Move

It used to be easy. Now you have to rage.

We need to move every day. In practical terms, I'll say we need to do it six hours a week, every week, forever. And if you asked 28-year-old me with a degree in exercise science and a deep need to get better at rock climbing, I wouldn't have cared about general strength nor joint mobility nor cardiorespiratory fitness.

Why?

Because I was on my way up and things came easier then. When you're 30 you feel it a little. When you're 40. When you're 50. And age is not "just a number," but a 100% guaranteed struggle.

Exercise and quality nutrition are keystones to getting the most out of your days. You sleep better, can do more stuff, and feel better overall. You're more effective at work. A better partner. In fact, a recent meta-analysis showed that exercise is about 50% more effective at redcuing depression than drugs or therapy.

Some weeks I wake up every day and am psyched to go. Sometimes it's a chore.

"Too busy."

"Too tired."

"Have an injury."

And so you go anyway. If I only trained on days I felt good, I'd train one tenth as often.

I admit, though, it's easier for me. I have built a life structure around making it happen. I work in a gym. Set my own hours. Live by the mountains. Have a home gym. Have a dog.

So how do we go from "I can't do it / don't have time" to doing it all the time, no matter what.

1. Do It Every Day. As James Clear says, "Keep the schedule, but shrink the scale." The easiest way to make sure this happens is to put it on your weekly schedule. If you don't keep a weekly schedule, today is the best day to start that practice. I totally get that people don't have time to get out and hike in the mountains for 90 minutes every day. But if you hold even 15 minutes for yourself every single day, you can then expand upon that 15 minutes. I suspect that you will probably feel like doing it a few times the first week, fewer times the following week, and probably will not want to do it at all the third week if you have not been doing this. Do it anyway.

2. Follow the 3-2-1 Rule. This is a simple reminder to do different stuff throughout the week. In this structure, we do three easy long days. These can be walking, hiking, skiing, bike riding, or whatever. This is what is popularly referred to as zone two training. You're going fast enough that your heart rate is elevated, but slow enough that you can still hold a conversation. Ultimately you would get to where each one of these sessions would be more than an hour, but anything is better than nothing so start with 10 minutes.

Two days a week you need to work on getting stronger. There is a whole world of strength training out there, but a simple place to start is to pick two exercises and do them alternating back-and-forth, maybe one upper body exercise and one lower body exercise. If you're training at home, you could do push-ups and lunges, and it would be hard to improve upon those. Aim for making the exercises hard enough that 10 reps is a challenge. Anytime you can get past that 10 rep mark, add load. Once you have time to do more than four or five sets of each, you can start adding more exercises in.

But don't get enamored by the idea of doing dozens and dozens of exercise exercises and feeling like you have to do them all the time. Stick with your main few exercise exercises and make sure that it happens twice a week.

One day a week, go fast. This means sprinting. You can do it on a bike or a ski erg or a rowing machine, you don't just have to run. You can do it in the swimming pool. The most important aspect here is that you are redlining your system and go to a point where your body begs you to stop. A good target here is to go for something like 30 seconds as hard as you can and then rest for 2 to 3 minutes. Do this a handful of times.

3. Back Off If You Need To, But Don't Stop. You are going to get sick, injured, or super busy with something you don't want to do. Train anyway. You can take your regular schedule and shrink it down to just minutes a day for a few weeks if necessary. On the flipside, if time allows, drag your hikes out to two hours or three hours occasionally. Keep leaning into getting stronger and spending more time moving.

As you age, training becomes something you have to do. You don't do it to send the next grade, win a race, of get sweet abs. You do it so that you're not a burden on those around you. So that you're the grandpa that will help move a couch. So that when you travel the world, it's not in the form of moving chair to chair through Europe.

It used to be easy. Now you have to rage.