I recently (about a month ago) introduced high intensity, puke-inducing, balls to the walls prowler sled pushes into my 3 times a week routine strength training sessions.
First week it felt like I could have found a new method for suicide! I kept on going, kept on pushing out those 7 rounds of 25 meters (each way).
Second week, I am sleeping better, my joint pains have all but disappeared. I can feel a huge difference in the way I walk. Walking has become faster, more deliberate such as lifting feet clear off the floor and even walking faster in public spaces without feeling shortness of breath.
Week three - I suddenly feel my mood, my speech and my thoughts have improved. Energy levels are high and I'm listening to music again, enjoying the small things again. I've phoned old friends I lost contact with many years ago for catch up coffee and I no longer have my usual thick-as-fog shameful sense of depression that I wake up with. It's there, but it doesn't intrude constantly like it used to. (I have tried meditation but I found it too difficult.)
I don't know how long this will last but I am almost certain that the high intensity blood pumping full body workout prowler sled pushes are the shit.
I cant second this enough. I echoed a lot of the same enthusiasm initially when getting into crossfit-style exercises but have slowly realized that heavy barbell/weight exercises is not that great for 5x a week training. I used to wear myself out to the point that my joints were aking so much that I had to take 1-2 weeks off just to come back to my old volume lifts. Its very easy to get too enthusiastic and it hurts more and more the older you are.
This and physical risks is a common problem. You feel great and keep pushing yourself harder. Without experience it's a pitfall one should be aware of.
I firmly believe that PE in high school is the most important class you'll ever take. Getting to know the limits of your body and learning to push and exhaust yourself is probably one of the most important lessons in life. PE teachers face a big challenge in making this as fun and rewarding as possible. But if they succeed their students will be rewarded with lower mortality, higher mental fitness and lower chances of serious injuries for the rest of their lives.
I blame school PE for giving me a distaste for exercise that took years to get past as an adult.
(edit: if you find yourself in this situation, possible solutions include unusual sports, or in my case getting a heart rate monitor and going for a run without putting yourself too close to your max heart rate. The bad things about school sports are the competitiveness, the uniforms, the lack of choice, the weather, and the lack of adaptation to your own ability)
This. I'm fully aware that I should improve my health for many reasons. But my every experience with physical activity tells me I will feel pain, discomfort, and personal embarrassment in large degrees. (Every experience I can actually recall. I know as a child I was perfectly happy running around - but that is not what it feels like now and I can't recall the feeling then. I know PE classes created negative associations, and those I CAN recall. In horrifying detail.
Everyone that talks about the good feeling you get afterwards either has different physiology, feels pain to a lower degree, or just has a better willpower + long term view. Regardless, such advice just feels like a dodge or an attack. Meanwhile, while my brain KNOWS healthy is better, the consequences just don't FEEL real, so it is far easier to procrastinate. All of which makes activity MORE painful, MORE uncomfortable, and MORE embarrassing (because I'm more out of shape), so it's the opposite of a virtuous cycle.
My issues today are a combination of time (in addition to disliking the activity, I'm disliking the opportunity cost), discomfort, fear, and boredom (if I have nothing to focus on all I end up focusing on is my discomfort. If I have something to focus on, I'll instinctively stop doing things that make it harder to focus, such as movement, which means I have to start focusing on the bad parts again). I know (again, from experience) that I can feel better with more exercise eventually - but it takes weeks at a minimum, involves a lot of discomfort, is easily lost, and has not yet been a strong feeling (though I've never had any activity I maintained for more than 3 months, and that rarely).
All of which sounds like excuses...and are. But they are also real obstacles I need to find a work around for, because willpower and logic alone have clearly not sufficed.
> Everyone that talks about the good feeling you get afterwards either has different physiology, feels pain to a lower degree, or just has a better willpower + long term view.
My experience is that I don't feel good after exercise at first. I have to keep it up for multiple weeks, until my body actually gets fit enough that I can pass some inner threshold of a Real Workout, and get my reward of a happy kind of exhaustion.
I'm currently out of shape and fighting to try and get myself to go exercise regularly enough that this happens again. It's not easy.
