How well would you adhere to a programme of picking this up twice a week?

It’s a really interesting study and quite readable, so I do recommend you go and have a read of it yourself, but I’ve included some of the more interesting points below.

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Adherence to a strength training intervention in adult women

Arikawa A Y, O’Dougherty M, Schmitz K.  J Phys Act Health 2011; 8(1):111-118. (Free copy of the study here.)

The study

This study was considering data already collected about 164 premenopausal sedentary women for the “Strong, Healthy, and Empowered” (SHE) study, reported in 2007 (Strength training and adiposity in premenopausal women: strong, healthy, and empowered study.  Schmitz KH, Hannan PJ, Stovitz SD, Bryan CJ, Warren M, Jensen MD.  Am J Clin Nutrition 2007; 86(3):566-72).  This earlier study required the women to participate in two years of strength training.  In order to assess how much the strength training made a difference it was necessary to keep note of whether the women actually did the training.

The authors of the study we’re looking at today used this subsidiary data from the 2007 study to look at whether there was any link between adherence and certain demographic variables.  The demographic variables being considered were: age, self-reported race or ethnicity, education, marital status, number and ages of children living at home and their work status.

The training programmes

For the first year participants were doing two training sessions each week, lasting 60-90 minutes each, and then recording them in a file kept at the YWCA fitness centres.

The sessions were structured with a cardio warm-up and “core” exercises followed by nine common strength training exercises and finishing with a warm-down set of stretches.  On the strength exercises participants did three sets of eight to ten reps for each exercise, always lifting the heaviest weight possible.

In year two participants were allowed, if they wanted, to drop down to two sets of each exercise.  This is estimated as having reduced the length of the workout to 45 minutes.

Strategies to support adherence

It is worth looking at the strategies employed to try and help these women adhere to the training programme.  After all, the team running the original study needed the women to do the training or they could not assess the impact.  To assist with this a number of support strategies were employed, reported as follows:

• Supervised intervention – For 16 weeks they participants did two sessions a week of supervised training with a qualified fitness professional in groups of two to six participants.
• Personal booster sessions – Access to one training session with the qualified fitness professional each month and also two group booster sessions every 12 weeks to introduce new exercises, ensure form was still correct and provide social support to the participants.
• Phone and email reminders – participants were contacted by phone or email once a week if they did not report their completed strength training sessions (their logs were checked weekly).
• Social support gatherings – twice yearly events for participants to share successes and challenges.  If I’ve learned nothing else from writing this blog, I’ve learned that women starting out on a strength training programme need a huge amount of social support, whether directly like this or through the internet.
• Incentives – free gifts like t-shirts or water bottles.
• Study website – this contained contact information for staff, methods to contact each other, success stories, ideas to help overcome challenges etc.
• Letters/email to significant others – study participants gave names of people they were close to who could encourage them.  These people were sent letters and emails explaining what they were doing and suggesting behaviours and activities that might support the participants.
• Child care – this was provided to any participant who had children age five or younger.
• Gym membership – the participants were given a two-year membership to the Minneapolis YWCA fitness centres.

This seems like a well-considered set of strategies.  However it doesn’t hit the mark with one of the biggest factors readers of this site tell me are reasons they struggle to adhere to their training programmes – a lack of time.  For this study the sessions were long enough to not be able to squeeze them into a lunch break or some other convenient window, which would have compounded any time issue too.

Provision of things like child care will have helped a little with the lack of time issue but for anyone with children over five (who would still need child care) or those with busy work lives, it would be easy enough to let time become the front-runner excuse not to train.  Even if the real problem is a lack of motivation, time can often be labelled, either rightly or wrongly, as the actual culprit for not training.

Results – supervised year one

The results can be found in full published together in a single table here.

On looking at them the most interesting part for me is that there was such good adherence while the participants were having their training sessions with a personal trainer.  Most of the adherence is above 90%, no matter how they classified the participants.

The only group where this was not the case were unmarried women with children aged 6-12 – an age group that still requires childcare and where we might assume (correctly or incorrectly) that support at home to provide this child care is less than it might be in a marital home.  These women only managed 76.7% adherence to the programme in these first few months.

Results – unsupervised year one

Even more startling is how quickly this overall adherence dropped off.  In the rest of year one, once the formal supervised training had finished, adherence dropped to 50-70% for nearly all groups, although there are some noticeable splits within that.  Most clearly when looking at race – white women maintained a 70.3% adherence while women of any other colouring only showed 48.6% adherence.  There is more discussion on this particular split later but I don’t really know what to make of it – is it cultural?

In the unsupervised part of that first year it is also helpful to look at the marital and age of children split again.  While the unmarried women with children aged 6-12 were still poor in adherence, they were safely within the main pack showing 50.9% adherence.  This suggests to me that there was much more influence from external factors on whether these women were able to adhere than pure willpower and desire to train.  They saw much less drop-off in adherence than all the other groups who dropped from an adherence above 90%.

The group who stand out this time were the unmarried women with children aged 13 or older, dropping from 96.7% to 36.3% adherence.  While this would usually imply to me something skewing the data, this pattern continues into year two and no other cut of the data reflects this skew, despite the fact that these same women must have been included in other groups (eg. college or non-college educated women).

Results – year two (unsupervised)

By year two the adherence across the board is mostly in the mid-30-50% range.  I was actually surprised by how high this adherence was in year two since it is often the second year when the love-affair with the new training routines and formats tends to finally wear off completely.

The question of race and ethnicity

Throughout this study there were results that surprised me and results that seem very easily explained.

The most extreme difference within a single comparison comes from the split between white and coloured women.  For some reason, white women, who represented 58.5% of the participants, show much greater adherence and without knowing how the other demographic characteristics split between these two groups (eg. did more coloured women have children) it is impossible to say why.

The authors gave some consideration to what might be causing this difference.  In particular whether

“the gym environment itself could be a deterrent for some participants and would particularly contribute to this division between white and coloured women.  The authors state that the “YWCA locations were in the city of Minneapolis, which had a 32% minority population […]. The YWCA mission is painted on the entrance walls of the facilities: “The YWCA of Minneapolis works to fulfill our mission of eliminating racism and empowering women.” The gym staff and membership, while majority White, reflected the diversity of the area. According to their geographic location, mission statement, staff and membership and course offerings (including hip hop, salsa and African dance, among other courses), the fitness centers did not appear to be unwelcoming to culturally diverse women. […] data gathered in focus group discussions and interviews with a subsample of intervention participants offer some perspective. Several women mentioned having joined the study in order to obtain a free gym membership. Six women of color and 5 White women explained their choice of a gym location and/or time of work out by noting disliking a crowded gym. Three women of color emphasized the gym provided a positive family experience. One said of her children: “They are all girls and I want them to know that working out is a good thing for them and they should find time as they get older.” Another found the gym “open, friendly”. Another woman of color said she had “respect” for the YWCA community, and in part frequented the gym to join that community. Two women of color had difficulties with the day care. While specific responses differed, it seems that most women did not have problems with gym-based exercise per se, but only with specific conditions: many preferred quiet, non crowded spaces.

