I thought I would elaborate on my fitness philosophy these days, since over-fitnessing is a real struggle for many of us. I used to exercise 2-3 hours per day, 6-7 days per week like it was my job. This caused: back pain, knee pain, foot pain, frequent injuries, poor sleep, raging hunger, binge episodes, bloating, weight gain, weakened immune function, constant colds, horrible moods, daily stress about how I was going to get it all done, and even more stress if I couldn't. Physically, the results were not awesome. I was always "struggling" with my weight. If I could restrict my food at the same time I was overtraining, I would briefly lose some weight but it was never sustainable. If I couldn't restrict the food (and I couldn't past a certain point), I would increase the exercise (ha!), which generally resulted in injury, illness, and binge urges rather than fat loss.
That's where I came from. It's not at all how I see it now. It has come to my attention that more exercise is not better. Better is better. In other words, if it's effective, it doesn't take all day.
It has also come to my attention that REST is the greatest workout performance enhancer of all time, NOT more exercise. All of the magic happens when you rest. No rest, no magic. Just broken stuff.
The biggest change in my philosophy came when I started exercising to feel fantastic. It was such a novel concept for a "no pain, no gain" person. I'm not exercising to burn calories, build muscle, lose fat, or impress bystanders. I'm exercising to be legitimately healthy, as opposed to feeling like roadkill in pursuit of a look. I'm training to add energy, not take it away, and to feel my very best.
There is no one right way to do that. Initially, I was strength training for about 20-30 minutes 3x per week, doing yoga once a week, and walking the dog every day. When I joined the ZGYM in 2014, I switched to daily 5-15 minute workouts. Initially, I was KILLING it every workout. If they're this short, I'd better make every second count! Faster, more weight, more reps, harder variations, extra rounds! That is uncalled for. LOL I learned quickly that doing that every day is not the way to go. Maybe one workout a week is all-out, super intense (and still under 15 minutes). Four workouts are medium intensity, phoning it in, going through the motions, watching TV and playing with the dog during sets. Two workouts are just yoga, stretching, foam rolling, OR under 5 minutes long. That is sustainable. That feels great. I've been thoroughly enjoying it for four years now with great results in terms of appetite, sleep, energy, mood, and fitness. There's no dread anymore. It's all fun and I always feel better afterward, not worse.
It's funny to me that I'm wearing a Fitbit again. I swore it off in 2012 or so when I found myself absolutely obsessed. I'd been "happy eating" for a while at that time, but I quickly slipped back into tracking food intake and energy expenditure, marching in place while I brushed my teeth, being unable to sit still, getting angry if I didn't hit my step goal. It was nuts. Back then, I took it off for my own safety and for the safety of those around me. When I started wearing one again a few years later, I was in this different "workout minimalist" headspace. What feels best? What is the least I can do? How can I use the Fitbit to improve sleep? Maximize recovery? Prevent overtraining? It was a VERY different mindset from "I'd better burn as many calories as possible so I can eat without getting fat."
Once I untangled food and exercise (and that took some doing), it was just a matter of eating and moving to feel my best, which in turn gave me fantastic results. My short little workouts are fun. I really look forward to them. I don't have a minimum step goal. I'm all about the "feel amazing" goal. Trying to hit an arbitrary number every day regardless of how I feel is counterproductive. I feel great first and look at the numbers later if at all. I do keep an eye on my sleep quantity and quality. Too much caffeine or staying up too late means I don't get enough deep sleep. Forcing myself awake too early compromises my REM sleep. If I eat too clean, my heart rate drops kind of freakishly low and I get cold. If I'm under unusual stress, getting sick, or not sleeping well, my resting heart rate starts to climb. So, the Fitbit increases my awareness and improves self-care. I see a change and get curious. What does this tell me? How can it help me?
Any thoughts? Questions? What is your minimum effective dose of exercise? Or have you found it yet?
From skwigg's journal:
(A related post on this topic as I'm going through old journal entries.)
I did 1-2 hour gym sessions, 3-4 days per week for 10 years (plus 1-2 hours of other stuff on non-gym days). I quit the gym in 2007 and never went back. When I first started training at home, I was still trying to bust out those hour-long workouts. I was still perpetually exhausted, injured, and burned out. I was still struggling with a seemingly out-of-control appetite. It wasn't until I slashed my daily workout time down to 15 minutes or so that I really started feeling amazing. I had plenty of energy for intense workouts and even more energy for moving around all day. Plus, my appetite became polite and cooperative instead of trying to kill me in my sleep.
