Chunking your way to fitness

September 28, 2015 by

Chunking.

Sounds like something that’s done to a piece of chocolate before it’s put into a cookie, but in this case it’s much more than that.

It’s a way to chop yourself back to fitness in small steps, each one building on the previous step.

Chunking is a tool used to solve a problem or complete a task. It’s when a bigger problem or issue is broken down into smaller more manageable pieces. As each piece is resolved, there is less of the whole to complete, making the overall task much less daunting.

To use a non-fitness example of chunking, let’s use one of everyone’s favourite pastimes…cleaning.

Let’s assume you haven’t cleaned your place in weeks.

You’ve got a kitchen counter piled full of dirty dishes because the sinks already full, you’ve amassed a collection of laundry hampers overflowing with pretty and not so pretty underthings and overthings, you’ve seen the dust bunnies replicating exponentially in every dark, hidden corner, and you’ve created your own leaning towers of papers piled up on every available horizontal surface.

Every time you open the door, that’s the scene you’re greeted with.

And every time, you push the thought of even starting the momentous cleaning task to the back of your mind because it’s just that overwhelming.

You don’t even know where to begin. So you don’t.

Instead, you add more clothes, more dishes and more papers to the ever growing piles. And then you repeat the same steps again tomorrow. And the day after that.

Now let’s imagine that one day, you read this blog post and it stuck in your mind. At that instant, you make a decision that today is the day that you’ll get your place clean and you’ll use chunking to accomplish it.

Let the chunking begin…

You take stock of what needs to get done in a global sense, but this time, you don’t let that foreboding sense of doom stop you in your tracks.

Using your newly found chunking skills, you decide that you’ll start your chunking with the laundry.

Because once you’ve started the laundry, you’ll have the washing time to work on another task, thus increasing your efficiency and decreasing the overall time you have to put into cleaning.

You sort and start the wash.

It’s not as bad as you originally thought (or maybe it is, but as piles are organized and distributed to the machine, there’s less of an affront to your eyes, and it doesn’t seem as overwhelming anymore ). You’ve got a load in the wash, and a few more piles patiently awaiting their turn in the machine.

You know you have roughly an hour for the cycle to complete, so you move on to your next task.

You decide that the stench of the dirty dishes is no longer tolerable, so that will be the next chunked task. As each dish is washed and dried, the counter space opens up and the once bare cupboards are now back to their glorious fullness and the kitchen is clean.

This is getting fun now!

Each completed task encourages you with the results you’re seeing, a deep sense of accomplishment washing over you with every square inch of your place becoming visible again, with every now fresh breath you take.

By this time, the washing machine has gone through a cycle, you flip the freshly washed clothes to the clothes dryer and add another load to the washing machine.

Chunked, which now gives you time to work on those papers. You sort the mail, file the receipts and recycle the unopened weekly flyers and advertisements.

And so on and so forth.

What started off as a huge, seemingly insurmountable task of cleaning your whole apartment just became a series of smaller, interdependent tasks that don’t paralyze you with their sheer scope.

As each task was completed, the overall problem grew smaller.

Now let’s use that same process with chunking your way to fitness.

Let’s say you’ve been mostly sedentary for quite a few years now. You’ve been dutifully paying your monthly gym fees, but you haven’t actually been going. You work a desk job and you have a busy social calendar, often involving socializing with good food and just as good drink.

With the above scenario, it’s possible that over the years you’ve put on a few extra pounds. Or maybe you’ve put on more than just a few, maybe 20 or 30 lbs extra and now you’ve noticed it’s impacting your health and vitality.

You’ve just identified the larger problem (you’re out of shape and overweight) and you’ve made the decision that you want to remedy it (you want to lean up and improve your fitness).

The major issue is that looking at a problem like the one above on its own often leads to paralysis.

Where do you even begin? What should you even do? What type of diet? What type of exercise? How much? At what intensity? How long will it take?

All these questions and all the questions the answers to these questions may bring…It’s overwhelming.

It’s probably better to just have some wine and cheesecake and think about them.

Well, that’s what the old you might have said, but this is the new, chunking you.

Whereas before, identifying the problem would have lead you to just quit before you even started, the new you takes that big problem and chops it up into small, manageable pieces.

You’ve taken the first step, you decided that you are ready to start your fitness journey, that you’re ready to trim down and shed those extra pounds and improve your fitness.

