100 Push-ups huh?
Lately I find myself swimming deeply in the pool of the social web. I spend most of the day in front of my Macbook. About the only exercise I get is the walk from the kitchen to the porch where I sit down some more and surf the net. Lately we’ve been visiting some of our elders who are incapacitated. A realization sets in. As each year of your life passes, it will be harder to ‘get around’. Any advantage you give your self will be welcome.
Just Exercise then.
If it were really that easy, I wouldn’t be making a post about it. Some people are born to exercise, but others like me don’t really ‘get it’. Why should I bother getting up at 7 and running around the neighborhood in a circle? That’s a waste of energy. Of course the big key is the ‘drug’ that eventually gets released. These are the so-called endorphins that will finally inject into your brain after a good exercise program gets underway.
The big problem with most people is that there is this “boot camp” period between the beginning of an exercise program and the period when good things start to happen. We’re talking about waiting for the strong endorphins to arrive. Perhaps we may see some fat visually disappear and our muscles tone. Most people fail during this time. Usually with me, it’s after a couple of days. I just give up because all I feel is pain, nothing looks any different and my head hurts.
Anyway, my big theory is that exercise has to be some sort of adventure or it wont last. I can’t run around the block. I need to hike up some trail in order to find a fantastic view, or an old cabin or perhaps a geo-cache. My last hike to Big Bald above Asheville NC was like that. I didn’t want to give up pulling that mountain. I knew the view would be great.
If the adventure aspect of exercise fails, we need a gimmick
So each morning I have coffee and catch up on the happenings of the web. It’s a routine for me. It’s like kids and candy. I need to post to Twitter, check Google Reader, look at Google News, add some Delicious bookmarks and browse my Gmail. You could say that I’m driven by what is happening on the web.
Yesterday I poked over my friend’s RSS feed from his Delicious account and here comes this article from Lifehacker about doing 100 pushups. It was nothing special or mind blowing. It wasn’t even that well written. However, it struck me as odd that I read this from a site who usually has stuff like router hacks. Now Lifehacker is telling me to ‘hack my life’ with push-ups. Further research showed me they are referencing the actual One Hundred Pushups site. I could summarize the site in one sentence: “We’ll tell you how to do 100 consecutive push-ups within 6 weeks.”
Great. Fine. Good.
I would love to do a short push-up routine each morning, but it goes back to being something boring that I will often conveniently forget to do. So this time, I’m going to try and ‘hack’ it into my morning web routine by creating a daily iCal alarm that goes off saying simply, “Please do some push ups right now.” The hope is that since this is something happening on the Macbook, I will be compelled to do it. An alert window comes with a reminder and makes me want to ‘get this task done’ before I forget.
It’s always hilarious how you try to trick yourself into these things when a good dose of willpower would have done fine. That’s a huge problem with our society. We don’t have any willpower anymore. My plan is to trick my self long enough to get through the first week or two where no big results can be seen. At that point, some willpower can kick in. You see the investment and you don’t want to loose it.
The times are changing and so is the stereotype of the computer programmer or designer who sits behind a computer all day without exercise. Now people are looking for an edge to help them become smarter and more efficient. A lot of research by John Medina has covered the the very idea of how much our brain needs exercise in order to function correctly. There is also an interesting podcast with John Medina and Geoffrey Grosenbach over at RubyOnRails.org. John goes into depth about how our primitive brain responses to exercise are still very much at work.
