflects what you value in your life?

athletes · cycling · fitness

Strava and Sam’s year in review

Sam B

Here’s my Strava year in review.

The highlights? I rode more than 4000 km but not the 5000 I set as my goal. My average speed was 26 km/hr and my longest ride was 126 km. No surprise that was the bike rally day 2.

I’m not sure what the new year holds. It will depend on recovery from left knee replacement surgery and when they operate on my right knee.

Here’s highlights from the community of Strava users from Bicycling magazine.

More riders rode more than 100 miles at a time. There’s a 22% rise in cyclists on Strava who rode a 100 mile century this year.

• Bike commuting is back to pre-pandemic levels and more people are using e-bikes.

,• Group rides are also motivational. People who logged rides with others rode further and faster.

You can read the report Strava’s Year in Sport 2022 here.

Here’s two more highlights from the report.

“Another one for those of us setting new goals in 2023: Picking up a new activity might just be the ticket to staying more motivated.

Athletes who uploaded two or more sport types in January not only had 75% more active days compared to those who stick to just one activity, but their total active time was up by 62% as well– indicating they didn’t split their time, but instead carved out more.”

************

“Whether we were motivated by exploration, open spaces or new adventures, 52% of athletes uploaded trail activities in 2022.

Some of us are riding the new trends in cycling – like gravel bikes and electric mountain bikes. Others are contributing to a surge in trail and ultra running. And while solitude may be a motivator for some, trail activities are 55% more likely to be done in groups.”

Are you a Strava user? What was your year like? Goals or plans for next year?

fitness

Sam is Checking in for December 2022

Sam B

What happened in December?

It’s a bit of a blur really. Work was exceptionally busy right up until the university closed.

Of course there was Christmas.

Bikes on the Christmas tree

There was a lot of snow and then a lot of rain and associated travel challenges.

I ate a lot of chocolate.

I rode my bike on Zwift.

I completed the reading challenge.

2022 reading challenge

I worked out 440 times in 2022, including snow shoeing at the farm.

Over the holidays I played some games.

I did a ton of physio. Of course. And my knee is being helped by massage therapy too. Thank goodness for benefits.

I also got fitted for a knee brace for my right knee. Sarah has been helping with the snazzy physio tape which seems to help with swelling.

I had a bit of a slip on the no shopping pledge but I’ve re-upped for 2023 until July 2023.

My left knee has good days and bad days. Sometimes I get sad and frustrated that everything still hurts and other days it seems I can walk easily without my cane.

Here’s hoping for more of the good days in 2023.

advice · fitness · goals · habits · motivation · new year's resolutions

Go Team 2023! Make Space.

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team!

I know you are probably saying, “Didn’t Christine say that she was done with the Making Space series and getting started on the Go Team series? Why is today’s post called ‘Make Space’?”

You’re right, I did say that. And it is true.

We’re done with the Making Space series for now and this is, indeed, the first ‘Go Team!’ post.

However, it’s ALSO true that before you can add new things into your life, you need to make space for them or everything else is going to get jumbled.

Note: For the record, it’s TOTALLY ok not to be taking on anything new or changing anything up this month. Some people *like* the whole new year ritual but if it makes you feel pressured or upset? Ignore it completely. Please be kind to yourself, no matter what.

You don’t need a huge idea.

You don’t need a crystal clear plan.

You don’t need to make sweeping, drastic changes.

You can just have a vague idea, a mere suggestion of a direction that you *might* want to move towards and you can begin to explore it by considering how the early, smallest steps might fit into your life.

For example, if you want to begin a meditation practice, you could ‘make room’ today by deciding what time of day would make sense for the smallest version of your practice.

Let’s imagine that you will start with 1 minute of meditation.

Where can you reliably find 1 minute most days?

When boiling the kettle? When sitting in your car before going to work? Right before your lunch? Right before bed?

Maybe you’ll want to give that one minute practice a whirl today but maybe you can consider your efforts to make space as your practice for today.

For most of us, changing or creating habits often depends on small, steady movements forward (and a few steps back and then moving forward again) rather than trying to magically transform ourselves in an instant.

It’s ok to count every part of developing your habit as part of the habit itself.

There are many steps involved in making change and the more steps that you can celebrate, the better.

