from The Great White North
As a new check-in thread, I feel as though it is important to introduce myself, even though a lot of you already know me. I have vacillated through my life between extremes of fitness and extremes of weight problems. A couple of years ago I decided that I had enough of that lifestyle, and I decided to get fit once again. This also coincided with the birth of my first son, but was also instigated by a lot of factors, mostly that I wanted to take control of my life again. The first year had a bit of success (dropped about 4 kg), but then I took it a new level in the second year, dropping another 40 kg. The year after that I dropped another 5 kg.
Along the way I learned a lot of things that my 20 year old fit version never bothered to learn or was held back by inhibitions. The first is that the way to succeed in terms of health is by changing lifestyles. Diets famously don’t work, mostly because people say “I am good how I am, I just need to lose some weight.” Once they lose the weight they go back to their previous lifestyle and not surprisingly the habits that got them overweight in the first place make them gain the weight again. Another point is that fitness is more so part of a holistic healthy lifestyle. Since setting out on this path I have obviously decided how to exercise more, but also to drastically change how I eat and also how I spend my free time. Everyone needs some rest time, but choosing how to use that time is important. So gradually over the past couple of years I have cut back on watching video, and focusing more on reading books and working on languages. I primarily use Duolingo and work mostly on Polish, but I have dabbled in Japanese and updated my French, among others.
Perhaps most important of the lessons that I learned is to stop caring how I am perceived when I exercise. In the past I would shy away from anything that didn’t make me look strong and masculine, but now I realize that fitness has to be about how I am going to live my life. If I look ridiculous doing an exercise but it results in more strength, more agility or more endurance, then that is all I care about. As I have told people before, I am only really concerned about two people. I try to stay a step ahead of the person that I was yesterday, and try to catch up to the person that I will be tomorrow. Let alone that I am doing mainstream things that I wouldn’t have considered in my 20s like yoga or pilates, but I will do bellydancing, katana workouts or throwing a javelin/discus.
On that note, I am a big fan of the ideas of Hebert. Fitness being broken down into Attack, Pursuit and Escape might be simplistic but it helps to understand what the human body should be able to accomplish when needed. So I will happily climb the playground equipment with my boys and look for all kinds of other ways to be fit that don't fit into an easy category. As those of you who have read my first check-in thread will know, I am always game for trying something new, whether this be ice dragon boats, a t-shirt ripping challenge or a food/fitness challenge.
I started out using this site as a secondary resource for an exercise routine that I was already happy with. I was basically using the workouts as a warmup or supplement to exercises that I was already doing. That changed in November of 2019 when I moved to a new house about 1000 km away. At the beginning I worked on creating a decent exercise room, and then the pandemic hit, which meant that gyms were closed and that the exercise room was all of a sudden a new and valuable resource. I switched almost completely to Darebee as my focus, and completed over 30 programs in the first year (note - they should really not be completed like this). After exposure to all of this knowledge in the past year, I have mostly focused in on a few exercises that I do regularly - running, pushups, and workouts from the database that use either dumbbells or the pullup bar. All the while I am always keen to try anything else new that comes my way or that I can figure out a way to try.
My previous check-in thread can be found here. My wife is also a member of the Hive and I will reference her often, though she doesn’t post as much as I do. At the moment I am also a fairly common poster in two threads in the Playground section, the collective pullup challenge and the collective running challenge. I also post routinely in the Chat Room for the books I have been reading.
Why call this check-in thread the “Mobile HQ”? Well part of it is inspiration from the first thread, which used the fictitious name of Captain Canuck’s base of operations (he is not very famous Canadian superhero). Also, I have moved much closer to my family, though not in the same city (about 3-5 hours from family), so I will be moving around a fair bit, even if I am maintaining my residence in Ottawa. At the moment, I am also living in temporary accommodation while waiting for the new house to be ready, and having just moved, I do feel very mobile at the moment.
With all of that said, here begin the entries that I missed over the past weeks. The first day was September 13, and each entry will proceed by one day. I will add a caveat as well. I get motivated by seeing pictures of things as much by reading, so I do have a tendency to post pictures from my running routes, even if I have already the same route 10 times before. This is for my own personal motivation, I appreciate comments always, but I do understand that they look a bit repetitive after a while and might not be interesting to everyone.
...
Even though we had been packing boxes for the past two weeks previously and therefore already packing, this was the day that we got the truck and packed it up. We are going to have to put a few things away until November, and because it would be too cold then, it meant that this was the only time that I was going to be able to do javelin for a long time. So before we got going in the morning I went out to a nearby park and did javelin for about 10 minutes.
