Welcome to Currents from Black Creek Coaching. This is a podcast for people who want to stay capable for the life they want to live. I'm Hugh, and this week's episode is about picking something that you'll actually do. So pretty much everybody knows that in order to keep their body healthy, they need to lift weights and do cardio and do mobility work and all that other stuff. So if everybody knows that they should be doing it, why aren't more people doing it? I mean, the super fit people at the gym can do it, so why can't you? You must be the problem, right? But of course you're not actually the problem. The problem is that that kind of menu of lifting weights and doing cardio and doing mobility work can make it feel like you're the only vegan guest at a wedding reception where the menu is beef, chicken, and double beef stuffed chicken. And just basically none of it sounds good to you. So you've been handed this menu of exercise options from people that are very smart and accomplished and want to help maximize health and longevity outcomes for you know as many people as possible. These are the general exercise recommendations for how to optimize your health. So optimization is great if you actually do whatever it is that's optimal. Uh if you hate lifting weights in the optimal way, you probably aren't going to be willing to load up a barbell four times a week and spend between 45 minutes and an hour and a half lifting it up and down. The same way that if you hate running, you're not probably going to get 75 to 150 minutes of cardio exercise through running every week. And it's really easy for us to get caught up in figuring out like what is the optimal thing for me to be doing. Um, and when that optimal thing doesn't fit your preferences or you're not able to do it, we kind of give up and we can lose sight of the thing that matters the most with pretty much every kind of health-promoting behavior that we know about, and that is consistent adherence. So consistently doing a thing that is beneficial, anything that's beneficial, is almost always going to beat out doing whatever the optimal thing is if you only do that optimal thing sporadically. And I think that consistency is driven by both enjoyment and accessibility. So let's talk about enjoyment first. People who lift weights like five times a week are only willing to do that because they enjoy it. But if you were to talk to some of those people and ask them about it, they might not sound like they actually enjoy it. They might talk about how sore they are and how much their training session absolutely demolished them that day. Uh, so there's a disconnect there. I'm claiming that they enjoy it, and some of them will say that they don't enjoy it. And I think that that discrepancy comes from the fact that there's different ways to enjoy things, and I'm gonna give you a list of them here, which is an unofficial, unvalidated, unscientific list. This is just five types of enjoyment that I thought of when I was thinking about this topic. So the first one is the most obvious. You enjoy the thing that you're doing while you're doing it, and that's also known as type one fun. The second uh way to enjoy something is to enjoy having done the thing after it's over, which is also called type two fun. And that's that like when you do something really hard, like a like a hard hike or something like that, and you might have been suffering during the second half of it, but then after it's over, you're really glad you did it. The third way to enjoy something is by enjoying the people that you do the thing with, and this is a huge one. This social connection is something that makes a lot of stuff a lot more palatable for everybody. The fourth way to enjoy something is that you enjoy the feeling of getting better at the thing, like the progress is rewarding to you. And this is where those weightlifters that I just talked about uh this is this is the enjoyment that they can derive even when they are really suffering in the middle of a session, is they are excited to know that they're gonna hit a PR or that they're gonna just be able to do more reps next time. They can feel the satisfaction of the progress. And then the last type of enjoyment that I came up with is kind of similar to the to the fourth one. Um, and that's doing something that you might not enjoy, or at least not enjoy very much, but you know that what you're doing is gonna make you better at something that you that you do enjoy. And so, like for me, uh an example of this is a set of specific shoulder and like rotator cuff exercises that I do several times a week in order to keep my arms and shoulders healthy for archery. I don't like doing those rehab type exercises, I find them tedious and and boring. Uh, but I do them because I feel a lot better when I'm shooting if I do them. So any one of these five things is going to dramatically increase uh the chance that you'll actually adhere to whatever activity it is that you're that you're trying to do. So let's imagine a person who hates going to the gym. Uh they probably won't go to the gym if we just leave it at that, right? If they just say, I hate going to the gym, I know I should, but I hate it, they're not going to go. But if they arrange to go with a friend who's also in like their pickleball league, now