Transform yourself while in self isolation

Here we are, sitting at home waiting for the Corona virus crisis to end in some credible way, thanks to the tireless efforts of our doctors, researchers, health and administration staff. While we pray for ourselves, our near and dear ones, and the less fortunate who may be more vulnerable due to age, health conditions, economic conditions of uncertainty and compulsion to work and so on, we also find ourselves in a rare, rare situation.

Time! That one elusive commodity we have always yearned for. Suddenly, we can actually think about some of the things we had dreamed of starting “some day”. This article is an effort to help us make the best of the time we now have, to not only make some positive gains in things we aim to do, but also form positive habits for the time when things come back to normal. Hopefully, it can also be helpful for parents with children at home without much to do and time on their hands.

Progressions and mechanical skills

Among all the other things that we could do at home during enforced confinement, like catching up on sleep, surfing our social media, watching old movies, reading old books, talking to long lost friends on the phone and so on, you must include some time for improvement in a (any) skill through progressions. Once this whole corona madness is over, you shall emerge from prison, like a butterfly from the pupa… your friends shall rub their eyes and wonder what magic potion you have been drinking… I jest not. The point is that many amazing skills can be built through repeated practice, starting from the simplest progression, and advancing steadily.

So, do it today. Do it now, stop reading this article, make a list of things you always wanted to do, provided you can find the space and equipment – for example if you want to learn from scratch to play the piano, the very minimum equipment you need is a 2 octave keyboard. The great news is, for virtually any skill you want to learn, from speaking a foreign language, to painting with water colours, to performing magic tricks, to editing your own videos, or to any other skill... all the knowledge you need to start is available free online, particularly on YouTube.

You can also improvise on equipment – if you have cricket crazy kids at home, set up a hanging ball for batting practice – a ball in a sock, tied to the end of a clothesline rope hanging from a roof hook works fine. If the budding cricketer gets addicted to it for hours, trying to play straight and to the off, with soft hands and full control, that’s half your problem solved in keeping him or her occupied.

But, I don’t have any specific bucket list skill!

I was hoping you’d say that. I have just the thing for you. Well, not everyone may be interested in music, art, photographing birds or speaking a new language. But everyone feels the benefits of a healthy body and the problems of an unhealthy one. The evergreen skill to develop is functional fitness training. In an increasingly sedentary world, fitness is super important for the young, and even more so for aging people. Functional fitness training will help you do everyday tasks like lifting heavy bags, pushing a broken down car, crawling under a table to plug in that charger, running up stairs and staying free from aches, pains and injury, even as you age. It can massively improve your quality of life.

Whether you are an active sportsperson who has temporarily lost access to your club or team due to the forced shutdown, or a person who has not worked out for years, utilizing this downtime to build a habit of functional fitness training could be one of the most important turning points in your life, in a long time!

So how and where do we start? Read on… And, what if you are not starting, but pretty advanced? That comes next, so keep reading…

Finding the right progressive skills program(s)

There are so many thousands of brilliant resources on the internet that I won’t even attempt to list them out here. But just to help as a starting point, here are some tips:

     

• The key is to identify a skill you want to develop (say, pull ups, or a Yoga pose like Chakrasana, the bridge), which is aspirational (i.e. you cannot do it right now). Next, find progressions towards that skill (i.e. easier versions of the exercise, so that you can reach there in some time). If you want general, overall fitness, then, that too is just fine to set as an objective.
• Search for videos and articles on Yoga, bodyweight exercise, calisthenics, stretches, strength building, running. All these require minimum to no equipment and can be done at home safely.  If you are a beginner, include that in your keyword search. Search for the specific skill you wish to develop, or for general beginner programs.
• You don’t need to find a single resource or program to follow rigidly. Find videos and articles which appeal more to you, and you can start with one, go on to another and so on. You can create your own program. It is very important to find videos or websites which resonate with you, and which you like. Most experts on the net have structured, paid programs, but also give tons of useful free information – you can use the latter to start and then figure out.
• If you have kids, figure out things you can do together.  The important thing is, the child should also have a target to achieve, a skill which is aspirational, to develop.