You want to feel energetic and vibrant again. Since we’re all about honesty, you know that leaning out would make you look good again, too.

Once that important decision is made (this is the same as deciding that today was the day you’re cleaning your place), let the chunking begin…

Since chunking involves taking a much larger problem and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable chunks, you realize that improving your fitness has two major, equally important components: exercise and nutrition. You recognize that both play different, but complementary roles in your overall health and fitness journey.

So you chunk both of them, making your bigger problem (being out of shape and over weight) into two smaller problems (lacking consistent exercise, lack of nutritional plan).

And then you chunk some more in each of those two areas.

In your exercise chunk, you know you need to start. But where and how? You could start with adding something as simple as 10 minutes of moderate to faster paced walking a day after dinner.

In your nutrition chunk instead of trying to overhaul your diet completely and putting yourself on some intense, highly restrictive and daunting diet-of-the-week, it can be something as simple as eating slower, or taking more lean protein at every meal. Something that’s just a little different than what you’re already doing but aligned with your end goals.

That’s it.

It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

Now instead of worrying about being out of shape and overweight, you just need to focus on and complete the two tasks you’ve decided on. That’s how you’ll work on resolving your chunked problem.

As these tasks push you past your inertia and you get comfortable doing them consistently, you can add more tasks, still keeping each task fairly small and manageable.

It may be as simple as adding 10 more minutes of fast walking for a total of 20 minutes or adding 2 servings of high fibre veggies to every meal.

In any case, all you’re doing is consistently and diligently completing very small tasks that work towards resolving your major issue without getting caught up in the enormity of “losing 30 lbs” or going from “unfit to fit” in one fell swoop.

For many of these chunked tasks, the time commitment is small, but over time, the effects add up.

Here’s the caveat with this type of chunking…

You will have to set your expectations appropriately.

Making these types of very small changes usually don’t lead to very rapid changes. These are not the changes that will give you the hyped up, gimmicky results that are plastered all over the supermarket impulse buy magazine racks. You won’t “lose 10 lbs in 10 days”, or “drop 4 dress sizes in a month”, or “build a six pack in six weeks”.

However, at these levels of change, these chunked habits are sustainable.

These chunks lower the barrier to resistance dramatically.

Tell me, which seems much less draconian to the average person:

Scenario 1: Full diet mode with restricted food items, no eating past certain times of the day, limited flexibility/control.  Restrictive practices may lead to later binge eating (you know that feeling when you’re told you can’t have something). Committing substantial amounts of time to exercise in the 5-10 hrs/week range at moderate to high intensity while already deprived of energy from food. You will likely be moody, tired, fatigued, and generally irritable.

It’s quite possible that you’ll see rapid drop in weight initially (N.B. this drop may not be all fat loss, but also loss of important lean tissues like muscle – the number on the scale would just be smaller) but after this initial drop, you will likely hit a plateau (if you’re eating so little already, it’s very hard to eat even less, and if you’re already exercising so much, it’s tough to add more in).

Scenario 2: Chunking both exercise and nutrition. Making one small change in each area such as eating each meal slower (20-30 minutes rather than scarfing down meal) allowing hunger cues to dictate how much you really need to ingest, eating 2 or more servings of veggies with each meal, or making sure that each meal has a lean source of protein. Adding one small element of exercise daily such as a 20-30 minute brisk walk after dinner, a short morning swim before work or a circuit-based body weight workout building up to 3-5+ hrs of moderately vigorous activity a week.

With the above, there will likely be very little initial change in weight or appearance but the new chunked habits are not drastic and would cause very minimal disruption to current habits and behaviours. Over time, these would lead to fairly significant yet sustainable changes. Your new fit, healthy lifestyle.

I think it’s pretty easy to see which one of these two choices is more comfortable, and more importantly, sustainable over the long term.

And that’s where results will be found.

Filed Under: Human Performance, Personal Training, Strength & Conditioning, Weight Loss Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

But I just don’t have enough time for exercise

September 18, 2015 by

Time. There’s never enough time.

Sound familiar?

Any time the phrase “but I just don’t have enough time” escapes open lips, it’s often met with a round of heads nodding in agreement and a cacophony of “oh yes, me too” and “same here”.

It’s an epidemic. Or it would seem that way.

But is it really?

Is there really such a shortage of time that we can’t fit everything we need to get done in the time we have available? Do people really not have enough time in the week to accomplish what we want to get done?

