Fitness Archives - Page 4 of 26

Selected New Experiences, September 3, 2023

I've been posting Sundays about the books and movies I finished that week. This week I didn't finish any new books or movies, but I did a few new things. A New Vegetable for Me: Jicama I discovered a new vegetable this week, jicama: I'd never heard of the vegetable, but I saw a bunch of them in the food scrap bin when I dropped mine off. They looked like radishes, turnips, rutabagas, or odd potatoes so I took them from the scraps and brought them home. They were mildly sweet, but I couldn't identify them. I showed them to Evelyn from the spring workshop and she immediately identified them. I looked them up and now I'm enjoying them without abandon. By the way, the…

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September 3, 2023

Fitness / Habits / Nature

What I ate in the last 24 hours, August 2023

In preparation for recording a second podcast episode with Dr. Michael Greger of Nutritionfacts.org, I tracked what I ate for 24 hours. I didn't plan or do anything differently. I still have no fridge or power from the electric grid, nor do I cook with gas. I do use the pressure cooker powered by my solar panels. The last time I tracked twenty-four hours of ingredients was February, for comparison. Romaine lettuce Cauliflower Pickled cucumber Hazel nuts Sunflower seeds Red onion White mushrooms Chard Red lentils Cherry tomatoes Nutritional yeast (with B12 added) Whole rolled oats Peach Blackberries Raspberries Defatted peanut flour cocao powder tomatilloes Green split peas Yellow split peas Chick pea flour Mung beans Chia seeds (ground) Flax seeds (ground) Tamari Cacao nibs…

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August 25, 2023

Fitness

Why I’m stronger and more tired than ever

Does being stronger than ever conflict with being more tired than ever? I'll show they don't conflict. My six-day exercise cycle means that every other day I either do full-body weight-bearing exercises (Turkish get-ups, kettlebell swings, and farmers walks), three sets of six lifts (two leg, two push, two pull), or a cardiovascular exercise. Other days I recover, though on all days I still do my burpee-based calisthenics. On recovery days, I'm tired and sometimes sore. On those days I think to myself, "I'm so sore, I should take it easy tomorrow," especially when the next day is a lifting day. I think I should use lighter weights or do fewer repetitions. I also think of how I'm older than when I started. Then, nearly…

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August 23, 2023

Fitness / Habits

Blood pressure normal, pulse: 51 bpm. Old man still got it.

In May a nurse measured my pulse at 47 beats per minute and my blood pressure 122 over 73. Today one measured my pulse at 51 beats per minute and my blood pressure 107 over 68. I'd like my pulse lower, but the web says it's still in athlete level. I'm glad to see my blood pressure normal. I'm not sure which is more important for health between pulse and blood pressure, but both look good. My BMI is 20.2, which is in the normal range too. The time is wrong. The measurement was in the afternoon, not 1:17am. I found this distribution of heart rates. I don't know how accurate it is or for what population: I found this distribution of American BMIs over…

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August 18, 2023

Fitness / Habits / SIDCHAs

On living your values with kids and a job

Tell someone with kids or a job that you pollute less and they will tell you they can't because of kids and a job. Then they'll lecture you about your ignorance and how you couldn't understand what it's like, never mind that humans have had kids and had to work to eat and for shelter for 300,000 years. Have you read about the woman, Candice Burt, who ran fifty kilometers per day for two hundred days in a row? She burned thousands of extra calories per day and took five to seven hours per run, not including days with longer runs, including hundred-mile races. I've been reading her blog and articles about her that it links to, and they're fascinating. She got the same you-can-but-I-can't-rationalization…

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June 3, 2023

Fitness / Freedom / Habits / My Favorite Posts / SIDCHAs

My sidchas, standard procedures, and preferences

I meant just to list all my sidchas in my post Freedom exists in structure; it’s not chaos, randomness, or luck. Here’s my structure and freedom, but I made a mistake. I included standard procedures with sidchas. I didn't think of the distinction. One is habits. The other is the best way to do something. I've written about sidchas. What about procedures? If there's a better way and worse way, why do the worse way? Choosing a best way saves mental effort on top of the benefits of doing something better. Doing it consistently allows for continual improvement and increasing self-awareness. For example, living on the fifth floor, I could take the elevator or stairs. I decided once and for all to take the stairs.…

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May 6, 2023

Fitness / Habits

Official heart rate: 47 bpm. Old man still got it.

