1512: Fatigue

I joined the gym again yesterday, and got up early to go this morning. Now I feel like shit. I feel the two things are not coincidental, though the “feeling like shit” part, to be fair, was lingering in the background before the “going to the gym” part, so going to the gym probably did not help matters.

I am in a frustrating situation in that I clearly need to do some exercise — I’ve been feeling super-crappy recently, getting out of breath far too easily, and something I’ve done somewhere along the line feels like it’s knackered my left knee — but actually getting back into a good routine looks like it is going to be difficult. It will, of course, get easier over time assuming I keep it up, but it’s getting that initial burst of motivation going that is going to prove challenging, I feel.

My most positive experience with fitness was back when I worked at the Apple Store in WestQuay here in Southampton, and the gym and pool complex was both practically next door to where I worked, and on the way home. Consequently, it was pretty easy to just drop in, do some exercise either in the gym or the pool, then head home and have my whole evening ahead of me. It got me into good habits and made me feel reasonably good about the effort I was putting in — I’m not sure whether or not it actually helped me lose any weight, but part of it was just the mental wellbeing it brought about. I still wouldn’t have described myself as particularly “fit” but I was certainly a whole lot better than I am now.

The difficulty with being unfit is that it makes the process of actually getting fit infinitely more difficult to get started with. When it’s uncomfortable and painful to engage in exercise, the idea of voluntarily putting myself through that is not at the forefront of my mind. But I need to; hopefully it will be something that gets easier relatively quickly and helps me improve my motivation. Because right now there’s not a lot of it there — though some of that may be due to the fact that I don’t think I’m very well.

Going to get some good rest and then hopefully kick this thing off in earnest at some point in the next few days. I’m looking forward to having a swim, actually; it’s been quite a while since I had a good swim, and while I’m not very good at it — I’m painfully slow, even when doing “fast” strokes — I do find it to be quite a relaxing experience, so that could be the ideal thing to ease myself back into things.

Anyway, for now I’m off to bed. Apologies for the self-pitying nature of today’s post but, eh, you’re probably all used to it by now. G’night.

#oneaday Day 758: Keep Moving!

Thus far the return to a regular fitness routine has been going pretty well. I’ve shaken off all vague feelings of illness, so I can’t use that as an excuse any more, and I have a variety of activities that I’m able to do so I don’t get bored. Also, as stupid as it sounds, associating the act of running with one of my favourite characters from Katawa Shoujo — that’s Emi, for anyone not tuning out when I mention that game now — gives me a positive attitude towards it, even if I suck in comparison to people who are fitter and slimmer than me.

Fitness is tricky business, though, as anyone who has tried to get themselves into a decent routine and struggled will attest. Just arbitrarily deciding that you are going to “get fit” isn’t enough for most people, in my experience. You need things to aim for and the means through which to motivate yourself.

I thought what I’d do today is share what I’m doing in the hope that it might rub off on some of you. Feel free to pinch any of my ideas if you’re struggling with the whole “motivation” thing.

First up, I have a selection of things to do — I don’t do the same thing all the time. If you’re a gym member, it’s easy to think that you should be using the gym as much as possible, and when you’re there, it’s also very easy to get stuck in a rut doing the same routine over and over and over again. And sure, sticking to a routine can allow you to work on the parts of the body that you’d really like to focus on, but good grief it gets boring after a while.

So mix it up. When you’re at the gym, try some different machines. If you do weight training, use the machines sometimes and the free weights at others. Try using barbells if you normally use dumbbells. Challenge some different cardiovascular machines. Bump up the difficulty. Set yourself more lofty targets — ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Challenge yourself to meet those targets without stopping for a rest, or with only a certain number of rests, or completing a certain amount of distance in that time period.

But don’t necessarily stick to the gym. Go outside and do something like cycling or running. While you may feel horrendously self-conscious attempting to perambulate your wheezing carcass at a faster speed than your normal zombie-like shamble in an environment that contains other people, there are plenty of ways to tune out the outside world. Loud music, for example — and we’ll come back to that point in a minute. The clothing you wear makes a difference, too — hide your face under a hoodie or a hat and you’ll feel much less self-conscious, plus you get the added bonus of being able to pretend you’re Ezio Auditore running away from the city guards. That and keeping the windchill off your ears, too. Also bear in mind that there’s a strong possibility that anyone who sees you running — especially in inclement weather conditions — will be impressed at your dedication to bettering yourself. (This rule is also known as the “Fat People Shouldn’t Be Ashamed To Be Seen At The Gym Rule”.)

On the subject of music, pick something that inspires you. No-one else is going to hear it (unless you have crap headphones that leak sound everywhere, and even then only if you’re exercising around other people and playing your music at full volume) so it can be absolutely anything you want, even the most shameful of crap in your iTunes library. In fact, in the age of Spotify, you can feel free to try out different genres of music to see what gets your pumped up. You may find that 80s cheese does the trick, or thumping dance beats, or — God forbid — dubstep.

