“You just need to move more.”
I have heard this countless times. I have heard I needed more volume. Less volume. Eat more. Eat less. The trouble for me with these recommendations, while all mean well, none come with any defined boundaries.
During the month of November, I wanted to see just what “moving more” might look like and mean for me. My plan was to make intentional efforts to not just move more but track those movements and to see what felt good and what did not. I could always add more volume to my training, but does that make sense if I felt like a pile of garbage the rest of the day? I spent too many years focused solely on my time in the gym while placing nearly no emphasis on what I did outside of it.
I always do better when there is some type of target to hit, so I leaned on my Garmin to help in that aspect. In the previous months, I would look at my calendar view as a gauge. October was a good month, and I am proud of the work I put in.
What stood out to me the most were the days with a single blue bar and the remainder bars being green. That type of day meant that I hit my step goal and had at least 4 activities tracked with the device. For November, my target was to make every day look like that.
Through the process of attempting to hit that goal, I knew that I would have at least 4 activities that I would need to track every day. How I filled those activities were where I was looking to test what felt good, what I needed to keep, and what could be thrown out. Because my brain is just wired up this way, I felt like I needed to give myself some rules or guidelines as the structure is calming for me.
- There are no rest days. I need to move every day. The intensity of every day will vary, but a rest day does not mean laying around on the couch not doing anything. A day that I am not lifting does not mean that I take that entire day off.
- Starting the second week of November, I signed up for a 6-week Peloton challenge. I knew that this would help me with a few goals. I have already seen progression with my functional threshold power. It would also offer up a great deal of cardio as I would be riding the bike 4 times a week at a minimum.
- I would hit my step goal every day. My step goal is a bit lower than what some have recommended, being 8,000 steps. However, I am also factoring in following a weightlifting routine along with the bike challenge.
- Some of the intentional movements I would be tracking have to be done outside of my normal activity time. In the past, all my activity was done at the gym. The rest of the day was virtually nothing. I wanted to use this to extend my activity across the entire day, such as walking in the evening, walking after a workout, or stretching at night.
As November ended, I was happy to see the calendar view and that I hit my goal nearly the entire month. There were only four days where I did not log the number of activities needed. I do not look at those as a loss. For example, on November 1st, I did a 5K walk with a weighted vest, a 90-minute Peloton endurance ride, and later on a 10-minute stretch. I am not going to beat myself up over not logging one more activity that day given how full that day was.
Thoughts:
- Walking has long been undervalued. Maybe it is because my fitness journey started with CrossFit, but I looked down upon any activity that was not high intensity. Now, I wish I had incorporated walking years ago. The value is hard to overstate. On days that would have typically been zero activity (a.k.a rest day), I found my day started much better when I woke up and went for a 45-minute to one-hour walk. I also found that I slept better when I had some type of activity toward the end of the day, such as walking the dog or following one of Peloton’s stretching programs.
- Stretching and moving later in the day helped me sleep better. I also felt better overall and had less pain. A year or two ago, I would continually joke about knee and back pain and to some extent there is still some discomfort. There is nothing that I would consider “pain” that would prevent me from doing any activity that I want to be doing.
- My cardio has improved more than I expected. At one point, I went outside and tested some running. What started as a brisk 200m ended up being several rounds of seeing how much I could push the pace. The drawback was my body not having done hardly any running at all could not handle what I was asking it to do, so recovery was another story all together. However, I never once felt like I could not hold the pace. My lungs and drive felt stronger than ever and I wanted to keep going. On the bike, I am able to work at higher FTP zones, produce higher output, all while working in lower heart rate zones.
I looked through my Garmin and my Peloton data, and it is interesting to see what all was accomplished across the 30 days.
- Walking: The total logged time for walking activities was 16:36:17 where I burned an estimated 6,036 calories and walked 59.55 miles.
- Cycling: The data here is going to be a bit more than an average month due to the 6-week challenge, however, that was the reason I signed up for it. During November, I cycled 386.96 miles, burned an estimated 13,259 calories, with a total time of 20:01:48.
- Workouts: I used my Garmin to track the total time I was in the gym and to calculate the total time lifting weight. I used these numbers to estimate the time I was lifting, not resting, and logged that each time I was in the gym for a total time of 12:34:38.
- Stretching: I feel the stretching has had a huge impact on how I have felt overall. The programs offered via Peloton are fantastic and my family and I have done them together several times. I logged nearly 2 and a half hours of total stretching time with these programs alone.
- Steps: 339,444 (Current step goal streak of 250 days).
- Peloton: I hit several output PRs and rolled over the 5,000-minute mark. Not bad since only having the bike since July.
- Garmin Badges: I am a sucker for these badges and have also used them to accumulate additional activities. There were weekend and month long challenges, such as November Step Month, November Weekend 40K (40K in a single cycling activity), November Weekend Walking (3 miles of walking), Lucky 13 Walking (13K walking in a week), Lucky 13 Cycling (13K cycling in a weekend), and November Joy Rides (75K cycling).
All of that is well and good, but moving forward, what does that mean for me?
First, I found that I have felt better by moving more and moving intentionally. Not just working out an extra 30 minutes on top of what I was doing. Adding a conditioning piece at the end of lifting was not going to make me feel better. I needed a focused effort later in the day. Just because I have gone to the gym to lift in the morning, then went for a walk, doesn’t mean I can not go for another walk at night just to feel better.
If I had only a limited time during the day to do some type of activity, it would be walking and stretching. In the past when I was training to compete in weightlifting, rest days were days that I would sit around and complain about how everything hurt. Now, regardless of the amount of activity done the days before, rest days were my chance to get caught up and truly recover, but to do so via movement. Walking provided so much to me physically and mentally. It has become essential to what I am doing.
Looking into December, the plan will be to ask myself, “If you have free time, how can you use that to feel better?”