It has recently come to my attention that I'm about 10 pounds lighter than what I was about a month and a half ago. I call that an exciting and satisfying turn of events. Want to know how I did it? I bet you do, discerning internet browser. In lieu of a not-very-detailed procedural, though, I'd like to briefly mention general health for a bit.
It should be abundantly clear that I play a lot (a lot) of video games. Some of you may have a falsified vision of me in your noggin that I am either the part of the basement dwelling stereotype that most gamers get saddled with, or am Joaquin Phoenix in Her. To that, I'd like you to briefly consider that neither of these examples represent any large demographic, and certainly one that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every Fall on discs with the words "Call of Duty" printed on them. While it can certainly be true that most mainstream media outlets find someone with, we shall say, a nonathletic physique to be a one-time commenter when things in nerddom are front and center in the news, I argue that this does not, in any way, represent a group as a whole. I also believe that all of that should have gone without saying, but there's nothing wrong with being clear here. And just to punch this horse cadaver a little more, do you think everybody that's really into the NFL are 6'2'' mountains of goatee-d machismo? My wife and a few of her lady friends will disagree.
Now, having said all of that, it's important to note that while you don't need to be in the (probably) small demographic of Shadow Hearts cosplayers that can bench 325 lbs., being healthy is an achievable and worthwhile goal for anybody. While, yes, I have the ultimate trump card in this argument in the fact that I had cancer and that because I regularly work out it made the whole saga a little better on me than it could have been, that doesn't mean you need a traumatic experience to reaffirm the idea that a body in good working order is its own reward.
Personally, I've been lifting on the regular since just before high school. I had a tough guy older brother that imparted me with little nuggets of wisdom until the day I left for college. Not all of it, you might imagine, was solid gold, but getting me into a routine of keeping my body in check has informed a lot of my habits going forward. I'm in my mid 30s now, married with no kids, and I make it a point to do something between 5-6 days out of the week. That may be a lot for some of you reading this. That might be just enough. For me, I've found that it's what works, and a large part of that isn't just the sweat and fatigue that comes with it, but the act of doing it itself; the routine of being healthy. I'm a firm believer that it's good for more than the body, and the piles of further research that you can dig up across the known universe can back me up. But we might get back to that at a different point. Today, it's all bout losing weight and gaining inner peace.
For the really curious among you, here's what my week tends to look like: On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work, I go straight to the gym and lift two muscle groups, usually alternating between them doing 3-5 exercises for each muscle. Since the New Year, I've been forcing myself to do at least some kind of short ab workout during this time, too (I hate doing abs). In a relatively crowd-averse gym, I can do a lot in just under an hour, and this includes the time it takes to change into my workout duds. I have a wife, a dinner to eat, and a very demanding stable of consoles that I'd like to spend some time with, so I've always been a very firm believer in keeping gym time short. But I kill it while I'm there. The first exercise of whatever muscle I'm working that day will be to, essentially, brutalize my workout, and subsequent exercises will straddle the line between further strength and endurance. Even though I don't like the idea of hanging out in the gym every night to get huge, I want the time that I do spend to be valuable and meaningful. That may make my gym demeanor a little on the odd side, but that's probably a conversation for a different day.
Mondays it's back and shoulders, which is probably my favorite muscle day of the week. Since my diet on the weekends basically blows out all of the hard-won ground I've gained during the work week (which goes from ingesting nothing but peanut butter, whole grains, chia seeds, and meat to beer and chicken wings almost exclusively) I use Monday as part blank slate, part punishment. The side effect to this is a pair of bum shoulders, but that's on me, I suppose. Wednesday is chest and leg day. This combination elicits an awful lot of hairy eyeballs from the gym regulars, and for good reason. Both your chest and your legs are muscle groups that define your entire physique, and form the basis of a vast majority of your baseline strength. Most people, even people like me that double up on muscle groups, split these up because of how much they take out of you on a per-exercise basis (squats alone muck with your center of gravity almost as much as playing handball in zero-G). On Wednesdays, then, I usually pick one and go heavy while taking it easy on the other one. Because I'm child and I dislike them so much, I almost never go heavy with my legs, and my back thanks me. Fridays are beach muscle day, and that means biceps and triceps. This is going to sound plenty stupid, but I've read my fair share of Cosmopolitans. You know those infantile surveys that they ask their readers to answer about what types of muscles ladies find the sexiest? Surprise, it's your shoulders, John Wayne, not your arms that are always at the top of the list. It's not for this reason alone that I leave arms as something of an afterthought; so much that if I can't make it to lift three days a week that I give up arms day. Every time you push something, though, you're using your triceps. Every time you pull, it's the stuff on the other side. Unless you do nothing but legs, your arms are constantly in motion, so Friday, to me anyway, is desert. I luck out in that I get to dip out of work at 4:00 on Fridays and this affords me extra time for a preacher curl cobbler, but it doesn't change the fact that your guns are swell, but not so much as other parts of your body.
In between lifting days is filled with about 30 minutes of cardio. Weather permitting, I wake up about 45 minutes earlier on Tuesdays and Thursdays and jog three miles in my neighborhood. This is a personal preference; I hate running as it is (and by "running" I mean that I could probably read a novel at the pace I plod along at), and if I can con myself into getting it finished first thing, well, that's just one less thing to worry about. Plus there's nobody else on the road that early in the morning, making crossing streets pretty handy. Lately, Saturdays are filled with 30 minutes on a treadmill and then 10 or so minutes on other machines like an elliptical or stationary bike. I'm usually pretty cooked by the end of the week, so I need those extra machines in case I wimp out and don't make the run a full half hour.
I'm getting older. Soon, I'll be buying houses and making babies. Will all of this continue? Hard to say, I guess, but I'm fine with a "probably not" for now. But that gives me time to be consistent, and to make sure that I don't have a stroke for another few decades.
Do you have to follow this? Not a chance. But something, anything, is better than hoping that you're just going to be healthy enough to live a long, full life. It's the one thing I like to be proactive about, and it works for me.
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