Not enough time for exerciseLet’s look at exercise.

We know it’s good for us.

We’re well aware of the incredible physical and mental benefits that it offers. We know that almost every aspect of our lives improve when we get enough physical activity including general health, work performance, mood and learning to name a few.

And yet we know we often don’t get enough.

When life gets busy, when we’re stressed, when we’re tired, when we’re pretty much anything, it’s the first item that can be rescheduled, shuffled, delayed and abandoned because we just don’t have enough time for it.

But is it really a matter of having enough time? If our days were an hour or two longer, would that really suddenly allow us to get our exercise in? Would any portion of that extra hour or two be used to get our heart rates up and our muscles working?

For a small number of people, perhaps. But for a vast majority, it’s not really about time, it’s about priorities.

Exercise is just not important enough because if it were, it would get done.

This is not to say that spending an hour in the gym with a half hour commute each way is going to be feasible for everyone, nor should it be.

But this is to say that many people just don’t place exercise high enough of the priorities list to have it reschedule, shuffle, delay or abandon another activity such as watching a movie on Netflix or perusing Facebook.

Let’s talk a little about priorities.

What are yours?

We may have a list of priorities in our minds, but our actual priorities may be very different in real life.

How can you find out?

Here’s a quick and easy way to get a rough estimate of your actual vs imagined priorities.

Take a piece of paper (or use your smartphone) and note down how you’ve spent your last week. Mark down how many hours you’ve spent doing various things from work, to exercise, to meal prep, to Facebook, to sleep, to Netflix or TV, to reading, to child minding etc.

Be brutally honest otherwise you’re only lying to yourself. As a side note, memory recall is quite fallible, so these won’t be extremely accurate for most people, but will give you a general idea. If you want a more accurate measure, keep a notebook and a timer with you and start clocking.

Tally up all the hours under the various headings. Divide each by 168 for the total hours available per week, multiply by 100 and voila, you have your weekly priorities in percentage form.

e.g. If I sleep 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, that gives me 56 hours per week. Divide 56 by 168 = 0.333 multiplied by 100 = 33.3%

Now that you have that information available, you can decide if there are any changes you need (or want) to make.

And if their costs are worth it.

Filed Under: Human Performance, Mindset Tagged With: , , , , ,

Do the work.

July 23, 2015 by

It’s not good enough to just show up.

You have to do the work.

Yes, we all think we do the work.

We often do enough to get by or satisfy our belief of what’s work.

Or we do what’s comfortable, what we’ve always done.

But when it comes to fitness and health, there are so many forces pulling us in so many directions that we aren’t always truly doing the work we need to be doing.

This is not meant as a personal attack.

But if you want to start seeing results*, the first item on the agenda has to be taking stock of where you’re actually starting from, doing a current audit of sorts.

When you go to the gym, how hard are you working? How efficient are you? Do you take your mobile device and check Facebook every few minutes? Do your water breaks seem to stretch out into happy hour territory? Does the intensity of your exercise actually leave you feeling like you’ve put everything you had at that time into it or could you go for round two without even breaking a sweat?

In most cases, we find short cuts. We find the easy outs.

We find any number of ways where we can make the work easier. Longer rests. Lighter weights. Slower pace. Lower difficulty setting. And so on.

This is human nature (at least for the vast majority of us) – we seek the path of least resistance.

When it comes to health and fitness, that’s not always the best course of action.

To teach the body to adapt to higher levels of fitness, we need to put it in higher levels of challenge and stress, beyond what we’re comfortable with, with enough consistency over a long enough period of time.

Being at the gym for an hour will not suddenly confer improved performance, decreased body fat or improved cardiovascular fitness or stamina.

Unfortunately, the feeling many people get from just showing up translates into the feeling that the work was done. This is almost like a mental check mark. And what do we do when we’ve crossed something off our to-do list is we often congratulate ourselves for the job well done and take a break in celebration.

Now, being at the gym and busting your butt for an hour, pushing yourself, putting it out there in a progressive manner, that, when repeated over time, will confer physiological changes. That will be the stimulus your body needs to change and adapt. That’s how fitness is earned and physiques are crafted.

Basically, showing up is not the same as showing up and doing the work.

So if you’ve been working on your health and fitness and haven’t been seeing the results you want, it may be time to sit down and do an honest, objective audit of the actual work you’re doing.

