Set up a routine and tap into the power of online buddies
QLockdown has started and I am trapped in my house. I have no motivation to exercise. Please help!
AIn an attempt to make sense of the new reality, some social media contacts were sharing a biblical verse to project a spiritual meaning onto the mass isolation.
“Come, my people, enter you into your chambers, and shut your doors about you: hide yourself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation is past,” Isaiah 26:20 reads.
The entire experience has been quite biblical, but with the modern tone of excess. Not because of the easy comparisons to a global plague but because, unlike Noah, most suburbanites ensured that they took more than two of everything as they stockpiled their arks.
You presumably won’t lack motivation to eat your stockpile. This isn’t judgment — the way I started this answer precludes me from such arrogance. You won’t lack motivation to sleep, and hopefully you won’t lack the willpower to clean yourself.
The reason is simple. You have a routine: wake up, do some work, eat and sleep.
If you eat more of the bad stuff, it’s because it is there, visible and accessible.
Make no mistake, building the motivation to work yourself into a sweat in your lounge or on your patio is not easy. However, experience has shown that it is possible. You need a habit.
Faux self-help personalities say you need 21 days to build a habit. Bummer. Let’s try another route.
Wake up, put on your gym clothes, turn on the type of music you enjoy training to and set a fixed time. When you’ve been to the gym before, chances are you were dressed and the routine followed a fixed schedule.
Where the gym has a distinct advantage is the presence of people who are there to do the same thing. It’s not easy to go to the gym and binge two episodes of Ozark — it’s possible, but not easy.
In the Watercooler’s experience, the best way to build a routine, feel motivated and hold yourself accountable, is by taking part in the fourth industrial revolution. Video-call your gym partner, join an online class or find a personal trainer who provides real-time training via one of the many online conferencing facilities.
I have been given access to online group classes during this lockdown. The most enjoyable aspect of the classes is the excitement of people training in their homes, but simultaneously in everyone else’s homes, while their wide-eyed spouses walk in and out of frame gawking at their incredible strength and endurance. A motivates B, who motivates C, who forgot to get out of her pyjamas.
A colleague told me that he recently completed his first online boxercise class. One would think it would be easier. He said that in real life he had found ways to take it easy, without drawing attention to himself. Now, he said, the webcam lens worked like a magnifying glass. The result? His most tiring class yet.
Do squats with your child on your shoulders and commit to 10 push-ups every time you walk past the pantry. Be creative and have fun.
HE SAID THE WEBCAM LENS WORKED LIKE A MAGNIFYING GLASS. THE RESULT? HIS MOST TIRING CLASS YET
This, too, shall pass. It may be 21 days or it may be longer. But we will be back in our gyms and park runs and Zumba classes.
Is it not funny that people who had not donned running shoes for a year felt the urge to go for a run on Thursday before the lockdown started? That those whose dogs usually live lonely lives suddenly became advocates for long dog walks through the suburbs? Such good impulses triggered by the fear of being locked in their own company.
My advice is to turn this imprisonment into a period of enlightenment. Take the time to learn how to exercise using your body weight. Master the basics. Fine-tune your balance. You will have earned the right to play on the fancy equipment when the gyms reopen.