So… I knew this first post would be terrible, as this whole week I only got to do my pushups on one day, which means my nice little schedule I pinned to my bedroom cupboard is mostly blank.
Here it is:
As you can see, this month has been pathetic, which is why in part I wanted to do this. By sharing it with you guys it will give me a kick to get off my ass and do the work.
These posts will be for subscribers only going forward, but in the interest of honesty, and inspiration for all you other lazy couch surfers: even we immortals fail at times.
The main difference is that simply by eating better (mostly carnivore/keto style food, I have lost about 4kg.
Now… about the weak, pathetic, bullshit excuses we all do when this happens…
“I was busy…”
“I have six kids…”
“The washing machine packed up and so did the spare one in the chalet…”
“The kids got sick and puked up all over so we also had dirty bedding to wash…”
“I had a lot of work on too and…”
“I also had the blog and finished two of the book covers for the books I had lying around complete for a couple of months, and…”
All true, yes. And also…
Complete bullshit.
The truth is you (me in this case) are a weak, self-deceiving pansy. You know how long it takes me to do 50 push-ups? Less than a minute. So who doesn’t have about 50 seconds or less to work out at least THAT?
And if I do all the exercises on there, even taking a short break between them in order to get the most out of the HIIT aspect of it, it’s all still under 30 minutes. And hard as it may be, I CAN fit 30 minutes a day for exercising if I want to.
The hardest part of exercising is not finding the time, it’s not the exercises themselves, it’s not any of that. It’s the mindset.
I know myself well, and absent family interruptions (i.e. when I was single, I am as determined as anyone, I never missed a session of training then and no matter what was happening I learnt long ago to just get my kit and go. Nothing has to be “perfect” you just have to DO IT.
The adjustment for me is the entire 6 kids and concomitant interruptions that come with that. It’s a mental thing, not a physical one.
When the 2 year old comes in early in the morning says “Good morning daddy, and wants to snuggle next to me and passes out again at 6 am, I just lose the will to hop out of bed and start doing crunchies. And by the time we do get up, the 4 year old and the 6 year old have joined us and what, am not gonna give them some attention like I did the little blonde, blue-eyed wonder and female mini-me? And the baby wants a boob and a smile. Then the 13 year old comes to say hello cause she misses her siblings… I could pretend I ran out of floor-space in the bedroom for it, but the truth is I am just being a lazy, weak, excuse filled meat-bag.
So… what to do ?
As I said, I know myself well, and when life tries to overwhelm me with distractions, however pleasant and good they may be, or drastic and painful (both are things that can divert you from your chosen path) I know that for me personally I need to do two things:
- Take time to set my mind up.
- Do/Get the things I need for the coming work.
The second part is really just a ritual more than a need. But say I want to take up hitting a bag again, even if I had the bag, I will go get say hand-straps (if I decide to use them). The thing is I can start anyway, without them, but there is an element of that ritual of “getting ready” with practical equipment, or whatever that “sets” my mind up, and internally gets rid of any of the lies your brain inevitably comes up with to try and keep you as a fat, unhealthy, lazy bastard.
What? You didn’t know your brain is your enemy in training? It is.
Remember, as with my recent analogy of being a harrier jump-jet, the pilot (brain) only has one main function: Keep the plane (you) intact. And the best way to do that is to never fly at all. Of course, you rot where you sit on the deck of the aircraft carrier that way, but hey… at least it’s “safe”.
No. You need to fight your brain so much so, as my friend Uldis put it that your brain basically switches from “no, relax, don’t do it, eat another cream cheese filled pastry,” to “Oh fuck! this maniac is going to keep running on that treadmill until we all die if I don’t start to help him!”
So that’s where I am at. I am also a little (tiny) bit wiser than I was in my 20s and 30s and probably 40s too, so I decided to look at getting a punching bag that I can leave outside in the forest, hanging near the giant chin-up bar I did last year in winter, and I’ll be getting a cyclette (exercise stationary bike) for my left knee.
In researching punching bags, I discovered that:
- None will basically be ok for continued presence outdoors, and,
- They are NOT cheap.
So I thought…screw that. I can make my own, and I don’t know yet if my idea of doing so will work, but I will keep you posted. My concept is I bought enough material to make two punching bags, so even if it dies after a while I can simply put up another, and the total cost for all of it is somewhere about half of what it costs for one professional bag.
