That moment when you have a choice. That moment of when you are on the precipice and your momentum is taking you steeply downward in one direction. You aren’t far off from the other side of the precipice where you used to be, but you won’t get back there without taking some action and doing things a little differently than you have been doing them.
Everyone in existence encounters Tipping Points
Tipping Points with their fitness, tipping points with their finances, tipping points with their health.
I recently recognized a tipping point for myself – with my fitness. Since I was a teenager I have worked to maintain my fitness. I worked out most days of the week growing up and then for a number of years as a personal trainer. Even in grad school I prioritized my fitness, both strength-wise and cardiovascular.
Through that time I learned to manage injuries that came with the territory of an active lifestyle. If there was a tweak, I would do the necessary stretching, chiropractic, and rehab work that would get me back up to full speed. At times I had some frustrations, but there were never any true tipping points, in which I would have a long, arduous process to get myself back to where I had previously been fitness-wise.
Recently, I had a physical set-back that almost meant a steep, downward trend in my fitness. In the fall of 2016, as a spry, young 35-year-old, I was playing soccer with my Tuesday night men’s league team one mild early October evening. I was feeling good and having a decent game playing central defender (clearly due to my prodigious height, standing 5 feet, 9 inches), but in the early minutes of the second half, while taking a free kick from my own half, during mid leg-swing without warning, I experienced what felt like a fist-size rock hit the back of my leg. I knew before foot touched the ground that this wasn’t good. We were playing on turf. There were no rocks. There were no players behind me either. This was the proverbial “kick to the back of the leg when no one is there” injury.
I had not just slightly pulled my calf muscle- this was a significant muscle strain. A couple of teammates helped me over to the sideline, where I remained angrily in agony attempting to stand and put weight on my injured leg for the remainder of the half. I was barely successful getting back to my car after the game and I was sure I was not going to see everyone on my team for a while.
I did all of the soft tissue therapy, chiropractic, and rehab that was possible during recovery.
I received acupuncture several times. I took care of my calf like it was a helpless child. Thankfully I was still physically able to perform all necessary treatments on my patients, but several of them got to hear my story of woe.
I continued to exercise and go to the gym during my recovery. After all, if I couldn’t do lower body exercise, I could do upper body, and before I was able to run on a treadmill, I was able to exercise on an elliptical machine. I was determined to come back just as strong as I was before.
Finally, by mid-November, six weeks following the injury, I made it back onto a soccer field with my men’s league team. My calf felt okay after multiple stretching sessions during the match, but my movement and fitness just weren’t quite the same. I was slower. Of course I had not sprinted in quite a few weeks and playing was somewhat grueling. I played one more game before the end of the season and then told myself that I would get in good shape again for my winter season. I continued to lift weights and run a bit on the treadmill at a slower pace than I did previously.
Then the holidays hit. Indulgences of all sorts that normally don’t tempt my completely broke down my will-power defenses. Desserts happened. Rich foods happened. Occasional drinks with friends and family happened much more often than usual. As a result, my usual work-out regimen wasn’t enough to keep up with my holiday excesses. While I didn’t gain a ton of weight, as I was reasonably careful about that, my physique just became “softer”, and my endurance lagged.
It was around New Years that I realized that my fitness wasn’t going to suddenly vault itself up to elite level from where it was. I wasn’t just going to throw away the desserts and run like I was in my early-20s again. It wasn’t going to be that simple.
This was the moment. This was my fitness Tipping Point.
This is when I realized that I had two choices: exercise at a much greater intensity than I had been and clean-up my nutrition, or give-in to the standard societal thinking that this is what happens when a person reaches their mid-30s; that recovery just takes longer and age begins to set-in. (I will write about age in a later blog, but generally in my observations as a former fitness professional and as medical professional now, numerous people blame their physical ailments on age, when the blame should really be placed on habit changes and reductions of physical activity).
It really was going to go one direction or the other. I was going to acquiesce to moving a little slower, running with less pace, and never quite being the same physically again. This would likely result in a slow downward spiral of fitness and ultimately health. Or I could put in a brief period of harder work and reverse this trend.
Clearly, the right choice was the latter. I started with changes to my exercise routine by picking up the pace on the treadmill and increasing the intensity of my weight lifting. Instead of lazy, post-workday “going through the motions” routines, I made sure to increase the intensity of my exercises. I stopped giving-in to that underlying thought that “I deserved to take it easy on my workouts after a full day of work” or that all of the exercises in the gym “used to be easier when I was younger”.
In addition to my workouts, I cut out the bad, inflammatory foods in my diet. I started with a 10-day kick-start to my nutrition (actually called the Shred-10 through the company Juice Plus+, which has great studies to back it up), cutting out all gluten, dairy, processed foods, added sugar, alcohol, and even caffeine (the hardest one for a Seattlite)!
It surprisingly was not that difficult, as it was not calorically restrictive. Bloating I didn’t even realized that I was carrying around was quickly reduced. My wife said she could see the difference on my waist in literally a couple of days! Since then, I have moderated my intake of all of these items and remained committed to a less-inflammatory diet.
These changes put together made the difference for me in moving to the right side of my Tipping Point. Had I not made these changes over the course of a few weeks in early 2017, it might have been possible to do similar things later on, but it would have been a much more arduous, long endeavor that would have provided many more opportunities to quit and go back to bad habits.
What are your Tipping Points?
What practices are you currently doing that could quickly erode your health, finances, spirituality, or any other aspect of your life? How can you change these? And why not make the commitment today?
(206) 954-7479