Taper Back your Workouts! podcast

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Your daily workouts are crucial for your body, and mind!

Not only in the gym, or your living room, but outside and in the woods, roads, and park. They don’t need to be written down or chronicled, or obsessed over. Not at all! But they do need to be something that you fit into your daily life, as an important part, forever.

When I was young, 20 or so, I started seriously working out with strength training. As a skinny distance runner in high school running cross country, which was only 2 and 1/2 miles, I was not at all pleased with my progress! I wanted to be like a superhero- strong, fit, and above all powerful. So I started lifting weights, as so many do, 3 times per week. Simple routines, of bench press, dips, military press, squats, bent over rows, chins, military press, and deadlifts.

Let me tell you; if you are young and implement such a strategy, you will very soon no longer be skinny! It will really build you up, both inside and out. Next, you will get into nutrition, and healthy eating. If you learn all about healthy, high protein eating, within a year or so you will appear to be a different, improved person. This is a wonderful way for young people to begin their adult lives!

Men or women, both will reap huge benefits from such a lifestyle. At first I included much running, but I learned to keep the distances at about 2-3 miles maximum. Anything else destroys your musculature, rather than enhancing it. Walking with ski poles as resistance in the woods, or heavy hand walking are vastly superior exercises, as is simply walking barefoot in the woods.

So, for many years I lifted weights, quite heavily, sometimes too heavily, and learned that less can really be more- higher reps, less weight can be wonderful overall. Your body can be sculpted as powerful and aesthetic together.

Now, in my 70’s, I am just as committed as ever. But now, in the early mornings I stretch in the living room, and do ‘virtual resistance’ exercises, along with isometrics and calisthenics in the AM. I do it in front of the television, and let me tell you it is the high point of my day! I pretty much only watch TV while exercising, and so that early morning 1 hour is entertaining, in that I awaken both my body and my mind together! I start the day both refreshed and happy, and my body is tuned and ready. I highly recommend this ‘coupling’ of workouts with the reward of television.

I used to do an afternoon workout later, around 3 or 4 PM, of pure strength training in my dungeon of a basement with weights, a power rack, and benches. I would do that workout as a split- usually lower body one day, and upper the next.

At first I alternated day by day. As I aged, I realized that was too much, and would work my upper body one day, take a day off (but always keep the morning workout), and then do the lower body. Take another day off, and repeat. Worked wonderfully, as did replacing bench presses largely with gymnastic rings pushups, and squats with pistol squats on the rings, and ring rows. Added isometric/aerobic presses and chins and dips in the power rack, for time. (Timed static contractions, where you press constantly against the immovable rack bar for a minute or more).

I also often go for a stroll in my woods, with heavy hand dumbbells or ski poles. Just for 15 minutes or so, which is refreshing! Being retired, I now have the gift of time, and I try to take full advantage of this luxury.

I have largely stopped sprinting in my yard barefoot. I seems to be overly draining now. As do my daily workouts, sometimes…

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