Thursday, Day 14 - today I felt like I was beginning to lose a bit of motivation for completing the workouts and doing my mission for the month. In my head I started telling myself that I might have been wasting the opportunities I had for making a difference to my strength and fitness by just doing the workouts any old how, and that really I couldn’t be arsed any longer with the whole thing. When my mind starts talking to me like that it’s hard not to listen - I find the more I “think” about whether or not to do something like exercise or eat nutritiously, the more excuses I can make myself for why I shouldn’t or can’t do it - too tired, too hungry/full, wrong time of day, should be doing something else, don’t have the right clothes/shoes/underwear on etc etc.
One of my massive revelations over the last couple of years whilst clawing my way out of the adrenal fatigue fog was that obsessing over the preparation details with exercising doesn’t make any difference. You don’t get stronger just because you’re wearing the most perfectly designed shoes for that activity, and you don’t get fitter just because you’ve eaten a macro designed meal plan timed to perfection with your activity level each day. As a starting point you get fitter and stronger because you put in some time and effort consistently to move your body and challenge yourself with the right technique and varied movements. Once you’re a well honed machine and you need to refine your calorie consumption to perfectly align with your output or you need to see a nutritionist to fine tune your vitamin and mineral levels then maybe you can talk about being obsessive, but I’m talking to women who are pushed for time, and want to train smart and not mess around. This is a case of the Hare and the Tortoise - we need to be the Tortoise, to chip away at it consistently and with intelligence, that’s how we make changes, feel better, get energised and gain a fully functioning body. This is something we talk about a lot in the Love Movement Conditioning programme - how to look at your mindset around exercise, movement and self-care and how you can improve the way you approach these things.
So back to today, I felt like I just wanted to lie down and have a snooze, but really I had probably eaten too much bread for breakfast (I can’t deal with this European breakfast situation!). My kids were desperate to go for a swim in the lake and they were ready in flash before I’d even cleared up so thankfully my husband took them in. I have to say, if I hadn’t had this blog to keep me accountable I might not have done it, but I knew I didn’t have any time in the schedule to waste a day. I went with my current method of just going through the motions until my head caught up with what my body was doing - I believe that's called "fake it until you make it"? I’m sure you’ll recognise as well, once you’ve finished an exercise session you feel so much better than you might have started. I caught up with yesterday and did the strength and the circuit sessions one after each other.
Strength exercises:
1) Pull down (elbows out to side)
2) Row to press back
3) Walking legs in bridge with ball between knees
4) Get up/down with mini band @ knees
This exercise is important because being able to get up from the floor without using your hands or knees is a key factor in indicating life-expectancy. Take a look at info on it here.
Circuit exercises:
1) Squat to twist lunge (step out and twist into centre)
2) Chair back Spiderman knees
3) Press ups
4) Squat cross-jumps
5) Supine - Legs out (45 deg) to legs lift (reverse curl)
With exercises 2 and 3 you can see I’m pretty upright - I didn’t want to be, I should have tried harder to find something lower down, however when I was doing the exercises I just upped the intensity a load - so I did 25 perfect technique, fast press-ups rather than struggle doing 3 on the floor with crappy technique.