Sunday School

[TheEncogitationer]

Belle Rose and Simon,

Here’s a great song from Jethro Tull I posted last year at this time for celebrating The Winter Solstice. For it’s time, the video’s animation was pretty sophisticated and it’s still neat to behold even today!

After reading Simon’s History.com article about the traditions of Saturnalia, I noticed the video also portrayed common elements with Saturnalia, such as bells, music, dancing, sundry and various roast beasts, the King of Chaos and Merriment presiding over the festivities, and the scythe-carrying bearded figure who resembled Saturn.

[TheEncogitationer]

Davis,

Happy Secular Holidays to you and kindest thoughts to you on your loss, which I didn’t know about until now.
🎄,🥀

Yes, we all are a quarreling, quibbling bunch, but it serves to sharpen all of our wits and show new perspectives from which to learn. May we all benefit from that in the coming New Year!

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake,

Much obliged on the advice for The New Year! Though I’m not sedentary in my daily work, exercise is is a hard routine to take up and maintain. I bought bike pedals, stretch bands, a jump rope, and an exercise mat months ago, but never could bring myself to use them. At least they’re intact and functional, so maybe I’ll try them again.

[jakelafort]

Enco, ya don’t have to do anything super strenuous if that is not your thing. Just walking. Walk out the door. Start 30 minutes. Get to an hour. Whatever. Study after study demonstrates lower mortality for walkers. Reduced risk of diseases. It is good for the brain. Makes ya feel better too.

There is also a lot of research that supports the notion that brief but intense physical intervals are great for heart and health. Jump rope will do the trick. Gets the heart going.

Stretch bands are good too. Another issue that is underappreciated is the significance of stretching. Especially as we age we become more rigid and subject to injury or falls. So a little stretching or yoga routine is pretty dope. I added it to my routine a few years ago.

[—]

It kind of helps if you have a goal or a physical activity you actually yearn to do/ train for. Exercise for the sake of exercise is still better than nothing, but the odds of most people putting in as much effort as they should are low and the odds of them sticking with a steady routine are even lower. But then some people, I think, get a kick out of suffering for gains and keeping a strict routine. To each their own.

[—]

jakelafort wrote:

Another issue that is underappreciated is the significance of stretching. Especially as we age we become more rigid and subject to injury or falls. So a little stretching or yoga routine is pretty dope. I added it to my routine a few years ago.

I’ve introduced flexibility training into my weekly routine. Since my late teens and 20s, I’ve had shockingly poor flexibility in my calf muscles and hamstrings as well as my upper back and shoulders in certain ranges of motion. Mostly I am training flexibility for performance wrt climbing, but the other two variables are injury prevention and mental strength training.

Part of training pliability is training your brain not to send unnecessary pain signals when you stretch, which means making bigger gains in flexibility requires some measure of discomfort.

[Strega]

We had a cord of wood delivered outside, and I have hand carried it up 13 steps, through the house and on to the deck to stack, over a period of two weeks.   A cord of wood weighs between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds.
I love our log fire enough for that not to have felt even slightly inconvenient.

I tried a 20 minute daily workout on a cross trainer (orbital elliptical?) for 90 days as a challenge. I created a Queen playlist exactly the right length so I wouldn’t clock-watch.
I hated every day of that 90 – even though I had clarity of thought, energy and other benefits. It took a while before I could stand listening to Queen at all afterwards.

Motivation is a funny old thing, isn’t it?

[—]

Definitely. When it comes to our brains, I feel like evolution is a drunk electrician. With exercise and diet, there are seemingly arbitrary switches that can flip between craving a particular activity or behaviour (or at least being completely fine with it), or outright having to fight your brain to get something done for your own good. If you try to approach it all with a rational cost/ benefit analysis, it feels like the neurological equivalent of flipping on the light switch in the bathroom causing the garage door to open.

What I’m getting at here is I, too, wish I had a log fire.

[jakelafort]

Yeah motivation is a funny thing. I liken the by-now pervasive motivation to exercise for heatlh to the pervasive motivation to eat well and avoid being too overweight.

When i was a gym-rat i hated post new years cuz the gym would fill up and it was a greater hastle navigating and using favorite machines. But every year in due course most of the new faces disappeared. The new years resolutions come with a giddy and gung-ho lets get em that dissipates like fog on a lake over a morning. And people i know who have started exercise routines with burning motivation have likewise ended their romance with exercise abruptly. Same shit happens with dieters.

So ya gotta make it part of your life or it won’t stick. No doubt as Autumn indicates that goals and loved activities increase odds of sticking. Of course goals having been met motivation may wane. But loved activities tend to stay in that status. One key thing is that when life inevitably gets in the way of a routine that the exercise is resumed as soon as possible. That is the DANGER ZONE. So easy for a dilletante to say fuck it. Or not even fuck it but just kinda forget about it.

Part of it is probably our upbringing. I had a dad who was and continues to be a fitness nut. I emulated him. As Sam Harris once pointed out strenuous exercise is quite painful-so much so that an equal degree of pain from an unknown cause would create a great deal of anxiety. So how do we react to that pain? I get how Strega reacted. And maybe carrying wood albeit strenuous is received with greater equanimity cuz of the love of fires.

There was a time i got into spinning classes. It was not long before i was spinning like a monkey on a jungle gym or a rat on a wheel. I was older than most of the spinners but within short period i was one of the better spinners. I gave it my all-embraced the pain. I always credit the post exercise mental clarity and gentle high to the effort so it is a good association.

So find a way Enco and others who are not doing enough. It is pay me now or pay me later. And pay a great deal more than the effort in exercising.