Keep going. It took some experimenting for me to realize what kind of strength training and cardio I liked. Try different things until you find something that is tolerable and then take it to the next level.
You just need to find that dopamine-reward cycle that keep you motivated until it gets to a point where doing that exercise becomes a way of life.
I say this as a person that has felt those things more than anyone.
I don't hate exercising, I hate the word, I hate the connotations and my history with it. I hated being overweight and as a result hated exercising.
Your making not making excuses, your brain is just making a rational judgement about the return your getting from that exercise. It might be looking for health benefits, but your brain wants the dopamine reward from the action. You need to get something emotional satisfying with the form of exercise you are doing. So you are going to have to find something fun, challenging but more importantly a short reward for that energy you put into exercising.
I think this is an interesting part. I've absolutely never felt embarrassed working out (no matter how out of shape I am), only about not exercising.
Exercising, for me, involves something of a Stoic (capital S) mentality: discomfort sucks, but it's temporary, and you can accept or even enjoy that aspect. It'll fade into the background soon enough.
Some people like to push themselves, others want the social aspect of team activities, some need a competitive aspect. Maybe the best option is working out with a friend you'd hate to disappoint by not showing up. Figure out what you can use to push yourself, and an activity that you don't hate much. Exploit your own psychology.
I have similar experiences in the broad strokes, but for me it's more that:
1) I don't feel anything interesting during exercise. I feel vague pressure and tension in roughly the expected places for a given movement, but that's about it. I don't get the sense that my body is actually doing anything in response to that movement.
2) If I make any attempt at actual intensity instead of literally just going through the motions (which does not do much to alleviate point #1), I often end up with some weird injury that flares up over the next week or two, even when nothing seemed to go wrong. Getting "brain fog" for hours after the exercise is also pretty common.
I suspect this is something to do with a broader interoception deficit (I also have trouble gauging hunger/fullness, thirst, tiredness, illness etc.), but it's hard to find any reliable information about that sort of problem. Most sources basically just tag it as an autism spectrum symptom and don't bother actually examining it.
A few things that may help. Do 2 months of consistent 3-5 times 1 hour moderate cardio a week. This will prepare your body for the more intense exercise you can start doing after the 2 months are up.
Don't wait until you are thirsty. Drink a mouthful of isotonic drink every 10 to 15 minutes minimum regardless of how you feel. Same for nutrition. Take a protein recovery shake immediately after you work out and then eat your meals normally. Also drink plenty of water after you exercise.
> Do 2 months of consistent 3-5 times 1 hour moderate cardio a week. This will prepare your body for the more intense exercise you can start doing after the 2 months are up.
Maybe I wasn't clear about this: I don't know how to maintain a consistent intensity when exercising. I don't have any particular awareness of my heart rate or respiration rate going up unless I stop and literally count. I don't have any sense of how fatigued I am until a good 15-30 minutes after I'm done, and even then it's quite vague.
I can relate to that to some extent. A good rule of thumb that I try to apply to weights is to pick a weight where can do 8 reps but where 10 would fatigue me. Same thing, if its cardio, I try to pick a pace where if I run for 10 minutes, I will need to rest. These two tricks help me at least improve my health incrementally.
Try paying attention to your respiration while running. Attempt to maintain a pace that is possible while only breathing through your nose. (This pace may be walking, which is fine.) This is less about proprioception and more about paying attention to what your exertion demands from your body and finding a pace/respiration equilibrium.
> Try paying attention to your respiration while running.
As I already tried to explain upthread (this seems to be a pattern), I have tried, and I don't know how to do those things at the same time. I can stop and count my breaths, but the sensation is so indistinct that it becomes difficult to keep track of when I'm doing anything else.
Just to weigh against the sibling comment, if you're struggling to get into it then avoid pain at all costs and go for things that don't feel like work. Getting the benefits of moderate exercise absolutely does not require pain.
Maybe I can offer personal insight here: finding comfort in discomfort, pleasure in pain and motivation in embarrassment really is the key, at least to me.
