covid

Rare Golden Owl

Stop worrying about not being where you want to be right now.

The only people who have been entirely unaffected by gym closures over the past 3-6 months are those of us who have a gym set up at home. If this is you, gyms shutting down never mattered to you - your gym is at home.

For the rest of us, we have had to adapt our training.

Some of us have enjoyed the luxury of having equipment to train with at home. Some of us have had to do bodyweight only workouts. Some of us have not worked out at all.

All of these scenarios are okay, and they are all examples of us doing what we can to get by until our gym can reopen again.

Understand what you are working with and be realistic about where you are.

You haven’t had the things you typically rely upon to produce your desired training results.

You haven’t had weights.

You haven’t had your trainer/coach.

You haven’t had your training partners.

You haven’t had a gym atmosphere to motivate you.

If you’ve gone backward, it’s okay. So have I and many others. That’s just temporary.

If you’ve done enough just to minimize the amount that you’ve gone backward, you’ve done better than me and many others.

If you’ve maintained your level of fitness, you’re in a great spot, right in position to get back to pushing ahead again once things become a bit more normal.

If you’ve made any kind of progress at all, you’re a rare golden owl.

Wherever you’re at today, don’t be so hard on yourself. This will all be a blink of an eye over the course of your training career.

Busy Getting Out of Shape

How have the past five months of your 2020 been?

From a fitness standpoint, mine have been dreadful.

It wasn’t until recently,

(when I found myself fighting for air

as I sprinted at 5.5mph

to the end of my 50 yard long street

to meet the food delivery service driver who had trouble finding our address

to retrieve my order consisting of pizza + dessert pizza + cheese balls + mozzarella sticks)

that I realized how out of shape I had become.

A week earlier when I experienced physical struggles lifting boards and climbing ladders while building an extension to our deck could have also been a hint, but I must have just blamed that day on the heat.

Over the last five months, it seems I have only been motivated to do two things…

  1. Break all of my old good habits

  2. Develop new bad habits

Since mid-March, I relapsed on soda - something I had very proudly not had a drip of for over 5 years prior to that. I went periods of up to 3 weeks of no working out at all. 80% of my meals have been junk.

Up until last Thursday, I have not been worthy of considering myself a promoter of health/personal trainer/coach/member of society.

But since then, I have worked out 6 out of 7 days (matching, maybe even exceeding the # of times I worked out in July). My eating has not been perfect, but under control.

This has been the most consistent 7 days I’ve had since the virus hit.

I’ve got some momentum built up.

You’ll hear more from me moving forward now that I am busy getting in shape.