The rest of the day was busy with over 30,000 steps, and according to the FitBit over 77 flights of stairs covered, even though I was usually only doing the 5 stairs leading into the house. I also managed to do 100 pushups and 30 pullups in the evening as things were winding down.
Along the way I learned a lot of things that my 20 year old fit version never bothered to learn or was held back by inhibitions. The first is that the way to succeed in terms of health is by changing lifestyles. Diets famously don’t work, mostly because people say “I am good how I am, I just need to lose some weight.” Once they lose the weight they go back to their previous lifestyle and not surprisingly the habits that got them overweight in the first place make them gain the weight again. Another point is that fitness is more so part of a holistic healthy lifestyle. Since setting out on this path I have obviously decided how to exercise more, but also to drastically change how I eat and also how I spend my free time. Everyone needs some rest time, but choosing how to use that time is important. So gradually over the past couple of years I have cut back on watching video, and focusing more on reading books and working on languages. I primarily use Duolingo and work mostly on Polish, but I have dabbled in Japanese and updated my French, among others.
Perhaps most important of the lessons that I learned is to stop caring how I am perceived when I exercise. In the past I would shy away from anything that didn’t make me look strong and masculine, but now I realize that fitness has to be about how I am going to live my life. If I look ridiculous doing an exercise but it results in more strength, more agility or more endurance, then that is all I care about. As I have told people before, I am only really concerned about two people. I try to stay a step ahead of the person that I was yesterday, and try to catch up to the person that I will be tomorrow. Let alone that I am doing mainstream things that I wouldn’t have considered in my 20s like yoga or pilates, but I will do bellydancing, katana workouts or throwing a javelin/discus.
On that note, I am a big fan of the ideas of Hebert. Fitness being broken down into Attack, Pursuit and Escape might be simplistic but it helps to understand what the human body should be able to accomplish when needed. So I will happily climb the playground equipment with my boys and look for all kinds of other ways to be fit that don't fit into an easy category. As those of you who have read my first check-in thread will know, I am always game for trying something new, whether this be ice dragon boats, a t-shirt ripping challenge or a food/fitness challenge.
I started out using this site as a secondary resource for an exercise routine that I was already happy with. I was basically using the workouts as a warmup or supplement to exercises that I was already doing. That changed in November of 2019 when I moved to a new house about 1000 km away. At the beginning I worked on creating a decent exercise room, and then the pandemic hit, which meant that gyms were closed and that the exercise room was all of a sudden a new and valuable resource. I switched almost completely to Darebee as my focus, and completed over 30 programs in the first year (note - they should really not be completed like this). After exposure to all of this knowledge in the past year, I have mostly focused in on a few exercises that I do regularly - running, pushups, and workouts from the database that use either dumbbells or the pullup bar. All the while I am always keen to try anything else new that comes my way or that I can figure out a way to try.
My previous check-in thread can be found here. My wife is also a member of the Hive and I will reference her often, though she doesn’t post as much as I do. At the moment I am also a fairly common poster in two threads in the Playground section, the collective pullup challenge and the collective running challenge. I also post routinely in the Chat Room for the books I have been reading.
Why call this check-in thread the “Mobile HQ”? Well part of it is inspiration from the first thread, which used the fictitious name of Captain Canuck’s base of operations (he is not very famous Canadian superhero). Also, I have moved much closer to my family, though not in the same city (about 3-5 hours from family), so I will be moving around a fair bit, even if I am maintaining my residence in Ottawa. At the moment, I am also living in temporary accommodation while waiting for the new house to be ready, and having just moved, I do feel very mobile at the moment.
With all of that said, here begin the entries that I missed over the past weeks. The first day was September 13, and each entry will proceed by one day. I will add a caveat as well. I get motivated by seeing pictures of things as much by reading, so I do have a tendency to post pictures from my running routes, even if I have already the same route 10 times before. This is for my own personal motivation, I appreciate comments always, but I do understand that they look a bit repetitive after a while and might not be interesting to everyone.
...
Even though we had been packing boxes for the past two weeks previously and therefore already packing, this was the day that we got the truck and packed it up. We are going to have to put a few things away until November, and because it would be too cold then, it meant that this was the only time that I was going to be able to do javelin for a long time. So before we got going in the morning I went out to a nearby park and did javelin for about 10 minutes.
The rest of the day was busy with over 30,000 steps, and according to the FitBit over 77 flights of stairs covered, even though I was usually only doing the 5 stairs leading into the house. I also managed to do 100 pushups and 30 pullups in the evening as things were winding down.
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