How Not to Get Fat in Quarantine
I know we’ve all said or thought, “If I had more time, I would [fill in the blank with an aspirational, impressive goal].” For some of us, that's to get fit or to go complete Marie Kondo in our living space or to write a novel. Now that many of us have that extra time that we’ve always wished for, ignoring the unfortunate situation that gave us the time, we’ve now realized that it requires more than just time. It requires a butt-ton of motivation. Butt-ton is a technical term, right?
It’s amazing how that even with all this time to be productive, you can find yourself crawling into bed at night reflecting on your day and realizing you have accomplished none of those “productive” tasks. However, you realize that you’ve managed to watch 3 movies and can only name two of them, ate entirely too many carbohydrates and pet your fur baby for 4 hours (that one I'm happy to call productive, though). Or is this just a me thing? Tell me you all are experiencing that, too.
I touched on this last week, but when the Paralympics were postponed a couple weeks back, all of a sudden, many of us lost quite a bit of motivation. There was the general consensus that they would be moved until 2021 but that uncertainty kind of threw me. Additionally, even with the new dates we’re still in limbo about how to qualify, if we keep our qualifying times, what races we’ll have in the next 500ish days, etc. While the IOC announced that those who have secured a spot for the Olympics gets to keep it for 2021, the IPC has not stated guidelines yet and for sports that have qualifying thresholds and selection committees (like athletics), we’re still waiting on answers. This has left me in a pretty uncomfortable limbo. I’ve noticed that training at home away from the structure of my normal training environment has me sleeping in, staying up later and being less productive despite having more hours in the day. It was making me worried; A: because I didn't want to get fat. And more importantly, B: because I’ve spent entirely too many years of my life training to let the slight inconvenience of training at home ruin all my hard work.
Mindset Reset
So, before the new dates for the game were even released, I sat down (like I have an option) and wrote out “Why do I like to train and what benefits do I get from it?” For those of you who have been following these blogs, the following will come as no surprise.
To go fast
To maintain my mental health
To be fit enough to live my life to the best of my ability
The aforementioned “To not get fat”
This is all I really needed to get me back training at more consistent times. Race or no race, I exercise for myself.
Staying on the Motivation Train *toot toot*
But, Sam! It's only been a few weeks, what's to stop you slipping back into bad habits? Well, I have a goal. I have steps for reaching that goal, and I have a support team to help me keep my sanity to achieve these steps. And this is something you can all do at home. Your sporting season might be over for this year but it's coming back around again next season whether you like it or not.
There are many ways to keep your goals in your sights and while the question about is great for getting you in the right mindset, you still sometimes need a little gumption to get off your butt and do these things. Here are some suggestions:
Goalception and Mini-Goals
Make yourself some goals, split those goals up using your best goalception skills and just start. If you have smaller goals, that you can check off regularly, you’ll feel that pang of success every time you check one off. Keep that list somewhere you see it often so that you’re constantly encouraged to keep up the good work. For me, I have a large note above my desk in my bedroom that reads “Summer Down Under → Switzerland → World Championships → Tokyo” and every time one of the events came up, I would cross it out with a marker. While my note is clearly in need of some updating and for the purpose of your quarantine you might want to have a smaller scale and more bite-sized things to cross off, the note being one of the first things I saw in the morning and last things I saw at night kept everything in perspective and my “eye on the prize”.
Accountability
I love training at Canberra because I constantly get to push myself with the help of my coach and teammates. This helps me conceptualize how I’m doing compared to others and gives me great encouragement to keep up the hard work. If you are a part of a sporting team, organise with a teammate to video call and do a session together, you’ll keep each other accountable, if that's not enough, put $5 on the line for missing a session. If you don’t have teammates to work out with, get a significant other, relative, roommate or friend to keep you accountable. Even if they’re not going to do the work out with you, they can still yell at you, bother you into doing it or put something else on the line if $5 isn’t floating your boat. Maybe keep it interesting by saying whoever doesn’t miss a workout gets to choose a movie to watch.
Incentivize
Training at home by yourself? Set weekly targets for rewards! If you hit your agreed number of workouts per week you can rent and watch that movie or documentary you had your eye on, get take out, eat a whole roll of Oreos for all it matters just hit that goal! Anyone else remember getting gold stars in primary school? Some people like to make charts or score cards to remind them of their records. I recommend stickers, but if you’re feeling “grown up” a whiteboard or simply a piece of paper taped to the wall will do.
Monotony will BORE you!
Keep your training simple, and change it up to break boredom. Sure you could do 50 burpees, 50 pushups and 50 squats every day for the rest of your life… but do you really want to be that person? I’m not saying you have to sign up for expensive apps but just googling home workouts will give you a lifetime of different exercises to chop in and out to keep things fresh. If all else fails, try seeing how quickly you can army crawl from one end of your house and back, learn the choreography from a Backstreet Boys song or learn how to juggle… go nuts! But honestly, 1990’s boy band choreography is way more athletic and exhausting than you’d think.
Oh Sweet Sunshine!
Don’t forget you can actually go outside to exercise. Just remember to be sensible, practice social distancing and good hygiene. Don’t go licking street signs or touching every surface in sight. Do go for a jog, hop on your bike and ride, go swim at the beach or just throw the ball for the dog. Fresh air, sunshine and getting out of the house is one of the most important things you can do to keep motivated. If the walls are creeping in, which I know they are, go for a walk around the block and breathe. This will pass. The fresh air not only give you good opportunities to get your blood flowing but can help you center yourself, give you a sense of calm, and remind you of the world beyond your walls.
Let’s Get Pinterest-ing!
Make a vision board of all the things you want to achieve over this period. What do you want to do? Paint the house? Learn how to make bread? Plant a vegetable patch? Setting and achieving tasks will help keep your sanity and give you some structure and hopefully stop the all-nighters watching complete series on Netflix. Make your board colorful and appealing so that it brings you joy and inspiration when you see it and you don’t see it as a daunting list of demands.
Healthy Mind, Happy Body
Try meditation and mindfulness activities. The world at times can be stressful enough with work, social media, news headlines and that time you stubbed your toe really bad. Add in a pandemic to all of those things and suddenly it’s hard to escape from the constant negativity. I can’t recommend enough to take time out once or twice a day to sit down, breathe and just switch off from the world. Even if it’s only for 10 minutes. Let your thoughts come and let them pass through you. Let yourself have the negative thoughts and process them, then refocus yourself and remind yourself of the positives. Check out my blog post on mindfulness in the face of competition stress to read more about this topic.
Will any of this actually help you? Honestly, who knows, everybody and every body (see what I did there?) is different. Find what works for you. But for me personally, these are all things I have started to do and will continue to do during this weird, slightly horror-movie-plot of a time. Most importantly, and this is something all the media is jamming down our mouths at the moment, remember “you are not alone” and we are all in this together. Stay in contact with friends and family, pet your fur baby excessively and stay safe and healthy!