There were, however, 6 women (2 women of color and 6 White women) who voiced discomfort with or dislike of the environment. Four specifically said they had been “intimidated” by the gym: for one woman of color it was the machines, for two (1 woman of color and 1 White woman) it was the many men working out in the weights area. The women of color noted this sense of discomfort ended once they became familiar with using the machines. A White woman said she would prefer a woman only gym: “it feels very intimidating for a woman, especially someone who’s you know who’s overweight to try and go and use the machines, when these guys are putting on all these weights, it’s just a macho thing… If they weren’t there it would feel so much more welcoming.” Another White woman, who suggested women only time periods, suggested: “women only [gym hours] and it would be like women trying to get into shape, so it wasn’t like all Barbie dolls…I would go because I would know it would be a welcoming environment”. Two White women voiced their general dislike for being in gyms without elaboration. These responses suggested that at least some women did not want to be in a social atmosphere under observation or in a male-dominated space, or perhaps indoors at all for physical activity. Most focus group responses did not indicate reservations about gym-based exercise. Instead, they emphasized their confidence in their ability to complete strength training correctly, but noted time constraints and issues of convenience.”

Given that many of these comments are coming from white women it seems unlikely that the gym conditions were the reason for this division in adherence.

The issue with parenthood and training

The authors also took time to consider the drop in adherence by women with older children too.  One of the women participating commented, “although her older children no longer required a babysitter, they needed rides to their scheduled activities.”  Another participant had commented that it was easier to adhere when her children were younger and didn’t have their own schedules.

Despite this, I do disagree with a comment from the authors that parenthood in general impacts training.  After all, those women without children didn’t always adhere as well as those women with children up to 5 years old who had access to child care.  The problem is not with being a parent per se but with what resources you have as a parent to handle the multiple commitments that this creates.

Conclusions

So what have we learned here?  Overall we have learned that there is a definite drop off over time in adherence to a training programme by overweight women.  There also seems to be a particular difficulty in training when women have children to care for – especially as those children gain a social life of their own but don’t yet have the means to get about alone.

The comments about the gym environment are especially helpful as they appear to support suspicions that I already had about gym environments putting women off training.  I have a private gym of sorts in my garage but even after years of training I still hate going into a public gym.

Some suggestions to improve this could include more women-only sessions being available in commercial gyms.  It might also be improved if gyms offered family-friendly environments where women can bring partners and children with them to workout in some way with them.  This would offer much more personal support for the women working out and also resolve some child care issues for them.  However, as a general rule in the UK nobody under age 16 is allowed into a commercial gym that has weights and until they resolve that families will not be able to workout together.

If we have friends we want to encourage to start, and then stick to, a training programme there are perhaps a few things we can do to help them.  We could offer to train with them until they have got used to the commercial gym environment and feel confident in going alone.  And even when they do feel confident, perhaps we could still go with them from time to time.  Perhaps we can offer to help with child care to allow them time to train.  These certainly appear to be the biggest barriers to adherence coming out of this particular analysis of the data.

What do you think?  Is there something I’ve missed here?  Are you a mother who has some tips you can share in the comments on how other mothers can successfully combine workouts and parenthood?  If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Related posts:

1. Strength training and adiposity in premenopausal women: Strong, Healthy, and Empowered study
2. Influence of moderately intense strength training on flexibility in sedentary young women
3. Why do women start weight training?

I hope all my reader’s have had a break over the Festive period and are feeling enthused for a fresh start on 2012, just as I am.  2011 was a tough year for me.  I knew that I would be giving up my full-time job at the end of the year moving to a more mixed role of full-time musician to bring in the money that I need with the aim of a five-day “weekend” from Monday to Friday to take me away from the desk, give me more time to be active and mobile, leave me with time to train, and remove as much stress as possible from my life.

To prepare I spent most of 2011 doing a seven-day working week as I put more effort into my music, setting myself up with a reliable income stream from it before I handed in my notice from the desk job.  Unsurprisingly I finished off 2011 incredibly ill.  There was an unpleasant bug going round the UK and both Chris and I succumbed to it before Christmas without any hesitation, leaving us both bed-bound for a couple of days and without an ability to eat much of anything for over a week.

After a break over the Christmas period I thought I would share some of the things I have planned for 2012.  This is my statement of intent for the year that this blog is going to be spruced up a bit!

Workout plan for 2012

While I would like to report on my training for the end of 2011 I didn’t actually do anything for the last two weeks, since I was far too sick to leave my bed, let alone get into the gym for the week before Christmas and was then away on a six day walking trip after Christmas.  As expected after such a long break (12 December to 3 January plus 6 days of strenuous walking) I’ve knocked back my numbers quite horribly.  The figures below compare my final December workouts to the figures I got in my workouts last week.

• Back squat: 80kg 3×3, 5×2 down to 75kg 1×3, 7×2
• RDL: 95kg 8×3 down to 90kg 8×3
• Partial overhead press: 20kg 8×3 to 25kg 8×2 (so no loss here, but it was a new exercise in December)
• Hip thrust: 145kg 2×3, 4×2 down to 120kg 8×3 (I’m not so surprised about this – when I put the weight up to 145kg I struggled to get full extension so I stopped my warm up when I hit a weight I felt I was working hard with this time – I expect this to increase reasonably quickly).

Farewell ye great and mighty hip thrust

In 2012 I would like to finally get a handle on my bench press.  I’m going to increase to 3 workouts a week but also cut the size of the workouts slightly.  Part of the reason for this is that I have gained an allotment at the start of 2012 and anticipate doing some pretty hard digging a few times each week – I don’t want to burn out.

In a few weeks time this should be taking the following format:

1. Back squat then superset partial overhead press with chins
2. Superset Bench press with a row and then hip thrusts
3. RDLs and Hip thrusts

Until I get my squat back I’ll be doing workouts 1, 3 then 1 again each week.

I’ve no doubt this will change as I progress through the year and get used to not sitting at a desk all week but I really do want to crack the bench press this year and see if I can get to competition shape by Christmas.

Figure improvements in 2012

I let myself go a bit towards the end of 2011.  I’d made a conscious decision not to strictly diet at any point in 2011 as I was aware of an unhealthy relationship with food that developed through my 3 months of really hard dieting at the end of 2010.  I wanted time to heal that ticking psychological time-bomb.  I was also aware that there would be no free meals out with clients in 2012 and this year would be naturally easier to diet (for starters, no endless supplies of cake on the cabinets at work for birthdays and successful target achievement and competitions and… you get the drift).