Podcasts are a good thing to insert into your earholes while you’re exercising too, not because they’re inherently energetic in themselves, but because they provide the illusion of time passing more quickly. By concentrating on the sound of peoples’ voices and what they are saying, you’ll find you naturally stop clockwatching, simply letting your body run on automatic while you listen to, say, the Minotti brothers yelling at each other on the Exploding Barrel Podcast, or the Squadron of Shame waxing lyrical about chin-strokey gaming topics.

My personal recommendation for listening material is to check out some soundtracks, both movies and games. Action movie soundtracks and games that are full of spectacle typically provide excellent soundtracks to work out to — particular favourites of mine include the soundtracks to Speed, the Matrix series, Metal Gear Solid, Split/Second, Shadow of the Colossus (particularly awesome when lifting weights), the bizarrely cheerful soundtrack to the iPhone version of DoDonPachi Resurrection and Space Channel 5. If you’re a JRPG fan, battle themes are particularly awesome to work out to. If you can create a crescendo of intensity culminating in the most epic final boss themes you can find, so much the better. There’s no better feeling than finishing that last set of reps as the choir starts belting out One Winged Angel.

Finally, and I think this is probably the most powerful motivational factor in my case: track your progress. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut, but to see measurable results provides powerful inspiration to push yourself harder and go a little further. Exactly how you do this is up to you, but as a gamer and social media junkie I use Runkeeper to track cardiovascular workouts (including mapping my runs when I go outside) and the very excellent Fitocracy social game/network to log complete workouts. I also share my completed workouts on Facebook and Twitter. While some may not like the “spam”, it’s easy enough to ignore, and the few people who do congratulate me on a job well done after the fact makes it worthwhile.

On that note, if you can build up a support network for yourself — be it people you regularly work out with or online friends who cheer you on from afar — you’ll find yourself motivated to succeed, particularly if they’re the sort of friends who would rib you mercilessly if you give up. If you’re going through a programme like the Couch to 5K thing I shared with you all the other day, then work with a friend or team to get through it together.

Above all, though, have fun with it. It may feel like work at times because it is — it’s something you need to make yourself do, and made of activities that your body often doesn’t feel like doing if you tend to live a fairly sedentary lifestyle. But unlike going to actual work, you’re free to tackle it and make it fun in whatever manner you please rather than sitting in a cubicle allowing your soul to be sucked out through your ergonomically-designed management keyboard.

I hope that’s made some of you think a bit. C’mon, if I can get off my arse and get active, I’m pretty sure that you (yes, you, with the beard/glasses/pointy nose/weird hair/lovely hair/nice tits/flatulence/worryingly prominent erection/kind face/greasy trout in your hand/jar of olives clutched to your breast/smelly armpits [delete as applicable]) can do it too.

#oneaday Day 636: A Vote for Fitocracy is a Vote for… Wait, No

Andie and I joined the local gym yesterday, and had our induction sessions today. All is good and we’re feeling suitably motivated to proceed. This will likely mean leaving EA Sports Active 2 by the wayside — boo, no PSN trophies for me, but seriously, who gives a toss? — in favour of using actual proper exercise machines. And also not having to strap on those motion sensors which occasionally disconnect for no apparent reason.

Don’t get me wrong, EA Sports Active 2 is great, and it offered enough to get me motivated to start gymming it again, but there’s no substitute for the “real thing”.

The thing with being a member of the gym is, of course, maintaining your motivation factor. There are lots of ways you can do this — going along with a friend, keeping a log of your progress or, increasingly, using some form of website or app to both track your progress and brag about how awesome you are and how swell your guns are looking.

There are plenty of these available — Runkeeper Pro is my app of choice on my iPhone — but a lot of them are relatively simple affairs that just track what you’ve done without any particular form of motivation bar what you make up for yourself. Runkeeper does email you every time you break a personal record, but that’s about it.

Enter Fitocracy, an up-and-coming website that’s still in beta. Fitocracy takes the concept of fitness tracking and jams it firmly up the arse of social gaming. This means that every time you track some fitness, you get points. Points mean levels. Levels, as we’ve seen from fifteen billion social games that really don’t need a levelling system, are a powerful motivational tool — and, as each level gets progressively harder to achieve, they inspire you to push yourself a little bit further, whether that’s demonstrating your patience with clicking on a Facebook game, or feeling the burn a little bit more with your workouts.

There’s also a Quests function, which is an awesome idea. Take on a Quest and you’ll challenge yourself to do a specific exercise or combination, with points on offer as a reward upon completion. Obviously a large amount of this is down to your own honesty — but then so is fitness tracking itself, and the only person you’re cheating if you lie is yourself. Levels don’t get you anything per se, they simply provide a degree of motivation to the whole experience.

I will be trying out Fitocracy with some interest over the next few weeks — and possibly longer if it turns out to be awesome. It’s invite-only at the minute, but if you’d like to try it out for yourself, get in touch and I can hook you up with one of my remaining ones so you can check it out.

In the meantime, I have some grinding to do.

#oneaday, Day 53: Mr Motivation

Motivation is a curious beast. And it’s not a case of either “having it” or “not having it”, there are many complex factors involved. And sometimes, apparently, blind chance.

