Cranking Up Fitness Focus

With a wedding and honeymoon now out of the way it’s time to get back to being serious about my fitness levels again.  Yes, I was able to not go totally off the rails over the last few months but I had a bit of a fitness deficit to work out of to begin with.  All of the excuses, legitimate or otherwise, are now gone.  No, I’m not going to do an experiment.  No, I’m not going to be targeting some specific weight loss, muscle increase, or performance goals.  I’m instead taking the tools that I’ve applied to those sorts of expeditions and applying that to a more general concept.

The first tool I’m applying is the concept of daily and weekly goal tracking.  I used this during my six week fitness challenge to great success.  The concept is that over a four to six week period you specifically track four to six things that you would like to improve on.  For this go around I’m going to be doing four week periods.  For the first four weeks the five things I’m going to be grading myself on are: adherence to a nutritional diet, getting 7-8 hours of sleep per night, getting a reasonable level of activity each day (10,000 steps or 2800 calories), performing at least 5 minutes of calisthenics each day, and doing yoga or meditating 15 minutes each day.

All but the nutritional goal are concrete to measure.  The concept of all the goals are to rebalance my nutrition, get enough rest, get enough physical activity to stimulate my body and to increase muscle balance, improve flexibility, and finally calm my mind.  Nutrition is vague because I’m not going to be following a specific diet protocol.  I’m essentially going to be trying to eat close to nutritarian during most days: lots of fruits, veggies, and beans while pushing to the side animal products and refined foods.  However cooking together is something that my husband and I want to do so I’m allowing that to go out the window (to a point) for dinners we make for ourselves.  I’m also giving myself the concept of a “weekend pass” which will allow me to have a limited amount of slop in my eating on Fridays and/or Saturday nights if I choose.  Those are going to be balanced by a fasting day (as I say in previous entry , if we can feast on a regular basis then we should probably fast on a regular basis too).  Because I have a few months, and especially the last few weeks, of crap eating to work through I’m going to be starting off doing more regular fasting and having a more dialed in nutrition than I will a month or so from now.

By the end of the four weeks I’ll assess how I’m doing on each of those goals.  If one of those goals is really dialed in then I’ll replace it with another one for the next four week period.  Probably the first to graduate will be sleep.  Even during the crazy last few months I was generally able to get 7-8 hours of sleep (the amount I need).  I therefore don’t foresee it being that much of a problem except for the fact that I want to start waking up a little earlier to do some morning workouts, writing, and to make a legitimate breakfast instead of eating health bars or handfuls of veggies, nuts, and cheese.

With that, off I go through the first of hopefully a perpetual number of four week cycles dialing in my fitness.