It’s pretty obvious from even a minimal perusal of this site that I run quite a lot and, for my age and given that it is less than 5 years ago that I properly started running, I would like to think that I am not a bad runner at all (7 marathons, 3 ultramarathons, blah, blah, blah). But despite the obvious fact that all of this running makes me pretty fit I am not, and never have been, anything like what you might call ‘strong’. My arms and upper-body are particularly weak and my core isn’t much better which is probably the reason why I sometimes get accused by my wife (or at least USED to get accused) of slouching. I’d very much like to be stronger and on a few occasions in the past two or three years I have embarked on ambitious programmes to build myself up, albeit these have always been home activities using minimal apparatus. My most recent attempt at this was my second attempt to follow a 10-week Bodyweight exercise programme by ex-US Navy SEAL Mark Lauren but although the programme looked quite feasible when written down on paper I found it too much to fit into my life and too hard. I wrote about this here: How My Arms Stopped Working.
Consequently, it is with significant pride that I am delighted to report that this morning I completed my 50th consecutive work-day set of exercises courtesy of the National Health Service (NHS) Live Well programme. I stumbled upon these exercise programmes sometime in October and started them in earnest on Monday 6th November (10 weeks ago). They are nothing like as difficult/involved as, say, the Mark Lauren programme and judging by the explanatory photos that are used to illustrate each exercise on the NHS website they are not exactly aimed at people like me. But I like them and, CRUCIALLY, I have continued with them because 1) they don’t take too long to do and 2) they are not TOO difficult. In the scheme there are six sets of so-called 10 minute exercises together with short (5-6 minute) warm-up and cool-down sections. I have been using five of the exercise sets, ignoring the one called ‘cardio’ because all of my running takes care of that aspect. I have done one of the remaining five exercise sets each work-day morning (actually non-work days including Christmas Day and New Year’s Day also when these are not weekend days) as the first thing I do when I get out of bed. In each case I do the warm-up then the exercise set and then the cool-down. I have been rotating the exercise sets so that I do the same one on any given day so it has been a case of Monday = toning, Tuesday = legs, bums and tums, Wednesday = abs, Thursday = bingo wings! [my exclamation mark] and Friday = firm butt. I have toyed with the idea of picking one of the five at random each day whilst making sure I do all five each week but for now I am sticking to the same sequence. It has to be said that the name of the programme is a bit of a mis-nomer. Some of the sets (especially toning and legs, bums and tums) take me significantly longer than 10 minutes to complete, but others (bingo wings and firm butt) only take about 5 minutes. All of the sets can basically be done in 30 minutes when the warm-up and cool-down is included. I like my sequence because the ones earlier in the week seem to me to be quite a lot harder than the Thursday and Friday ones which provides an extra little boost once mid-week has passed knowing that only the easier ones are to come.
10 weeks (or 50 exercise sets) in I can certainly detect a difference. It would not be too much of a lie to say that it is now possible to see muscles in my arms, chest and core. When I look at myself in a mirror (don’t worry, I don’t spend ages admiring myself) I can see signs of a 6-pack, although I am not sure whether anyone else would agree, it MIGHT just be optimism. And I can certainly complete more exercises, more easily and more strenuously. For example, whereas at the start I would do 8 half-press-ups during each of two circuits of the toning workout I now rattle off 15 full press-ups the first time round and usually get to 10 or so second time round before switching to half ones to conserve myself a bit for the rest of the circuit. At the start I could practically not do a stomach crunch or oblique at all – now I can reasonably comfortably do 2 sets of 15… So these exercises work and, most particularly, they work because I do them regularly. On the one hand a streak length of 50 days doesn’t seem that long but on the other hand it has spanned getting on for one third of a year so it is not too shabby and having reached this point I find myself wondering what I will be like by the time I have extended the streak to 100 days.
More generally, I was musing yesterday about the value of streaks, noting that I was (then) on 49 weekdays for exercises, and at least 11 days for 10-minutes of mindfulness meditation and reading a few pages of science content in Scientific American (or similar), and 9 days for writing entries on this blog. The value of thinking in terms of streaks like this seems invaluable and really powerful. This morning when I woke up I really struggled to get moving, but knowing that 49 was going to become 50 was a huge motivating force. And similarly, seeing my other streaks breaking through into double-figures is making me absolutely determined not to let any of them slip either.
Tim O'Hare 