100 Things I wish My Dad Taught Me. Episode 23. “Your health and wellbeing tomorrow result from you actions today.”

Well as you know from yesterday, your actions, words and thoughts… are a more exact definition of your health tomorrow.

Who would argue?

I love my bike riding. I have two bikes. I can only ride one at a time. Seems a bit extravagant. But I love my sport. I don’t compete with anyone but myself. I ride mostly on my turbo on the balcony. Sometimes it’s excruciating but I force myself to get on the bike each day. Some days I can only get fifteen minutes into it before I surrender. Others, two hours. Out on the road if I make the road commitment it’s so much easier. I would never stop after 15 minutes no matter how bad it was. The difference is that on the turbo on my balcony, on a stationary bike, I feel everything. On the road, I have traffic and falling down to occupy me.

Three things are important here.

1. If I do no bike ride it would be worse.
2. More time on the bike is not always better.
3. It doesn’t have to be easy.
4. Pain is part of the process and important.
5. Stopping on those 15 minute days is more healthy than continuing.

100 Things I wish My Dad Taught Me. Episode 23. “Your health and wellbeing tomorrow result from you actions today.”

It’s important to recognise that action includes your state of mind. If I am burnt out from too much bike riding I am not wise to do more. Training on tiredness, mental and emotional, and physical, is not good. Negative mindset, while exercising, breeds illness.

I am painfully aware of the states of mind that are unhealthy during exercise. They are the same at work.

1. Feeling sorry for myself that I have to exercise/work.
2. Wanting some sort of praise for the sacrifice when, health in itself is the greatest praise I could wish for.
3. Not organised into a long term objective and therefore just training on the bike for the fun of it.
4. Tiredness.
5. Resenting discomfort and pain, which is the balance of comfort and pleasure.
6. Not trusting the evolving process of the training programme. In other words, just cycling without science.

I have an Oura ring on my finger. Right now it’s not. I am getting it replaced and not confident of the accuracy of my old one. I really miss having the data on my phone that the Oura ring generates. My HRV and recovery, are two really important variables and I use them as one measure of the quality of my coaching.

You might find it surprising that there are biological measures that express the quality of my mostly emotional, mental and spiritual executive coaching but I can tell 100% from an Oura ring feedback where a person is emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The body never lies but we do.

My partner uses Training peaks for her run coaching with her RUN-CREW coaching programme. I know the owner of RUN-CREW, Ben, quite well from my last relationship. He and I spent allot of time talking about the training load of certain people and he, with only simple Training PEAKS feedback can also tell the mental and emotional state of his athletes. Science helps us be more powerful and healthy in our lives and eliminates the notion of “how do you feel” as a metric of health.

How do I feel? It plays into the hands of the pleasure seeking aspect of life. I might have mentioned this before. When they interview a marathon athlete, how they feel is not a metric. They feel bad. But that isn’t the focus, not feeling good is a part of their event. How’s their heart rate, pace, focus, commitment? Those are questions they can answer.

In sport, there is a feel measure, even in an app for training. It is called Real Feel. But this is an all encompassing measure of effort. 10/10 is maximum. 1/10 is minimum. This Feel is different. It embraces emotional, mental, spiritual and physical strain. In other words, how hard you are working in an exercise program. This is different to “how do you feel” and for some, the difference is too subtle.

How you feel as an effort scale is sophisticated. There’s a paper on it. A web site called “MEASUREMENT IN SPORT AND EXERCISE” and if you need to get subtle, that’s the place to get it. But for now, a ring, my Oura ring, measures scientifically how I feel too. My biometrics reveal my biological tiredness even when, with coffee and sport gel, I might say, I’m not tired.

Training on tiredness, like working on tiredness is bad. Bad for the firm, bad for your health, bad for the body and mind.

There are so many people addicted to adrenalin. That’s the enemy of the recovery process. They feel good with adrenalin and adrenalin addiction is not healthy.

Here’s a book for you on this.