And keep in mind that to earn the results, we have to do the work.

*The work audit should also take into account the “work” you’ve been doing with your nutrition. Exercise without appropriate nutrition will not yield optimal results.

Filed Under: exercise, Mindset, Personal Training, Strength & Conditioning Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Perfect Form in Exercise – Does it even exist?

January 23, 2015 by

There is no such thing as “perfect form” in exercise.

There is, however, ideal form, which is more of a range of forms rather than one fixed position.

Ideal form changes from person to person based on myriad variables which can include at a minimum:

  • body shape (e.g. height, limb length, anatomical structure/build)
  • training experience (beginner, intermediate, advanced, elite)
  • injury and/or fitness status (rehab, post-rehab, post op, fit, sedentary)
  • goals (recovery from injury, lose body fat, gain muscle mass, improve mobility, increase endurance).

Take for example an individual who comes in with knee pain when squatting (either with body weight or with external load). Once cleared for any underlying issues such as nerve involvement or ligament/cartilage injury, there are few ways to aim to get back to squatting pain free.

In many cases, the above described individual will find relief and be able to continue squatting with just three simple positional alterations:

  1. Change in stance position: Many people do better and experience less knee discomfort with a wider stance. There are some people who do better with a narrower stance. Play around with this to find your sweet spot. You may also find that comfortable stance position changes for different types of exercises (e.g. wider back squat vs narrower front squat).
  2. Change in foot position: This involves changing the position of the foot itself. For some people, this may mean turning the foot out (toes pointing away from midline of the body). For others, this may require bringing the foot back to a more forward facing position (neutral foot). Again, your ideal foot position may be slightly different for different exercises. Play with your foot position to find the one that allows you the best range of motion with no pain.
  3. Change in hip travel path: This involves changing the direction of travel of your buttocks as you squat. For some people, a more backward travel path may help, while other may find a more vertical path less painful. As with the previous two, your ideal movement with this may be different with different exercise.

If you’ve been having knee trouble with your squats, give these three a go. Some people may only need to alter one item on the list, while other may have to work with a combination.

And if you’re still having trouble after trying the above, get in touch with us.

We’ll help you get back to squatting pain free.

 

Filed Under: exercise, Personal Training, physiotherapy, Strength & Conditioning Tagged With: , , , ,

Exercise as medicine: One physiotherapist’s journey

November 16, 2014 by

It’s almost always the same…time slowing to a crawl, certain sounds growing crystal clear, others fading quietly to the background. A sharp cut or twist attempted in a moment of fatigue. A mistimed step on unforgiving turf. An unfortunate collision of two bodies in accelerated motion. Or even just a simple fall. And then it’s over almost as quickly as it happened.

*****

Having been active in sports and physical activity my whole life, I am no stranger to various aches, pains and injuries.

Through my years playing competitive soccer, I have faced my share of down time from myriad sprains, strains and even broken bones and ruptured muscles. Because of these, I am also no stranger to the world of sports physiotherapy and injury rehabilitation as a patient and a client.

In the years before I would become a physiotherapist myself, after each injury I would make the hour-long trek to my physiotherapist’s clinic on the other side of town; she was the only one I trusted to get me back on the pitch in the shortest period of time, with my body ready to perform as before.

I knew she would help put me back together again.

She would run me through her complete physical assessment, gauging my injuries and devising an appropriate physiotherapy treatment plan, one that was built on the tasks that my body would be required to complete on return to sport. The running. The jumping. The sudden change of directions.

Unfortunately, as was the norm 20 years ago, and still practiced at some clinics today, each of my sessions always included hot/cold packs as well as various electromodalities: therapeutic ultrasound, interferential current, and other electrical stims.

These were used because they were always used: “for swelling, for pain, for speeding up tissue healing”.

These were the unchallenged physiotherapy traditions and at the time, I didn’t know any better.

But in addition to these thermal agents and electrical devices strapped to the various injured body parts, my physiotherapist would give me specific exercises. Empowering exercises.

Movements that started out simple enough: standing on one leg, hopping from side to side, or even just partially squatting down on one leg. With time, these would be progressed to more complex patterns, with greater challenges of speed, balance, control and precision. Eventually, I would be flying through sports specific drills at full tilt, exploding through intense plyometric jumps and pushing through challenging strength exercises.

With her encouragement, this is where I invested my time. These were the activities I took home with me, working on them consistently and diligently between math assignments and science papers.