I value fitness as anyone knows with my calisthenics and all, as is accessibility, with my focus on bodyweight exercises. Those who email with me may have noticed I included as one of the statistics about how I live my life is my heart rate of 50 beats per minute. I was at a doctor's office recently and they took my pulse a few times with a dedicated device, not just me counting and looking at my watch or using a cell phone app. It read as low as 40 bpm more than once, but I only got a picture at 47 bpm, so I'll count that number as official. They took an ekg to make sure I was okay, but climbing thirty flights of…

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May 3, 2023

Just finished another three-day water-only fast.

I Haven't Eaten for 3 Days and It's Amazing, Joshua Spodek in Inc.

Fitness / Habits / Inc.com

Just finished another three-day water-only fast.

Years ago someone told me the first meal after a three-day water-only fast tastes life-changingly good. I'd heard of fasting then, but 1) didn't think much of it and 2) thought humans would die after a couple days, even with water. But he didn't seem like he was lying and I liked the idea of a life-changing experience that cost no time or money, rather would save them. In May 2018, I did my first. Today I did another. I forget if it was my second or third. I know I've done a few two-days, maybe a two-and-a-half day. I haven't kept track. I wrote up the first time in this story in my Inc. column, I Haven't Eaten for 3 Days and It's Amazing:…

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February 27, 2023

Choosing/Decision-Making / Fitness / Freedom / Habits / SIDCHAs

Freedom exists in structure; it’s not chaos, randomness, or luck. Here’s my structure and freedom.

Freedom exists in structure. It's not chaos, randomness, or luck. When I find something works in my life, I make it automatic. For many people, diet and exercise seem horror shows, or mysteries, wondering what they should do, how often, how much, and so on. When the most important bases of my life are automatic, I don't have to think about them. I can focus on everything else. People might see the regularity of my exercise or diet plans as restrictive, but it creates mental freedom and the results I want. As far as I can tell, by choosing the most effective exercise and diet, I work the minimum to achieve my level of fitness. I would feel uncomfortable to be less fit. Likewise with…

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February 25, 2023

Fitness / Habits / Nature

Do I get bored of my diet? What I ate in the last 24 hours.

I once read that most people think their diet is more varied than they think. We fall back on what we like more often than we think. As a corollary, we tend to see others' diets as less varied. (I couldn't find the research on diet variety, but Most people think their diet is healthier than it is: U.S. adults commonly overestimate the quality of their diet, study shows, which found "Out of over 9,700 participants, about 8,000 (roughly 85%) inaccurately assessed their diet quality. Of those, almost all (99%) overrated the healthfulness of their diet.") Yesterday someone asked me if I get bored of my stews. To my discredit, I talk about stews and salads as single things, but they vary from batch to…

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February 18, 2023

Fitness / Habits / SIDCHAs

200,000 burpees

It's easy to track how many burpees I do as part of my twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. I know how many I do per day and I don't miss days, so I just update the date in my spreadsheet and it tells me. More accurately, the spreadsheet tells me a minimum since now and then I do burpees for other reasons, but I haven't missed and, so I've done more than what it says, but not much more. I don't do many random burpees. Earlier this month I lost count of how many sets I'd done so defaulted to the lower number just in case. I'm pretty sure I ended up doing an extra set. I check the spreadsheet a few times a month, mainly to…

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October 30, 2022

Fitness / Habits / Nature

Thoughts climbing eleven flights of stairs twice a day to charge my battery from sunlight

For the first couple days, I was still getting used to it and wondering how things would go. Later, it became a ritual, like my morning and evening calisthenics, giving structure to my life. Also, have you noticed how when movies have monks, they often show a scene of them mopping the floor, or some repetitive task that for a monk becomes mindful? Like that. Lately I've been thinking, "Why can't I be like a normal American and drive a car to a gym and use a Stairmaster?" I consider damning with faint praise an art form.

