Peace of Mind Organizing

Daily exercise for the win!

14 September 2022

My brother, Larry, is visiting me right now. He lives in Australia, so I don’t get to see him often. Our father died last month in Walla Walla, Washington, and Larry made an emergency trip to the U.S. After the memorial service, he came back to St. Louis with my husband and me.

We’re having a great time hanging out and catching up. And we’re even learning a thing or two from one another. One thing that Larry’s really impressed me with his daily habit of doing pull ups. Larry is a slender, strong 63-year-old man. He’s genetically inclined to being slender but he also has muscles. And now I know why.

Every day, Larry does ten pull ups.

He tells me that he started his pull-up routine in 1995. He started with only four, which was very easy for him to do. He slowly increased the number and now he’s up to ten. Along the way, he’s created a few rules for himself. If he can’t do all ten because he doesn’t feel strong enough, he lets himself take up a break. He can make up the difference a little later or, barring that, he’ll make up the difference the next day.

When I asked Larry this daily exercise habit and how he’s managed to keep it up for literally decades, he said,“It’s easy. That’s the beauty of it. I knew that I had to be flexible about it because I’d lose heart if I tried to force myself to do something that was too difficult. I knew that if I could do it every day it would be good for me. And it’s not something that’s impossible to do.”

There are so many things I love about this:

• His goal is realistic
• He builds some flexibility into it
• He allows himself to fall short but makes up for it
• He’s reaping visible benefits from this daily habit

I feel the same way about my daily yoga practice, which has fallen by the wayside due to a variety of circumstances. But Larry’s inspiring me to get right back on it and allow myself to just do a little bit of yoga and count it as a success. I know daily yoga is beneficial. (I didn’t miss a day for over a year during the pandemic.) My promise to myself is that I’ll let it be easy.

Larry is reminding me that when it comes to exercise (and really almost everything) any effort is better than no effort. His daily ten pull ups takes him literally a couple of minutes. (It’s fortunate that we happen to have a pull up bar just like the one he has at home.) And he’s definitely reaping the benefits!

Tagged with: exercise, habits, routines

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