Being fit has a whole lot of benefits associated with it.
- You look good
- Feel good
- Able to do more with your body
- Generally feel more confident being with other people
- Food digests better
- Sleep better
- Nature and other people feel awesome
Getting fit, on the other hand may feel like a roller-coaster ride. The process seems to feel less than inspiring. One has to deal with making new year resolutions, only to break it just a couple of weeks later, while simultaneously noticing other people get fitter. We compare ourselves with them and feel miserable. We may start feeling like we are older than we actually are. Upon hitting rock bottom, we start reflecting and maybe wonder why we did not stick to the most perfectly crafted new-year-resolution. It may occur to us that one needs a lot of grit and determination to ‘get fit’.
After trying out several approaches, I managed to hit something 2 years ago.
I managed to reduce my weight by 25kgs from 88kgs (by end of 2021) to about 63kgs (in early 2023). I am a bit heavier (68 kgs) now (in Oct 2023), given that my coach has put me on a bulking phase. He will likely put me on a cutting meal plan from mid of next month. But I have managed to pack more muscle in my body now than ever before.
I was recently clearing out my old clothes and found a trouser that I used to wear two years ago, without needing a belt. I was surprised to notice just how much things had changed over the past two years.
I had written a post before about how nutrition coaching helped me in slimming down. In this post I want to share the approach to fitness, I happened to stumble upon.
If I have to sum up my personal observation about fitness over the last two years, it would be like this:
fitness works best when the habit is burned into your body, so that the mind doesn’t have to generate willingness for it.
I was stuck with a misnomer for almost all my life, that to get into a regular workout routine I need to have will power, discipline and all that hot stuff. That view is totally valid when we only make use of ‘the mind’ to make regular-workout happen. It so happens that we are all blessed with a body, which has much larger real-estate than the brain. So, why not ‘install’ the ‘exercise habit’ in the body? That way ‘the brain’ can do other stuff, and the body ensures that it gets its dose of exercise whether you like it or not. Just like, you know, when you have to go to the bathroom – you go to the bathroom, no logic or mind-chatter works.
I realise that many of us will want to point out that mind is not just in the brain, but is infact much bigger than that. But that’s besides the point.
So, I want to present a theory that getting fit is about burning a fitness-habit into the body.
How do we do that?
I will break it into 4 phases.
- Phase 1: Easy weekly workout routine (1 – 2 months)
- Phase 2: Enjoying your body and getting playful (1 – 2 months)
- Phase 3: Amp your routine (3-6 months)
- Phase 4: Seek a professional nutrition and fitness coach (1-2 years)
Disclaimer: everything I share is probably nonsense so please feel free to discard it, if it rubs you off the wrong way.
Phase #1: Easy weekly workout routine (1 – 2 months)
Well, start with the easiest-to-do workout in the most easiest-to-repeat-weekly-workout-pattern. For example:
- Morning 30 min walk, 3 times a week (Mon, Wed, Fri) — OR —
- 20 min Suryanamaskar, 3 times a week (Tue, Thu, Sat) — OR —
- Cycling twice a week (Mon, Thu)
Choose your flavor, doesn’t matter which one. It could be strength training, plyometrics, HIIT, Running, Swimmng.. absolutely anything. The goal is to get into an easy-weekly-workout-routine. The goal is NOT to actually workout. If workout happens, that’s a bonus. But don’t bother about it in the first few months. Don’t worry if you are getting enough flexibility, strength, endurance training or not. That is really really NOT the point of this phase.
During these first few months, its important to be blissfully uninterested in any advise anybody gives about fitness to you. You will notice that as soon as you start regular workout, every tom-dick-harry-and-their-dog wants to give you expert advise. They will want to suggest you books to read, podcasts to listen to, exercise variations to try out. Just listen to them all and respectfully ignore everything.
The goal is to get into a easy-weekly-workout-routine. The goal is NOT to actually workout. If workout happens, that’s a bonus.
You will know that you are done with this phase once you start to notice that your workout-routine is driven by your body and not the mind anymore. For example, if you had chosen walking then, you will start noticing that the body wants to go for its morning walk, just like the body wants to go to number 2 if it has to go. If you start noticing that the body starts protesting (random pains, irritability, mood swings etc..) if it doesn’t get its weekly dose of walking, then you will know that the routine has set in.
Phase #2: Enjoying your body and getting playful (1 – 2 months)
Once the routine sets in, then start enjoying your body while you are doing your workout. I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t enjoy your body before or after.
I am saying that in this phase:
the primary focus should be: enjoy your body while doing the workout.
What does that mean?