And every time I returned for a follow-up physiotherapy session after doing my exercise-based homework, I would be stronger, faster, and more powerful.

I would be better. And more confident.

*****

While our knowledge of injury rehabilitation, pain science and motor control has grown by leaps and bounds, there still remains so much to learn and discover, especially when it comes to the nervous system and how the body heals and repairs.

Due to these new challenges, and new opportunities, the physiotherapy profession has also progressed tremendously.

These advances in better understanding the human body have led to novel treatment therapies and techniques and have opened the door for us to challenge and revise old, scientifically unsupported ways of thinking and doing.

Various professional associations, such as the American Physical Therapy Association, have adopted policies and practice guidelines eschewing traditionally used treatment modalities such as heating pads. Our research-focused colleagues have devoted their time and resources at trying to find the most efficient and effective therapies for our clients, the treatments with the lowest risk and highest returns.

This evolution has caused many of us in the physical therapy profession to move away from the traditional passive care approach which primarily used machines and into the realm of active rehabilitation using progressive exercise as the main modality of choice, our gold standard of treatment.

At least that’s where I find myself.

Looking back at what I did as a physiotherapy patient, and what I do now, as a physiotherapist, only one component remains the same…

Using exercise as a way of helping the body heal. Using appropriate movement to create a safe environment for the body to repair and fix itself.

Using graded physical activity to decrease the threat, real or perceived, to an over-excitable nervous system.

Using exercise to help my clients perform.

Using exercise as medicine.

Filed Under: physiotherapy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Web of Persistence

September 5, 2014 by

Every few days, in a very specific area of the clinic, I notice an intricate spider web.

It’s silken threads form an incredible lattice of amazing beauty and engineering ingenuity. It comes complete with structural supports, kitchen area, living room and an array of the other amenities that would make any spider lucky to call such luxurious accommodations, home.

And every few days, I take it down.

I feel bad. I really do.

I can appreciate the hard work that went in to building such a functional structure. And I do understand that those spiders, and their webs, play a role in trapping the myriad of annoying insects that one will find in urban life.

But that doesn’t stop me and down the web goes.

Duster 1 – Spider web 0

Until just a few days later, when seemingly overnight, a new bigger, grander web has taken its place. With more silk. With more living space. With more effort.

What can we learn from this spider?

In this seemingly endless battle between me and Charlotte’s kin, there will be no winner, but we both will persevere. A battle of the ages.

And that is the lesson here.

Perseverance.

Each time I “bring down the house”, that spider doubles down and rebuilds. Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t quit, or give up, or even move to my neighbour’s unit. It stands its ground. And each time, the results are more spectacular that the previous.

Duster 1 – Spider web 1

Imagine we use the same mindset when dealing with with our human performance or injury rehabilitation goals?

Imagine we kept working at improving our physical limitations or deficiencies by exercising diligently? By endeavoring to regularly eat fresh, healthy, nutritious foods?

Imagine we consistently worked on building strength, endurance or stamina without stopping at every obstacle or set back? Imagine the foundational structure we could build.

Imagine the web we could weave…

Filed Under: Human Performance, Mindset Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

23 and a half: a visual lecture that will make you think.

July 26, 2012 by

Thoughts?

At Primal this is our type of medicine.

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

Your Primal Self

March 21, 2012 by

For most of us, we know what we need to do.

We know we need to eat better. We know we should exercise more. We know that we don’t get enough sleep. We know our stress levels are too high. And the list goes on.

We sure do know a lot…and if we don’t know it, we can easily find it. We’re are in the midst of an incredible information age.

So what’s the problem?

It’s in the doing.

The more we know, the less we do. We’re paralyzed. Frozen. The mythical ostrich with its head in the sand.

We know we need to eat better, but we don’t. We know we should exercise more, but we don’t. We stay up later each night watching meaningless TV. We know we don’t have any more free time, but we agree to put more on our plates, unable to say no.

We don’t act on the things we know. We ignore them. We rationalize them away. We put them off for another day. We deny them. We justify them. We’re shamed by them. Embarrassed. Guilty. Feeling sorry for ourselves. This vicious cycle is then perpetuated ad nauseam.

To truly experience your best, you will have to make your stand and focus on you. Prioritize you. Rediscover you.

It’s time to put your Primal Self first.

Team Primal

 

 

 

 

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