High volume, low intensity workouts.
Run slower than you feel you could run. Then slow down a little more. Run at a pace you can breath through your nose. And if you can't run breathing through your nose then walk. At this slower pace go for 20 minutes. Then come home take a shower and do it again the next day. Then if one day you feel like spicing it up, go for 30 minutes. But continue doing your exercise at an intensity that you can maintain while breathing through your nose. The goal of this type of exercise is not to get faster. It is to give your body time to adapt to the increased strain you are putting on it.
My story of exercise:
I have not always been living an active lifestyle. Long stretches of my life have been sedentary. Growing up I played sports and video games. When I finished college in 2015 I no longer was enrolled in any sports and I stopped exercising. It did not occur to me that this lack of physical activity would play a toll on my body and my mind. Once day I stepped on the scale and saw I weighed 240 lbs. Not only was I having trouble tying my shoes I was not happy with my life. I started smoking weed more and more to ease the anxiety I was feeling. Eventually it started affecting my work and I realized I needed to change something because the situation was not fair to me or the people around me. I starved myself for a few months eating a salad a day and dropped down to 210 lbs. But I was not healthy. I was hurting my body and it was affecting my mind because of it.
I went back to working for a couple Conservation Corps and the physical work in remote locations as well as the camaraderie brought me a sense of purpose. The hard work reminded me that it is OK to struggle and that I can overcome obstacles that pop up in life even if they can feel overwhelming.
But at this point in my life I did not consider the importance of being intentional about living an active lifestyle. I would work hard at work which would strengthen my body, then in my free time I continued to smoke and drink to excess. Being in my mid 20s my body could handle the load but the stress I was putting on my body led me to the same anxiety that I was trying to escape.
Then I landed a job with the US Forest Service working in Wildland Fire in Western Montana. I quickly realized that I was too heavy and my lungs were not ready for how strenuous it is to hike up steep hills all day for work. With the guidance of the friends I made at that job I started to think more about what I needed to do to stay lean in a healthy way. I paid more attention to my diet and to my workout routine. But I still wasn't thinking about exercise as a critical aspect of my daily life. When I wasn't working I wanted to sit and play video games which over multiple days and weeks added up.
I then went for an interview for a hotshot crew which I really wanted to work on. I got along well with my future boss but then went for a run with him and got my ass kicked. A run that takes most people about 30 mins took me 40 mins. I wasn't sure I would be hired after such a poor performance but I promised that I was going to train over the winter and show up fit for the summer.
This is when I started to think about the importance of exercise as a lifestyle. I spent the first couple months that winter in Vermont running on icy roads after work. It was cold, dark, and I was not fit and it was miserable. I could run for about a mile before I was gassed. I had no idea what I should be doing I just tried to run as hard as I could for as long as I could until I had to stop. Eventually I found a running machine I put in the basement. It was dark and miserable but at least it wasn't as cold. Because I had this goal set for myself to show up fit for the summer I stuck with it. And I started thinking about how to measure my progress to make sure that I actually was making progress towards my goal. I started buying audiobooks that discussed running and listened to them on my runs.
The first book I listened to was Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It was the first time I had heard about the injuries associated with running and the idea of high volume low intensity exercise.
Born to Run got me thinking more about injury prevention than improving my performance. I figured that if I could keep myself from getting injured while exercising consistently every day then I would end up more fit than I started. I also picked up some books by ultra-marathon runners because I figured if they are able to run for 100s of miles, I should be able to mimic them and be able to do 5 or even 10 mile runs without hurting myself.
I then spent a month in Miami and made a habit of going on morning runs down the beach. Those runs were a real joy. Warm weather and soft sand kept my spirit up and my joints happy. I then left for Flagstaff to train at higher altitude and visit my friends there. By the time I showed up for work back in Idaho I was where I needed to be in terms of fitness and it did not get in the way of doing my job.
Then that following winter I continued where I left off. Going on longer runs at a slower pace. High volume, low intensity. And yet I still found myself getting injured a couple times over the winter. I still was not doing a good job of taking care of my body and giving what it needed to stay healthy. I was leaner, stronger, and faster but my ankles and knees would sometimes give me pain and it took days to recover.
At the beginning of this Fall I started using a Whoop bracelet which tracks your strain, recovery, and sleep by monitoring your vital signs. It has given me a quantitative means to check how my body is feeling. One thing that it has made very clear is the impact that alcohol has on my body's ability to recover. Cutting down on my alcohol consumption has helped me recover faster and more fully from my workouts which in turn has led me to get more workouts in each week. My body has finally been able to get stronger than it has in the past and with a balance diet of mostly whole foods I have felt my workouts improve without the injuries that have popped up in the past. Along with the improved health of my body, the anxiety that has plagued my mind in the past has largely dissipated. I understand how difficult it can be to start a journey like this, and I have made many mistakes but I have continued on this long steady boring road to slowly improving the health of my body and it has improved my life in ways I did not imagine were possible before.
The books I have used to learn on this subject are:
Training for the Uphill Athlete by Steve House
The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown
Breath by James Nestor
I highly suggest reading these books if you are interested in improving the health of your body.
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