No more cake lying about on a daily basis to tempt me

• 15 January to 15 February 2012 – I intend doing a 30 day Paleo Challenge at the start of the year.  It’s pretty much underway now, I didn’t really make a note of exactly when it started since there was much rubbish to cut out of my diet anyway, but there might be something inappropriate on Chris’s birthday this week, so it officially starts on 15 January after the partying finishes.  I know the dates above aren’t really 30 days but as 15 February is my birthday, it seems an appropriate date to stop the challenge.
• January – March 2012 – I will also be getting some of the excess fat off my hips and glutes.  This is one of my experiments for this year though.  I’ve done enough cutting diets in the last few years to know that the only way I could previously get results was an incredibly strict and repetitive food regime, fewer than 950 calories each day, and various cardio strategies over the years.  Despite looking “almost awesome” in December 2010 at the end of my last dieting phase I could never get rid of the handles of fat on the tops of my hips.  They got smaller but never went.  Through monitoring and measuring this year I want to see if the following appear to be true:
  • The fact that stress hinders fat loss is documented in several books on our shelves, hopefully I will find that I finally can shift those lumps of fat that sit at the top of each hip.
  • Reading any bodybuilding article or book by the old school bodybuilders, there is very little “cardio” mentioned.  However, they don’t sit around doing nothing either.  I’m going to see if I can lose weight without a complete starvation diet simply through the fact that I am more mobile each day and therefore using more calories.
  • Being based at home most days should also enable me to try something else too – eating when hungry.  I will always have foods that are appropriate to hand and so I intend eating food when I feel hungry and, where possible, stopping when full.  I will also eat something that appeals and not count the calories of it.  Again, this should hopefully have a positive affect on my figure and it will be interesting to see if I am able to lose weight this way without the psychological issues that come from a regimented calorie-restricted diet.  It will also be interesting to see how much I end up ingesting each day, what foods I tend to favour and what the macronutrient ratio looks like.

The shampoo experiment

I’ve always had trouble with my hair.  It’s thin, limp and hangs in rat-tails unless it’s within half a week since I visited the hairdresser.  It also gets greasy incredibly fast – I’ve never been able to contemplate leaving it unwashed even for one day as I wake up each morning with greasy-looking hair, even if it was washed the evening before.

This first month away from work without clients and internal meetings and a strict “business-acceptable” dress code finally gives me the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to try the shampoo-free experiment.  I can wear headscarves as much as I want and nobody needs to know what my hair looks like.  Everyone’s blog-posts I’ve read about trying this has agreed that it starts to look good after the first month, so I started this experiment on 27 December, when we left for the walking trip.  I’ll be blogging about my progress with photo evidence.

Technical research

Those of you who have been reading my blog for some time will have noticed that the quantity and quality of my technical research posts went sharply downhill towards the end of last year as I had less and less time to read up on topics.

Back to a bit of technical research

This year there are no excuses and areas I want to learn about include:

• Endometriosis – several of my friends have struggled with this and I think it is surprisingly common.  I’d like to understand more about it, both what it is like as someone with endometriosis and also what the known and suspected causes and potential solutions (if any) may be.
• Palaeolithic female figures – this is a much longer term project that could take more than just this year, but I’d like to see what I can learn about the figures of early females through skeletal structure and imagery.  It’s going to be delving back into my degree as an archaeologist.
• Women and bench press – for obvious reasons I’d like to learn more about whether it really is true that women struggle more with the upper body than the lower body when it comes to strength and, if so, why.
• Ketogenic diets – I promised someone at the end of 2010 that I would look into this and I never did.  This year I’m going to learn more about them.
• Metabolic Type diet – again, this has been mentioned to me and I am very skeptical but I shouldn’t be skeptical when I know almost nothing about them, so I’m going to at least read a couple of books and understand it better.

As I learn about these I will write about them on the blog.  However, I’m keen to research areas that other people would also like to learn more about, so please do leave a comment or send me an email through the contact form if you have other topics you would be interested to learn more about from me.

I hope you have all got similarly ambitious plans and intentions for 2012, whether in your personal life, in the gym or at work.  Please do let me know if you miss anything from the articles I used to write or if there is something you’d like me to be writing about but which you aren’t seeing.

Best of luck to you all for a happy and fulfilled year!

Related posts:

1. Why do women start weight training?
2. Setting New Year resolutions
3. Iron Lady: interview with Laura Trimble (part 1)

Take some time to think about yourself

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Go back four or five years and I was on the traditional carb-heavy active person’s diet (porridge each morning, pasta salads and bakes for lunch, pasta and rice-laden meals at dinner).  I was living in my trainers, had lots of stress from day to day, plenty of cardio through walking and cycling, no weights, no supplements.  I couldn’t even overhead press an empty dumbbell handle weighing a hefty 1kg.  As for my body weight, I had weighed 50kg for about 10 years, despite being 5’6”, with it never going either up or down.

Sound familiar?

Since then I’ve been through a journey of discovery.

I’ve converted to an almost carb-free existence for a while to learn to be a fat-burner, I went strictly paleo for long enough that I can now get away with the odd non-Paleo diversion from time to time but know that I’m looking after my body the rest of the time.

I care for myself better, both mentally and physically.  I have learned to control my stress levels better and know how to recognise my stress characteristics and manage them.  I can feel different muscles in my body working with an awareness I never had before and, as a result I can use self-massage techniques to keep my body feeling as free and relaxed as possible.

Elsewhere in my life I’ve converted to living in Vibram KSOs whenever I can get away with them.  I still cycle and walk a huge amount but I balance it now with a programme of lifting weights.  I’m push-pressing a 20kg kettlebell for reps, squatting safely over my national qualifying weight (with the BDFPA) and happily hip thrust 140kg for reps.

As for my body composition, I’ve gained an enormous amount of muscle and struggle to keep my weight near 56kg because my love of food, when put alongside the hours I spend sitting still in my desk job mean that it tends to drift up a kilo or two at times, despite the fact that I’m carrying less body fat than I was when I weighed 50kg.  I definitely can’t fit my quads, hamstrings or glutes into any of the jeans I used to wear (which is actually a bit frustrating, but never mind).

*****

It’s a lot of changes in a surprisingly short space of time and that’s just what I’ve achieved without removing the full time desk job from my life.  I expect that a lot of others who read this blog have come through similar journeys of self-discovery and change in the recent past.

Have you adopted some changes to diet, training or lifestyle and seen similar massive changes and benefits to your overall being?

No related posts.

The most noticeable thing they have in common when you first look at the interviews is the photos.  Without exception, they are all stunning with fantastic physiques.  It’s a brilliant advert for the physique benefits of lifting heavy weights.

So take a break from the heavy weights and enjoy these interviews.

