Published: Mar 18, 2023
Last Modified: Jan 30, 2024
“Those who do not find time for exercise now will have to find time for illness.” -The Earl of Derby, 1873
The three health risk behaviors are unhealthy diet, sedentary lifestyle, and tobacco use.
The four chronic conditions are cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and diabetes.
These four conditions cause more than 50 percent of all deaths in that vast majority of communities.
Dr. Mike Evans – 23 and 1/2 Hours - Walking at a brisk pace for a half hour a day is incredibly beneficial for your health.
Rapitude – The Best Deal in the World Right Now
I think most of the resistance boils down perceiving the cost as higher than it really is, and the rewards as smaller than they really are.
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In other words, the best deal in the world looks like a bad deal from the outside — i.e. when you’re not taking the deal. For now I’ll say this much: the number one thing is to never do an exercise you truly hate.
The Hacker’s Diet: Exercise - A strong argument that a little bit of exercise everyday will pay for itself.
Alan Thrall – Training 1x per week - To get started on excerise, go to the gym once per week. Do stuff that you like. Get used to it.
Mark Rippetoe – Training vs Exercise
Exercise is physical activity performed for the effect it produces today — right now. […] Exercise is physical activity done for its own sake, either during the workout or immediately after it’s through. Training is physical activity performed for the purpose of satisfying a long-term performance goal, and is therefore about the process instead of the workouts themselves.
TimeAndDate.com Yearly Calendar
A frequent problem for those who want to workout either do not know how to set goals or simply do not care about setting goals. This is a mistake. Goals are an integral component of an effective program, as they give guidance in structuring a workout plan. Sure, one can make progress without goals, but by setting high quality goals your performance increases will skyrocket. –Overcoming Gravity, p. 26
Warning: You can easily injure yourself playing with rings. See my experience with a rotator cuff injury below. Talk to your doctor, do tonnes of warm-up, and be safe.
tl;dr: I injured myself for four to five months by goofing around with gymnastics rings.
In the summer of 2023, I bought some gymnastics rings and hung them in my basement. They’re a lot of fun. Mira and her toddler friends love playing on them. However, after several months of working on them I began to develop persistent shoulder pain in my right shoulder. It would be triggered even on non-work-out days and last throughout the day. The only thing that seemed to help was extensive stretching and warm-up in the morning. Eventually, I had to stop working out on the rings. The pain persisted, even once I stopped working out.
On August 17, 2023, I went to a chiropractor, who told me that I’d injured my rotator cuff. This is a complex of muscles that allows the shoulder to rotate in a bunch of directions. We figured out that I had damaged my supraspinatus (ExRx) and teres minor (ExRx) muscles.
My supraspinatus was previously injured due to wearing a heavy single-shoulder bag for many years. These muscles had gone from doing essentially no work to stabilizing my body weight. It was a massive jump in stress on them.
At our initial meeting, the chiropractor prescribed some specific physiotherapy exercises, and they helped a great deal. Within about a month, things were looking better if I did my physio every day, first thing, and didn’t do anything heavy. We had a follow-up on September 5, 2023, and I got more physio exercises to do daily.
As of January 5th, 2024, I no longer have serious persistant pain in my right shoulder. There is occassional pain if I do something unusual with my arms. For example, today, I lifted Mabel over my head and that upset my right shoulder. This is a quality-of-life hit, as I like to play with my kids. The biggest impact of the injury has been on my motivation to exercise. I took a long break from exercise while recoving from this rotator cuff injury. My exercise routine got replaced with five minutes of physio per day and a lot of walking. This sucks. I really enjoyed exercising regularly. Now, I have a slight fear of exercising because I don’t want to go through another injury.
Lesson: if I’d talked to a doctor or chiropractor before playing with the rings, I would have saved myself a lot of time and pain.
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