Mar 18, 2023
“Those who do not find time for exercise now will have to find time for illness.” -The Earl of Derby, 1873
Alan Thrall – Training 1x per week - To get started on excerise, go to the gym once per week. Do stuff that you like. Get used to it.
Mark Rippetoe – Training vs Exercise
Exercise is physical activity performed for the effect it produces today — right now. […] Exercise is physical activity done for its own sake, either during the workout or immediately after it’s through. Training is physical activity performed for the purpose of satisfying a long-term performance goal, and is therefore about the process instead of the workouts themselves.
Rapitude – The Best Deal in the World Right Now
I think most of the resistance boils down perceiving the cost as higher than it really is, and the rewards as smaller than they really are.
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In other words, the best deal in the world looks like a bad deal from the outside — i.e. when you’re not taking the deal. I’ll unpack that in an upcoming post, but for now I’ll say this much: the number one thing is to never do an exercise you truly hate.
TimeAndDate.com Yearly Calendar
A frequent problem for those who want to workout either do not know how to set goals or simply do not care about setting goals. This is a mistake. Goals are an integral component of an effective program, as they give guidance in structuring a workout plan. Sure, one can make progress without goals, but by setting high quality goals your performance increases will skyrocket. –Overcoming Gravity, p. 26
In the summer of 2023, I bought some gymnastics rings and hung them in my basement. (They’re a lot of fun. Mira and her toddler friends love playing on them.) However, after several months of working on them I began to develop persistent shoulder pain in my right shoulder. It would be triggered even on non-work-out days and last throughout the day. The only thing that seemed to help was extensive stretching and warm-up in the morning. Eventually, I had to stop working out on the rings. The pain persisted, even once I stopped working out.
I went to a chiropractor, who told me that I’d injured my rotator cuff.
This is a complex of muscles that allows the shoulder to rotate in a bunch of directions.
We figured out that I had damaged my supraspinatus and teres minor muscles.
My supraspinatus was previously injured due to wearing a heavy single-shoulder bag for many years.
These muscles had gone from doing essentially no work to stabilizing my body weight. It was a massive jump in stress on them. I hadn’t thought through what I was doing, and didn’t know why my shoulder hurt so much. So, I found myself in a position where I had to talk to a chiropractor about my shoulder.
The chiropractor prescribed some specific physiotherapy exercises, and they helped a great deal. The right shoulder now feels fine most of the time, and the injuries are healing. It looks like I’ll be able to resume something like normal workouts in a few months.
Lesson: if I’d talked to a doctor or chiropractor before playing with the rings, I would have saved myself a lot of time and pain.