The Come Alive Project

Category: Senior Fitness

  • Energy Bite 198 – What Do You Do After You’ve Reached Your Goal?

    When you exercise or go on a diet to reach a specific goal, what do you do once you’ve reached that goal?

    Let’s say you recognize you are overweight and out of shape, and your 50th High School reunion is coming up in a few months. So you go on a massive diet and exercise program so you will lose weight and shape your body to look good for your old classmates. It’s not only your classmates you are doing it for; you know you have needed and wanted to lose weight and shape up for a long time.

    So, let’s say you succeed. You lose twenty-five pounds and your body looks better that it has in thirty years. You’ve had the willingness to set the goals and the discipline to reach them. Your confidence is high and you feel good about yourself. You show up for your reunion and your old classmates gush over how great you look, how much energy you have, and how well you have taken care of yourself over the years.

    You feel better than you have felt in years, and you radiate that health and energy that you’ve wanted for so long, and that you worked so hard to get. But next . . .

    The reunion is over. What happens next? You really want to keep the way you look and feel more than anything in the world. You feel so good. You look so good.

    If you’re like most people in that situation, you start letting yourself ease right back into where you were before. The reality is that what you really want right now is to go back to eating like you used to. You want to finally stop exercising and get back to normal.

    So, what’s the answer? Here’s a thought:

    “Don’t throw out what you want most for what you want right now.”  — Anon

    The answer is to think of Health and Fitness as a “long term practice.” And that takes willingness and discipline. Self-discipline. If you had the willingness and the discipline to do what it took to get rid of the weight and flab and re-shape your body, you can continue to do what it takes to keep it. It all starts with the way you’re thinking. It’s a matter of mindset. Think in terms of exercise and good nutrition for their own sake rather than the short term extrinsic rewards you get, even when those extrinsic rewards are positive.

    When you are healthy and fit, you are more confident about yourself. When you are more confident about yourself, your posture improves, you hold yourself differently and you think about yourself differently. You are a different —  and better —  person than the one you were just a few months before your reunion. Don’t throw that away for your short term desire to ease up and go back to normal.

    When your 60th reunion rolls around, you will still look and feel good. Some of your classmates will be gone. Your remaining classmates will continue to comment on how young you look and how much energy you have and how well you have taken care of yourself over the years. That’s the extrinsic reward. The real reward is how good you feel about yourself.

    Let’s see, it’s mid-August. Reunion time is just a couple of months away.

    Thank you for reading.

     

  • Energy bite 197 – My Wife Caught Me Slumping

    My wife caught me slumping the other day and told me to watch my posture. I’ve always been very aware of my posture. I have always made a conscious effort to maintain good posture. I’ve written and spoken about the importance of good posture for years. I used to get positive comments about my posture. Perhaps a stint in the Marine Corps helped.

    This is a three minute read but is worth it if you are getting older.

    Anyhow, I was noticing my posture in the mirror one morning recently, and discovered that I seemed to be bending slightly forward with my shoulders rounded and my head forward, signs of a deteriorating posture. I made a note in my notebook to watch my posture and to make a deliberate effort to stand up straighter. I didn’t think that it had actually become noticeable to anyone else, but just two days after I had made that note to myself, my wife approached be with a strict admonition about my posture and how it was starting to decline. That makes it a more serious problem. (And no, she doesn’t peek at my notebook).

    Why is my posture beginning to decline? First, I spend a lot of time at the computer — a couple of hours every day. That automatically invites the head forward, slumped over posture that my wife and I were seeing.

    Second, I do a lot of exercises for my abdominal muscles and not enough exercises for my back. If you are not conscious of it, that can result in a “pulling” forward and down of your entire upper body. If you do a lot of pushups or other exercises for your chest, that can add to the pulling forward of the shoulders. Unless you do offsetting exercises that will strengthen the “pulling” muscles of your back, the slumping will get worse. It’s a function of balancing the exercises.

    Ironically, part of the solution is consciously tightening your abdominal muscles as you are standing or sitting — not a forced tightening, just a conscious tensing.

    So what am I doing to correct my posture before it gets worse? First, I posted an index card on the lamp directly in front of my computer where I wrote in large letters: “Posture”. The reason? Simply to remind me and make me mentally and physically aware of my posture as I am writing or otherwise using the computer.

    Second, I started doing exercises for my upper and lower back to offset the emphasis I had been focusing on with exercises for my abdominals and chest. Most involve “scapular retraction” (pulling back my shoulder blades and upper back) and exercises where I am on my stomach while lifting shoulders and legs off the floor. In the fitness arena, the latter exercise is called a “Superman”.