I've struggled with the opportunity cost of exercise, too. What I realised, though, was that I didn't really apply that same criteria to other things in my life. For example, I'd happily browse hacker news without worrying about the opportunity cost of that activity. The issue was that I saw one activity (browsing hacker news) as valuable, and one activity (exercise) as not.
I decided I had to first decide whether exercise was valuable to me. If I came to the conclusion that it wasn't, then I could forget about it completely and never worry about it again. I sense that you're still not completely convinced that exercise isn't a valuable activity, so I'd suggest continuing to apply logic to this problem until you know for certain.
My first step was to list out the pros and cons. Cons, it turned out, were just a few: time, a little bit of money, and temporary discomfort. Pros were significantly more: less pain as I age, more mobility as I age, more strength in case I need to lift things or climb over something one day, increased courage that comes with having a stronger body, increased courage from facing my fear of going to the gym, increased discipline, increased persistence, defeating a part of myself that's eaten away at me for too long, etc.
By doing that, I'd decided for myself that exercise was a valuable thing for me to do. I'd encourage you to do the same thing, and see if you come to the same conclusion. Once you find your own reasons for doing something, doing that thing becomes easier. Lifting weights because of some vague idea that it's good for you is a difficult thing to maintain. Lifting weights because it's a personal exercise in courage and discipline, for example, makes it way more likely to stick.
I'd also like to offer a tip on starting to exercise: start small. All my failed attempts at starting a gym routine in the past happened because I tried to make too big of a change too quickly. Instead of starting a whole new diet and exercise routine, I'd recommend finding ONE exercise that you'd like to get better at, and attempting to increase your numbers in that exercise over time. That's all. For me, it was the pullup. For you, it might be the pushup, or the squat, or the overhead press. It just needs to be something that you can increase over time. I started off being able to do just one pullup, and increased that number significantly over the next couple of months (here's another tip for increasing your reps of an exercise: google 'greasing the groove'). The great part of this approach is that the opportunity cost is extremely small — it takes maybe 10 minutes out of every day. So if you do decide that you want to try exercising again, I'd encourage you to forget complicated routines or schedules for now. Start as small as possible with a single activity, and focus on increasing the number over time.
Totally agree. I hated school PE. As a smaller and rather introverted kid, I didn't fit in the team sports that were imposed to us most of the time. But I loved sports outside school (started Judo when I was seven).
And, in my part of Texas, we call the lil roads next to highways as "feeders" where I've never met someone else that uses that word. And I suspect that nobody cares.
Another testimony. I already play/played several sports.
Unfortunately, school PE focused on team and socially popular sports. Here that meant things like rugby, afl, soccer, basketball, etc. Sports I had and continue to have no interest in and due to not really getting a growth spurt until about 15-16, really wasn't built for.
And even when we did then do a fortnight of say "racquet sports", what was the point when you could beat the teacher and everyone else. PS: I still remember I got a B for that.
Luckily I was already active, so I had the benefit of NOT being turned off physical activity by school PE, but god damn did I despise that class, and so did almost everyone else I know that didn't already play the anointed games.
Never heard a good review of school PE until earlier post...
Please also firmly believe in funding these endeavors. It's becoming increasingly intractable to argue for equitable resources outside of activities not directly related to STEM. We're struggling to reach parity even with focus solely on STEM fields. Public schools around the country are always teetering on the edge of losing their PE, art, music, history and civics classes.
We keep electing people that don't care. People that want to redirect funding to private institutions that limit access. The latest tax bill turned 509 education savings plans into a tax-evasion vehicle for parents sending their kids to private schools. It also penalizes states that use state income tax to more equitably fund schools.
My PE experiences ruined me for years. I came away from them thinking that exercise and sports were pretty much evil and for bad people. This was through multiple classes, years, and "coaches."
I think the core thing is that PE should require more individualized attention than most classes. Different people's bodies are made for different things. Forcing kids into team sports that they're not built for just to make them suffer and "build character" just teaches them to hate physical activity.
PE class taught you the limits of your body? I really miss that hockey game with the giant whiffleball and the tree gym thing in middle school but my main life takeaway from PE class was to wear deodorant when surrounded by a large group of women
I never thought about that. I realized math class kills lots of people learning about math, art class makes a lot of people dislike art. I guess its only natural PE makes people hate exercise.
