I don’t normally have specific exercise goals. I just have a commitment to exercise 3 to 4 times per week, to get stronger, and to generally support healthy aging. Actually, I suppose they are exercise goals! What I mean is, I don’t normally have a defined thing that I want to achieve like wanting to run x distance in under x minutes, or wanting to do x lift at x weight. I just kind of keep at whatever type of exercise I’m doing at the moment, and then switch up when I get bored. This year was different. This year I wanted to get one pull-up. I have not been able to do pull-ups since I dislocated my shoulder in my mid-twenties. I have sporadically tried to get a pull-up for the last decade, but I never seemed to get close to achieving it. So I would give up after a while
Earlier this year, I wrote about my achilles tendinopathy which was caused by wearing Vivobarefoot shoes. I still have the tendinopathy and am now on the waiting list for shockwave therapy. Please don’t wear barefoot shoes. Learn from my mistake and don’t wear barefoot shoes. I actually had this conversation with a newbie convert recently. He was devoutly proselytising that our feet are evolutionarily ‘designed’ to be barefoot, so wearing shoes which mimic this state can’t be bad for us. Yes, young padawan, but whilst our feet are designed to be barefoot, they’re not designed to be barefoot on tarmac or concrete, which is what most of us spend our outdoor time walking on. They’re designed to be barefoot on grass, sand, soil, and and other natural materials: materials which all have some ‘give’ in them. In my experience, those of us who live in urban environments need more cushioning in
Earlier this week, I was helping a woman with some basic calisthenics exercises in the park. She saw me doing some bar work and asked for help. She is eight years younger than me, and started exercising this year. She runs 4-5 times per week, including the park run, but she isn’t getting the results she wants, both in terms of how she looks and how she feels. Aside from the fact that she is running too much and needs to concentrate more on strength training to build muscle mass, the crazy thing is that she knows exactly why she is failing to meet her goal: her diet. She knows very well that you can’t out run a bad diet, but yet she still can’t stop herself eating loads of cake. (Her words.) Then she said that I must have good willpower. This really stuck with me as I don’t perceive
I enjoy experimenting with my diet, as my umpteen posts on the subject illustrate. I learnt the term ‘bio-hacking’ recently, and I suppose I am low level doing that in my quest to feel the best I can feel. What I like the most, is seeing the variety of ways my body responds to different foods, positive and negative. I wish more people would do it: figuring out the best clean diet for yourself, plus adequate exercise, is simple preventative healthcare. The more you read about nutrition, the more you realise how shaky the foundations of this field are. For starters, most nutritional studies are observational studies, rather than interventional ones. This means that they rely on people self-reporting what they eat, and also cannot properly account for other factors in a person’s life which may be impacting on the results. So when they say ‘eat your leafy greens’, they aren’t
Despite my earlier commitment to stick with the carnivore diet for a full three months, I reluctantly started adding plants back in to my diet a few weeks ago. I got a spot/zit, and as that is a novel experience for me (I rarely get them, not even when I was a teen), I behaved like I was twelve and picked it. This resulted in a strange hypertrophic scar which persisted for a couple of weeks, something I have never experienced before. This suggested to me that I was deficient in something, likely the vitamins E and/or C. So, I reluctantly started adding in some plants to my diet. I genuinely felt incredible eating only animal-based foods. To recap, my mood was significantly improved (to the point that people asked me if I was high, to which I replied: HIGH ON MEAT!), my tendonitis, joint stiffness, and muscle tension went away