Women can be strong (image courtesy of Greg Westfall)

• Sue Metcalf is a Strongwoman competitor from Queensland.  Strongwoman competing in Australia doesn’t have a huge amount of competition but she’s had some great results in the US as well and I think she’s going to be someone to keep an eye on over the next few years.
• Molly Galbraith is a figure competitor who also competes occasionally at Powerlifting.  She was interviewed as part of the Beautiful Badass profile series that Nia Shanks ran (more of these further down) and there was even a part two.
• Adriane Blewitt recently made a name for herself as the first woman to certify on the IronMind’s Women’s Captain of Crush certification for the Number 2 gripper.  Diesel Crew did an interview with her in which she explains how she got into the weird and wonderful world of grip strength.
• Jean Fry is a professional powerlifter who answered some questions about getting into powerlifting, her best lifts, cardio, strength training myths and misconceptions and various other things.  Oh, and there are some awesome photos of her on the article too.
• Courtney Prather is a Fitness Model and Bikini Competitor.  You might not think this necessarily fits into a category of “strong” women but to have some good muscles to show off you are going to have to lift some reasonable weights.  Find out what Courtney does in this interview.
• Gillian Mounsey is a strength athlete who has been through a long journey of self-discovery over the years.  I strongly recommend reading the interview that Krista Scott-Dixon did and also reading some of the other links that are included in the introduction.
• Jenni LevÄvaara is from Finland and is a Fitness competitor.  In this interview she talks about the fact that she started from a muscle-free modelling background before deciding she wanted to do Fitness and being told she therefore needed to start lifting weights.  I found it interesting because I know so little about Fitness competing.
• Jen Sinkler is the senior fitness editor or Fitness Life who does some series tough training.  She is also another one of Nia Shanks’s Beautiful Badass profiles.  In fact, as the series is still in its early days I recommend that you keep a close eye on Nia’s blog because there will definitely be more.

So there’s a few interviews to inspire and entertain.  I hope you enjoy them all.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: should women run?
2. Blog-watch: should women train like men?
3. Strength training and adiposity in premenopausal women: Strong, Healthy, and Empowered study

How to keep a life timetable

While keeping a detailed timetable of your life can prove tedious at times, it’s a worthwhile exercise to do for a couple of weeks just to see where the time opportunities are, where you’re taking longer than you should over something (and are therefore taking some bits of guilty “me-time”) and where you’re overdoing things and really ought to make more space.

The easiest way to do it is to build a basic excel spreadsheet on the computer that is nearest to you for the majority of the time.  For me this was my work computer.  To keep it accessible at the weekends, since my work USB stick wasn’t compatible with my home computer, I uploaded it as an attachment on a draft email in my online email account.  During a standard day I would keep it open all the time, adding to it whenever I changed what I was doing or when I ate something.

Choose your level of detail

You don’t have to get that detailed if you don’t want to.  Say you just want a flavour of how long you are spending between sleeping, commuting, working, doing workouts and actively relaxing (eg. watching TV) then just record those things and use “other” for anything else.

For my own experiment I wanted to get really granular.  Not only did I want to know if there was time I could reclaim to do other things, I also wanted to get a grip on how much relaxation I was getting and how much time was spent at work and commuting – time that I’ll reclaim next year.  I wanted to know why I couldn’t fit anything else into my life.  A quick tally in my head suggested there were more hours available during my weekdays than I actually had.  Where were they going?

To make sense of the data in this level of detail I added an extra column, categorising my detailed comments into broader categories that could be analysed.

Getting extra benefits

Since I was recording every moment of my day I also recorded in the comments what I was eating, recording the details of every naughty little nibble.  I was aware that with the other stresses in life I was being a bit more laid back about my food choices, despite still caring about what I was doing to my body but I wondered how often I was slipping up.

By highlighting cells in red if it included something I felt didn’t fit with my healthy diet concepts I was able to shock myself into realising I was slipping something through the net almost daily.  It was amazing how quickly this changed when the results were staring me in the face though.

The results

Here’s what an average weekday without a workout ended up looking like:

• 07.00 – Rolling (self-massage with the baseball)
• 07.15 – Shower (shower, weigh in, get dressed)
• 07.35 – Violin practice
• 08.10 – Pack for work including putting my bike in the car
• 08.15 – Drive to work (actually, Chris giving me a lift)
• 08.45 – Work
• 12.45 – Relax (if things aren’t too hectic at work I’ll take 30-45 minutes to sit in the canteen with work colleagues and drink a mug of tea while they eat lunch)
• 13.15 – Work
• 17.45 – Cycling (this includes about 15 minutes of packing up at work and changing into my cycle gear and then 5 minutes unpacking and racking my bike when I get home)
• 18.50 – Shower for 20 minutes, including changing and just recovering from the day OR Epsom Salt bath, which takes over half an hour by the time I’ve run the bath and got dressed at the end of it
• 19.10 or 19.30 – Something: this could be time spent doing some cleaning, dealing with house paperwork, doing blog research or something similar.  Sometimes I’ll cook the dinner instead of Chris in this window as well.
• 20.45 – Dinner (Chris and I make the effort to sit down together at this point and talk over dinner – it’s usually the first opportunity we’ve had since we went to work).  Yes, this is the only time I eat on a non-workout day unless I’ve given in to someone’s birthday cakes at work, which I always make sure is at least right at the end of the day just before I cycle home if I’m feeling weak-willed and know I’m going to give in to the cake/chocolate desire)
• 21.10 – Housework (washing up and cleaning the kitchen)
• 21.40 – Relax in bed.  I would put “sleep” here, but the reality is that Chris and I talk for at least 20 minutes after we get into bed and put the light out.
• 22.00 – Sleep

On the one day when I do a workout this changes to me driving myself to work and then from 17.45 it goes like this:

• 17.45 – Drive home
• 18.15 – Change and eat a tin of tuna mixed with mayonnaise and a spoon of sauerkraut
• 18.30 – Gym
• 20.30 – Shower
• 20.45 – Dinner and back to the routine above.

One day a week I’ll work in Birmingham – it looks like this:

• 06.30 – Rolling
• 06.45 – Shower
• 07.00 – Pack for work
• 07.10 – Drive to work (should take about 75 minutes but traffic at commuter times is dreadful)
• 08.45 – Work
• 17.00 – Drive home (leaving work early having worked through lunchtime but still hitting bad traffic)
• 18.15 – Shopping (there’s a supermarket near my motorway exit so I try to put my Birmingham day near the end of the week and shop on the way home, otherwise I’ll have to shop in my “something” window on another day).
• 19.15 – Finish driving home
• 19.45 – Unpack shopping
• 20.10 – Housework (washing up and things usually) and perhaps clearing emails and Google Reader
• 20.45 – Dinner with Chris and back to the usual post-dinner routine.

So there’s 30 – 90 minutes on my non-workout days to do the things I want to do, including keeping the house in a presentable state, keeping on top of the paperwork and my emails, reading for the blog and so on.  That’s why the blog writing moved to be a solely weekend activity a few months ago.

Oh, and this doesn’t count the fact that with a concert coming up I now spend all of Wednesday evening at a rehearsal too.

The results – making it meaningful

So this timetable is useful, but what does it really mean.  What was the majority of my week spent doing after I include the weekends as well?

