Yesterday one of my neighbors called me over because she was excited about a book that she had bought upon recommendation by her physical therapist. It’s an exercise book utilizing a method called T-Tapp. ( www.t-tapp.com ) Check out the site for more information about it.
I looked it up online and decided to order the ebook. Ebook doesn’t come with the video dvd, but it was only $10 and won’t take up physical space on my shelves. If time moved on and I didn’t like the book, I’d only be able to resell the physical book for about $5 at the used book store, thus having spent $13 total on a book I’d no longer have. Ok, so cant resell an ebook, but I also spent less on it that I would have even if I’d sold the physical book after checking it out. (the library’s copy had a 3 person waiting list) Anyways, I think the ebook format is good for me. Frustrating that I can’t print off the exercises though. But OneNote allows me a way around that by clipping the page, pasting it into OneNote, and then printing off from there so that I don’t have to have my computer up and running every time I want to look at the exercise instructions. Also I can make notes on the paper. The quality isn’t good at all, and quite difficult to read, but it works for what I need. (I’d really love to have an ebook reader, though. I knew I should have let Richard buy me one for my birthday. But I don’t want kindle’s due to the format issues, and the iLiad which I really do want had some customer service and hardware issues.)
Anyways, so I’ve got the ebook, read the sales pitch (I hate that part of books, I mean, I already friggin bought the book, no need to sell me on the program), and finally got to the exercise portion. I’d read on the site that the HoeDowns and the Back Stretch were exercises that could be done separate from the others, the others needed to be in sequence. So yesterday I tried the HoeDowns.
Ouch!
Not ouch as in bad pain, but ouch as in, I barely made it through because of how intense it was (going to have to reduce the amount that I do until I gain enough muscle strength to increase the amount). My legs were still feeling the burn even when I went to bed. This morning they are tired, but not sore..yet. Today when I do them I’ll reduce the amount and focus on form a lot more because yesterday I kept losing the form while trying to finish a count.
I’m refusing to jump in full force. That’s a sure way to lead to frustration and burn out. Instead I’m intending to learn one move at a time, focusing on form… quality over quantity. If this is going to be a life time habit I’m developing, then there’s no rush, right.
The book/site has a thing called “bootcamps” which is basicall do a set of exercises for 4-14 days in a row before going to every-other-day and then to every third day. It also has something called a “weekend bootcamp” where you do a set of exercises twice a day for two days in a row and then e2d then e3d. At the moment, I kinda like the idea of doing weekend bootcamps and one week of e2d. So the schedule would be Sat, Sun, Tues, Thursday. Each week learning a new exercise to add to the list. This way, each week I’d be doing exercises that I already knew how to do with good form, and spending a week working on good form for a new exercise. This would also allow me to work myself up to being able to do these things, without overwhelming myself. It would also allow an easy way of tracking what I’m doing and how much of it I’m doing.
The book also has a dietary option that seems so … obvious… but that would have had to be spelled out for me before I’d have thought of it, lol. Two days of Nature-made foods (fresh vegetables, fruits, protein, etc) followed by one day of Man-made foods (sorta like a cheat day I guess). This would be a good way of not getting bored of natural foods and knowing that some man-made food that I want I can have in just a couple of days or so.
I know that this goes against the whole intuitive eating ideal. But considering that I gained 6 pounds by attempting the intuitive eating and then sliding back into old habits, I still need some guidelines for helping me make good decisions and developing good dietary habits… and getting out of my own way. The choices I make on those days, however, can still fit into intuitive eating. As in, given these choices (nature-made or man-made), what do I really want to eat?
Anyhoot, wish me luck on succeeding with this. The dietary aspect can’t help but encourage better dietary choices, and the exercise aspect is more well-thought out than my haphazardly picking out a couple of yoga moves to work on. I feel positive about this.