they're stacking two of these different like types of enjoyment into this routine, the social connection and the knowing knowing that they're going to improve their performance at the thing that they do enjoy. And so I think that's really important to consider when you're trying to decide how you should exercise or you know, do any other kind of health-promoting behavior is think about how you can make it more enjoyable or what are ways, like what are variations on the thing that make it enjoyable. And the second thing that I said was important for consistency is accessibility. And this is another huge one. So a lot of exercise plans will get deep sixed if they require somebody driving to a gym that's like more than 20 minutes away from their home or from their work. Um, so let's say that I live 25 minutes away from my gym. That means that it's a 50-minute round trip to get there and back. And if you do a little bit of math, maybe get a paper and a pencil, you can figure out that 50 minutes is almost an hour. And furthermore, we only have 24 hours in a day. So we're talking about taking an an entire one of our 24 hours just to get to the gym and home from the gym, and we haven't even done the freaking workout yet. That's a lot to ask somebody who's living a busy life or who doesn't really enjoy being at the gym in the first place. Similar to this, like exercise plans that are complicated or that require a lot of equipment are way more likely to not get acted on than simpler ones or shorter ones. Um, and when I say complicated, I'm talking about there's a lot of different ways a workout can be complicated, but having you know movements that are kind of all over the place in terms of like you're not sure how to do them, or rep schemes, or like rep working and resting schemes that are hard to follow. Uh, and then anything that requires either just a lot of equipment that you might not always have access to, or equipment that takes a while to like set up and tear down before and after the workout. So any one of those accessibility variables might be manageable on its own, but once you start to stack them, your chances of consistent follow-through really start to tank. And the limit here, like the thing to keep in mind, is that if you pick something that is easy to do and something that you enjoy doing, you know, we're we're not going to worry about optimizing, but it may be that those very easy, very enjoyable things are so far away from optimal that they're not giving you that much of a benefit. So this isn't an endorsement to just stay inside your comfort zone forever. Um, if you are somebody who has a goal to be independent and you know full of energy when you're 80, you're gonna have to load your body in meaningful ways and you're gonna have to get uncomfortable sometimes. But that doesn't mean that you have to do hard things all the time. I think that life has seasonality to it, and it's smart to recognize when you're in a season of life that allows you to be more aggressive and thorough with your training. And when you're in a season of life that is more demanding of your time and energy, you might need to scale down your exercise and be really strategic with your time and energy. So that could look like doing a workout that isn't as effective but that you enjoy, or it could be doing a workout that's really effective and really hard but shorten duration so that it's not demanding, you know, too much of you to kind of fit it into your schedule. So the bottom line point of this is that the optimal list of exercises is not your only option. So the thing I want you to do this week is to pick one thing that you can do that doesn't take a huge force of will, even if whatever that thing is seems like too easy to be worthwhile, do the thing and then see if you can do it again. And if you can, then that's some something that you can build from. And then maybe you can invite a friend or a family member to join you on doing that activity to add another layer of you know adherence promoting uh enjoyment to it. Um it's a great phrase, right? Adherence promoting enjoyment that makes it sound really fun, I know. Uh so it can be hard to figure out like what you actually enjoy. We can spend so much time thinking about this, we can spend so little time actually having fun uh in our day-to-day lives that this can actually pose quite a challenge. And so if you feel stuck, that would be uh something to reach out to me about because I'd be more than happy to chat with you about what your day-to-day routine looks like, what your goals are, and see if we can find ways to sneak some fun, you know, or at least not miserable types of movement in to help you move closer to your goals. So that's the episode for the week. Um, starting uh next week, we're gonna be starting a new series that I'm calling Capability for Real Life. So up till now, all the episodes have been about kind of how do you get started, and we're going to be getting into like what should you do, what is it for once you do get started. If you know somebody who's struggling with this issue, it'd be cool to share the episode with them. Um, and if you have any questions, you can always email me, Hugh at BlackCreekcoaching.com. And I'll look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Until then, be well.