I’m preparing to start the 21 Day Fix on Sunday which will hopefully take my health & fitness goals to an entirely new level, but in the meantime I figured I’d post a bit about my running goals and Fitbit thoughts!
Ange is a blogger whom I met on vacation last fall at a mutual blogger friend’s wedding in St. Louis (yay for blog friends!). She is a big runner, and I’ve always WANTED to be a runner, but every time I get into it I end up giving up because of knee pain, so I was really interested to read this article she linked to about foam rollers. I bought one right before I got pregnant with Stella…and surprise surprise, I haven’t really used it in the past 4 years because it hurts dammit. So, yes, it’s supposed to hurt, but I was afraid I was doing something wrong, so this article was a great read for me to renew my commitment to ROLL ROLL ROLL and try to get back into running as the weather warms up.
She also posted about wearable fitness trackers (I have a love/hate relationship with my Fitbit), and I found the quote below from FitKnit Chick to be especially true:
Is it useful to categorize a person’s activity level by simply the number of steps they take in a day? According to the activity categories of the ’10 000 steps a day’ campaign, many very physically fit people would be categorized as ‘sedentary’ or only ‘moderately active’ only because they choose to spend their daily exercise time doing something other than walking. Take me, for example. After an hour of heavy strength training, I’ll typically have racked up only 1000 or so steps. If I had spent the same 60 minutes walking the treadmill (without building muscle or improving bone density), my count would have been pushing my daily 10 000 steps goal. Given the push to share one’s activity tracker data via social media, there’s the potential for feelings of shame or inadequacy. Or even worse, the feeling like one needs to do more to avoid appearing slothful.
I’m torn about my FitBit.
Reasons I love it:
- It pushes me to move more. (duh)
- When I’m between 1,000s, I usually move a little extra to hit the next thousand before bed, so if I’m at 5,600, I’ll walk until 6,000 before laying down in bed. Every little bit helps, right?
- I love the competition. I often partake in work week or weekend competitions with other people who have FitBits, and it’s inspiring to move more when I see I’m close to overtaking someone else. I also love the new “goal day” competition feature they have which allows you to compete based on percentages of your goal, so if you’re a 5k goal person vs. a 10k goal person, you’re not automatically being blown out of the water but you’re still inspired to hit your goal (I do this challenge a lot with my Mom and sister!)
Reasons I’m not in love with it:
- See the quote above.
- To expound on that, I know i need to do cardio AND toning exercises at this point in my health and fitness journey, but it’s so tempting to only do cardio (elliptical) vs. a toning DVD (Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred) because I’ll get so many more steps on my FitBit.
- It also discourages me from doing other awesome workouts that don’t show a lot of “steps” per se – yoga, swimming, etc.
Overall I’m still happy to have it, and I think it encourages me to be a more active person (I park farther away from stores, walk to the post office on my lunch break, etc)… but I’m excited to take this 21 Day Challenge to NOT be focused on my steps and to instead really dial in on my diet and on doing QUALITY exercise.
Wish me luck!