More exercise is not better. Separating exercise from weight and calorie burn was life-altering. I exercise for joy, strength, speed, power, endurance, flexibility, health, mood, all the fun things. Weight is all about food. Weight has nothing to do with exercise or calorie burn. This really hit home for me in that old video of Brad Pilon eating pizza while Craig Ballantyne ran on a treadmill. It takes like 10 seconds to eat a thousand calories and a whole day of grueling exercise to burn them off. Doesn't it make more sense to manage things at the food end? And wouldn't it be easier to eat mindfully to satisfaction if you weren't STARVING from hours of grueling exercise?
Yes, it all slowly dawned on me. Then people like Josh Hillis, Dan John, Nia Shanks, and Zuzka Light really hit it home. Short, challenging workouts are more effective because they reduce your appetite and leave you plenty of energy for spontaneous movement throughout the day. They did not cause me to lose muscle, gain weight, or fall apart as I had feared. Still, when I tell people I do 15 minute workouts, they don't believe me, or they think I'm doomed to lose muscle or fitness. Nope! It's been working just great for years now. :-)
I did think it was kind of funny [@sunshine] that I created a post about minimalist fitness and then explained how I’m active 7 days a week. LOL But there is no comparison between 5-15 minute of varied-intensity playtime and 2-3 hours of smashing myself. The mood boost and endorphin buzz is real! If it’s all about feeling my best, exercise really makes my brain happy, as long as I’m eating enough and recovering. 5 minutes of heavy kettlebell swings, 15 minutes of yoga, or a walk outside on a beautiful morning all take my mood up about 10 notches. Being sedentary for days makes me mopey. I don’t mean anxious about muscle loss or afraid of weight gain, just depressed. Movement and mood go together for me, so it was a matter of figuring out how to move every day for maximum feel goodz and with no fallout from overtraining. This took awhile! If frequency is up there, then intensity and duration need to decrease, and food and sleep need to increase. I can relate to the feeling of addiction that comes from really overdoing it though. It’s similar to the buzz I used to get from the honeymoon phase of intermittent fasting. At first, I would feel like I was so focused and had so much energy. I thought I was invincible! Actually, I was just flooded with stress hormones. That state was never going to be sustainable or healthy. When I got used to the fireworks of overdoing it or undereating until I was “floaty,” I no longer noticed more subtle shifts in energy or mood. It’s just like with hunger and fullness. Diet long enough and it gets so you only recognize extreme hunger or painfully full. The subtleties are lost. They can be regained with both food and exercise though. With practice, you don’t need an hour of hard exercise to notice a mood boost or your stomach chewing on your spine to notice hunger. It’s been a twisty adventure sorting it out.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I definitely exercise more than is necessary for health. I understand that. When I started running as an adult back in 2001 the main reason was to get in shape. I ran my first marathon that year - basically couch to marathon - and did not get crazy skinny like I thought I would! But I kept it up and wasn't too obsessive about it. The 2000's was actually a pretty good period of happy eating for me. I was in my late 30's - late 40's and if I ran 30 miles a week then I could eat anything and I really didn't think about it too much. My crazy un-happy eating actually happened after I started running even more and thinking I needed to be at "race weight" and started restricting.
Anyway, I love running because I love the feeling of being in good enough shape to run around a volcano in a day. I love the places I can go and see while running. It helps to live in a really beautiful place with forests and mountains and miles of trails. I love the feeling of a high metabolism and being really hungry for my meals. I love the friends I've met in the trail/ultra running community.
That said, after my last long race in October I haven't had a huge desire to get back out there and run a lot. This despite it being the sunniest, warmest fall I can remember. Hiking has been really appealing. I still want to be in good enough shape that I can go out and run 20 miles in the forest with my friends whenever I want. But I'm thinking I need a little bit more balance in my life. I dunno, this may just be fall/winter speaking and once the new year comes I'll be raring to go again. Going to think on this and see where it leads me.
As anyone who has read my journal here at any point in time knows, I still haven’t found my minimum effective dose of exercise. Exercise is tricky for me. I think maybe I over produce endorphins when I exercise or something because it gets almost addicting to me. I had to give up running for that reason. The runners high was so addicting. I would run even if I felt like crap. I switched from running to just walking and weight training but still find that sometimes I’ll push myself to exercise just to get the endorphin rush afterwards.