The easiest way to look at it is in a pie chart of the whole week.  Here’s an average sort of week with totals in days, hours and minutes:

Chart of my week - 20-26 August 2011

A few notes on that particular week:

• I was doing our tax returns, so there’s more paperwork than normal and no “technical reading”.
• We went for a walk at the weekend, hence “walking”.
• The babysitting and Chris business bits are me doing various admin bits like flyers and profile updates online.
• “Training” is my gym sessions.
• I tend to anything that could be relaxing into “relaxing”.

I was pleased by the dedication to getting sufficient sleep each night and pleased with the consistency of my rolling.  I was disappointed by how little time I find to move about training, walking and cycling.  Despite that my housework is usually quite active and once I remove that work slice I can replace it with more activity and a bit more technical reading and blog work.

So I gained a lot of benefit from my life timetable.  It revealed when my windows of opportunity were, how much rubbish I was eating, what needed moving to the weekend (the blog) and what I wasn’t getting enough of (activity).

Hopefully my pointers are helpful for anyone thinking of keeping a diary like this.  Would you have the dedication to keep a life-timetable?  Have you already done so?  If you have, then what did it reveal for you?  I’d love to find out how other busy people fit everything into their lives.  This was done during quiet season at work so I’d love to know how people who are even busier or who have children to work around fit training into their lives.

Related posts:

1. Work-Life balance
2. Self massage for a busy life

Initially I wasn’t going to do this for another week but I had a wonderful, if crazy, weekend squeezing in a trip to London, visiting some old friends and going to my younger niece’s first birthday party.  Unfortunately it meant I didn’t have time to finish pulling together the type 2 diabetes material so this is me buying myself another week.  Sorry everyone!

Stressful life

No stresses out here but it's different when I'm home

I’m not sure if I’ve ever put on this blog what I do for a day job, other than noting that it is a desk job.  I am a corporate tax advisor.  There’s a reasonable amount of responsibility involved and the interaction with clients makes my day unreliable.  I can start the day with an urgent to-do list, find that my phone rings off the hook with queries from clients that they want dealing with urgently, assist more junior staff through the day with their queries and, at the end of the day, find myself with the same to-do list still outstanding and have to work late to make a dent on it.

When things are quiet my working day will be reasonably reliable.  I should work 09.00 – 17.30 with an hour for lunch.  However, the reality is that an average day has me arriving at 08.30 and packing up at 18.00, while only getting up from my desk for lunch depending on my client work that day.  Compared to bankers and lawyers, my job is really much less stressful than it could be.  Having said that, I often have a few months at a time when there are several big projects on as well as the usual day-to-day pieces, when the hours are unreliable, when there is too much going on, when a client is being unreasonable in their demands, and when something comes up at 5pm on a Friday and I end up doing several hours at the weekend.

On top of this I have a natural tendency towards “allowing” situations to become stressful.  I’ve done a lot of work over the last few years with the help of a mentor at work.  This has helped me get some control over my OCD-type approach to living (no more obsessive washing up when I get home from work late) and also given me the perspective to step back from things and keep chilled more often.

It’s not perfect – I still get wired and stressed when things get really bad at work but I’m a lot better than I used to be.

What I want from life

When I was 8 years old I announced to my parents that I was going to build up a property portfolio and then use the rental as income so that I was free to travel all over the place.  At the time I remember that in my mind this was limited to the excitement, as I perceived it, of travelling to new places in the UK by train.  Pretty perceptive for an 8 year old.

By my early teens this has changed slightly to an idea that I would also be a reader for publishing houses (doing the first read of manuscripts that a publishing house receives to decide if they should make it to the editor’s desk) or a proof-reader.  These were jobs working with reading, which I loved, and which could be done freelance at times that suited me.

I’ve never let go of the idea that I wanted to be able to relax and explore and do all the activities I enjoyed.  The flawed UK school system meant I had to make a notable decision about which way my life was going to go when I was 14 years old.  I decided at that point that while I loved music and playing my violin, piano and singing, I didn’t want to make a living doing music.  I worried that I might end up hating music because I would have to accept every piece of work that came my way, no matter whether it was a job I wanted to do or not.

My violin and I - music will always be part of my life

In my final meeting with my lecturer when I was graduating from University I told my lecturer that I would love to keep doing research but didn’t want to rely on it for a living.  I told her I was going to be an accountant and save up until I could afford to retire early and be free to do the research without having to do worry about whether it would earn enough money.  I had in mind 35-40 years old.

I’ve put this all down here because it gives a lot of insight to what I want from life and how the idea of that lifestyle developed as my understanding of how the real world has changed.  If I were to summarise what I want from life it would be as follows:

• Financial security through careful investment of money I’ve made myself (I’ve never wanted to rely on someone else for money)
• Having the freedom to explore places and activities when I want
• Pursuing all the things I enjoy in life including music (especially my violin, piano and singing) and academic research (these days torn between archaeology, nutrition and fitness)
• Ability to consistently improve my gym performance eventually qualifying to compete at National or even World levels at drug-free powerlifting
• Being outdoors doing things like rock climbing, cycling, walking, wild-camping with the flexibility to go when the weather is good rather than when my time allows it.

What I don’t get from life at present

Right now I aim to fit in the following things to my life:

• Full-time job as corporate tax adviser
• Playing violin
• Passing on my skills and knowledge by teaching violin, piano and general musicianship at weekends
• Powerlifting training
• Cycling
• Regular walking trips, working for a walking company and checking their self-guided routes
• Technical research in the form of reading and writing for this blog

I’m not doing badly at meeting my list of things I want from life but there are some problems with fitting it all in.  Recently, I decided that I wanted to do more cycling, because I realised that I had not touched the bike for 9 months.  To fit some cycling in, I had to cut down from three to two workouts a week and I built the cycling into my commute to cut out 20 mins of normal commute time and put it into my cycling time.  Chris now kindly drops me off at work with my bike and I cycle home on days when I don’t have a workout planned and won’t need the car to drive to a client or another office.

I also wanted to spend more time practicing my violin, getting my piano playing back in line with where it was and increasing my teaching volume – I was really missing music.  To manage that I had to cut down my blog work, which I was already focussing on weekends to free up teaching time, and tighten up the timetable of my weekday evenings to ensure a half hour of practice time can be grabbed most days.

My desk job was starting to impact badly on my posture so I needed to build 15-30 mins of rolling time into every day – I started getting up earlier.

Then there are the things I just don’t manage to fit in at all.  Rock climbing, wild-camping outside of walking holidays, doing the walking when the weather is good (holiday gets booked up to a year in advance – I’ve no idea what the weather forecast will be), archaeology research, reading fiction books (although I’ve started doing this while I do my rolling), singing, getting piano practice in is very hit and miss, long-distance bike rides (some of you may remember that a year or two ago I was doing 80-100 mile rides most weekends, touring style which took 5-6 hours)…

I'd like more of this in my life

There just isn’t the time to do everything I want to do.

