It’s Friday night. Time to unwind.
Started caulking the front of the house. I have two peaks, one by the garage and the other on the other side. Tall peaks. Plus cedar siding.
When I thought about the cost to pay for the house to be painted, I thought, shit, I could take the family to Mexico. Let’s do that instead. I’ll paint the house.
I love Mexico and that takes me to the current training which consists of a lot of walking. When you travel, you do a lot of walking. Every time I go to Mexico, I walk a lot. Historically us homo sapiens walked. A lot.
Turns out, there wasn’t a lot of weightlifting then. And it turns out that if you have an active life, there is no need for weights.
Weightlifting is a supplement. Like nutritional supplements, we only need it because we’re living in an unnatural and artificial world.
I’m an office worker. I call myself that to identify with the class of people who basically sit on their ass and stare at a computer, professionally.
My “activities of daily living” are pretty pathetic if I don’t intentionally exercise.
This is the part that caught me by surprise. Sort of like a receding hairline. It caught me by surprise that my daily life consisted of no baseline fitness and I was trying to force weights on top of that. It was a sort of unconscious living.
It was a painful realization to be sure, and there were compounding factors. But the basic fact of the matter is I wasn’t getting enough activity.
Get enough activity
Move your body.
Check out the difference between the two pictures side-by-side.
Look what movement can do.
It’s the same in your body.
We’ve simply gotten too sedentary and our diets deviated from nature. Artificial. Experimentation. Two words that come to mind.
Primary and secondary exercises
The deadlift is the primary exercise I’m doing. Followed by the KB military press and then the TGU.
Then a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. I’m training 4-5 days per week.
August I’ll be taking it easier because I’ll be doing the painting. I have to space the painting out. I don’t think I’d be physically capable of doing the whole house in consecutive days and frankly there is no reason to push myself.
So, I’ll be doing deadlifts and more joint mobility. Maybe some Qi Gong. Softer stuff. Stretching, etc.
Default settings
There are several default settings. Here are a few:
- Daily 30 minute brisk walk (sometimes broken up into 2 15’s based on the day)
- 10K daily steps
- Flossing the teeth
- 2 cups of coffee
- A bit too much alcohol – prior to summer it was all good but this summer has sort of been a post-covid summer with way more fun and social interaction. I stay under two drink a day except on Friday’s.
- 5 days per week high quality salad with raw veggies, sprouts, etc.
- Less than 30 grams of sugar 5-6 days per week
- Some form of weighted exercise 4-5 days per week
- Some form of stretching 2-3 days per week
Puppy playing
The last part of this blog is the playing with the puppy part. I am not going full speed sprinting, but I am hustling, and cutting…maneuvering, if you know what I mean.
It’s good. And good ol’ Ollie is a reason why I’m getting 10K steps. He comes with me many times.
What do you do with this information
The biggest takeaway is Baseline Fitness as a default setting. It’ll help you with everything you have to do. Whether it is painting a house or thinking about a spreadsheet. Baseline Fitness is energy for life.
So if you’re not already doing it, the first thing you do is you start to walk. Walk in nature. Walk around your neighborhood. Get steps in.
Walking will save the world. It’s the correct pace of life. It has everything you need to be in shape enough for life.
Then consider some default settings for yourself. As I frequently say to people reading my newsletter, I don’t want to be a saint. Perhaps you don’t, either. That may be why you’re here. You don’t want to give it all up and you want to live a normal life within reasonable bounds.
Hey, I appreciate that. Doing a few simple things, the Baseline Fitness and the Beneficial Health stuff and then living your life is more than totally acceptable.
A tip…have a different walks
My favorite walk is the one I take up to the freeway and back. This walk goes through a path in the woods and up to the freeway which for me is a cool sort of artery of commerce and travel. I stop mid-freeway and head back. It’s about a 35 minute walk. I imagine all that activity to sustain the world. The freeway network is impressive.
Then, I have all sorts of paths I take around my house that are different walks of varying distances. And different perceptions.
Makes it fun.
Find a way to make it fun and it’s no longer work.
Then you’re set.
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