Culture Clash

So I've been doing this for just over a week. I measure fluid intake, portions of fruit & veg, sleep, and exercise activity (everything from walking fast for the bus to free weights). Oh and physio exercises (they count as "light strength exercises" in the exercise tab but they get their own thing because they're important). They're all compared against daily and weekly minimum targets, and yes there are graphs. Dammit.

I'm not measuring fat or sugar intake, though I probably should, on the grounds that I've noticed in the past that, when on a health kick, I feel too full to snack, and eat dried fruit instead. Except this weekend...

One of the things I've struggled with over the past year or so since inheriting the physio exercises, is fitting them into my busy poetry (and other things) schedule. One of the reasons everything slid so much towards the end of 2013 is that I was ferociously heavily-booked for gigs. Cycle goes: work, travel to gig, gig, travel back, eat something random, sleep; wake late, rush breakfast, bus/ taxi to work, work til late as left early yesterday to travel to gig, home (bus), sit around exhausted, eat late, sleep; rinse, repeat. Where to fit the physio exercises (20 minutes of mat work for legs and core, in case you're interested - I assume you are: you're here…) into that? Morning and evening both seem to be out as I keep catching myself by surprise by it being 8 o'clock and "too late to start all that".

Which is basically bollocks. Make a plan, execute the plan; rinse, repeat - excuses are for the weak...

I don't respond well to bullying, so I have to coax myself along. I read my Kindle during everything except crunches; praise myself for doing half the reps; tell myself how much more awesome I'll be when tomorrow I do two more of each set; remind myself how good fit feels; picture both the impressive upswing of multi-coloured graphs and how long I'll be able to walk for. I love walking.

But I sucked at fitting just physio in before; how am I going to fit physio, gym, and other calisthenics in?

I'm guessing that I'll have to timetable it; make it explicitly as important as performance stuff. Even when... Well…

See, part of the problem is stamina. I'm getting older, I'm not very fit, and things wipe me out. Take this weekend. Saturday (yesterday) was a Big Deal of a gig. I jittered like a muppet on speed beforehand, eating and drinking very little, stayed up (very) late afterwards grinning like a loony and belatedly eating cheese, and spent all day today eating biscuits and complaining about being tired. Physio was done Saturday morning; fair enough. Today? NOTHING.

So the lessons here (I reckon) are:

1. Establish a routine. Stick to it. (See 3 and 4.)

2. Don't punish yourself for transgressions; that just leads to more cheap comfort-seeking behaviour.

3. Find better compromises than Do All The Exercise OR Do Nothing.

4. If you need to sleep, tell people to let you sleep. Trust what your body's telling you.

Because I'm buggered if I'm giving up poetry, and I'm buggered if I'm giving up (so soon) on an exercise regime, and I need to go to work between these two…

Thassit for now.