Take some time to think about yourself

*****

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.

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.

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

There seem to be lots of pregnancies among my friends at the moment – probably something to do with my age.  We’re all at that age where our thoughts turn to mothering.  I’ve even caught myself feeling motherly towards a few youngsters recently (although my definition of youngster here expands up as far as 18 years old).  Despite not wanting children of my own I am quite happy enjoying everyone else’s and want every child to get the best possible start in life (and all my friends to feel as good as possible while they are going through the process).  I feel the best I can do to help with this is doing my bit of research and news-sharing.

Human foetus at 20 weeks (with thanks to Cehwiedel, Creative Commons)

• I’m always pleased when there is some sensible information in the media about pregnancy-related subjects, rather than the usual scare-story or media hype about a new recommendation (with no idea of what has caused the change in official guidelines).  The New York Times did a lovely article about some new research looking at the impact of exercise during pregnancy on the foetus and newborn.  As you might expect, they found that exercising improved the cardiac system of the foetus (well, with all that blood pumping around at high speed I’m not entirely surprised).  Not only that, but the heart was still healthier than those of babies born to mothers who didn’t exercise during pregnancy an entire month after birth.  So now we can add “healthier heart” to the list of reasons why it is good to exercise during pregnancy (such as having a baby who sleeps more soundly).
• If you ever listen to Robb Wolf’s podcasts, The Paleo Solution, you are guaranteed to hear about reducing stress to improve cortisol levels and improve overall health, both digestive and elsewhere.  It makes logical sense to strive to improve these things when you are pregnant or even when you are trying to get pregnant since it is likely to give your body the best chance.  However I had never considered the issue of stress post-pregnancy.  That bit where you’ve got broken nights and, if you’re a new mother, all the attendant worries of whether you are doing the right things.  Fortunately, Cassandra Forsythe (who is definitely far more qualified than either me or Robb Wolf to comment on such a topic) responded to a reader question on this.  I definitely recommend taking the time to read it whether you are pregnancy, recently gave birth or even if you just know someone in that situation and would like to be of help to them.
• This link is a bit of a break from the more technical considerations of pregnancy.  Just an article detailing someone’s experience of getting back onto the training regime after being pregnant and then increasing in responsibilities at work.  As Julia says. She was “working out for the last 18 months, but not training.  And yes, there is a difference.”  I know exactly what she means about there being a difference.  One of them you are just doing a bit of training for the sake of it with no real commitment to each exercise or workout.  It becomes really easy to miss part of a workout or play about with something else for a few weeks with no sense of disappointment in yourself for not progressing or improving.  How she got herself out of that was to sign herself up for a meet.  Suddenly she really needed to train.  Why’ve I included this link here?  I guess it’s just a reminder for any new mothers that if you are struggling to motivate yourself to start training properly again, the best way to do it is sign up for something which means you become accountable to your goals again.
• If you are trying to get pregnant at the moment don’t get your hopes up too much if you feel tired one day.  However, based on the studies, if you still feel fatigued 14 days later then you may want to think about taking a test.
• Mistress Krista posted up a great post-pregnancy workouts article by Lieke Lekkas who explained what she’s been doing to workout since she gave birth.  It’s pretty inspirational stuff and a reminder that, once baby arrives, your life doesn’t have to go on hold.
• Finally, the last link goes to That Paleo Guy, Jamie, who has found some studies looking at the nutrients required to improve reproductive potential in women and the best sources for these.  Jamie concludes that the best source in both cases would be meat.  So the advice is: if you want to get pregnant, eat plenty of meat and veg!

That’s the lot for now.  Best of luck to anyone out there who is pregnant, who has a pregnant partner or is trying to get pregnant at the moment.  Congratulations to any new mothers – and fathers – (whether it was your first or you are an old hand by now).  Hopefully there’s something for all of you in the links today.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: pregnancy diet and exercise
2. Blog-watch: pregnancy and workouts
3. Blog-watch: pregnancy updates

Try to find some time and a special place to release the stress

Since I last went through a stressful period at work I’ve collected together a few select articles about stress, in particular articles about how these impact on training and diet.  If you have a tendency to get stressed then take a moment to read through these articles and see if they ring as true for you as they did for me.

• I’m going to start with an oldie.  The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban is a fantastic site since it specialises in reproducing old magazine articles about lifting and can therefore give you a “new” perspective in the modern age.  Sometimes the old information is the most reliable since it was built up over long periods of time and is firmly grounded in experience.  I like the fact that the articles are so well-written as well.  Recently they reproduced “Training during periods of stress” by Tom E. Kakonis.  A few of the examples are a bit outdated, but the observations of the different ways people may go with their diet and training when under stress are spot on and may help you recognise the signs earlier.
• A few months ago the same site featured an article entitled “The Mental Approach”, originally written by John Grimek in 1961.  The article isn’t actually about stress but concentrates on how your mental state can affect your performance in the gym.  So why is it relevant to this blog-watch?  Simple because when you are really stressed you are rarely in the right mental zone to perform well and poor performance can make the stress worse.  A reminder that if you start on this downwards spiral then a rest week or two may be a good place to start.
• Next up is an article from Patrick Ward.  Patrick explores the idea that we actually have a finite resource at any one time for stress.  When we are mentally chilled we can place more physical stress on our body.  When we are going through mental or emotional upheaval we need to reduce the physical stress we place on our bodies.  I really liked this concept and it certainly rang true for me.
• If we’re going to deal with this stress issue then we ought to spend a bit of time thinking about what is causing it.  Take a moment and think about it.  What is really causing your stress?  You can’t solve the problem until you identify it and start addressing the root causes.  Here’s a piece from Dan Pallotta on the Harvard Business Review about how we can convince ourselves that work is causing the stress but that our mindset may actually be what is making work stressful.  Chris suggested that I put this quote from the article on my partition wall at work:

  “Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.”
  