For instance, if you have chosen to walk then,
- Notice how your legs move when you walk
- Notice how pressure at the bottom of your feet changes as you walk.
- Notice, with wonder, how the body seems to walk all by itself.
- Notice how the muscles in your abs seem to pull your legs.
- Notice how the bottom most part of your spine vibrates as you walk.
- Notice how those vibrations move up your spine.
- Hold your teeth such that they just about touch each other and notice the vibration in your teeth.
- Notice the sounds that your body makes while you walk
- Notice how your breathing seems to auto regulate while you walk
- Notice your heart beat. Try ‘listening’ to it.
- Notice how visual frames in your eyes change as you walk.
- Notice those small bacteria like creatures move across the visual frame in your eye.
- Notice sparks of light that show up, if they show up. Don’t bother if they don’t.
- Generate a mental intention to walk faster, and notice with wonder how the body walks faster. Keep that fast pace for a while and then generate a mental intention to slow down. Watch how the physical walk slows down.
- Breathe-in for 4 steps, hold your breath for 8 steps and watch the whole dizzy feeling in your head, breathe-out for 6 steps, hold for 2 steps. Pick any rythm, but the idea is to ‘feel your body’ intensely.
- Like this, tweak your workout to introduce variations and see how your body reacts.
- Generally bask in the wonderous show that the body is.
It doesn’t matter what you do specifically as long as you spend time thoroughly relishing your body-in-workout. Get in close contact with your body. Feel every part of your body. At the level of the brain, certain important physical changes are likely happening as you do this. For one, the part of the brain that deals with map-of-the-body is getting activated and ‘serviced’. This part is super important to activate if you want to get into fitness-as-a-lifestyle. But don’t worry about all that, just enjoy your body.
You will know that you are done with this phase once you get bored of just watching your body and start getting curious about what else your body can do. You have to dip into that part of your psyche which wants to inflict ‘workout-pain’ on your own body, to see how it holds up. That’s when you know that you are ready to amp up your fitness routine.
Phase #3: Amp your routine (3-6 months)
In this phase there are two things to do:
Intensify your already established workout routine, and add a new workout routine
For example, if you are walking 3 times a week
- Intensify that walk by either stretching the time you walk, or doing something like interval walk, or maybe do walk-run-walk-run; AND
- Add two days of cycling or swimming or weight training or yoga or core workouts.
For the workout that you intensified do what you did with phase 2, which is observe your body. For the workout you added, simply focus on ‘hard-coding the new routine into your body.’
As you observe the body in your intensified workout days, you will begin to uncover aspects of your self which you did not know before.
- I discovered how much shame I had associated with so many parts of my body, when infact I had a body that was so willing to ‘go play’.
- I discovered that stretching before and after my walks allowed me to spread the tightness (or soreness) in muscles across the entire body estate, which in turn felt like every part of the body wanted to cooperate with every other part of the body.
The actual scientific reason for these insights is immaterial. It is your experience that truly matters. Don’t bother getting oh-so-mature and scientific about explaining what’s really going on. Stick to your experience, no matter how much you feel anybody else will ridicule it, if you ever shared it to them.
Now, in those days where you are adding a new workout to your routine — you will start noticing the difference in ‘life experience’ that this new flavor of exercise is adding. Don’t bother about doing it perfectly.
The idea is to make progress and not get hung up on perfection.
Ofcourse, you have to pay attention to basics. If you are going to the gym for example, don’t mess with the posture while doing exercises. But then don’t get hung up on doing it perfectly either.
During this phase, you will also feel like tracking a whole bunch of stats: Step count, resting heart rate, VO2 max, workout minutes per week, blood test metrics, body age, body fat %, muscle mass etc. Measure whatever you can, but don’t get nutty about it. But if you do feel like getting nutty about it, don’t hold back either. Enjoy it. This is a phase and it will amplify or dial down on its own. Don’t bother being oh-so-mature about it.
By this point, people around you will start noticing changes in your body. Some will appreciate, some will comment, some will advise, some will try to induce fear, some will throw sarcastic remarks about your stats-nutty-ness, some will intellecually question your approach, some will want to sell their ideas or approaches as better, some co-workouters will want to compete, some will compare and so on. Develop a thick skin. Make peace with the barrage of commentary that will head your way.
You will know that you are done with this phase, when you start to notice that you now want to buy clothes specifically for your workout, and you are now planning your vacations or out-station visits to ensure your workouts don’t get impacted. Believe me it will happen. Just like you pick up home-stays or hotels with good bathrooms, you will automatically look for hotels or home-stays which has infrastructure to suit your flavor of exercise (a pool or gym or running track or forest).
