How Fit Do I Need to Be?

How Fit Do I Need to Be? 

Sunday, August 07, 2011 

Thursday evening, I went to the gym. I thought I was holding back, only did four exercises. I try to do, at a minimum, a major leg exercise, a pulling exercise, and a pushing exercise. Did deadlifts for legs, military press for push, and lat pulldowns for pull. Then I wasn't worn out, so I did renegade rows. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL4Ygzz20gk I used the gym's round dumbbells instead of the easy square powerblocks the guy in the video is using. Kettlebells would be more challenging. 

Friday, I skipped my morning Turkish getups, which I normally do with a windmill at the top. 

Skipping these the morning after lifting weights in the evening is normal. 

Then Saturday morning, my shoulders told me that they didn't want to do the TGU/windmill combinations, still. Hmm. Guess I worked harder Thursday than I thought. Okay, gave the shoulders another day of rest. They were fine Sunday morning for the TGU/windmill combo, and I even managed two sets of kettlebell snatches. 

Now, I don't do a whole lot of this stuff. 5 TGU/windmill combos on each side, and one set of 10 KB snatches is generally all I do in a morning. I'm currently working with a 35 lb. kettlebell, and I weighed in at 190.8 this morning; so it's not like a major lift requiring rest on its own merits. But if I'm going to lift weights twice a week and skip the kettlebell stuff the following morning (or worse, the following TWO mornings), I'm close to breaking a habit. Hmm.

Then there's the cardio. I really backed off this weekend, settling for a couple of slower walks and mowing the lawn. That was the right thing to do right now, as my body was telling me this wasn't the time to be pushing. But that does raise a couple of philosophical questions: How fit do I need to be? And how much time do I need to devote to obtaining and maintaining that fitness? 

Fitness is like any other hobby, in that it will suck up however much time I throw at it. I already know I have a tendency to overdo the fitness stuff, then burn out and fall off the wagon. I need to find a balance, where I do enough to stay fit but not so much that I overtrain, injure myself, or psychologically burn out on the time expended.

How fit do I need to be? For all practical purposes, I need to be fit enough to do the things I want to do in life. 

I need to be fit enough to mow the lawn, however many times it needs mowing in the growing season. That's not a terribly high hurdle. I managed to get the lawn mowed even when I weighed 221 and had to come inside for water and cooldown several times in the process. 

I need to be fit enough to park at the far end of the Walmart or Sam's Club parking lot, so I don't have to fight the insane traffic near the door. That's not a very high hurdle, either. I've never come close to needing to park close to the door. 

I want to be fit enough to walk five miles on short notice. That one's a little higher, but not terribly so. There was a time when I was so out of shape that one mile seemed like a very long walk, but that's been quite a while. Even after being off the fitness wagon for a year, I can walk five miles without any thought that it might be too far. 

Beyond that, I'd like to be able to run the 3.5 mile Chase Corporate Challenge the entire way without slowing to a walk. I've never managed that, because it would require training during tax season. I'm busy during tax season, doing stuff that is more important to me than training for a race that happens in late May. And other than the company social aspect of the Corporate Challenge, I'm not particularly interested in being a runner. 

While it was a great ego-boost, at my peak of fitness, to be able to hold up my half of a piano that needed moving, I don't really need to be that strong. If I can lift and carry 100 pounds short distances without undue effort, that's good enough for life activities. 

Then there's the non-fitness goals. I want to spend some time doing maintenance on my house. Some of it will need to be hired out, but some of it really ought to be do it yourself projects. Time spent exercising is time not spent getting this stuff done. I'll have some seasonal commitments that I don't really want to give up. Somehow or other, I'll need to take care of fitness in spite of having more commitments in the fall, winter and spring than I do in the summer. 

It's a puzzle. Ideally, I'd like to find some fitness routine that will maintain a minimum level in not a whole lot of time, so I can do more in the summer and enough the other three seasons to start the summer without a lot of remedial work. 

The one bright spot in the conundrum is, I'm no longer worried about weight or diet. Four weeks on SP have convinced me I can track food and maintain calorie discipline throughout the normal change of seasons and commitment levels. Yeah, I don't have down yet just how I'll navigate the social eating of the holiday season; but there will be a way to navigate it. 

That's kind of an odd thought, because I've been working on the exercise side a lot longer than I've been working on the controlling diet side. But there you have it. Controlling the diet is self-limiting. Get it done, and the time is freed up for other pursuits. But exercise is open ended. It can take up however much time I'm willing to throw at it. 

 So . . . how fit do I want to be, and how hard am I willing to work to be that fit? The answers to those questions will determine how much time I should put into exercise. Finding the right answers could mean the difference between maintaining fitness long term and a cycle of falling off and climbing back on the wagon.