300

I passed my 300th blog post yesterday and thought it deserved a celebration. 

So… for my 300th post I am going to share something related to that number. This is a short video about the ‘300 workout’.The official workout used by the actors to prepare for the movie of the same name. It was high intensity designed to build muscle fast and to add definition so they all looked fab in their little outfits… and they did too.

Believe it or not, this is similar to what I do with Darren, the same kind of things, away from conventional machines and more of a struggle with my own strength and will. Sometimes I watch the guys who are good at this (believe me when I say I do a ‘version’ of this) and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do anything close to what they do and wish I’d done this when I was much younger because I actually enjoy it. I love the challenge, the aggression, the ‘out of comfort zone’ feel of it all, I love the exhaustion too. Somehow it’s easier to push yourself to exhaustion when you’re dragging a tyre or a box with a 17 stone man in it behind you than it is to sit pressing, pushing or pulling levers, or jogging nowhere on a treadmill. 

As old and as big as I still am I can do some of this stuff and I know I’m lucky that I have a good level of fitness in spite of my weight and I have the mobility and lack of health problems which allow me to pursue such hobbies (that’s what it is officially for me now because I enjoy it) but it still impresses me that I can even try some of this let alone have small successes. I would never have known if I hadn’t given it a go and thought “to hell with what anyone watching thinks”. To be fair I get a few cheers from people who are around when I’m being put through my paces, which is wonderfully supportive and I’m grateful to those kind hearted people who know this isn’t easy. I think they know, as I do, that I’m not hoping or imagining that I’ll ever look like the guys from the film nor would I want to. They know I’m doing this to lose weight and get fitter but who cares what they think. Mostly though we do this early and nobody is around or we use one of the class work out spaces so we have more privacy. It isn’t too expensive and I pay for it using money I would otherwise have spent on crap to eat and I don’t have much time in my day but it give me so much more time because it energises me so I need less sleep and it helps me get through tasks faster.

You know how with churches where they pay a tithing and they say if you have faith and give you will receive more back and you have to kind of take that leap of faith to really understand what that means, that it doesn’t mean you give 100 pounds or dollars and you get 1000 back the next day, but somehow your remaining money goes further, you get a promotion, someone suddenly wants to buy your artwork, you have a long standing loan suddenly repaid… that kind of thing, well this is like those stories. You make the effort to get out of bed an hour earlier even though you are finding it tough and somehow you find that it feels like you have 25 or even 26 hours in the day… you just fit more in. It’s magic. Well, we know it’s not magic, it’s those intangible rewards that we get from trying, from investing in a positive way, for having faith, for having courage. I say this all of the time but it’s true, this is not all about weight loss and body shape, it’s about so much more. It’s about taking ownership of our lives again or for the first time, giving ourselves more options and more time to enjoy everything we’ve been denying ourselves.

So my 300th post message is, push yourself to a new level, have the courage to go for it, you can not appreciate the rewards you don’t open yourself up to.