Pending...

No post next week, because my partner and I will be on vacation, and I intend to maximize my loafing time as much as possible.

No time for loafing now though! We've got a post to bottle up and cast into the Sea of Bottomless Blogs and Ocean of Endless Opinions.

Sploosh.

Rise and Shine...or not!

As the season transitions into fall, daylight grows more scarce, and it becomes more precious. Left to my own devices, I wake with the sun, rising earlier in the summer months, sleeping in during the winter, and every year around this time I experience that creeping sensation of guilt and frustration as my sleep schedule shifts, making me interrogate why it's so difficult to wake up at the same time when the only variables that have changed are the weather and when the sun rises.

I have a sunrise alarm, too, but even it begins to fail me as darkness clings longer and deeper with the passing of days into weeks. Inevitably, I go from waking up naturally at 6:00 or earlier in May to 7:00 in August and 7:30 in September. Based on previous experience, I almost guarantee that by December, I'll be struggling to climb out of bed before 8:00, and that's after the time change.

During this transitionary period, I feel an increasing tension with all that I want to accomplish and the reality of not being able to meet those high standards. To compare, it's the kind of tension a student might feel as the months they have to write a 30-page essay shorten to weeks and then days. The longer the student procrastinates, the more the internal pressure builds. Similar feeling, different mechanism.

I've been listening to my body for years, and the shifts in my sleeping schedule have remained consistent from season to season. The transition from autumn to winter is a time to slow down; the transition from spring to summer is a time of increasing activity. The fluctuation of productivity levels should logically feel natural. My feelings of guilt and frustration would disagree. I buck against the change, thrash against it. I should be rolling out of bed at 6:00 sharp every day of every month of every season! Curse my lack of willpower!

Except maybe it's not a lack of willpower. Maybe my body is unlearning all of the impositions placed upon it by modern society. The clock says it's 6:00 because that's the universal agreed-upon time this part of the world says is 6:00. I don't know about you, but my body doesn't care about an arbitrary number on a device designed to tell people when they should be waking and working.

The only reason I feel like I should be up by 6:00 is because my partner gets up before then and leaves for work by 7:00. I measure my seasonal sleep changes by his external obligations and call waking up at 7:30 "failure" instead of viewing it as a natural, self-regulating, personal cycle. The irony is, once he gets home from work, he takes a nap.

So, what happens if I start measuring my waking hours on my terms instead of his?

Transitions

Well, I'll be damned if I let the shortening daylight hours control my motivation and momentum. I'll aggressively sleep in and check off my boxes! Ha!

But how? In the summer, I had 12-13 hours in a single workday, meal times included. With my current sleep schedule, I have ~8 hours in my workday, meal times again included. Fewer working hours means compacting.

In the summer, I go on shorter but more frequent walks because jogging is too risky. My workouts are longer. I can focus for greater chunks of time.

As we enter autumn, I move from walking to jogging, which saves on time, but I adjust my schedule in the mornings to work out and then jog, which affects my concentration for creative work the rest of the day. Sequencing becomes a major issue, because my most productive writing time tends to land mid-to-late morning, and if I go jogging beforehand, my mind is too abuzz to wrangle. It's a fascinating conundrum that eases as it gets colder and I can instead push my jogs to the afternoon.

I don't know how to solve the sequencing issue yet, but I've begun experimenting with compacting my workout routine to save on time, if not energy.

In my old routine, I might have 7 exercises for my shoulders day and would do sets of 3 for each exercise, sometimes 4. I always held some energy in reserve to make sure I had enough to complete each subsequent set for each exercise so I wasn't pushing through on fumes. Each exercise takes ~60-90 seconds on average to complete, depending on rep range and whether or not it's an isolation exercise. A workout lasts ~30 minutes from just the exercises alone. Now, add in a 3-minute rest period between each set. That adds another hour to the entire routine. Supersetting some of the moves can shorten the time here and there, but we're also excluding the 5-10 minute warmup.

So, what looks like a 45-minute workout on paper turns out to be well over an hour in practice. Do you see the issue I have with continuing this kind of routine through the winter when every time block matters?! Add in jogging for an hour or walking for an hour and a half to hit my step goals, and that's a good chunk o' time eaten up by physical activity, 3-ish hours give or take.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy strength training, and I have my goals there, too! I'm just not interested in bloating the time to athlete levels of investment.

Then, last week I had a thought. 'What if I cut the fluff and shortened each exercise to a single set? Just one set per exercise. Even on days when I'm most tired, I can manage that. The caveat is that I would need to push each and every set so close to failure it leaves my muscles pulsing with heat afterward. Time traded for exertion. I can exert myself. I do better exerting myself, in fact! If I have one chance to push hard, my brain is primed to keep telling me I can do one more rep. If I feel particularly good one day or feel like I could complete multiple sets, then all I have to do is hit that button to do so mid-workout. Easy. Do the bare minimum, take each exercise as it comes, and push to do more where I can.'

One week into this experiment, and what I can say is that the shift from obligation (3 sets) to choice makes control feel more in my hands, even though it has always been in my hands and is all a matter of perspective. Nothing stopped me from deleting sets on days where I wasn't feeling it, but that elicits feelings of failure instead of opportunity. The addition and deletion of sets as an act by itself is really the same phenomenon, but the mental processing changes depending on which method I use. Having to complete one set but adding two more to each exercise because I want to energizes me so much more than having three sets as the goal and managing only one.

Whether this experiment is sustainable or just hype-driven from being a changeup of the norm, I have yet to determine. But that's the beautiful thing about routine: it changes with the seasons.

Summary of Notable Accomplishments (9.30 - 10.6):

• Built With Science

  • Arms

  • Chest

  • Legs

  • Shoulders day breakdown for those who like the deets:

    • Seated dumbbell shoulder press

    • Band-assisted pull-up

    • LU raises

    • Dumbbell lateral raises

    • Dumbbell reverse flyes

    • Dumbbell wrist extensions

    • Weighted prone arm circles as a cooldown stretch

• Transcribed Session 147 & the first half of 148

• Beat Dead Cells at 2 Boss Cells, which I'd been struggling with, and then at 3 Boss Cells just a couple days later

• Rewriting/editing Cael's 21st of Nudon journal still

• Wawfuls

Real Talk:

• A short question to chew on this week: how much of your perceived "failure" is really just somebody else's obligation?

  • The example here being me comparing my sleep schedule to my partner's obligation to going to work at 7:00.

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Qiri