Here is the list of things I got for it:
That’s basically 10 euro each for two bags that should be large enough to form a decent enough punchbag. Jute sacks are generally long-lasting and can take a punishment, but reading up on it I also discovered that they can be made to last a lot longer and prevent any fungus and cold, etc getting to them by impregnating them in copper sulphate solution. So I got some copper sulphate and left the bags stack in a solution of it for like a week.
Split in two we are at about 17 Euro total for materials so far.
I then stitched the bags so that they form a round-ish bottom, and while my wife was googling for thick enough needles to do this, I twisted a piece of metal wire into a needle-ish shape and stitched the two corners up onto the side. The bottom of the bag is now a rectangular-ish/round-ish shape. I already had the string, so I don’t know how much that cost, but probably 5-6 bucks. so call it a total of 20 euro for each bag (but the string is over a hundred meters long so you’ll have plenty left over).
Here is a close up of just how technologically advanced this all was:
Yes, I work in my underpants at times. This is normal throughout Italy.
Detail of the impromptu “needle” I made. It worked really well though.
The next thing I need to do is get a large PVC pipe that is able to be properly sealed at both ends, and a bag of sand. Fill the pipe up with sand and seal it and this will form the core weight of the punch-bag. Then I need to cut a piece of durable plastic into a round-ish shape to form the bottom of the bag.
Place the plastic “shield” shape in the bag, making sure I also have somehow threaded enough material, (old t-shirts, rags, etc) into it’s edges so the thick and somewhat sharp plastic is not in direct contact with the jute bag, and this will form the base.
Then tape, tie, knot a bunch of rags and material around the central core of sand-filled PVC pipe and once that is done put it inside the bag making sure all the area around the central core is stuffed with well-packed but essentially “soft” material (probably all the t-shirts my wife seems to think are no longer worthy of public display. You know because of a slight rip or tear or gaping holes in them, stains from working on the tractor, etc. etc. or my trousers with barn-sized rips in their nether regions. She’s such a fashionista, I tell you. Anyway, once that is all done. I plan to make another bag, using waterproof canvas this time, to put it all in. And I will probably also soak all the rags in the copper sulphate solution too before doing all this. This last part, the bag “cover” if you like, is the most expensive, and I will probably need to go to a cobbler or a leather worker or something to get it stitched up properly with durable stitching string/wire/magic strands/whatever works.
Here is the canvas I got:
And yes, if you take note, there is enough material for two bags.
So, all told, so far, the cost is about 60 euro for each bag.
I will still need to get some decent rope of some kind to hang it from, and I am still figuring out how to maybe do 4 attachment points on the bag for stability, instead of just one, or maybe also add a bit of elastic Bunji rope around the bottom of the bag, just above the “shield” and then tie that to something on the floor, possibly a metal ring buried in the ground. I don’t know, I need to think on it.
The bags will be sizeable enough for a basic punch-bag workout and will hopefully last a long time, and even if I buy high quality rope (and lots of it) I doubt the cost will be more than about 80 euro each, so for less than the cost of a “professional” bag, I will have two that I thing will turn out pretty well.
Anyway, once that is done, I will have no further excuses, and this is the training bike I am thinking of getting, though am still researching them a bit:
This was actually the hardest thing to force myself to do.
Training, whether in martial arts with others, or by yourself, inevitably teaches you aspects of yourself that most people prefer not to look into.
So here is a glimpse into a bit of my own psyche.
I trained in karate since about age 3. And it is very common for westerners to end up with knee injuries in that sport. Partly because our knee joint is not used to the way things get done in Japanese culture for millennia, partly because of bad training. Luckily for me, dad was already a 3rd Dan when I was born and he told me early on, when kicking to never let the knee joint fully extend. This has undoubtedly saved me a knee operation, because pretty much everyone I know that trained to the same level and intensity and for long as I have has had this. Later, when training in systems I discovered and even better way to train, where the full extension is used, but locked at the exact same moment. But that’s fairly advanced work and not recommended for beginners that on reading that sentence are thinking “whut…?”
Anyway… all this to say that despite my having avoided an operation, one of my knees in particular, the left one, has taken strain since my 20s. Hiking hard with a heavy bag across African trails, sometimes running for long distances in such conditions, caused its share of impact (especially on the downhills) and my right side is also a little bit shorter than the left, so the left leg takes more compressive impacts in such activities. Inevitably, when it started to give me a bit of pain, I went and did some spinning classes at the local gym and the issue resolved itself.