Good luck! Be kind to yourself!

Go Team!

Here’s your gold star for your efforts today:

a drawing of a gold star happy face outlined in green, surrounded ​by gold and green dots
Image description: a drawing of a gold star happy face outlined in green, surrounded by gold and green dots.

fashion · fitness

Sam’s new year commitment: No buying continues

Sam B4 Comments
A year without buying clothes, shoes, purses, jewelry…Can Sam do it?

I’m reupping my no shopping commitment in face of failing during the post holiday sales. I didn’t quite make it through the holiday shopping without buying a few things for myself either.

I now own a pair of very sturdy and warm Canadian made black ankle boots that I can wear to work. I’m extra afraid of falling this year with my knee still in recovery. These have nice soles with serious treads. I do own snow boots but the snow boots are too warm and clunky for merely traipsing between buildings.

In the boxing day sales (online, I wouldn’t go to a store the day after Christmas) I impulse bought a red and black plaid jacket. Luckily rather than decide the no shopping year was over and I could go wild, after that I decided to start again and continue on. That’s my approach to streaks and failures of all sorts.

I also got some things I’m not buying as gifts for Christmas. I now have a new warm and fuzzy bathrobe, new PJs, slippers, and a fun two pom pom hat. Thanks Sarah. Thanks mum!

Sam snow shoeing in pink

But now it’s the new year, the no shopping challenge is back on. Here in the blog community Martha has been joining in on the no shopping challenge since the summer. Tracy is joining in for 2023.

The challenge has certainly made me think more about what I need. I have two black wool dress coats, one short and one knee length, that need replacing. I’m keeping a list for next year and even then will work on being more thoughtful and deliberate about my purchases.

I liked this Globe and Mail piece on making do, which is neither all about minimalism and capsule wardrobes and more about careful choices and repairing what you have, rather than continually searching for better and buying more.

Here’s the big picture problem,

“Our bloated culture of consumption extends far beyond clothing. Each year, Canadian adults spend about $9,000 for consumer packaged goods – about twice as much as 25 years ago. We replace our smartphones every 25 months. We swap out TVs like toothbrushes. We browse for Instant Pots, pet-hair-removal gloves and spa bath pillows when we’re at dinner, when we’re driving and when we’re drunk. Shopping isn’t just convenient; it’s inescapable. The shiny and new is seldom more than a click and a day away.

Unsurprisingly, we are drowning in stuff. Despite the average Canadian home doubling in size over the past generation – and family size shrinking – the self-storage industry is booming, with nearly 3,000 jam-packed facilities nationwide. And that’s just the stuff we keep: Landfills are overflowing. China has stopped taking much of our recycling. Africa is refusing our used clothing. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one-and-a-half times the size of Ontario – and growing. Worse yet, we are spending money we don’t have: The average Canadian has about $30,000 of non-mortgage debt. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it best: “Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.”

And here’s the making do approach explained.

“Making do is about taming the reflex to discard, replace or upgrade; it’s about using things well, and using them until they are used up. Taken literally, it simply means making something perform – making it do what it ought to do.

If Marie Kondo delights in discarding, making do is about agonizing over it, admitting that we probably should not have bought that thing in the first place. Instead of thanking our outgoing goods for their meagre service, per Ms. Kondo, making do means admonishing ourselves for being so thoughtless in the first place. Ditching something costs us, ecologically and cosmically; it should sting. And it should teach us to think more carefully about the real value of things.”

What’s your approach to shopping these days?

Now I know you might be wondering what the fitness tie in is to this topic. Partly it’s because sports clothes are one area where I over shop. I own a lot of workout gear for cycling and the gym. Partly it’s about mental health. Shopping isn’t the worst stress relieving activity out there but the too much stuff in my house makes me feel worse even if the shopping temporarily makes me feel better. Finally, there’s the feminism and the environment tie-in which is mattering to many of us more and more.

I’ve started making lists of things I’m tempted to buy so I can think about it when this year is over. Are these things I need, will they improve my life in some way, or are they just amusing?

So what I am not buying? Definitely I’m not making some impulse purchases on the internet. Today for example I’m not buying this hoodie, modelled on the Nazgul, from Lord of the Rings. I’m pretty sure it falls on the merely amusing side of things.

Nazgul hoodie