• Once you’ve identified what is causing your stress you’ll need to work on getting control of those problematic factors.  In the meantime, here are 100 ways to help overcome stress.  Some are perhaps a little more helpful than others although you’re bound to find something on the list to help you.

I hope you found a few of these links as useful as I did.  Do you have any special tips on other ways you’ve found to deal with stress?

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: stress
2. Blog-watch: impact of the contraceptive pill on performance
3. Blog-watch: weight loss mind-games

On the Saturday I finally admitted a temporary defeat and decided to completely re-write the training program from scratch.  I had two main reasons:

1. work-related things at the moment mean that it would be handy to have a bodyweight equipment-free workout that will be effective and which I can bring out whenever I need it – a completely new program like this needs a testing period of a few weeks to make sure it is effective and none of the exercises start to aggravate anything (eg. does it contain more push ups than my elbows can survive?); and
2. I couldn’t face my workouts any more.

A few weeks ago I started struggling to motivate myself to go into the gym and do my workouts.  I would do my first warm up set of squats and feel the enthusiasm drain out of me, or not even get as far as the gym before I felt my heart sink. 

I tried to fire up some fun by reintroducing Farmer’s Bars but that wasn’t enough.  I’ve been doing the same workout pattern, very successfully, for nearly five months and mentally I have just had enough of going into the gym and doing almost the same thing every week with some minor variations to assistance exercises.

On Saturday afternoon I was standing on the threshold of the gym, depressed at the thought of starting and wishing I was doing something else with my life.  It was time to change the program.

Losing the plot entirely

On Sunday I then tried to do day two of the exciting new workout.  There were brand new exercises and exercises I’d not done since 2009.  And there were pull ups.

The previous weekend I’d had a disappointing showing of 7×3 reps and 3×2 reps on my ten sets – at the time I had put this poor performance down to post holiday issues since I routinely lose a lot of lat strength while away on active holidays (a problem I need to solve).  On Sunday I set out to significantly improve yet the ten sets looked like 5×3, 1×2, 4×1 – a massive loss of strength on the previous week.

Needless to say I burst into tears, although in my defence I was suffering from PMT as well.

Is work to blame?

I am, unfortunately for my gym work, a conscientious employee.  I work hard, do my job and, if something goes wrong with the staffing on my projects, I’ll do whatever needs to be done to make sure that we still meet the deadlines.

Recently we’ve had a lot of junior staff unavailable due to training, holidays or secondments.  Suddenly a batch of urgent deadlines came up and there was nowhere for the work to go.  I don’t blame my employer for this – sometimes things just don’t work out the way you intended. 

No-one could anticipate that one project, originally with a 30 June deadline when three people were around, would have a hiatus with the deadline moving to 26 July and only one week’s notice when all staff were on holiday or sick.  No-one was to know that an annual recurring project, for which I’d diligently trained up two staff members, would come through a week late with only two days left to complete it – two days that coincided with one staff member being ill and the other having just gone on holiday. 

Getting the work-life balance wrong

Thanks to these sorts of issues, my last seven weeks have each been 50-55 hour work-weeks except for week three (holiday) and week five (ill for four days).  Once you take into account time to sleep, eat, travel and shower there isn’t much time left in the day.  On top of that, the stress levels mean that even in those few free moments my brain never really switches off. 

The impact on the rest of my life includes:

• Poor quality sleep, waking up frequently and unable to sleep for the full night;
• Missed workouts;
• Inability to recover from workouts;
• Lost enthusiasm to do anything outside work (including workouts);
• Apparent loss of strength in the gym;
• Mental exhaustion when faced with anything outside of normality or office work;
• Tension and knots in my shoulder, impairing my ability to do effective upper body workouts (as much from the hours spent sitting at my desk as from the stress);
• Cascading stress about everything else I’m not getting done at home (eg. missed/failed workouts, filthy kitchen, no clean clothes left to wear etc).

Fighting the guilt-factor

There are limited solutions to this issue since giving up work or changing to a completely stress-free job is a non-negotiable option right now.

I was amused to read a scenario from Poliquin.  In it he robustly pushes back on a woman who has missed workouts because she “doesn’t have time”.  In reality, most women feel these contradictory pressures and it can be difficult to find time for ourselves. 

I struggle to express to Chris the levels of guilt I feel when I no longer find time to wash clothes, iron shirts, wash the dishes, clean the kitchen and the myriad of other things I do.  The guilt I feel when he does some of them instead to take the pressure off me.

It’s ridiculous to feel guilty – we both know that if I don’t have some time to relax or do personal things like workouts or blog posts I end up in a downwards spiral of depression.  However, it’s a curse of guilt which seems to plague plenty of women.

Get it right!

For the conscientious woman (or man) who wants to remain in robust health, enjoy non-work activities and/or maintain progress in the gym we must consider our work-life balance.  There will be times, like those I’ve just been through, when the pressures are difficult to avoid but when that happens we ought to take action to resolve issues as quickly as possible and not let it become normality.

So far this week I’ve found two hours to try a taster session of Krav Maga and tonight I plan a long soak in the bath.  It’s a long climb back through recovery though and it’s a hard lesson that has impacted excessively on both my health and fitness during the learning process.

Related posts:

1. A day in the life
2. Increasing work capacity
3. Lessons learned: getting work capacity right!