I’m not a beginner – what’s the best use of my time?

That’s even better. The enforced downtime at home gives you a great opportunity to regain old capabilities or build new ones. I would like to specifically suggest two transformative progressions in fitness improvement for the non-novice. This would be useful to you irrespective of your area of interest in physical fitness, whether it is for a specific sport (tennis, squash, football) or general functional fitness.

Increasing muscular endurance

Am not talking so much about cardio endurance, as in running on the road or on a treadmill, because I think this is quite well understood generally. In case you need a good running progression also, the same methods as above apply – find an aspirational target, whether it is a 10K, or a half marathon, and find a progressive program that gets you there, starting from your current capability. Again, tons of programs available online, and you can use this period to break the inertia and start.

Coming to muscular endurance – a useful technique well known to many fitness trainers and trainees, but perhaps not so well known in the mainstream, is GTG.  The big advantage of using the GTG (Greasing the Groove) method is, that it is tailor-made for our current circumstances – where you are in the same place all day. The method, popularized by the famous Belarussian-American fitness trainer, Pavel Tsatsouline, involves doing multiple sets of an exercise throughout the day, without ever going to fatigue, but progressively increasing reps and sets.  Over a period of time, when you try your maximum reps, you are likely to have progressed to a much higher level. Here is an example, say you can do a maximum of 8 pushups:

Day 1: do sets of 4 throughout the day, every hour or so (anyway you are chilling at home) – if you do 10 sets, you would have aggregated close to 40, assuming that you drop a few reps in the last few sets

Day 2: do a few sets of 5, and the rest of 4

Day 3: and so on… progress for 2 to 4 weeks

In most cases, a normal person following a schedule like the one above, after a couple of weeks, would find if they attempted their maximum, they would have doubled their capacity to about 16!

Search the net on “Greasing the groove” and choose articles or videos that you can relate to the most. At the end of this corona virus lock down period, you may emerge on a high, amazing yourself and your friends, with the changes in your body and capability!

Increasing body mobility

I have benefited massively from learning from experts on YouTube and the net, on how to train progressively; and one message which has stuck with me, especially when it comes to increasing joint mobility is, that mobility and flexibility improvement exercises often suck, so we tend to give up or not do them regularly.

Instead, we must embrace the suck.

Again, the forced lock-down gives us a great opportunity to find a good program to improve body mobility with the following steps (in brackets, I have given some data from my own personal recent example):

1. Identify the problem (mine was, I have not been able to sit cross-legged on the floor for several years now, which is doubly embarrassing because I am an Indian living in India)
2. Identify a target (want to be able to sit cross legged for long periods, with no pain or discomfort – no specific deadline to achieve this)
3. Find the correct online tutorial - as mentioned earlier, it is extremely important that you find the right resource and expert that you relate to, and would like to follow (in my case, for sitting cross-legged on the floor, I found dozens of videos, but it was surprisingly difficult to find the one “perfect for me” – finally I found it, and am giving the link below)
4. Practice with perseverance and diligence. (After just one week of following the video below, I am able to see results which I have not, for over 20 years. I think that in a few months, I should be able to sit cross-legged perfectly and painlessly, for hours on end. If it takes several months instead of a few also, I am OK. I am using the current forced self isolation and downtime, only to get a flying start in my practice).

Here is the video, from which I am learning to sit cross-legged – while it is a small thing for many people, for me, it would be a huge transformation: video by Atul Kumar Verma (it is in Hindi), from Fitness Rockers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBSG4q_eYYo&list=LLygoQOjvdAqivXhhDbDWp0A&index=21&t=0s

So, in conclusion, I would encourage you to utilize this forced downtime at home, in self isolation, to identify skills that you really want to develop, find progressive methods to get to them, and work towards them. You will be amazed at how strong and positive you may become, instead of getting affected by gloom.

I wish you all the best in your endeavours. If you would like to discuss anything further with me, please feel free to mail me at jayaramk1968@gmail.com.