I don't mind admitting that other people have helped to give me good ideas, where exercise is concerned. Over the course of a lifetime, it has happened four-to-six times, and it would help me out if it happened again. Specifically, I need some help with hiking. There are people who blog about hiking, and they do a good job of it; but it doesn't seem to help me visualize the sport as interesting.
Isn't it odd how people never get around to discussing the philosophy of exercise? By 'philosophy' I mean the basic questions. What are you trying to accomplish? Why does one sport work better than another, and why does this vary with the person? What is the biggest drawback to the sport, and how do you overcome it?
And most of all: How do you turn this kind of exercise into something that you actually want to do, instead of something that you are forcing yourself to do? This has been the secret to most of my success with exercise. I've emphasized hedonism, rather than disciplinarianism. It's not that determination and self-discipline have no role to play, but it is prudent not to ask too much from them. They are necessary, but not sufficient, for success.
The trick then, after adopting a realistic and humble attitude toward the self-discipline you are likely to hold to, is to look for other tools. It is these "other tools" that should be consciously dwelled on, while self-discipline stays in the background, lest you provoke yourself into rebelling against it.
Comments
bobthebum
It would be more pleasant to go "bushwhacking" where the vegetation is friendly, like in Utah, creosote bush desert, high grasslands, and ponderosa forests.
Gayle
Additionally, I have observed that such people, if prompted a little, will expound on these topics
to an apparently infinite extent.
I would have to count myself among this group. I was bitten by the exercise bug 33 years ago and it has kept a firm hold upon me ever since.
Considerable reflection on why I do it has brought me the understanding that my primary motivation is related to my enjoyment of instant gratification. Instant gratification has gotten a pretty bad name the last few decades, what with all of our concern about addictions, etc, and our puritanical perception that gratification is something to be sacrificed or at least, delayed. I can't say that I subscribe to any of that stuff.
I like your term "hedonism" vs the other term "disciplinarianism". I think, though, that what people often call "hedonism" is a certain quality of present-time enjoyment with a rather stiff price of later-time anti-enjoyment. I would use the term "decadence" for the latter. Me, I'm a hedonist. I want the kind of pleasure now which will bring me even more pleasure later. That's what I call "hedonism". That is what I get from exercise.
I think that if exercise is unpleasant to you, you have overstepped and are doing too much too soon. Exercise is best embarked upon with a profound attention to the principle of "gradualness", rather than "abruptitude".
Anything that you do with abruptitude will more or less suck.
"No pain, no gain" strategies are ridiculous and suggestive of an immaturity about how life works. If you tell a carrot growing in your garden, "no pain, no gain", the carrot will laugh at you and keep on growing at his gradual, natural pace. Integrate exercise into your life using the carrot's example of painless, natural gradualness.
I added walking to my exercise repretoire about ten years ago. I had been exercising for more than two decades at that point, and I had never liked walking because it always seemed to make my body hurt within an hour or so. I noticed that other people seemed not to have this experience, but it seemed a mystery to me why walking made me hurt so much, while most of my other exercises made me feel blissful.
Well....the first thing for me to do was get rid of any descriptive terminology which might be suggestive of negativity. For me "hiking" has a pretty negative connotation, so I use the benign term "walking". One could probably do even better if one chose an even more fun term than, "walking", I think.
So...I began walking.....I usually started hurting within about 45 minutes and I hurt too much to continue after 60 minutes. Taking a page from F.M. Alexander, I began to consider the way in which I was walking and experiment with walking differently and see if I achieved a different result. The results were astounding and liberating, and lead me off into a variety of personal studies of my "gait".
Write back if you want to know more details....happy walkin'.........Allan.
Think of it. It's not much different than imagining "Master and Commander".
Of course, there is the difference in actually being outside. But, no danger of crashing and hurting oneself. In the gym, you can crash on screen but you don't hurt yourself.
We're becoming a virtual world, aren't we? Kids indoors doing their games hardly play outside anymore.
What's to become of us?
In it, he starts off by writing about his preferrred term: sauntering.
Yeah.....let's see.....cadence; degree of knee-bend; degree of butt-protrusion; degree of toe-out(pronation?): degree of toe-in(supination?); length of step vs shortness of step; knee-in vs knee-out; stomach-out vs stomach-in' chest-sink vs chest-out; shoulder-raise vs shoulder-back; anteriority of head vs posteriority of head; line-of-sight-up vs line of sight down; lift of head upward vs sink of head downward; breath(an entire universe unto itself)....and many more adjustable prameters....
I discovered first that by slightly narrowing my stance and pointing my toes more forward, my tension-free walking time almost immediately quadrupled from one hour to four hours. For me that's somewhere around 10-14 miles. I was shocked and amazed.......
The key seemed to be to slightly traction or adjust various parameters but only slightly and never to the point of creating greater levels of tension than before. If you're creating tension, you're pushing too much......
Also....allowing my butt to stick out a bit here and there helped to eliminate lumbar and cervical spine pain which has tormented me since early adolescence. I think that I must have been tightly holding my "dead white pelvis". as I think Eldreage Cleaver mentions in "Soul On Ice". I now just let it stick out a bit and am quite a bit more at ease, at many levels.....more later.....