A radical solution

You probably already understand from all of this why the blog has been taking a bit of a back-burner for the last few months and why my training has gone down to a maintenance level.  However, there was a reason why I was prepared to make those sacrifices – I knew that I had a long-term plan and this was a short-term problem.  I have, essentially been leading two or three lives simultaneously for the last few months. 

Chris and I have been working hard for the last few years, living a frugal lifestyle and putting everything aside to pay off our mortgage.  We knew that if we could clear the mortgage then our main drain on cash would be gone.  Thanks to our frugal living, which has become a habit rather than a chore, our need for money is very reasonable.  So back in April we finally managed to pay off the mortgage and have been building up an emergency reserve since then. 

During the last few months I’ve been increasing the number of music pupils I have at weekends to build it to the point where it can bring in sufficient recurring income to cover my contribution to the house expenses.  A few weeks ago I told work that I will be leaving the firm at Christmas.

That’s right!

At the start of January I will be without a desk job.  Instead I will be teaching music at the weekends to bring in the money I need and taking paid playing work on my violin when it comes up.  That will leave me free from Monday to Friday when I can head out cycling, walking, camping, climbing and anything else I like whenever the weather is good.  I’ll also have the time to do research whenever I want.

I’m hoping that the lack of desk job will also mean I can fix the mobility problems in my upper back.  This would mean that I can finally get a grip on my bench press.  That’s why I announced at the start of this year that 2011 was the year of the deadlift and 2012 would be the year of the bench press.  Once I’ve sorted out my bench press problems I will feel confident about competing and start on that path.

The best bit should be that this removes one of the least controllable stressors in my life.  The result should be top-notch health and happiness.

Imagine being this relaxed all the time...

Being brave

I’m terrified that it might all go wrong and I’ll find myself jobless and penniless, but I need to take control of my life so that I live the life I want to live.  Seth Godin put is beautifully when he said:

Make big promises.

Burn your boats.

Set yourself up in a place where you have few options and the stakes are high.

Focused energy and serious intent will push you to do your best work.  You have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  (Better than the alternative.)

Apologies if I’m not always consistent in my writing for the rest of the year – as the teaching work builds up I will have less time for myself.  I promise things will be back on track and better than ever next year.

Do you think I’m crazy?

No related posts.

What is diabetes?

The commonly-known diabetes is in fact short for diabetes mellitus.  A surprise to me was that there are actually other diseases with “diabetes” in their name which don’t have anything to do with the group of diabetes diseases that most people think of when you say “diabetes” – the group which we’re looking at here.

Diabetes mellitus is made up of a group of metabolic diseases which are all characterised by high blood sugar.  For the purpose of this series I am focussing on types 1 and 2, but it is worth being aware that diabetes is not restricted to these.

Frequent insulin injections can become a way of life for type 1 diabetics (image courtesy of Jill A. Brown)

Different types of diabetes

Here is a quick run-down of some of the types (thanks to Wikipedia):

• Type 1 (formerly known as insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes):  the body fails to produce insulin.  It is recognised as an auto-immune disease.  I’ll explain a lot more about type 1 next week.
• Type 2 (formerly known as non-insulin-dependent or adult-onset diabetes):  whil the pancreas produces insulin, the cells don’t use the insulin properly.  Again, there will be plenty more on this in a couple of weeks.
• Gestational diabetes:  some pregnant women have high blood glucose levels during pregnancy when they haven’t previously had diabetes.  It could be a precursor to type 2 diabetes, but most often resolves after delivery.
• Congenital diabetes:  genetic defects to the insulin secretion.
• Steroid diabetes:  induced by high doses of glucocorticoids – these are not the same steroids as the anabolic steroids used by bodybuilders.
• Monogenic diabetes:  hereditary forms of diabetes caused by mutations in an autosomal dominant gene.
• Cystic fibrosis-related diabetes.

That’s just a taster so, as you can see, almost any disease that is characterised by elevated blood sugar levels is “diabetes mellitus”.

Symptoms of diabetes

The classic symptoms of diabetes are:

• Polyuria – frequent urination (in children this is noticeable if bedwetting recommences),
• Polydipsia – increased thirst,
• Polyphagia – increased hunger,
• Weight loss (most common with undiagnosed type 1 diabetics) (1)

Another symptom which is often how diabetes is spotted in older people is significant changes in eye strength.  Someone I knew was tested and found to have type 2 diabetes after a routine eye examination revealed an unusually profound improvement in short sightedness.  I suppose older individuals may not report other classic symptoms to their doctor, believing that they are simply caused by aging.

If those symptoms are missed then diabetes can lead to more serious conditions or symptoms such as diabetic ketoacidosis (not the same as ketosis) which is often characterised by nausea, vomiting, dehydration and lethargy (1).  If left untreated there is also the risk of things like nonketotic hyperosmolar coma (sometimes known as diabetic coma), cardiovascular disease, chronic renal failure and retinal damage.

How insulin works – why we don’t all have high blood glucose

When we consume carbohydrates these are broken down by the initial digestive processes into free glucose which is absorbed into the blood stream.  When the pancreas senses the elevated levels of glucose in the blood, it responds by releasing the hormone insulin from the pancreas’s beta cells where it is created.

Insulin is a powerful hormone which is best known for its regulation of blood sugar but is, in fact, a general nutrient-storage hormone.  It is involved in the storage processes for other nutrients and the pancreas responds in a similar way to other triggers, such as elevated amino acid levels (2, pp.51-52). 

The insulin indicates to the body where nutrients should be stored, therefore regulating our body’s maintenance and repair at the cellular level.  In the case of elevated blood glucose, the insulin activates blood glucose transport molecules known as GLUT4 which are found in cell membranes and the GLUT4 facilitates the absorption of glucose by the liver (2, pp.63-64).  A recap of glucose storage can be found in my article about different carbohydrate sources.

What happens if a person has diabetes?

I will cover the mechanics of how this insulin-based process breaks down for diabetics in the next couple of weeks, as the different problems with the process define the different forms of diabetes.  However, a question that struck me was why does it matter if we have elevated blood glucose levels?

To answer this I strongly recommend that you read Robb Wolf’s Paleo Solution, pages 63 to 71, for the step-by-step walk through of the complete destruction which occurs but I’ll try to summarise it in simple terms here.

Protein is a fundamental building block for the body, it is what our cells (and therefore our tissues) are made of.  The problem is that protein reacts with free glucose, oxidising the protein and creating a toxic substance known as “advanced glycation end products” (AGEs).  To protect against this our bodies also produce enzymes to undo the AGEs, so usually everything should be fine. 

Usually the insulin would keep our blood glucose levels in check by indicating to, and enabling, the body to store the sugar.  If, for whatever reason, this system breaks down and the body doesn’t put the glucose into storage, the level of free glucose circulating in the blood will rise unchecked.  Unfortunately there is only so much good work the AGE-defeating enzymes can do, so if the system is constantly flooded with free glucose and as a result also floods with AGEs the AGEs will accumulate.  