Your high school PE class helped you get to know the limits of your body?! What did you do in PE class? We did things like roller skating, go bowling, etc. It was all about having fun.
We mostly played soccer. But there were running days and the occasional 12 minute run (which was really exhausting). There were also one or two compulsory lessons where we had to work on the parallel bars and the same also for gymnastics on the horizontal bar. And lastly there was a school wide track and field day, which we had to practice for. We had 4 hours of PE each week.
Run laps with someone with a stopwatch timing you.
The "Pacer" test.
Either play basketball, just slowly walk circles around the gym while chatting with your friends, or secretly hide under the bleachers and hang out.
We were either doing things like running a couple miles when we'd never done that before so it felt horrible or we were screwing off and passing the time.
I feel a bit silly that, for most of my life, I figured that I could eat whatever I wanted all the time, never exercise, and live a mostly unhealthy lifestyle, and it wouldn't affect my brain.
I've never believed in a mind-body separation, so the fact that it took me 25 years to figure out that there might be some effect is quite silly; the brain is an organ, and like anything else in your body, and if you don't take care of your body, it will be affected.
The good news is that I realized this early enough and try and eat a bit healthier (though admittedly I don't exercise as much as I should).
What would be the best advice for a healthy diet when it comes to the (aging) brain?
It's easy to find a lot of advice by searching, e.g. [1], but how do we know which advice is solid?
Also, there are many dietary-supplements (e.g. resveratrol, phosphatidylcholine, etc), but which really work?
Finally, does it make sense to do genetic testing (e.g. 23andme), and support your "weak" genes (SNPs) through diet? Or is that approach a health-fad, unlikely to work in practice?
https://examine.com is a great resource for supplements and nutrition backed by research studies.
As for diet, the best, simplest advice, imo, is a wide variety of whole natural foods:
Leafy greens (spinach, arugula, kale, etc)
Nuts (almonds, walnuts, cashews, etc)
Protein (salmon, fish, chicken, no processed red meats like pepperoni/ham/bacon)
Other veggies like sweet potatoes, avocados, carrots
Fruits (apples, bananas, berries)
Mushrooms, onions, garlic, olives
dark chocolate
beans/hummus
Multivitamin if you think you may be malnourished. Don't skip breakfast.
For breakfast, look for protein & fat. (Bacon & eggs). With butter. A small amount of carbs is okay, but watch the toast (grains) & jam (refined sugar). Tea/Coffee with cream, if you like. The protein and fat will help with satiety and avoid a big carb/sugar insulun spike.
I wouldn't bother with genetic testing or obscure supplements until you feel like you have the basics covered, and have found a lean, stable body weight.
If my anecdote can counter your (healthy) skepticism, I ran the "who needs breakfast?" experiment on myself as a high schooler. I regret it. I was constantly dizzy/lethargic in the morning, despite eating well in the rest of the day. (Of course, you can point to the differences between a teenager and an adult person.)
I have the opposite anecdote: If I ate breakfast, I was tired/lethargic/falling asleep until the afternoon - but if I skipped breakfast, I was alert and awake until dinner time.
I'm no nutritionist, so I can't speak with any kind of authority; I've mostly just cut out fried food entirely, as well as most meat (except special occasions), and eat a lot more vegetables. I have no idea if it's the healthiest way to live, but I think it's certainly a positive delta.
Calculate your calories requirements, split it among carbs, protein and fat as 5:4:1,eat 5 times a day, exclude any junk food. Cook your meal on steam every day if possible.
My mom subtly encouraged me to do her VHS aerobics routine alongside her when I was a kid, but with no pressure. I was therefore more open to the idea of trying out weightlifting in high school. I was then more open to checking out a gym membership (or three) in my 20s. I accordingly found it easier to shell out for a home weight bench & stationary bike in my 30s.
After a (typical) February backslide, I finally got my first workout all month done this morning, it's the best I've felt in weeks. Fortunately I'm still in better shape than I was a year ago. The benefits become increasingly clearer over time. I often quit for longer than I should, but I keep coming back. Anyway, thanks, Mom!
