JWL.Freakwitch.net

health, diet, and exercise

Thanks to a friend's LJ, I came across a brilliant site for weight training. Stumptuous.com Women's weight training contains a ton of useful information. And it's not just for the chixx and grrls; the information contained there is useful for anyone who wants to embark on a sane weighttraining regimen.

But even more intriguing to me is the shovelglove and the No S Diet. Both of these were created by the same guy, designed to be simple and effective lifestyle-changing methodologies.

The shovelglove is simple form of weightlifting:

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your "shovelglove." Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays.

The idea is to work your muscles using useful human-oriented work tasks. The sledgehammer becomes your weight. Very intriguing. I like the simplistic philosophy, for example, his rationale for choosing 14 minutes:

You guessed it, 14 is a significant number. Why? Because it's one minute less than the smallest unit of schedulistically significant time. No calendar has a finer granularity than 15 minutes. No one ever has a meeting that starts at 5 or 10 or 14 minutes before or after the hour. You have no excuse not to do this. Time-wise, it doesn't even register.

Yet it is just long enough to give some aerobic benefit. Yes, half an hour would be better. An hour would be even better. But guess what? You won't do it. You might do it for 3 weeks, or maybe even 3 months, but you'll start to resent it and you'll quit. Do it for 14 minutes and you'll do it for a lifetime.

Very interesting. I like the way this guy thinks.

The No S diet is and equally compelling model of elegant simplicity:

There are just three rules and one exception:

• No Snacks
• No Sweets
• No Seconds

Except (sometimes) on days that start with 's'

That's it.

Too simple for you? Simple is why it works.

OK. A few days before I leave for a vacation is hardly a good time to begin a new diet/exercise regimen. But this system resonated with my consciousness in a way that few things ever have.

I've really been enjoying going back to the gym lately, but knew that the time to supplement that activity was anon. I think I will try to incorporate both of these into my life, in addition to the workouts I'm doing (on average of 2x per week), since they are both so simple.

My modified diet over the past several weeks has been 'no food after 9pm,' and it's been working nicely. The main objective there is/was to get my late-night eating under control. But for a week or two now, I've been compelled to modify my diet strategy, and the no-s diet seems right on the money for me.

Incidentally, there is a 3rd component to his system, which is walking an hour a day. This is another important component, one that I would very much like to include, especially now that clearer weather is on the horizon.

Anyway, who knows. Lots of food for thought. I don't want to make a commitment just yet, but I really feel compelled to give this system a try.

Now, to do some sledgehammer pricing....

posted by JWL at 2:57 PM |