Why does it matter if our bodies become flooded with (toxic) AGEs?  Well, AGEs can damage proteins (essential building blocks for the body), enzymes (essential to run the body), DNA (telling cells what they do) and hormone receptor sites on the surface of cells.  Since these are the things that ultimately drive the symptoms of aging we get “older” a lot faster and earlier.  Not only that, but AGEs can also kill the beta cells which produce the insulin and the GLUT4 molecules – the essential equipment to stop this happening in the first place – so it ends up making everything much more permanent (2, p70).

So how widespread is diabetes?

A global study of diabetes carried out for the World Health Organisation (3) suggested that in 2000 2.8% of the global population had diabetes and the number of people with diabetes was expected to double by 2030 (partly due to the increase in the population aged over 65 years).  However, when you read the study there is a good chance that these numbers are wrong. 

The percentage was worked out by using data from a limited number of countries and extrapolating to cover the global population.  For example, the data for the Netherlands was extrapolated to cover 13 European countries, including Germany.  There was no data available for developing countries so they assumed that the same relative risks applied and extrapolated existing data to cover the developing countries.  I believe that many developing countries, where diets and lifestyles differ significantly to the Westernised world, may not have diabetes to the same extent and the widely acknowledged risk factors may not be correct.

Despite the implication that this percentage may be overstated, a response to the study and return response by the original authors (4) concluded that this percentage could actually be significantly understated, at least for the Westernised countries.

Either way, this is a significant number of people and a good reason to understand diabetes!

 *****

Bibliography

1. Cooke D and Plotnick L: Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus in Pediatrics.  Pediatr. Rev. 2008; 29:374-385
2. Wolf, R: The Paleo Solution: the original human diet.  Victory Belt Publishing 2010
3. Wild S, Roglic G, Green A, Sicree R, King H: Global prevalence of diabetes – estimates for the year 2000 and projections for 2030.  Diabetes Care 2004; 27:1047-1053
4. Rathman W, Giani G: Response to Global prevalence of diabetes: estimates for the year 200 and projections for 2030.  Diabetes Care 2004; 27:2568-2569

Related posts:

1. Type 1 diabetes
2. Type 2 diabetes
3. Type 1 diabetes: a possible cure

When I reviewed Robb Wolf’s book, The Paleo Solution, I explained that one of the areas that hit us both hard, especially Chris, was the chapter on stress.  Stress has been an increasingly significant part of our lives recently.  Every so often we realise that the stress is starting to take over from everything else.  When that happens we sit back and try to work out what we can cut back on to lighten the load again.  Those tend to be the times when you might spot me doing things like cutting back on the number of posts I write or the frequency of my workouts.  Our latest “hit” on the stress has involved a new writing/workout/bedtime routine, removing evening computer work from our lives and reducing my workouts to twice a week.

Chris was so taken by what he read in a few different books, each of which reached the conclusion that stress was causing some significant Western health problem, that he decided to do some research into stress.  The series of articles, research paper reviews and book reviews is so complete that I thought I would put the links all together here.

To quote Chris, he believes that “stress may be the biggest factor impacting on our training that we are not currently addressing properly.”

I need to take some de-stress lessons from the cat!

Main articles

What is stress, anyway? – an introduction to the topic.  It wasn’t until Chris asked me to define stress that I realized I really couldn’t.  And anyway, who decides when a person is “stressed” for the purpose of research?

How does stress work? – there are two key hormonal mechanisms that operate during a stressful experience: the fight-or-flight response and the hypothalamic-pituituary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis.  Chris uses this article to explain more about these mechanisms.

How does stress make you ill? – this article looks at the mechanisms which cause people to get ill when they are stressed.

How does stress make you fat? – Robb Wolf particularly highlights the fact that when people are stressed they may do well at losing most of their body fat during a diet but they may be unable to get rid of that last bit.  Some extra stress may even cause people to put on fat despite not eating more or exercising less.  Unsurprisingly hormones are involved and Chris pulls together the information on it here.

How can we reduce stress? – as a neat ending to the articles, Chris pulls together some points on how we can reduce chronic stress.

Review of research papers

Arousal and physiological toughness – apparently our modern lifestyle doesn’t foster a natural toughening so that we can’t necessarily respond in the best way when the stress appears.

Chronic stress and the HPA axis – a meta-analysis of observations of the HPA axis in response to different stressors.

Psychological stress and the immune system – we know stress affects our immune system but this recent meta-analysis reveals how little we still understand about how stress affects the immune system.

Centralisation of body fat – an explanation of why obesity is such a huge health issue and why it seems to lead to so many “Western” diseases.

Affirmation of personal values buffers psychological stress responses – apparently there really is something in the idea that positive thinking can affect stress and stress-related issues.

Book reviews

The Stress of Life, by Hans Seyle – Chris says: “Hans Selye is the grandfather of stress studies”.  Like Robb Wolf’s book this has both useful summaries and all the detail for those who want it.

The Status Syndrome, by Michael Marmot – if you read Chris’s articles you will find mention of the Whitehall study, carried out by Michael Marmot.  This book looks at the connection of status as a stressor.

Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers, by Robert Sapolsky – this is a good reference book for anything to do with stress and has all sorts of useful facts that would be worth knowing.

The Cortisol Connection, by Shawn Talbott – if you don’t want to just know about stress but also want some solutions maybe try this book!

The Western Way of Death, by Malcolm Carruthers – this book looks at the links between stress and cardiac disease.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: the impact of stress
2. The power of self-belief: why you should ditch mental stress
3. Blog-watch: longevity updates

It wasn’t until I got away from it all that I realised quite how stressed I had been.  There has been so much stress and exhaustion in my life that it was several days before I properly started to relax so I was particularly glad for the extra week away from it all this year. 

The mountains giving me time to think and take control of my mind

Mental stress and clarity of thought

It is not going to be a surprise to anyone that mental stress can cloud a person’s judgment.  It can cause them to doubt their decisions, struggle to find a rational route through their thinking and miss obvious points of detail, usually details which would actually make their life easier.  It’s almost like they refuse to believe those details are there, as if they were looking to make life difficult for themselves.

I used to suffer from extreme levels of mental stress.  I’ve learned, through some one-on-one mentoring at work, to get some (limited) level of control over it.  For example, I can stop myself from making the problem worse when there are external stressors in my life which I don’t have proper control over. 

There was a time when I would become more and more meticulous about “having” to do the washing up and similar chores as I became more stress.  More stress in my life at work usually means much longer hours and suddenly I would be caring about getting home from work late and making myself wash up, having crying fits about the fact that it “had” to be done and couldn’t be left until the next day.  Those days of irrational thinking are thankfully past but it doesn’t mean I don’t still suffer from stress.

Mental stress impacting on performance

I’m sure many of you have noticed those days when you have had a bad day and are not in the right head space to do a workout.  The busy life schedule dictates that, despite that, you need to get in the gym and move that weight. 