About 2 years ago, I lifted in and out of a car, a stove that was probably about 150/200 kg, by myself, using a home-made ramp out of a plank of wood, and caused myself a bit of an injury in my back, and left knee. The sciatica I used to get periodically when I overdid things in training returned and my left knee has been niggling me for 2 years. And I have basically “ignored” it because of a psychological dark spot this whole long explanation is written for, so as to introduce and explain it, so that maybe it helps others hopefully become aware of similar issues and avoid them.
In traditional Karate, if you show any weakness, it gets stomped on. You have an injury and try and act like a whiny bitch protecting it? It gets punched and kicked more.
There are two schools of thought on this:
- The honourable sportsman perspective – One must clutch one’s pearls at this most ungentlemanly behaviour! A wonder “soldier” in the dojo should not be Molly-coddled, but attacking his injury itself is beyond the pale! Gasp! Shocked face!
- The merciless bastard perspective – Karate-jutsu, (practical application) as opposed to Karate-Do (philosophical Way) is about actual fighting, or budo (Way of War). And in war, no one gives you any free passes. In fact they absolutely will attack any weakness you have and do so hard. So you may as well train as life really is, weakling. And stop your whining, no one cares.
Some people that do karate take the first view, and the head of our style in Japan certainly took the second view. Personally, I have always taken my own view, which is to respond in kind. You wanna play honourable soldier, that’s fine with me. you want to play merciless bastard, that’s fine with me too.
I am a counter-puncher by nature generally anyway, and as it turns out, if you have excellent timing, that is also one of the hardest people to defeat when he’s in good form. It probably also tends to get you into more fights, because psychologically stupid people assume because you are possibly not giving out a super-aggressive vibe, that you may be “weak” or an easier prey. So they tend to over-step that red line and then find out the hard way they miscalculated.
Anyway… that kind of mentality in the dojo was only a tiny, almost insignificant version of what I grew up with at home basically, where any failure, any weakness, any psychological chink in your make-up was essentially attacked. A lapse of judgement, a too inaccurate piece of work, a lack of attention, bad workmanship, half-assed work was simply come down on like a drill sergeant might in basic training. On the other hand, neither of my parents usually had any idea what I was up to, and when I occasionally did relatively serious stupid shit (not often) my dad would tend to not even do much more than a few words.
The result of all of this is that I only became aware of certain effects it had on me much later.
I hate going clothes shopping for myself for example. Makes no sense? Well, it kinda does. The very idea of trying on different things to see which one “fits” better is kind of embarrassing to me. Just get some clothes and go. I once forced myself to do this, go and shop for clothes for myself, alone, without anyone else, and it was hard. by the end of it I think I got a couple of pairs of jeans and some t-shirts but it took me most of a day and I was exhausted by the end of it. The only partially acceptable way of doing this, and then I can only stand it for a half hour or so, is to go with the woman I was seeing at the time, or my wife currently and have them pick some stuff out for me (where I tend to reject at least 50% of it as I don’t like the look of it). Even then it’s an ordeal. My wife has taken to simply getting me clothes without me present, which I am very grateful for.
But it all stems from the (absurd) sense that exposing myself to such vanity is a weakness that I am just not comfortable having. And I mean I’m talking basic clothes ware here, it’s not like I have private showings of suits at Armani.
On the other hand, I have zero problem saying or getting what I want . Wanting something is fine. It’s the needing something I struggle with. I find it really difficult to get anything I need (a new pair of reading glasses say, or that training cycle to fix my knee, or go to the doctor for my deviated septum, etc.) and this realisation has finally come to a head, where I am resolved to get rid of that little black hole in my brain.
So I am getting that training bike, dammit.
It’s due to arrive on August 1st, and hopefully I will have finished the punching bag/s too by then. So… starting August 1st 2025, I should have no more “excuses” fake as they are anyway, and I should be able to get my ass in gear properly. I suggest you lazy-ass subscribers get whatever you need too so we can all tell ourselves we always meant to start in August anyway, not a month ago. And then we’ll see if a year from now we have all learned to be a bit fitter and bullshit ourselves and each other less.
I may, for the next instalment, post pictures of myself for the “before look” of my lazy
56
55 (for a bit longer) year-old self, but that will be limited to subscribers only, so you can poke fun but only if you pay me for it! ha!
Who said I have no sense of shame or dignity in matters of practical effort.
Oh… one last point, the T and F and HIIT training and Systema training style stuff, etc… that will all be explained next week in the Subs only post.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
