To Get Fit After 40, You Need Self-Awareness
The following is an edited excerpt from the book The Wellness Roadmap: A Straightforward Guide to Health and Fitness After 40 by Allan Misner.
It was a Sunday morning in early 2010. Work had me traveling about 90 percent of the time, so I was taking full advantage of a rare weekend at home, resting everything but my thumb. I was sprawled out on the couch flipping between Face the Nation and weekend infomercials.
An advertisement popped up for the Insanity workout with Shaun T. I leaned forward on the couch — the man looked amazing. All the people behind him were exercising as he coached, and they looked great, too. They were sweating, they were happy, and they were fit.
I was five years removed from my decision in Puerto Vallarta, and I was at an ebb in my wellness journey, rather than a flow. I was marginally fitter than I’d been back then, but I could feel my momentum fading. Weeks on the road for work meant I wasn’t exercising regularly. And because the Insanity workouts didn’t require equipment, it seemed perfect for me.
I called the toll-free number and bought the DVD set.
When the DVDs arrived, I opened the box like a child opening a Christmas present. I spread the DVDs and booklets out on my kitchen counter to take it all in. They had meal plans, protein shakes for sale, and about a dozen DVDs with the workouts. I popped in the first DVD and pushed my couch out of the way to make room for my Insanity.
The first step was taking a guided test, meant to gauge my fitness level. I was so hyped that I hit that test as hard as I could. I quickly jumped in different patterns, did squats, and lunged all over my living room. Physically, I was capable of the movements, but I could tell within the first minute that this was going to be very difficult.
After the test, I was lying on the floor huffing and puffing, just like the Insanity crew on the DVD. I was tired but extremely proud of how hard I had worked. I showered and went about my business.
The next morning, I opened my eyes and I felt like I’d been strapped to my bed and beaten with a baseball bat — I couldn’t move. I take that back: I could raise my arms a little, but it hurt so bad I didn’t want to. I tried to get up for work, but it was not happening — I couldn’t get out of the bed. I thought back to the team behind Shaun T. I doubt they woke up like me the next morning.
I couldn’t imagine sitting at my desk all day in so much pain that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on work. Everyone would wonder what the hell was wrong with me as I walked around the office like amummy.
What I had was something called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), which is not life-threatening but hurts like hell. I do not handle failure well, and this felt like a huge fitness failure. At my age, my mind hadn’t caught up to my body.
That moment in bed, totally incapacitated, is a big reason why I focus my podcast and personal training on people over forty: by the time we reach that age, our capacities are lower than in our twenties. We now have to deal with our past injuries or the effects of sitting at a desk for twenty-plus years. It’s hard for our youth-seeking minds to catch up to our aging bodies.
My mind had pushed my body past what it was capable of doing in that moment. I overdid it so badly that I had to call in sick for work. My inclination to go from the couch to standing behind Shaun T on the Insanity DVD absolutely sabotaged my decisions to improve my fitness.
I never did a single workout from Insanity — I’m guessing those videos are still somewhere in my house, but I seldom think about them. Even though I’d be able to do them now, I lack the desire, all because I pushed too hard when I didn’t have the self-awareness to realize I didn’t need to.
Don’t Pass The Red Line
If I didn’t put my ego in the back seat, I was never going to get to my wellness destination. I would only continue dealing with DOMS, or worse, injuring myself. I could blame Shaun T, but I know who did this to me: I did.
It’s easy to laugh about it now, but that was a turning point for me that easily could have gone the other way. If I had never learned to stay within my capacity and only pushed hard, I would have burned myself out and potentially given up the entire journey.
Think of an old car: if you just step on the accelerator without easing up, you’ll redline the vehicle and you might blow the engine. Likewise, if you have worn-out brakes (your knees), you won’t want to follow the car in front of you too closely. If you understand the capacity of your vehicle, you’ll be more likely to get from point A to point B in a responsible and efficient way.
We’re not twenty years old anymore, and most of us aren’t driving new sports cars. Take it easy on the accelerator. There are few things worse than redlining over the age of forty and injuring yourself. It’s harder now than ever to recover. This can really set you back, especially if training is a big part of reaching your vision.
After my incident with the Insanity workout, it took me years to learn how to stay within my capacity and manage my ego. I also learned the value of consistency and progression. It was a painful lesson I learned from my overzealous participation in the Insanity workout — or, rather, the Insanity fitness test, because I never made it to the actual workouts.
