I have reached the end of Phase II of my experiment and I am declaring it a success.
No. I didn’t manage to do a warm up before each walk.
And I didn’t manage to organize my days to make it easier to do a warm up.
Instead, I have successfully discovered that I don’t want to keep trying to make this work.
Yes, success on your own terms really does have a lot going for it.
ANYWAY!
Just like my efforts from the week before, last week’s attempts at trying to warm up before I walked the dog meant that I ended up delaying my walk and stressing the dog out.
As a bonus, I also ended up feeling annoyed about the whole thing.
And while it may come as a shock to hear this, annoyed is NOT the feeling I am going for when it comes to taking a walk.
When I had this idea two weeks ago, I was trying to make sure that I got ‘more’ out of my walk. It’s my most consistent form of exercise and I wanted to increase my efforts cardio-wise so I could ensure that I was challenging myself – especially on days when I didn’t have time for other exercises.
It definitely seemed like a good idea and when my first week didn’t work out because of general life chaos (and a few sick days), I reframed the experiment and tried to focus on picking a specific time for my walks so I could include time for my warm-up.
But when that didn’t work out either, I gave it a bit more thought and I realized that trying to intensify things was taking the fun out of my walk.
My walk is usually a relatively relaxing part of my day. I’m not always super keen on having to go out in bad weather and sometimes it’s a challenge to jam it into my day, but once I am actually out there, I never regret it.
I listen to a book or to a podcast or just to the sounds around me and I stroll along with Khalee, taking things in. I usually feel the tension drop out of my shoulders as I amuse myself by watching herself sniffing her way along.
Occasionally it’s a bit dull and it’s usually not much of a physical challenge but maybe that’s asking too much of my daily stroll.
Maybe instead of trying to make my walk more intense I could just decide to enjoy the experience of being outside with Khalee, observing the way things change from day to day and week to week and catching up on podcasts and books.
So, it took me two weeks to determine this but it turns out that my experiment wasn’t ‘Does a 5 minute warm-up help me have a more exercise-y walk?’ and it wasn’t ‘How can I make it easier to do a warm-up before I walk?’ it was ‘Will the effort of trying to do a 5 minute warm-up before my walk add something positive to my day?’
And the answer to that is a resounding NO.
Sure, you could look at this revised-revised experiment and say that I didn’t try hard enough or that I didn’t give it enough time or that I didn’t organize it well but all of those conclusions ignore the key finding from this single participant study:
I don’t *actually* want to work on adding a 5 minute warm-up.
What I wanted was to have my walk serve more than one purpose – a walk AND a specific type of exercise.
BUT since trying to add intensity was decreasing enjoyment, I feel totally comfortable in ditching my warm-up plan.
So, instead, I’m going to follow my usual non-plan impulse-related approach for my walks and I will get more cardio in other ways.
I’ll work on being more consistent with my other forms of exercise.
And if consistency gets too hard then I’m just going to keep starting over – I’ve got lots of practice at that.