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Staying the Path


Sooner or later, every exercise plan stumbles upon obstacles, such as work demands, travel, weather, or injury. Following are the ones I encountered over the past five years. I will address each in turn in later posts, along with my response to each challenge.
  1. Finding the time to exercise.
  2. Schedule disruptions such as illness, travel or extended work commitments.
  3. Monotony: Boredom from doing the same routines and running over the same trails.
  4. Being a single-parent: I have shared custody of my daughter, which imposes the added challenge of integrating my exercise with my parenting.  
  5. Weather: a significant factor for exercising outdoors.
  6. Trail conditions: ice, rain, mud, potholes, construction closures, etc., can interfere with our planned activities.
  7. Injuries.
  8. Specific adaptations because of lifestyle. For example, I live in a townhouse, so end up doing stairs twice as often as usual, while my work involves sitting in front of the computer for long hours. These habits, as well as posture and sleeping positions, lead to skeleto-muscular adaptations that need to be included in designing my health plan.
  9. Dietary limitations: As a lifelong vegetarian, I had to learn how to prepare healthy meals that provide adequate nutrition for my workouts.  
  10. Allergies: Severe ones that interfere with breathing can bring exercise to a standstill.  Recently, I have discovered that in addition to environmental allergies, I also have food allergies, which, given my vegetarian dietary choice, make preparing nutritious meals more challenging.
Success in staying on an exercise plan hinges on its flexibility and requires problem-solving.  Each difficulty in sticking to the plan has to be identified, then the plan re-worked such that the issue ceases to be an obstacle.  For example, in response to the challenge of being a single-parent, I invested in a jogging stroller, which allowed me to integrate my walks and runs into my time with my child.

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  1. UnknownAugust 20, 2018 at 10:25 PM

    Staying the path can be challenging, as I've experienced first hand. Looking forward to reading your future posts to see how you tackled the various obstacles you listed.

    ReplyDelete

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