Jan thoughts on movement/exercise:
There’s been a lot of messages about exercise showing up on social because of the time of year and the January “new start” type trends. Messages like: needing to be consistent, train x days a week, combo of strength and cardio and influences advertising programs etc. It’s taken years to figure out that all those recommendations were external influences discounting my personal needs and unhelpful. What I needed instead was to figure out a good approach for my body, my mental capacity and my overall health.
What’s worked for me has been: checking in and seeing how my body was feeling and what it was up for each day, a low amount of scheduled/committed activity (once to twice a week max), needing massages/physiotherapy and stretching regularly to support movement, finding ways to move that were different each week and giving myself a lot of options. Needing a lot of rest and recovery.
For every day of activity my body seems to need 2-3 days of rest.
A good warm up is essential because my ligaments and joints are sometimes achey and easily prone to injury and my cardiovascular system needs a 15 min warm up before it can handle more intense activity
I have to monitor my heart rate and stay in my body’s ideal zone for hiking or I get burned out fast
I need to drink a lot of water and be mindful of eating enough on longer hikes/days out or I will be low energy, sore and have a long recovery
Once I moved away from trying to meet external ideals, pressures and advice things got gentler, kinder and I was able to drop the guilt with movement. What resulted was not some miracle of “oh I started to work out every day” or “I smashed x goal.” What happened was instead of chasing exercise, movement followed my life. Some seasons of life I’m more active and others I’m working on rehabilitation or recovery. It allowed me to be kind, understanding and patient with my body and my life demands.
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