Phase #4: Seek a professional nutrition and fitness coach (1-2 years)
By now the body is set on a routine. Your mind doesn’t have to drive it anymore. You will also have sampled atleast two, if not more, kinds of workouts. I had sampled interval-walking, cycling and strength-training by the time I hit this phase.
Its around this phase, your body will clearly tell you what kind of workout it wants. My body told me that it wants to indulge in strength training (at the gym), with some cycling thrown in between. I also found some fascination for core-workouts-with-bosu-ball.
My body had also started to complain that all my self-led-exploration was going great, but I was doing something wrong. For example, I could go 65 kms cycling but as soon as I got back, I wanted to sleep for the whole day. I could do a full-body workout at the gym for 90 min, 3 times a week – but I wasn’t feeling any stronger. I started having a nagging feeling that I was doing something wrong. It became clear that I needed professional help.
This phase begins when you badly want to continue working out — but you have this nagging feeling that you are doing it wrong and want some help.
There is only one thing to do: SEEK HELP!
After interviewing a bunch of ‘coaches’, I found the perfect coach with fittr. My coach studies me, understands my needs and goals and crafts a good meal and workout plan. Given how I was able to nurture a habit for close to 10 months all by myself, I found it relatively easy to rigorously stick to the meal-and-workout-plan my coach gave me. He also has a specific set of stats that he expects me to measure each regularly and report, which he follows up on to keep track of my progress. He keeps tweaking my meal and workout plan with time.
I am in the middle of this phase right now, so I have no clue what comes next! But I am thoroughly enjoying this phase. In fact, to enjoy this phase really well you will need to celebrate small wins, because the really big ones take a long time to come about. More about this in just a bit..
You may choose to hire a personal coach, or join the gym where there is a trainer, or read books, or listen to podcasts and figure it out by yourself. Everything is fair-game, as long as you are getting some expert consultation, you are good to go.
Once again: people around you will start noticing changes in your body. Some will appreciate, some will comment, some will advise, some will try to induce fear, some will throw sarcastic remarks about your stats-nutty-ness, some will intellecually question your approach, some will want to sell their ideas or approaches as better, some co-workouters will want to compete, some will compare and so on. Develop a thick skin. Make peace with the barrage of commentary that will head your way.
Around now, I notice that people I have known for long seem to want to scan my body a bit more closely. I notice people staring at my abs, possibly wondering if I am wearing a tight belt or if I have really slimmed down. Many relatives warn me about taking protein suppliments. I get WhatsApp forwards from well-meaning-relatives about people crashing to death in the gym. Elders in the family ask: for how long will you continue like this (like I have a psycho-mental condition).
Friends and well-wishers who are on a formal fitness coaching themselves will want to share insights from their coaching and encourage you to apply the same in your routine. While they surely mean well, it pays to follow only your coach’s advise. I have a few friends who advise me more supplements than what I have been advised to take. I acknowledge such suggestions from friends, but unless my coach tells me to do the same — I simply won’t do it.
It is also true that some people will look at you admiringly and ask what’s your secret. Some close friends and relatives make it a point to notice changes your posture or your physique in general and appreciate your efforts. Friends who you get to meet only rarely, compliment how young and fresh you look. Along with that, strangers on the street will look at you and smile. Some people may check you out.
I have had people tell me that I don’t look 40+ and that I look like I am in my mid-thirties. On days I have taken bath and combed my hair well, I get compliments that I look like I am in my late twenties. I know that I fit better in my clothes now. I generally feel more confident when I go out.
I can now sit at a cafe and read an entire book in a single 3 hour sitting, if I want to. My back will hold up. These are the small wins I was talking about.
My cycle rides are so much better than before. Best part is, I don’t have to crash-sleep once I get back from cycling. I can go about my work as usual.
It has been long since I left my teens and twenties. I had totally forgotten how it feels like when a woman takes a second look at me. These days (at the mall, or a restaurant), I sometimes notice one or more women looking at me. I look at them and smile, and they return that smile. Feels nice. It’s flattering and at the same time doesn’t mean anything. I totally enjoy the attention and flattery; but then I come back – hit the gym 5 times a week, and cycle 20+ kms twice a week, follow my quantified nutrition meal plan and rest well. Trust the coach — all iz well!
You will do your flavours of fitness routines too!
In summary:
- Phase 1: Easy weekly workout routine (1 – 2 months)
- Phase 2: Enjoying your body and getting playful (1 – 2 months)
- Phase 3: Amp your routine (3-6 months)
- Phase 4: Seek a professional nutrition and fitness coach (1-2 years)