I hate fitness, so I do it in VR. Part 1: background

By the way, in this series of articles I will use the word “fitness” as a synonym for the expression “moderate physical activity” in accordance with definition from Wikipedia.

Go!

What's wrong with regular fitness?

With regular fitness everything is fine, but something is wrong with me. To avoid the feeling that I’m a lazy log and “just haven’t found “my” sport,” I’ll give a list of everything I tried to do.

Seriously, that is, from several months to several years of regular training: tennis, swimming, wushu, karate, tai chi, qigong, wing chun, jiu jitsu, waltz, regular fitness (cardio and weights).

In the “test” mode, that is, from one to several classes: EMS-training, running, boxing, Muay Thai, hatha yoga, aerial yoga, critical alignment yoga, jolie jumping, tango, Zumbafitness camp (including hiking), horizontal bar (month), as well as skates/skis/rollerblades and the entire school/university physical education program.

Finally, on October 1, 2019, I realized the futility of these searches. There's just something wrong with me, and there's no point in looking for something that won't ruin my mood every time I think about it. I just need to put my feelings somewhere far away and turn on the discipline mode, simultaneously optimizing the time/benefit ratio to the maximum.

Somewhere I heard the opinion that, no matter what you do for 21 days in a row, a habit will appear, and then everything will be automatic, easy and pleasant, like brushing your teeth. This, of course, comes from the same abyss of marketing nonsense as about using 10% of the brain. But now I can say from experience that this does not work for me, as a person who, at the time of writing these lines, is engaged in physical exercise for about 1636 days in a row, with the exception of Sundays, as well as illnesses, emergency jobs and other statistically insignificant breaks. Still hate every activity and get tense when I think about them.

And what kind of activities are these?

First of all, I immediately decided that I would train at home, because any trip somewhere automatically reduces my capabilities (in terms of available time and current geolocation) and increases the time spent. Also, my workouts must be done without any equipment or paraphernalia so that I can continue them during any travel. Finally, my clear requirement was to prioritize regularity over duration. That is, something that I can do, for example, 6 times a week for 10 minutes, and not 1 time a week for 60 minutes, because carving out 10 minutes every day is much easier than a whole hour, even once a week , and at the same time the price of the pass will be much lower. Having read about HIIT I realized that it is quite possible to implement this without compromising efficiency.

I started without any special system, just with a challenge for myself: with training One Punch Man – squats, push-ups, crunches, running. Only I replaced running with more complicated exercises (jumping squats, push-ups with fists, straight-legged crunches), and adjusted the number of approaches according to current capabilities. On Sundays, I gave my muscles a rest (or simply justified at least one quiet day for myself). Every week I increased the number of approaches by one. Everything was quite successful, and after a few months I allowed myself to buy a fitness mat. 😀

Then I came to the realization that I needed to diversify the load and use more muscles, so I tried a bunch of applications that offered short complexes. Stopped on the app “7 minutes”, which offers six seven-minute complexes for different muscle groups (in reality, just 10 minutes, taking into account breaks between exercises), and for each day of the week I assigned a corresponding complex, and left Sunday free. It seems that there is even some research about the effectiveness of these complexes, but honestly, I haven’t found the source, only this is the news.

I still use this scheme with some modifications.

Does this really work?

During the first year of classes, I lost 14 kilograms – primarily due to the switch to proper nutrition and calorie counting (they wrote a lot about this here, I won’t repeat it), but I think physical exercise also played a role. In addition, two smart scales, from Xiaomi and Realme, which I had the opportunity to use, unanimously stated that everything was fine with the ratio of all tissues of the body, and the age of my body was a year or two less than the real one. An abyss of marketing nonsense, but it’s nice. 🙂

Subjectively, I do more sets now than I did four years ago, and overall have better control of my body. And now I like to look at myself in the mirror. I don't have any more accurate data. We'll check it out in 30 years at the next medical examination.

And what is the benefit + benefit and a pinch of pleasure?

My brain was exhausted during classes and constantly sent me impulses “use me, otherwise you are wasting your time.” I decided that the only unused organ of perception in this process is the ears, and therefore I can load them with something useful. Thus, I began to regularly listen to audiobooks, which over time completely replaced text books in my life. At first I found ready-made mp3s and listened through Smart AudioBook Playerand then a miracle happened, and Yandex created its own magnificent Yandex.Readerso any e-books became available to me, even without unpleasant Russians TTSthat existed previously. Taking this opportunity, thank you, Yandex! 🙂 There is, however, a minus: you need a very good Internet connection. When I don't have this luxury, I fall back to the application @Voice with an unpleasant, but autonomous TTS.

By the way, if you, like me, have ears that don't fit well with regular wireless headphones, I found an excellent solution: ribbon headphones² – picture below! As a bonus, it also protects against sweat pouring into the eyes. And here options with temples don't work for me. Once on an excursion I used an earphone this design (from here) – this is a cool thing, but I haven’t found wireless headphones in a similar design. I would also like to take this opportunity to recommend the excellent absolutely waterproof headphones from Senso, in which I also couldn’t train, but with them I also continue to listen to books in the shower after training, directly lathering my hair. 🙂 Total of half an hour of audio reading a day: excellent pace!

² Here and below, all links to AliExpress and other stores are random, and not necessarily to the sellers from whom I bought. I am not trying to promote specific products or specific sellers. I just want to clarify what I’m talking about, since the products I list often simply do not have generally accepted names by which it would be easy to find them, especially in Russian. Please do not purchase anything through these links. Do your own research and choose sellers based on reviews.

I explained to my brain that I now set aside special time every day for books, but exercise is just that, in the background. He really liked this formulation.

Over the past two years, I have periodically improved my formula to benefit + benefit + benefit: I listen to books in English. If everything is fine with the text, then it is very difficult for me to perceive English speech by ear. This is where Yandex.Reader can’t cope, it’s obviously only for Russian, so I use TTS Reader.

And about a year ago I took up articulatory gymnastics to improve the quality of my speech. And after some time I realized that it uses, let’s say, the same brain channel as physical exercise, and they can even be done in the same rhythm. I tried to combine them, and it turned out quite successfully. I received additional direction for development absolutely free of charge. This is already some kind of benefit × 4. 🙂 And don’t worry about the quality of each direction with such a merger: it is controlled according to objective criteria and remains at a fairly high level.

Oh yes, a pinch of pleasure! Firstly, I alternate between useful books and fiction ones, and the latter, accordingly, bring pleasure. And secondly, I added VR to my fitness!

Exactly! Where is VR? What was this, clickbait?

No, not clickbait, it’s just that VR appeared in my life only about three years ago, so a backstory was required. Of course, I needed it, but some of you also had to suffer and read all this. 🙂

And yes, it’s still clickbait, because only part of my classes now take place in VR. The reasons, pros and cons are in the next part, which I will post tomorrow. Subscribe so you don't miss out. 😉

Thank you for attention.