    Finally, I am making sure I am mindful of when I lapse into poor posture by being extraordinary conscious of how I am sitting, standing, or moving at any given time. I am “visualizing” myself enjoying good posture — not only mentally, but physically. In his book Psycho-Cybernetics, author Maxwell Maltz said to picture your end result clearly and vividly and then capture the feeling of the successful result. He said:

    “Then your internal machinery is geared for success to guide you in making the correct muscular motions and adjustments . . . to make the goal an accomplished fact.”

    A little off the wall for you? Hey, visualization worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger, why not me? (NOTE: Arnold turned 70 two days ago on July 30th.)

    In the meantime, while I am making the conscious effort to regain excellent posture, my wife will be reminding me by punching me touching me gently in the middle of my back whenever she catches me letting poor posture get ahead of me.

    Being fully aware of the problem is the first step in resolving it. I’m glad I caught it early and that my wife reinforced it. My recommendation to you? Be aware and make a conscious effort to stand up straight. Your posture is one of the first things people see and use to make judgments about you. It is a vital factor in your health, energy level, and for your physical and emotional well-being.

    The takeaway? Keep an eye on your own posture. It doesn’t take long for it to deteriorate and it may not be noticeable at first. Don’t be in denial. It’s never too late to recover, but it’s best to catch it early and do something about it right away.

    Thank you for reading.

     

  • Energy Bite 196 – Mind and Body Working Together – Part 2: Creative Visualization

    Welcome to Part 2 of Mind and Body Working Together. Last weeks article was about the power of the imagination and some aspects of mental imagery or visualization. This week I’ll cover the topic of creative visualization along with an exercise in how to do it.

    Esther Hicks, one of Hay House’s most popular Spiritual authors said: “Seventeen minutes of focused, pleasurable visualization is stronger than 2000 hours of working to obtain a goal.” That’s the power of your subconscious mind. Does that sound a little bit outlandish? Well, scientists are now experimenting with the manipulation of brain waves to create physical changes not only in people but in the things that people are focusing on. Uri Geller and his mental fork bending is coming to a location near you. Some scientists are studying how to weigh thoughts (as in with real scales). That may be going a bit far for the scope of these articles, but it is nice to be aware that scientists are beginning to demonstrate in the laboratory what people have been living for many years — the power of the mind to shape your physical reality. Neuroscience is an up and coming field of study.

    In his book, Psychocybernetics, author Maxwell Maltz said: “Define your goal or end result. Picture it clearly and vividly, then capture the feeling you would experience if the desired goal was already an accomplished fact.” That’s his formula for creating your own reality. The phrase “capture the feeling” is critical because it implies that for visualization to really work, you must not only “see” the outcome, but you must be emotionally and kinesthetically involved to get the full benefit.

    Try this adaptation of an exercise taken from the book The Life We are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy. I’m both quoting and paraphrasing here to condense it a bit. The goal is to perceive an imagined experience with the “vivid here and now clarity common to many mystical and other exalted experiences.” Give it a try.

    Sit comfortably in a straight backed chair or in a meditation position on the floor. Balance and center yourself by initially focusing on a point about an inch below your naval. Close your eyes and create an imaginary ball about the size of a soccer ball in your hands in front of you. Hold it gently. Sense the surface of the ball by moving your hands slightly as if you were rolling them around the surface of the ball. Let the ball become real in your imagination. Feel the surface of the ball as you move your hands around it while seeing it in “your mind’s eye” at the same time. Feel the weight of the balI as you hold it. If you are fully focused and in the present, you should be able to “feel” and see the ball as real. Some will see and feel the ball as if it were physically there. For others the physical and mental image may not be quite as vivid, but it should still be there. Mentally put the ball on the floor and open your eyes. If you didn’t see and feel the ball, give it another try. Remember you are trying to make what is in your imagination into something “real”.  Source, The Live We are Given, pages 154-155.

    Based on what I have described above, the exercise should only take a few minutes and should help demonstrate for you, the power of creative visualization to create a physical reality for you.

    Search back in your own life for an example of where you have visualized something vividly and it has come to pass. Shakti Gawain, author of the bestseller from a few years back, Creative Visualization, wrote:

    “We always attract into our lives whatever we think about most, believe most strongly, expect on the deepest level, and imagine most vividly.” It’s worked for me and it’s worked for others that I have listened to and read about. I’ll bet it has worked for you too.

    Oh, and yes it does work for fitness. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger who said:

    “A pump when I picture the muscle I want is worth ten with my mind drifting.”

    Well said, Arnold.

    Thank you for reading.