Childlike Mobility
If you’re a prudent driver, you take your car in for a diagnostic check before you hit the road for a long trip. Otherwise, you risk breaking down and waiting on the side of the road for a tow truck. You need to do the same for yourself before you start your wellness journey.
Understand what your injuries and choices in the past have done to your body and how they affect you today. Because of years sitting at a desk, I know I have certain muscle imbalance. Take an inventory of what your lifestyle has done to your body over the years. Before you get started on this journey, you might have to get corrective surgery or start physical therapy.
This is an important part of your wellness journey, and you shouldn’t take it lightly.
Most of us have nagging injuries. I’m not just referring to the popping, stiffness, and pain we feel in the morning. What I’m referring to is even more serious than that. One in five people over the age of seventy has a tear in their shoulder, and one in three people over ninety years old has a tear.3We develop these injuries because most people over forty have what corrective exercise defines as movement compensations. You walk, run, or otherwise move in an unnatural pattern to account for pain or muscle imbalances.
When we were kids we’d sit cross-legged for story time. When was the last time you tried to sit cross-legged on the floor?
We’ve been sitting in chairs for decades, so we don’t have the mobility to comfortably sit on the ground anymore. Once they got us out of kindergarten, they stuck us in chairs and we’ve been sitting in them ever since: from our desk at work to the wheelchair in the nursing home.
Have you ever watched a child squat? They look so natural and comfortable squatting down to pick up a ball and hopping up to run away with it. As adults, even in our twenties, we have already made lifestyle choices — such as sitting for long periods or wearing high heels — that inhibit our natural movement patterns.
We’ll talk more about mobility in chapter 5, Training, but I want to stress here that it is critical that you identify your physical limitations and work on fixing them before you set out on your fitness training. Just as driving a car that isn’t properly aligned will wear out the tires quickly, you need to get your body aligned before you start pushing yourself. Our bodies are machines, after all: they can and will break down.
Mental Self-Assessment
Taking stock of your physical starting point is important, but what about your mental strengths and weaknesses? You’ve committed to a wellness journey, but what if your kids still want to eat Oreos and ice cream? What if your spouse wants to eat out three nights a week? Will you have the mental capacity to maintain your path and account for potential detours?
Identify your potential sticking points and how to compensate for them. Where have you slipped up in the past? What caused you to quit on an exercise plan or cheat on a diet? Do you know how to say no when someone brings doughnuts to the office staff meeting?
Be realistic — lying to yourself by thinking you can avoid all temptations is not a good approach to wellness. Remember that wellness is being the happiest, healthiest, and fittest you can be. Being miserable and depriving yourself is not going to cut it. Detours happen. By knowing when and why you’re taking a detour, you’ll have more control over it.
Having mental self-awareness is much more difficult than having physical self-awareness. You know where your aches and pains are physically; you feel them when you walk down the stairs or squat down to pick up a child. But we are so good at lying to ourselves about our mental tenacity. You won’t succeed if you’re not honest with yourself.
It’s the mental blind spots that will force you off the road on this journey. Once you get those dialed in better, you’ll see improvements in your fitness and understand yourself even better. That’s the only way to build the wellness lifestyle you want.
Saboteurs
As you work through the self-awareness stage of your Wellness GPS, you’ll recognize saboteurs. Saboteurs come in all forms — ranging from evil to well-meaning.
Evil Saboteur
This is the person who will bring a doughnut by your cube and say, “Hey, I grabbed you a doughnut so you don’t miss out.”
You respond, “You know I’m eating low-carb to be healthier. We had this conversation last week.”
Then she flippantly says, “It’s just one doughnut.”
That’s the saboteur who doesn’t want you to succeed. They’re trying to undermine your efforts intentionally to see you fail. They’re the ones who will tell you your nutrition plan will make you die of heart disease or that you’re doing something terrible to kill your metabolism. “You’ll go into starvation mode,” they’ll say.
They’ll focus on the negative aspects of your life improvements. No matter how amazing your coworkers, friends, and family are, there will be a few people who just want you to fail.
They don’t want you to change because your success highlights their failure. Keeping the status quo helps them stay in their comfort zone. Misery loves company. You have to either separate yourself from these people or flat-out ignore them. Stay the course. Don’t let them bring you down.
The Well-Meaning Saboteur
These are the people who truly love you and really want to be positive influences on your life, but they simply believe what you’re doing is terrible. They don’t tell you you’re hurting yourself because they want you to fail; they worry about you hurting yourself, even if they’re wrong.