Take today. I got my ass soundly kicked by a boss in Final Fantasy XIII (which I am enjoying a lot so a big middle finger to all of you who hate it) so instead of swearing profusely and trying again, I swore profusely, turned off the PS3, said to myself (silently, because saying it out loud with no-one else nearby would just be weird) “I’m going to go and run 10km now,” and then went and ran 10km. I’d say “just like that” but it took over an hour and a half, and anything over a couple of minutes is automatically disqualified from “just like that” status.

Anyway, casual bragging that I’ve achieved my goal of running 10K aside, I find that sudden bursts of motivation like that happen at the strangest of times… and it’s very difficult to force them. Impossible, in fact. They’re a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive sort of thing… which makes it rather inconvenient when you actually need some motivation to do something.

Part of the issue is, of course, prior successes. My running has been a slow but sure upward slope of little victories, one step at a time, and so that has provided ample motivation to continue and keep pushing myself to the next milestone, no pun intended. Contrast this with the jobhunting, on the other hand, which has been a string of ignorance, incompetence and idiocy—none of which was my fault—and it’s understandable how I may be feeling a little disheartened on that particular front. Still, I am cracking on with it and have yet another bunch of applications in now. It remains to be seen if anything will come of these ones. Some of them, again, are even relevant to what I want to do, though the pay is all over the place. I’m kind of taking the opinion now that any money coming in is better than no money, particularly if the job in the question offers a potentially good “foot in the door” for other Good Things. Which at least one of the things I’ve applied for does.

So we shall see. But it has been a long time since I’ve felt that same surge of motivation for the jobhunting than I have for the running. Perhaps it’s because of the difference between something I want to do and something I have to do. No-one likes feeling obliged to do things—given the opportunity, most people would rather be able to stay in bed as long as they like and then spend their days doing any combination of eating pies, playing video games, watching TV, staring at the Internet, wandering through fields of flowers, driving expensive cars very fast, wanking, listening to music, smashing Justin Bieber albums over the heads of people they don’t like very much, giving and/or receiving oral sex, smoking weed, drawing pictures and eating Lindor chocolates—and so anything that you need to do that gets in the way of doing those things that you want is automatically parsed by your brain as being an inconvenience.

Perhaps I just need to want to find a job more. For that to happen, though, I need to spot the Awesomest Job Ever That Is A Complete Shoe-In For My Appointment And That No-One Else Will Ever Apply For.

What’s that? AwesomeTech are looking for a “Playing Final Fantasy In Bed Technician Called Pete” for £50,000 a year? I’m so there.

Sigh. A man can dream, huh?

#oneaday, Day 80: Lift! And down. And lift! And down.

I started “playing” EA Sports Active again the other day, having got out of shape during my abortive attempt to return to classroom teaching. And yes, I blame the latter for the former. Partly because the 80-mile round trip daily commute I was doing meant I got back too late to go to the gym, and also that the stress caused tiredness and lack of motivation. Finding myself currently with relatively little to do (it’s the Easter holidays, so I’m going to have to wait for supply teaching work) I decided to start it up again.

Those who have known me a while know that I used to keep a blog here. I’m thinking I may start using that again, as it was an excellent self-motivation tool. Even if others weren’t particularly interested in reading about how many chest presses I’d managed that day, the act of writing that stuff down helped.

EASA takes a similar approach by constantly offering you feedback and achievable goals. God, I feel like an obnoxious management-type just saying those words, but it’s true. For once. Start on the app’s “30 Day Challenge” programme and you’re automatically set some goals – a number of calories to burn in your first week, a total number of hours to achieve in the month and a number of workouts to successfully complete in the first week. You can also create your own goals, which is nice – though I’m quite happy with the ones it’s set for me so far. There’s also an Achievement-like trophy system that rewards you for completing workouts, burning certain numbers of calories, completing certain exercises several times – it’s surprising how motivating adding these “game-like” elements is.

EASA also has the benefit of actually working. Unlike Wii Fit’s all-you-can-eat buffet of exercise with no structure whatsoever (though I understand the Plus edition fixes this), EASA gives you a decent structured workout to do that isn’t the same each day. Some days you’ll be concentrating on the lower body and doing things that will make your thighs hurt for days afterwards. Other days you’ll be using the included twangy red band to work on your arms. The band itself isn’t very strong, so I’ve taken to wearing wrist weights while undertaking the workouts. They’re not THAT heavy, but they add enough additional challenge to be able to feel the strain a little bit.

EASA will also get you breaking a sweat quite quickly. Again, unlike Wii Fit, whose only really challenging portion came in the bizarrely featureless monochrome world of the yoga and muscle exercises. Today I had a lot of jumping around, which looked ridiculous, but which was also genuinely hard work. This is good. If I come off a workout feeling tired, then I feel like I’ve achieved something. It may not be the most pleasant thing to be sitting there sweating, but hey.

Anyway, I shall be continuing with my 30 Day Challenge and seeing where it takes me. I’m also going to try and pick up my gym routine. Motivation!

Now, if only all this stuff I was doing was earning some money, I’d be sorted.