May 12th 2020
Hunk, chunk or drunk?
You will either come out of lockdown a ‘hunk’, a ‘chunk’ or a ‘drunk’. That’s if social media is to be believed anyway. My hope is that we will actually come out of lockdown more resourceful and far more appreciative of ‘normal’ life and everything that accompanies it. But why let that idealistic view get in the way of a good blog? Back to ‘hunk’, ‘chunk’ or ‘drunk’.
‘Hunk’ is a specialist topic of mine. Not because I am one, because I am certified to train people to become one. I’m a Personal Trainer. Or I was, until about 4 years ago. I am fully trained in how to count reps up to 10. I am also expert at standing on the treadmill next to a client chatting away and expecting more than one word answers from a paying customer who is growing gradually shorter of breath with every second!
Quite rightly a huge proportion of the country have decided now is the time to finally get fit. It is an excellent idea. New habits are scientifically proven to take 30 days to embed into our life - we have certainly had over 30 days with significantly more free time on our hands. Furthermore, breaking old habits or starting new habits is proven to be more effective during periods of big life change. For example moving house, starting a new job, a global pandemic...the usual stuff.
I believe developing the habit of exercise works in steps - we have moved now from the realms of Science to my anecdotal evidence from 5 years in the industry - and my steps can be shown in the diagram below.
With all the extra time we have had on our hands and the disruption to normal work and life routines now has been an incredible time to look at Steps 1 and 2 (albeit there is a smaller pool of exercise options to explore). If you have found one form of exercise that you really enjoy, then the tricky part lies ahead.
Let’s take cycling as our example. So you’ve enjoyed a few bike rides with the kids and then got to the stage where you’re going out on your own. You’re doing progressively longer rides and you’ve maybe even downloaded Strava to track your progress on local routes. That’s class. Now you might be thinking about entering a sportive (mass long ride), but that’s Step 4 and we’re still only on Step 2. The big stumbling block is fitting your new pursuit into your ‘normal’ life. We have no normal at the moment...but you can ‘practice’ normal. Practice getting up when you would need to in order to get to work on time and fit in that hour-long ride beforehand. Try cooking dinner for the kids and doing that online HIIT class yet still being able to read the kids a story before bedtime.
This may sound silly but you’ve put in a great deal of hard work to get to the end of Step 2 and you don’t want normality to destroy all of your progress. This lockdown will end but don’t let your fitness journey finish with it.
#VirtualMoulsford
