Habits, and Good Morning Legs & Glutes!

17 Nov 2013-

On Habits & Today's morning workout: Legs/Glutes =)

 

•  Warmup on Treadmill on an incline, 10 minutes

• Leg Extensions = 50lb x 30r (warm-up) / 50  x20r / 60 x 16r
• Hamstring Curl = 50 x 12r + 
• 1 Leg Ham Curl = 10lb x 5r per leg
• Hyperextension = 20r
• Smith Machine Squat = 70lb x 6r / 70x6 / 70x6 (Tough weight for me but I am going heavier)
• DB Back Lunge = 20lb DB/12r, 3 sets
• Good mornings = 35lb x 15 / 45x 15r / 45x 15r
• Pulley Str8 kick-back = 40lb x 15r + 5 Pulses/ Set 2, +12 Pulses/ Set 3, +10 pulses
• Pulley Lift for inner thigh = 20lb x 12r / 20lb x 12r/ 20lb x 12r per leg
• BB Hip Thrust = 45lb x 10r
• 1 Lying down Leg hip thrust, feet on bench = 15R per side with 1 foot extended up.

 

Now on to habits...

Habit is a powerful thing. Once you get used to a particular action and routine you just automatically fall into it without much thought. This is why talk about creating healthy habits is so spot-on. Life can get busy with different responsibilities and we tend to gravitate towards the actions that seem easier. The smart way to go about things is to create a setup that makes it easier for you to engage in the healthy or desirable habits (behavior) to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. Normally people will refer to creating healthy habits when it comes to embarking on a fit and healthy lifestyle and/or you have specific body transformation goals. I suppose you could apply this philosophy to other areas of life. If you are trying to pass a course and need to prepare for the final dissertation or exam, then create habits that permit you to more easily be in a setting conducive to writing, studying, etc.
If you want to improve foreign language skills you could start leaving index cards with words in the foreign language to trigger you to define the word and think about the language a bit more than you otherwise would.

I definitely have habits around my workout regime. Waking up at a certain time (5am or 5:15am) is a fundamental and extremely powerful one. The time you wake up and start the sparkling new day is directly linked with your levels of restedness and can ultimately shape your schedule. For instance, it impacts the time you go to sleep, the types and scale of activities you do at night, it thus reflects an altered lifestyle, and early starts are also conducive to being more productive since this is when you're at your freshest and most alert. However, this is coming from me, already a morning person :-), so perhaps my friends who are not early risers would beg to differ on the last bit.

Other habits include coffee prep process, setting up the laptop to listen to some inspirational video clips, and getting the log book ready to write down the upcoming workout. We are creatures of habit so it's sensible to set up some good patterns of behavior to easily fall into them.  There are habits in marriages, parenting styles and work habits...practiced behavior, repetition breeds familiarity and comfort, hence the willingness to repeat. The more you repeat, the less you think about the action.

Similarly, we can have bad habits, and somehow these seem to be easier to do and harder to eliminate - they're like chewing gum that gets stuck on your shoe sole - pesky, persistent and you seem to always have the most minimal residue no matter how hard you try to remove it!

Thoughts, too, are a habit - hence the saying "Habits of thought" or "habitual thinking"...

If we accept that thoughts create our future, and thoughts are a habit, then it's plausible that habits are intrinsic to creating and shaping our future.

Keeping specific habits can be the key to success in a given domain, field or towards a goal. However, we should also remind ourselves to not be slaves to habit or mindlessly functioning in a mechanical way. It was Emerson who wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Indeed...action without reflection is going through the motions without connecting fully, heart and soul, with the activity. Not being 'in the moment,' on a regular basis, can quickly lead to disinterest and self doubt. This is when we are prone to giving up... Don't give up!!!

So the kernel of truth could be: think about what you want and what gives you intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction in doing it, what makes you feel good - and set up some habits that nourish and cultivate paths towards that end goal of satisfaction. Reflect on why you are doing what you are doing so as to be fully rooted in your actions. We can better prime ourselves to do what we want to do, get what we truly want and enjoy the process. Seems like an enjoyable and enriching way to experience life. :-)