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October 19, 2022

Evolutionary Psychology / Fitness / Nature

Sustainability and mating

A friend told me he thought of me and my sustainability leadership work with concern while reading the book The Mating Mind. He described it as describing the implications and effects of sexual selection in evolution. He started with the example of peacocks having elaborate tails. Sexual selection suggests that the tails that make them easy targets for predators indicate all its other genes are fit, so a potential mate attracted to big tails will more likely give birth to healthy children more likely to have more grandchildren. The upshot: animals evolve sexual attraction to some properties that seem maladaptive. There's a lot more detail than I'll go into here. My friend told me one property of traits like peacock's tails across the animal kingdom…

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October 12, 2022

Fitness / Freedom / Nature

The New Yorker published my letter

In its August 22 issue, the New Yorker published a piece, Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of Refrigeration: For the developing world, refrigeration is growth. In Rwanda, it could spark an economic transformation. August 22 happened to start my fourth month of my experiment disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid, which is to say 3.93 months longer than I expected to make it. The article was about bringing more refrigeration to Africa. My experiment disconnecting my apartment traces one root to an article in Low Tech Magazine, Vietnam's Low-tech Food System Takes Advantage of Decay, which described how other cultures use less refrigeration, focusing on Vietnam. It seemed to me to suggest healthier, more affordable, more local, less polluting food and a food…

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September 26, 2022

Fitness / Nature / Stories / Visualization

My first bike-camping trip since 1988

Longtime readers know one of the highlights of my summer is visiting the farm providing my summer and fall CSA vegetables, Stoneledge Farm. Since the pandemic, they haven't chartered a bus for us in the city without cars. I've been biking more, including two overnight rides to Philadelphia, each 125 miles over two days. They were fundraisers and, since my group raised the most funds, I ended up getting free hotel rooms. Actually, the second trip I meant to camp, but the rain was so cold and lasted so long, I took them up on the hotel. The map says Stoneledge Farm is 130 miles. It's a holiday weekend so I had time, a tent I hadn't used yet, and plenty of desire. Working in…

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September 4, 2022

Fourteen years ago today I swam across the Hudson River for the first time

Manhattan ahead, New Jersey behind

Fitness / Freedom

Fourteen years ago today I swam across the Hudson River for the first time

The bigger an achievement, the more it's just the start of another stage in your life. Maybe swimming across the Hudson was my start of learning that you don't have to fly to create life experiences, that we don't have to accept what others consider impossible, and that we aren't risking our lives to do things people have done for thousands of years. I've used the picture of my swimming across at the top of my home page to represent me crossing from one part of my life to another, less passive, less accepting what others tell me. Now I do hundreds of thousands of burpees, write bestsellers, lead world-renowned guests on the podcast, and go months with my apartment disconnected from the grid. The…

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August 9, 2022

Choosing/Decision-Making / Fitness / Habits

My pride and shame in giving blood for the first time since college

I'm proud to have given blood Tuesday. If you haven't listened to yesterday's podcast episode with Sebastian Junger, listen to hear his story of receiving ten emergency transmissions leading to his giving blood regularly. Why ashamed too? Because when the nurse checked me in, filling in my address from my driver's license, she asked if I'd changed my address. The address in the system showed my freshman year dorm address. The last time I'd given blood was 1988 or 1989. Why so long? Because after giving blood that time, sitting in the recovery area, my ears started ringing and I started feeling faint. I started to put my head down on the table just in case. Immediately a bunch of nurses jumped to me and…

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July 30, 2022

Awareness / Exercises / Fitness / SIDCHAs

Fifty-one

Different people define middle age differently, but having just turned 51 I think I'm in it by all definitions. Physical My first sense of my body physically declining came in my early thirties, when my potential to compete in ultimate began to decline. Before then, I always felt motivation to practice since I knew the next year my potential would be higher. After then, no matter how much I practiced, my potential would decrease the next year, which decreased my motivation to practice. Over the years, the physical decline continued. The biggest included the time to heal from injury and recover from hard workouts. In my second-to-last summer playing summer league I didn't play to be the best on my team, then in my early…

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July 20, 2022

Fitness

All Glory: day two riding from Princeton to Philadelphia

Yesterday I wrote Equal parts misery and glory: today’s ride from New York to Princeton. Today: puffy white clouds and blue skies. It started chilly and foggy but warmed up to make yesterday's ride worth it, like when the home team is down and scores to come-from-behind and win in the final moments. Still lots of plastic packaging that nobody seemed to care about. Today we rode about 55 miles, including riding across Center City, Philadelphia, my home town, to the Art Museum, by Boat House Row, behind the museum to the Schuylkill and along the riverfront paths to south of Center City (Lombard?), then back across to the Delaware River, mostly by Pine Street. I loved seeing these beautiful parts of the city. After…