If you are lucky (or well-practiced at the art) you’ll be able to leave the mental baggage at the door, but invariably if you have been really stressed, the doubting thoughts follow you into the gym.  Suddenly you don’t believe you can move the weight that you moved last week or something that is a lighter weight feels heavier than it should.

Getting control of my mental state is an area I still have a lot of work to do in.  I’ve made some progress, but this holiday revealed that all I’ve really got control over the outward signs of the stress.  The impact of the stress is still there, undermining me.

Noticing mental weakness while hiking

It was clear as we walked that my ability to get over technically difficult ground improved as the fortnight progressed.  It correlated with the return of my mental clarity and the related “white noise” of self-doubt and mental exhaustion sinking away to the back of my mind where I had some control over it. 

You can't have your head in the wrong space for this type of "walking"

When walking across or down a precariously steep slope with very loose earth under your feet and a sense that there is nothing to stop your fall for a couple of hundred metres if you slip you don’t want your mind to start telling you that you are incompetent and that you’ll slide as soon as you move.  That line of thought results in standing motionless on the side of a mountain for the rest of your life, moving neither forwards nor backwards. 

I was in danger of doing an excellent impression of a static walker on our second day when my mind was still full of “white noise”.  Having rushed over a col trying to not get caught in the hoards of hikers who had stopped for lunch at the top, we rapidly started our descent before realising that we were mired in a tough and technical descent.  Chris had to coax me down this long and steep slope as quickly as possible, constantly aware of rocks being dislodged above us and narrowly missing our heads.  We both knew that there wasn’t the luxury of time for me to get my own head in order. 

Thanks to Chris for getting me down safely that day. 

Fast-forward two weeks to the final Thursday and there I was trotting quite happily (if a little carefully) over a full day of similar terrain. 

It’s all in the mind

My ability to walk on more challenging terrain has nothing to do with my skill or technical ability.  I have those skills.  What I lack is self-belief in hose skills and I only need a bit of general mental weakness to make that self-belief leap to the front of my mind.

The same applies in the gym when lifting weights.  I know I can do the movements and I know I’ve moved those weights.  What I need to do is trust my body to do the right thing – if my mind interferes it forces my body to do incorrect motor patterns, “protecting” me from perceived dangers that I don’t face.

This is definitely an area for me to work on over the next 12 months.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: the impact of stress
2. Blog-watch: stress
3. Lessons learned: mental strength

The research

I’m not going to replicate everything that Scott has written and steal his thunder.  Instead it would be valuable to read his article before carrying on with this the rest of this post.

Scott Abel’s article The Self-Destructive Nature of Willpower: The Willpower Rebellion

The highlight of the article is some research of willpower done by Roy Baumeister.  Subjects fasted for at least three hours and were then separated into three groups.  Groups one and two were both given plates of chocolate chip cookies and radishes with group one being told they may only eat the radishes and group two allowed to eat anything on the plates.  Group three were the control and were not given any food at all.  After an extended period of time the groups were given some “simple” geometric puzzles to solve (which were not actually solvable).  Group one, who had exercised willpower to not eat the cookies when hungry, gave up on the geometric puzzles before those in groups two and three.

Could you manage a mental challenge after looking at this and resisting it for a few hours

The conclusion drawn by the researchers is that group one had exhausted their mental energy, reducing the capacity for other mental tasks.  Scott notes that this experiment has been replicated with other tasks and provides the same results each time.  Despite the tasks being unrelated, there appears to be a limited pool of mental energy available for use as willpower.

Willpower or motivation?

I’ve not previously distinguished between willpower and motivation but Scott’s piece has made me reconsider my standpoint on this.  It might explain why I sometimes have “epic failures” in relation to my diet and workouts while at other times I seem to be fine.

Training – fully motivated

Going into the gym, no matter how exhausted I am, is something I am usually good at.  I would put this in the motivated category.  I am motivated to beat previous repetition or weight records and I always have my core motivation – a desire to build bone density so that I can be active in old age. 

I rarely have to overcome a desire to miss my workout and willpower doesn’t feature.  I just get on with it.  Training has become a habit.

I’m also better at listening to my body when it comes to workouts.  If I feel out of sorts, usually with some an illness coming on, I notice the signs.  I’ll still do my workout, but I’ll adapt it a bit to work within the bounds of motivation.

Still motivated to train, no matter how tired I am

Dieting – mind over matter?

My diet is a whole different story.  I love food, the flavours, textures and scents with different foods. 

I find a calorie restricted diet tough with this love of food.  800 calories a day requires careful planning to ensure that it has sufficient protein to leave me feeling satiated and the best blend of vitamins and minerals possible.  With a busy lifestyle I end up developing just one or two days of meal plans and sticking to them.  I lose the variety I enjoy and boredom sets in.  A weekly cheat or re-feed day can help and weekly measurement sessions can also assist, provided I can see a reasonable amount of progress, but willpower is vital.

Willpower exhaustion in action

Scott’s concern is that Figure Competitors and extreme dieters are setting themselves up for a long period or lifetime of mental problems.  It may be an inability to maintain a realistic or healthy diet once they stop dieting but it could affect other areas of life, including relationships, training and careers.

Last summer I had a simple example of the condition that Scott is drawing attention to.  I was trying to keep my diet clean but felt like I was fighting an uphill battle.  I’d been “keeping an eye” on my caloric intake for a few months and had kept strictly paleo before a couple of weeks eating what I liked while I was on holiday (Alpine huts are not paleo-friendly).  On my return I tried to go back to strict paleo and calorie restriction again.  Unfortunately I’d pushed the boundaries too far and I cracked.  I wrote about my experience afterwards.

A couple of weeks after the return from holiday I reached my mental limit.  I was feeling listless in every area of my life, including work and home life, and it finally impacted on my workouts.  I had to abandon my training workouts and replace them with something completely different for a month.

In hindsight I don’t think it was anything to do with the workouts.  I think it was a complete exhaustion of my mental control.

Learning lessons

Reading Scott’s article and considering my own experiences over the last few years, I have a few personal learning points:

• Establish significant dietary changes in small steps – build up carb restriction and paleo changes slowly, don’t change everything at once and create daily situations of denial.  Instead create new habits for life.
• Don’t keep a form of severe calorie-restriction going long-term.  Have a fixed period for hard dieting and then be less restrictive on the types of foods permitted afterwards, using a food plan like Alli McKee.
• If undertaking a fixed fat-loss period be aware of loss of mental energy elsewhere and, if it starts to impact noticeably in other area take a few days off the diet.

Those lessons are very specific to me.  I’d be interested to hear if others have noticed similar exhaustion of willpower and what lessons you would take away from this.  Do you even agree that there is a limit to how much willpower and mental reserve you have?

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: weight loss mind-games
2. Iron Lady: interview with Laura Trimble (part 1)
3. Blog-watch: the impact of stress