I don’t know what changed but I’m back to having a weird relationship with my Fitbit and hitting an arbitrary number of steps each day not matter what. I had escaped that thinking for a while.
Mott I love the conversation you had with your husband about NEEDING to get back to the gym. I had a similar conversation with my sister several years ago when I was still going to a commercial gym and lifting really heavy. I’d come home all excited about some PR I had just hit and she’d very quickly bring me back to earth with realistic questioning: Why do you need to lift that much? what does that matter? It kind of made me realize that my motivation was just bragging rights and a fit looking body which was very superficial.
I’ve been really surprised what my minimum effective dose has been for fitness. 15-30 minutes of low-moderate intensity 5ish days per week. I actually do better with mostly easy work outs. I lift heavy one day per week. I have two medium strength sessions, usually only 30 minutes. Beyond that, I’m doing easy walks and yoga for relaxing. I feel great, and after 6 weeks, I am having some noticeable changes in muscle definition and strength.
I’ve found that my minimum effective dose of exercise is - none, haha. No exercise, lots of physical activity! For a long time, I thought that exercise-exercise, “workouts” were invariably necessary, and necessary every single day at the height of my compulsion (which lasted about 10 years!), and I was willing to sacrifice a lot of time, stress, relaxation, and money to make them happen. It was a half-forced transition out of that mindset, once the time, energy, and money were no longer even there to choose, about halfway through my second pregnancy. I fought it at first, but eventually I gave in. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised - maybe not much of a surprise since I’ve followed Skwigg and others here cutting back - that I’ve experienced very little...maybe no negative effects at all as I did less and less, and the compulsion and vague discomfort of feeling not well exercised has faded away with time too. It might be a different story if I had a desk job and had the time to lounge around and read, but with my current lifestyle I’m on my feet all day long. I walk pretty much everywhere, lugging children all the way, when I work I stand with my laptop in the counter, spend the day doing busywork almost constantly. I flop on the couch whenever I get the chance, but most of my waking hours I’m at least upright. I can’t tell any decrease in my health or overall fitness. My endurance and strength are lagging behind being a pinnacle of fitness I’m sure, but not in any way that affects my daily life. I remember whining to my husband a few years ago that I NEED to get back to the gym regularly again. He asked why, and I said something about needing to be stronger. And he asked again, why? And I realized, I don’t know, LOL. There’s no actual reason I NEED to be able to run a 7 minute mile or do 10 pull-ups or press the 16 kg kettlebell. It would be a super cool accomplishment, and getting stronger and faster and more flexible is fun! But it’s not actually a life or death situation. Obvious! but only once I stopped to think about it. I don’t do anything for my appearance either. I’ve written before about how I worked out in order to appear athletic and sporty, just to have that image, even when I wasn’t actually sports-minded at all. Now I’m happy for my body to reflect the kind of life I lead. There’s nothing wrong with not looking with a triathlete bodybuilder if that’s not what I am right now. That said, again a surprise-not-surprise, my body doesn’t look much different without intentional exercise. I’ve gained weight since I stopped restricting food and went through my pregnancies, of course, but I still have just as much muscle definition as ever. I use my body to lift and push and propel and reach in daily life activities, and that alone seems to have been effective enough to maintain most of my muscle mass and actually the majority of my strength too. Who knew! I just realized that I can’t remember the last time I did anything to burn off calories either. That used to be a huge part of my motivation. I thought I had to use all food calories I ingested to fuel intentional exercise, and if not, then I had no right to eat, or all the calories would turn straight to fat. Despite science and facts telling me otherwise, it seemed like truth to me for many years. Anyway, I went from a compulsive 60 minutes of cardio and a split strength workout every day of the year no excuses, to short HIIT workouts and body weight strength, to ZGYM and kettlebells, to more and more days doing nothing, to now, it just doesn’t cross my mind really. I do pull-ups when I’m in the bedroom changing the bedsheets every so often, but nothing feels necessary anymore. I do miss working out sometimes. When I wake up on a fall morning, I wish so badly I could go for a run! I do crave a long, push myself bike ride or weight lifting sesh. I want to join back in the ZGYM thread! I especially miss it for the stress relief and positive effect on my mood and depression. But right now, it’s not worth it to me to take the effort to work that into my day, and that’s okay too. Caution, random rambling! It’s interesting to stop and think how drastically my attitude toward exercise has changed over the years, since I first joined Happy Eaters and realized there was another way.
I'm pretty similar to what you've said here. The only thing I need work on is loving myself. Sometimes I still hate myself deep down.