The most important factor in maintaining fitness for life seems to be how long one can maintain the exercise activity. This is a major reason why I am a transportation cyclist. I don't own a car, am too cheap to use ride-sharing frequently, and dislike buses, so I have no choice but to ride almost everywhere.
No excuses are valid. Don't feel like it? Doesn't matter. I don't want to ride most mornings. Cold weather or rain? Too bad, no choice still. Sick? Take a day off for your health.
Several people I have met seem to think riding as often as I do requires superhuman willpower. But I am no more successful at maintaining other exercise in my life. I used to run more regularly, but I haven't had the time for a while. So I understand how difficult maintaining an exercise habit is. That's why I leave nothing to chance.
If you can organize your day such that exercise is unavoidable, do it.
(And it doesn't need to be cycling. Walking to work is good too, though much more time consuming and lower intensity. I also think doing exercise in a group with social costs for skipping out is good, though not as unavoidable as transportation cycling.)
I suffered a life threatening infection in December. I have since started taking health seriously. I am nearly 39 and I can run a 28 minute 4 mile and a 12:30 2 mile even though I have asthma.
It also makes you substantially more physically attractive, which can be a welcome change or a nuisance, depending on your goals.
I found it somewhat offensive to learn firsthand how incredibly shallow people really are. Fit men are constantly flirted with by women, unfit, not so much.
It's obvious in hindsight, and doesn't really bother me anymore.
How is that offensive? Fit women are also flirted with more than unfit women by men of all levels of fitness. Being fit is a positive quality to look for in a mate, and it's one of the few that you can tell at first glance. Congrats on getting more fit though!
This is a little difficult to explain, especially without appearing crass or it coming across as a humble brag or something like that.
Let's just say in the USA there's a strong culture of denial and reinforcement surrounding being unfit and/or overweight. If you live long enough surrounded by that environment, you start believing it yourself and being part of it.
So when I started making changes without any specific goal of changing my appearance, I was just trying to make myself stay youthful longer for quality of life reasons, the appearance stuff was a necessary side effect. It was pretty jarring to have women agressively flirting with me since it was completely unfamiliar territory, nor part of my goals, and a lot of those lies this culture surrounds what are arguably unwell people with just kind of shattered: yes looks matter, yes I was previously unattractive, yes people are shallow, no your girlfriend saying weight doesn't matter on guys is not being honest, etc.
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One of my friends married a Chinese woman, and I was visiting where they live (now in the US) for a couple months. We hung out when I first arrived, and I was in really excellent shape with well-fitting clothes. Just in the course of a couple months spending time in a different area, with a drastically different (unhealthy) food culture, and generally taking less care of myself, I must have put on 10-15 lbs.
The next time we hung out, the first thing that came out of his wife's mouth when she saw me was "you're getting fat!"
Americans don't do this, and it's a disservice to everyone. I was not bothered, and it made me laugh, knowing it was just a temporary condition. But this is damn important feedback for people to hear rather than letting everyone exist in total denial enabling further self-neglect.
I've had a number of experiences like this with Chinese women, their culture is a lot different in this regard. Americans tend to see it as rude, I see it as necessary, and really appreciate the honest unsolicited feedback.
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There was just some adjustment that needed to take place. It's learning you've been lied to for a very long time by many people to the point you were lying to yourself. Kind of similar to the atheist rage that commonly occurs when someone raised in some religion realizes everyone growing up was lying to them the moment they discovered it's all fiction.
Then there's the challenge of simply acclimating to having all this attention from the opposite sex when previously there was none. Depending on your personality, this can be quite a burden and stressful. I miss the freedom to just go out and be ignored everywhere I go. It's not something I predicted losing when I started taking better care of myself. But when you're fit, and I'm not even talking like some body builder or anything - unfortunately in the USA it doesn't take very much effort to be well above the average fitness - people give you substantially more attention.
I'm nothing special. All it seems to take is doing a few hundred pushups every day and eating copious amounts of produce, for years. People get all hung up on spending hours exercising, seriously just spend a dozen minutes a day on lots of pushups every damn day and you'll get most of the benefits exercise has to offer in my experience.
