You Have Heard Of Intermittent Fasting, How About Intermittent Training?
“I don’t have time.” It’s been common as long as we can remember which should make us realize time shortage is inevitable. Whether it be a college semester, a demanding job, raising a family, priorities deserve our utmost attention although it almost seems to come at the expense of our health which eventually becomes a priority. This is a problem I wish more fitness influencers on social media brought up as a lot of their posts seem to be tailored to people with an abundance of time. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 36.5% of adults in the US are obese while 32.5% of adults are overweight. It’s important to note that these statistics were prior to COVID-19. When about 70% of adults in the US are in poor shape and contending with the worst of COVID-19’s impact as well as the mental health and opioid crisis, you can only wonder as you look for a solution starting with ourselves.
2020 arguably has been the most consequential year of my life aside from my birth year. I say this not to boast and I implore you to keep reading and hear me out. It’s late January of 2020 and I just returned from my deployment to the Middle East right as the first cases are being announced. Less than a week, I am starting the Spring semester which is my last semester of college thanks to courses I took remotely while deployed. It’s a rough transition nonetheless crossing off requirements on the checklist for academics and graduation. Before long, it’s March and I am on Spring break. COVID-19 is gaining traction and now Schools are going remote and eventually a Lockdown ensues. My Guard Unit is looking for volunteers for the COVID-19 Response and now I find myself balancing a volatile job and my last semester to get my degree. Fast forward to the summer, I am finished with the semester although I am still working the COVID response although a different job directly with the Department of Health while enrolled in a Data Science bootcamp for skill-building. Not to mention, I am studying for an Air Force related test. More work piles on and the exhaustion has me having less time to train. It’s at that moment when I realized I have to start getting more creative and allocate my time more effectively.
During lunch, I would spend 10–15 minutes training, often relying on gymnastics rings and anywhere that can hold it, whether a bar or a sturdy tree branch. I kept a weighted vest in my car as I drove to these places nearby. After work, I spent another 10–15 minutes in which I felt I got a good workout. If I felt it was not enough, I could go later. Oftentimes, even just 10 minutes had me breaking a sweat. For anyone who has never used gymnastics rings, I can vouch from experience that I have gotten more of a workout doing 10 ring push-ups than 50 regular push-ups especially if you do the reps slowly. I would attribute it to the instability and trying to control your body. It’s not just with gymnastics rings, I have done this before with weights or a sledgehammer for swinging. When you think about it, you are getting the body moving and supplementing it as you go along. If your meals are scattered as in 6 small meals a day, you have an advantage. When tracking this, it becomes a lot easier. It did not matter how much things changed with regards to COVID and the work schedule, as long as there were break opportunities, there were loopholes.
In case I have you confused, let me provide you with a real life example.
This is Jacques Sayagh, a French bodybuilder in his 50s. Looking at the picture, you can already tell the guy is in great shape. As you may not know, he is homeless, HIV positive, and sleeps on the pavement with his dog. He has no fancy gym membership, no big weight machines, and no nutritionist to plan his eating habits. All he has is a few bits of equipment and some supplements to keep his workout regime going which is based on calisthenics. He does not do strict reps nor sets, he trains intermittently throughout the day. He switches up his push-ups to vary the stress on his muscles. Some of the equipment include resistance bands which he uses as an alternative to dumbbells and that he says it’s great for adding progressive resistance to a movement. That said, the more you stretch it, the harder your muscles are worked.
If there is one takeaway I want you to get from this is that you should never feel you have to train yourself to failure and burn out. I say this to those who are adamant about losing weight or trying to put on huge slabs of muscle. This comes from experience as I hope this can relate with you. A lot of you may think that losing that stubborn fat or making those gains depends on how “hard you work.” The reason I quote this is because in the process of this we fail to get enough rest and our body to recover fully. That leads to potential injuries especially when we become so fixated on those extra reps that we ignore the form. Injuries seem to be common as I often heard from others to avoid surgery which made me more prone to being attentive to my training. As I look at it, the person who trains regularly and consistently for years is much better off than the person who is constantly pushing themselves incurring injuries over the years. One treats everyday as a solid building block while the other is building a house of cards. Quality should come before quantity. One of the biggest stigmas in fitness I feel is training to discomfort instead of relief. If you train consistently even if it’s not a lot, time will reward you more in the long-run than any hard work you did in the short-run. That said, move around and be active without having to kill yourself. I say this as I am going into my 2nd year of calisthenics and following the practice of training intermittently when short on time. Looking back, it’s only gotten better and I have people like Jacques to thank!
