brent99’s BodyBlog

I was sitting in my chair thinking about going to work out when I had this revelation — this equation in my head! An insight into personal training motivation that could be quantified in numerical analysis and qualified in human behavior.

What I realized is this: the motivation to work out is inversely correlated to the numbe of days you’ve been away from exercise! While this is somewhat counter-intuitive, its true. In basic terms, it means that the more days you go without exercise, the harder it is to motivate yourself to go exercise.

M=I/Dsquared

I say this is counterintuitive because we all think that after a few days of rest, we are going to be MORE willing to go work out. But does it really work that way? While certainly you need your breaks, REST HAPPENS. It hardly needs to be planned. But 1 day becomes 2. 2 becomes 3. And you keep thinking, "tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow". Meanwhile, your gym clothes get lost in your laundry, your ipod charge wears down, you lose your running shoes. By the time you want to go again, it’ll take you 1/2 hour just to gather your crap and get out of the house! Meanwhile, your muscles begin to atrophy, your diet slips, your progress starts sliding backwards. In just a couple of weeks, the task of re-breaking in again starts becoming daunting. In one month, your at the bottom of the hill again staring up. In 3 months, you are deep in the hole.

So embrace the equation. Realize that the more you let time slip, the harder it gets. Once you get in there, each successful trip gets a little bit easier and when you have that day off, you will have earned it!

About a month ago, suffering from my shoulder injury that limited weightlifting, I decided to get off the couch and start running again. I haven’t run for years, spurring it in favor of time lifting. I vowed to run for 24 hours and 128 miles in December. Actually, I didn’t do anywhere near that much running, but I probably put in a good 10 hours of cardio over the month, which isn’t too shabby at 40-45 minutes a pop.

The results are pretty impressive. I had been bulking up, but I added as much bodyfat as muscle in the process. I peaked to 15.3% when I started running. Now, I’m back to 12.4% which is more representative of where I’ve been the last couple of years. I did absolutely no dieting during this period and polished off more than my share of beer. Now, to be fair, I think this represents more of my natural body state so I’m sure that helped a lot but its still pretty impressive.

Since I started blogging on this over the past YEAR now, my bodyfat has netted more than a 1% improvement with a pound of lean mass gain and 2 pounds of fat loss. Of course, because of the various techniques I’ve employed throughout the year, its been a wild ride. I have found that changing my weight 7 pounds up and 15 pounds down had yielded little positive results. In 2007, I hope to remain about the same weight but improve my body composition. I believe a combination of all 3 elements will propel me to higher ground.