Today was an easy day:
- 5 min jump rope
- 3 rounds of burpees
- various rope climbs (horizontal pull ups, L climbs, quick pulls from floor to standing)
What did you do?
General
Fasting and short exercise rounds
The body will down regulate metabolism when food is in short supply. This means when you eat less, you will move less. It’s a survival mechanism to conserve energy. If one knows this, then one knows how to trick the body a bit by forcing the metabolism up.
Today’s set for me is fasting till sundown (last meal was last night’s dinner) and staying modestly active.
- 3 sets of 20 hindu pushups as sprints…30 sec rest in between
- 2 sets of turkish getups (5x with 12kg each for holding weight overhead with right arm and left arm)
I’ll continue to be active around the house drinking lots of water. Later today, I’ll finish up with a hike in the Marin Headlands with family, friends, and dogs. Dinner will be very, very welcome!
I can’t believe how good this works!
I haven’t posted in awhile. I’ve been focusing on other things and letting exercise be just 15 – 20 minutes of my day and not everything I think about. I don’t feel like I need to “think” about it anymore. I don’t need anymore studies or books to read. I really feel like I have found the “it” for health. Primal fitness or Evolutionary Fitness, whatever it’s called, is it. Eating vegetables, meat/fish, nuts and fruit (unprocessed) and little else while doing brief but intense exercise plus long walks has been incredible for me.
For the past 12 or so years, I had love handles and my cheeks have been full. Since I took this way of eating and exercising on, I can’t keep fat on. Love handles are gone. Cheeks are showing bone structure. I am thinking I actually want to taper back as I am getting veins showing around my lower abdominals and thighs. I can’t believe it. I do NOT need to do any “cardio” or watch my calories.
I’m pretty good about eating only what I mentioned above. Although, I will let 2 to 3 meals in a given week contain a pancake or a piece of pizza. It doesn’t seem to matter. The occasional beer doesn’t seem to matter either. It’s like my intense exercise, empties my body’s energy stores completely so whatever is left around is burned for fuel. The only danger I have found is over training. Sometimes I get into to doing air squats and will do five minute sessions say 4 times over the course of 7 sessions. That’s about two thousand squats in 2 weeks. That can tighten my hamstrings to the point of discomfort. I’ve got to watch the accumulation of intense movements and remember that variety is required. Apart from that, this stuff is total gold.
Advertising designed to make us feel inferior
I walked by a window of an unnamed fitness facility. On a mannequin, there was a shirt that said “Look better in the buff.” I guess it means people walking by don’t look as good as they could. It means they should be better than they are. It means by coming into the facility and buying the services, you will look better in the buff.
This shirt slogan is probably not a shirt someone would actually wear. It’s there for a purpose. It’s advertising. Clearly, it’s advertising. However, it’s actually pretty tacky advertising. I think tacky is a nice word. It’s designed to make people feel poorly about how they look. It’s designed to insert low self esteem. It’s designed to make someone feel poorly about themselves. After you feel poorly about your self esteem, you then will have a need to feel better about yourself. This is where the fitness facility comes in. For this reason it’s disgusting. They are creating a need where one might not be and they are using self esteem as the medium. Lame…, very lame.
How I learned to tell stories
I’m not sure I remember when I started telling stories. At first, my children started asking me about what happened to me when I was little. I suspected they were looking for stories of how I handled things or what might possibly be coming next for them. They couldn’t get enough of my childhood and I couldn’t remember enough. Most people who came near got the childhood story request as well.
I always enjoyed my father-in-law’s stories. He could tell some wild ones about a 12-foot half-man-half-chicken beast who looked terrible, but was really quite gentle. He lived under creek bridges and was responsible for much of what’s taken place in modern history. These were seriously creative and very outlandish. I certainly enjoyed them. No matter where he was, he could just go on about this chicken man beast.
I’ve always known about the importance of story telling with children. I held myself back for a while, but as my children’s behaviors began to ask for what the limits were or how to integrate into a new activity, the stories just started coming.
The first epic was when my girls started hounding me for barbie dolls. There was no way in Helo that I was going to let those infernal creations into our house. I started into a story about a big ugly green troll who made plastic dolls (which had less than honorable properties) and brought them into a town in order to sway the children from the good words of their parents and the good ol’ trusted toymaker who used natural materials. In the end (of the first chapter), the troll was found to be up to no good and the old toymaker convinced the towns people to give the troll a chance to put his toy making skills to good. He ended up carving wooden horses for the children. This proceeded on to larger horses that the children could ride on, and thus, the rocking horse. The troll found he felt much better doing good for the children of the town than being less than honorable. This story ended up going on for about 20 chapters.
Now, it’s easy to tell stories. Often when there’s an ideal to aspire to or a behavior to correct or a activity to begin, I can whip up a story and the girls hang on every word.