These interactions are difficult because these people genuinely care about you, and you should keep them in your life, but what they’re doing is going to inadvertently sabotage your efforts if you allow it to.
This saboteur also comes in the form of a friend inviting you out for a few drinks to “catch up.”
They mean well, whether it seems like it or not. That’s just their lifestyle. It used to be your lifestyle, too, but you have to ask yourself if you can maintain those same lifestyle choices and still fit them into what you want for your vision.
As well-meaning as those people might be, or as close friends as they are, you may just have to say goodbye to them (if only for a short while). At the very least, tell them that you’re not going to interact with them in the same environment anymore. If they want to hang out, they’ll have to do it on your terms.
If you know you’ll have difficulty avoiding drinking martinis at the bar, you can say, “The bar doesn’t interest me, but how about we meet at the park after work tomorrow and go for a walk?”
It’s not easy, but if they can’t meet you where you are in your wellness journey, then you may have to distance yourself from saboteurs, even the well-meaning ones.
Mindset
As you adapt to your new lifestyle, you’ll start forming different and better habits. Suddenly, you’ll be eating healthier, moving more, sleeping longer, and having a better outlook on life. You’ll feel more energetic, and that will drive you to even more change.
I’d encourage you to focus on changing one or two habits at a time, especially when you first get started. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re making too many changes at once.
If you start off by saying you want to cut out processed foods, stop drinking alcohol, do a couch-to-5K program, start sleeping eight hours a night, meditate every morning, and journal every day, that’s a recipe for distraction. It’s like having your GPS in your car telling you to turn left, your spouse telling you to turn right, and your backseat passenger telling you to stay straight. Trying to go in so many directions at once will cause you to ignore your Wellness GPS, and you’ll fall back on decisions and willpower — and we all know where that leads us.
Make sure your mindset is focused on just a few habits at a time to reach your next mile marker. Each mile marker you reach will teach you about yourself and give you much more resilience, making it easier to see your way to the next mile marker. It’s like getting the right prescription for your driving eyeglasses: now you can read the signs and know you’re on the right track.
Mindfulness
How do you handle stressful events in your life? What would happen if, after building habits and reaching your SMART goals over time, you injured yourself? Or suppose you got into a car accident? How would that impact your mentality? Would you feel defeated and then regress?
While I can only guess at your response to these hypothetical setbacks, they’re worth thinking about. Only so much is under your control. You might have a setback — you’re human. This is where mindfulness becomes the best navigator you could ask for.
Mindfulness allows us to be present, but it also helps us manage our response to outside influences. Staying mindful helps you see the speed bump and slow the car down.
If you can predict how particular events will trigger stress and anger for you, you can better prepare for them when they happen. I’ve had high-stress jobs, and I learned that rather than turning to booze, I can take it out on the weights in the gym. That time could have easily been spent in the bar after work, but through mindfulness I recognized the pattern and made the change in my life to use it for my wellness.
Back To Insanity
I had good intentions when I tried Insanity, but as you’ve heard, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I went into that workout (well, fitness test) with plenty of passion but no strategies to back it up. “But look at all those people in the infomercial! They’re in great shape. I’m in good hands.” The testimonials, the packaged set, the diet plans — I knew it had to work. However, I didn’t know that my body wasn’t capable of doing it, and that seriously impeded my progress — I went over a speed bump way too fast and it put my car in the shop. Then I let that moment of discouragement stop me, and my wellness declined as a result.
Shaun T couldn’t see me pushing too hard; he couldn’t tell me to back down. My GPS was set beyond my capabilities, and I suffered for it. Good intentions and bad application sent me down the wrong path because I lacked self-awareness.
Now that you’ve learned how to practice self-awareness, you’ve successfully set your GPS. You know where you’re going (you have a vision) and the reason for the trip (you know your why). You’ve laid out your personalized course for your wellness roadmap, and you can see your first mile marker (your SMART goal). You also know your car is fit for the journey (meaning you’ve assessed your mental and physical capabilities and limitations). And your driving glasses (mindfulness) are smudge-free. You’re ready to go!
It bears repeating: you are the driver on your wellness journey. So turn that ignition. Let’s take it to the STREETS and see where this journey takes us.
To keep reading, pick up The Wellness Roadmap: A Straightforward Guide to Health and Fitness After 40 by Allan Misner.
