Discord and I both grew up in a math contest culture, so each month or so we pick something we “should” be doing and turn it into a contest. This month it’s getting half hour of exercise a day. At the end of the month the winner “wins” something from the loser. It’s been surprisingly effective. I go to the gym about 5x as often as before. Works best with a daily cap. If there’s no daily cap then it turns into an arms race (such as 5 hours of exercise in one day). This sort of thing, that we “should” do but like to hand to tomorrow-self, really is a lot easier when you can do it with someone. Someone who will call you and taunt you. :)
That’s great for motivation and all, but with physical exercise you have to remember that more is not always better. Prolonged and intense training every single day may have detrimental effects upon joint health and recovery capacity.* It may improve performance more effectively, but performance is not the same thing as health. I used to run every day for a while, for instance, until I messed up my knees with all that jogging. One year afterwards, I kinda sorta almost recovered, but knee pain is much quicker to come back than before.
*There are no studies I can cite (and most of them are probably behind the paywall anyway), but this seems to be a very common piece of advice given to novice bodybuilders.
I agree 100%. That’s why we have a limit of half an hour each day, no bonus points for doing more. Our last contest was “logging the most steps with Fitbit”, and it ended up wasting a lot of time with no health benefits. Lesson learned!
Discord and I both grew up in a math contest culture, so each month or so we pick something we “should” be doing and turn it into a contest. This month it’s getting half hour of exercise a day. At the end of the month the winner “wins” something from the loser. It’s been surprisingly effective. I go to the gym about 5x as often as before. Works best with a daily cap. If there’s no daily cap then it turns into an arms race (such as 5 hours of exercise in one day). This sort of thing, that we “should” do but like to hand to tomorrow-self, really is a lot easier when you can do it with someone. Someone who will call you and taunt you. :)
That’s great for motivation and all, but with physical exercise you have to remember that more is not always better. Prolonged and intense training every single day may have detrimental effects upon joint health and recovery capacity.* It may improve performance more effectively, but performance is not the same thing as health. I used to run every day for a while, for instance, until I messed up my knees with all that jogging. One year afterwards, I kinda sorta almost recovered, but knee pain is much quicker to come back than before.
*There are no studies I can cite (and most of them are probably behind the paywall anyway), but this seems to be a very common piece of advice given to novice bodybuilders.
I agree 100%. That’s why we have a limit of half an hour each day, no bonus points for doing more. Our last contest was “logging the most steps with Fitbit”, and it ended up wasting a lot of time with no health benefits. Lesson learned!