But be warned, socially, I've found it's a mixed bag.
I've found that professionally it can be a mixed bag as well. I'm in pretty good shape physically and I take care to wear clothes that fit me well, even going so far as to have my shirts and blazers altered. I've found that displaying what would otherwise be considered positive and confident body language, coupled with a fit, muscular physique tends to make people assume I'm arrogant and overconfident without having exchanged a single word. In the average workplace where your ability to do your job well takes a back seat to being able to deftly navigate a politically charged environment, this will cause you to be isolated very quickly. It took me a very long time to understand what was happening, because I just couldn't believe it. It made absolutely no sense. Still, I wouldn't change a thing.
just to be clear, by "politically charged environment", I'm referring to office politics, not politics in terms of our government
Adopting a more active lifestyle will benefit you in nearly every way possible, mentally and physically, both immediately and in the long term.
We did not spend millions of years evolving to be inactive, sedentary, or slow. We are not sloths, tortoises, plants, or mushrooms. We are an apex predator optimized for frequent mobility and efficient travel over long distances for extended periods of time. Perhaps if we spend a few more million years sitting constantly while over-consuming garbage foods, we will evolve into blobs of fat and cartilage surrounding a central brain.
I recently started going to the gym for yoga, cardio classes, or just walking on an inclined treadmill for about 2 hours per day. This has been the best I've felt in life. I don't mind doing this for the rest of my life. The quieting of mind from yoga really helps me step back and see things from a higher viewpoint (like not being stuck in a local minimum).
Out of curiosity (because I would like to organize my day to be able to fit 2 hours of exercise each day) how is your typical day structured? Between work, commute, personal projects, grocery shopping, appointments, cooking, and sleep, I barely have enough time to fit 1 hour/day 3-4 times a week. Weekends are the exception, but I'd like to be able to have more flexible time during the week.
I identified that transition cost to exercise (for me, personally) is a barrier to exercise. Scheduling it, driving to somewhere, etc. all eat time and motivation.
I try to work around this instead by just running near where I live. After I get home, I change clothes and jump out the house for 30-45min of just running. Transition cost is just changing clothes and I'm active for the full time. This way it feels much more productive.
I get what you mean. I have a simple gym in my apartment complex that probably saves me about 5 minutes in transition from going to the gym that I paid for a membership to. I end up only using my gym membership about once a week because I don't feel like taking the 5 minutes to make use of the extra equipment that I am paying money to use.
I’ve been making myself get up around 6am to take 1 or 2 classes at the gym. After work, I go for an hour for yoga or just watch something on my iPad Pro while walking on an inclined treadmill.
I think the key is to sleep early and get up early. Also, watching shows at the gym instead of at home helps.
Yeah, I'm currently trying to switch my workouts to the morning, which has been giving me some difficulty because I'm too used to my schedule. Thanks for the info, I'll be a little stricter with shifting my schedule now.
I take 1.5 hour training twice a week. With prep, commute etc. It was 8 hours total per week. After a few months I slept noticeably better and got up one hour earlier. So essentially broke even on time available per week, but feel a lot better.
I recently (about a month ago) introduced high intensity, puke-inducing, balls to the walls prowler sled pushes into my 3 times a week routine strength training sessions.
First week it felt like I could have found a new method for suicide! I kept on going, kept on pushing out those 7 rounds of 25 meters (each way).
Second week, I am sleeping better, my joint pains have all but disappeared. I can feel a huge difference in the way I walk. Walking has become faster, more deliberate such as lifting feet clear off the floor and even walking faster in public spaces without feeling shortness of breath.
Week three - I suddenly feel my mood, my speech and my thoughts have improved. Energy levels are high and I'm listening to music again, enjoying the small things again. I've phoned old friends I lost contact with many years ago for catch up coffee and I no longer have my usual thick-as-fog shameful sense of depression that I wake up with. It's there, but it doesn't intrude constantly like it used to. (I have tried meditation but I found it too difficult.)
I don't know how long this will last but I am almost certain that the high intensity blood pumping full body workout prowler sled pushes are the shit.
Highly recommended.