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May 15, 2022

Fitness / Nature

Equal parts misery and glory: today’s ride from New York to Princeton

The skies opened up on us about halfway through today's fundraising bike ride from New York to Princeton, helping create a bike path from Maine to Florida. The normally best part of the ride, along old canals that are now lush and verdant, was thirty miles through mud in near-bone-chilling cold. I can't say I was miserable since once I was out, I'd prefer riding in that cold mud to sitting on a couch; but I wouldn't choose to go out in it if I were on a couch. So in the moment on the surface I felt miserable, but for being out in it, I felt glory. Hence equal parts misery and glory. I mentioned that feeling to a few teammates and they nodded…

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May 14, 2022

Fitness / Stories

“Titty twister”

What does unwanted body fat have to do with pollution? One of Urban Dictionary's definitions At my father’s eightieth birthday last year, I saw friend and coworkers of his I hadn’t seen since childhood. The first thing one of them said to me was that he remembered me as chubby. By today’s American standards, I may not have been, but I remember from my childhood my older stepbrother grabbing my nipples and the fat underneath between his thumb and fingers, twisting them, and yelling “titty twister!” I felt helpless and ashamed. It motivated me to work on lowering the body fat I didn’t want. In high school I began to play sports. In college, I got more serious, playing the sport of ultimate at the…

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May 4, 2022

Tragic doof addiction statistics: up to 70 percent of children’s calories.

Enjoy Coca-cola!

Addiction / Fitness / Freedom / Habits

Tragic doof addiction statistics: up to 70 percent of children’s calories.

Podcast guest Dr. Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM did a video on doof, which he calls ultraprocessed food, junk food, or ultraprocessed junk food. He's a multiple time number one bestselling author and host of Nutritionfacts.org. Experience shows me that using the word food confuses people into thinking it's food when it isn't. Just because something fills your belly when you're hungry doesn't mean it's food. Heroin would make the hunger pangs go away too and it's made from poppy. Should we call it junk food too? If we called cocaine "coca leaf extract" or heroin "poppy extract" we might consider them healthier. They derive from those plants, but we recognize they're qualitatively different. Prepare to be shocked by how much of what America spends its…

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May 1, 2022

Exercises / Fitness

Why I’m writing at 3am: I’m so sore that moving wakes me up.

Yesterday I ran outdoors for the first time this spring. Two days before I lifted weights and was still feeling tired, plus I'm fifty years old, so I took it easy and ran at a comfortable, even slow pace. Now I'm so sore that tossing and turning in bed wakes me up. [EDIT, the next morning: Note that I'm not complaining in this post. I'm just observing. If anything, I appreciate the soreness. As for aging, I find it life's greatest source of acceptance and therefore celebration. As I wrote in one of my blog's earliest posts, If you can accept something you can celebrate it. Not long after posting, I fell asleep.] I don't remember feeling this sore. I know I used to, when…

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May 1, 2022

Fitness / Freedom / Nature

Can you imagine a vacation without burning fossil fuels to get there?

People used to walk across the country. I recently read that before cities, people used to travel more, and that cities led people to travel less, thousands of years ago (source: The Dawn of Everything, which I'm in the middle of and love so far). In fairness, because of cities' diversity, people in cities may have experienced more diversity in people without traveling far, but walking, riding horses, and sailing allowed them to explore nature and diversity beyond the city. But people before cities traversed continents. Why not? They weren't bound to one spot. They experienced more of nature's beauty than us. People today tend to reflexively respond that we're healthier or live longer today, or some advantage, but the more I learn from anthropology…

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April 14, 2022

Fitness

According to the CDC, I weigh 6% less than the average American woman. My waist is 13% smaller.

I stumbled across some CDC statistics on American averages: Men:Height in inches: 69.0Weight in pounds: 199.8Waist circumference in inches: 40.5Women:Height in inches: 63.5Weight in pounds: 170.8Waist circumference in inches: 38.7 I was born with three genetic conditions on weight. One is that if I eat more calories than I use or excrete, I put on weight immediately, mostly fat if I don't do muscle-building exercise. Another is that I have tremendous difficulty stopping eating until I feel full. A third is that I love the tastes of salt, sugar, and fat and find it hard to resist convenience. If something I find tasty is within reach or view, I generally think about it and want to put it in my mouth. By contrast, I believe…

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March 2, 2022