[Strega]

The answer is to exercise. It’s the question of how, and of choosing motivation smartly.
For me, yes Jake I don’t think revulsion is too strong a word to describe my relationship with exercise for its own sake. Whereas for me again, I recognise my delight at creating something I want. Not need, really. Want. And I don’t seem to care how much energy it requires.

The challenge for me is what to want for the other three seasons that requires equal exertion 🙂

[—]

jakelafort wrote:

When i was a gym-rat i hated post new years cuz the gym would fill up and it was a greater hastle navigating and using favorite machines. But every year in due course most of the new faces disappeared.

Gyms have a strange business model basically built on people not using the memberships they pay for. On the bright side, those New Year’s resolution memberships pay to keep the lights on the rest of the year.

I am the same way with the climbing gym though. I’ve sort of set my work life around being able to go in midday on Mondays and Wednesdays when it’s low traffic. I’ve started hating stat holidays because the gym fills up and my training goes to shit. But when the weather improves, I can just go outside on those days.

One key thing is that when life inevitably gets in the way of a routine that the exercise is resumed as soon as possible. That is the DANGER ZONE. So easy for a dilletante to say fuck it. Or not even fuck it but just kinda forget about it.

This is part of why exercise journaling and calorie tracking work for many. Your brain will lie to you and rationalize eating more or exercising less without skipping a beat. Some of this may be due to evolutionary mechanisms developed for periods of greater food scarcity. Store as much fat as we can and expend as little unnecessary energy as possible.

But when you see your behaviour laid out in plain text, you know when you’ve been slacking and you can’t let a legitimate rest day or break turn into a week of “I’ve been good lately; I’ve earned some time off”. It’s not for everyone though.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Some random thoughts –

Exercise should not be seen as a sacrifice of some kind. It is an investment into your overall well-being.

Jake is 100% correct about starting out by just walking for 30 minutes. Even if that is the only exercise that you do, you will benefit from it.  Increase gradually for a few weeks to one hour. After 3 months you should be able to walk 3.5-4 miles in that time. Read more. (Max heart rate is 220 minus your age).  At the weekends pick a good park or forest to walk in and just enjoy walking it for a few hours (no sweat!).

If you don’t track and record it you won’t continue to do it – so start logging it in a spreadsheet. Better still, get a Fitbit or similar tracker.  (I use a Versa 4 as it has all the monitoring info I need).

Before you start, get a medical check-up of your BP and cholesterol.  Exercise can fix a lot of things or but not any genetics that can lead to heart or breathing problems.  So even if you don’t exercise go get it checked.

Reread the last paragraph.

Buy good walking\running shoes!

If you want to run 5k’s then download “Couch to 5k” to your mobile or mp3 player. (I never take my phone with me when training or exercising).  If you find it tough then repeat week 6 and week 7 – 11 weeks in total.

Don’t get too bothered about your times. It is the distance that is important. But you do need to heat up, sweat enough to find your t-shirt is wet and your BP is raised for short periods of time.

As a guideline you should know your BMI (here). (Mine is 22.8).

There will be days you miss out on doing anything so don’t give yourself a hard time about it. Other days your just won’t feel up to it but will go out and discover it was a great move to do so!

[jakelafort]

Some directed thoughts-

I used to use a gadget to monitor heart rate. It is so cool to go up a mountain and watch your heart rate climb. I am sure what Autumn does is super strenuous and causes a very rapid increase in heart rate. Also kinda cool to have the estimated calories burned readout. Then as you get fitter you can maintain longer and longer being at or near your max heart rate. Also with greater fitness you will notice your heart rate comes down faster when you ease off the gas pedal. Furthermore your resting heart rate will go down down down. I am still in the high 40s in the morning.

I am kind of competitive. So for me i love the challenge of exceeding prior bests. It is counterintuitive that at my age in 50s i can keep bettering prior bests even though i have gone at it hard for years. Unfortunately i no longer can surpass prior bests. Those periods in which i worked really hard to reach a fitness goal and then finally achieved it are so rewarding. On one occasion that was not meant as a fitness challenge i was going up Killington in Vermont. Had a fairly heavy pack and i just accelerated like a mutha..heart pounding and driving with everything i had. I had such a high sitting at that restaurant in the aftermath. It is weird to wax on about exercise but there it is.

I agree with Reg that walking in nature is far better than on the street. If i recall Enco you live in Florida. If you are on the west coast there is the Pinellas trail (i think) that goes on a long way. Any time you can get into the mangroves where those wooden planked trails are is a cool environment to walk.

For Strega how about creating maple syrup? Tastes good eating pancakes by the fire with your own maple syrup. Also this is a great time to get out in the woods in Vermont and walk. I have come to love low 20s and sunny without wind for hiking. Coming inside and having a fire to come to is really cool. Birch bark is readily available and a great fire starter. Some people like to collect rocks or search for precious or semi precious stones in the woods. Another idea for Vermont is disc golf. A lot of the courses are on hills or mountain sides. It is a fun game and gives ya some easy exercise.

[Strega]

You’re thoughtful, Jake. I’m quite lucky in that I have ten acres abutting an unmanned wildlife park with maybe five of my acres being woodland.
Loads of trees have been felled and chopped to about two or three feet logs. My ambition for the spring is to get a small power saw, chop them up and haul them into the log rack. There are chunks of them all around the clearing where my house is centred. I suspect there’s around four full cords out there.

A cord is a stack of logs (of around 12-24” each) that stacks four foot high, four foot deep and eight foot wide – most people have a cord rack to stack them on around here.

So that’s my ambition this coming spring – because I want to.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Someone talking about power tools?

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