Category: Fitness

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Do you use an activity tracker? I have an Oura ring, a Google Pixel watch, and a phone which runs Google Fit. All of those count my steps, and each one does some additional activity or sleep tracking. I find them all fun and interesting, so I’m always amused when yet another article comes out warning of the dangers of activity tracking.

My Google pixel watch and my Oura ring

The article at the moment is this one, sent by my brother: Five hidden pitfalls of fitness tracking, by Sahar Bakr.

I mean, sure. If you’re really foolish, you can be seriously led astray by one of these. But you’d have to be really foolish. It’s like the early days of GPS map software, where they’d be giving you directions and say, “Turn left!” but if you turned left you’d end up in a creek. Sure, you could do that, but all you had to do was look where you were going, and you could avoid it pretty easily.

Although the article has five items, there are, I think, two fundamental issues that Bakr is warning about. The larger one is outsourcing our good sense to some external device. The smaller is an excessive focus on step-count as the measure of fitness activity.

Letting a device tell you to push hard when you’re feeling crappy is just stupid. (It is perhaps somewhat less stupid to let a device tell you to take it easy when you feel great. I have several times decided to push hard because I felt great, even though one of my devices was warning me that I wasn’t fully recovered. More than once when I did that, I ended up having a crappy workout, because the device was right and I was wrong.)

With their fixation on steps (because that’s easy for a device to measure), devices have a pretty limited insight into the full scope of your movement practice. This means that they’re never going to know if your strength training is covering all the major muscle groups, or if your volume and intensity are on point. But that’s not really different from training without a device. Really, it only makes things worse if you’re so foolish as to imagine that it’s got some insight into stuff other than your steps and heart rate (or whatever else its measuring). Just like it doesn’t know enough about your strength training to provide useful advice there, it also doesn’t know much about your skills training or your flexibility training.

A lot of my training is focused on specifically increasing the sort of fitness I need for my HEMA practice. None of my devices even tries to guide me as to whether I should do less lunging practice in favor of overhead pressing practice or vice versa. (And if they did, I wouldn’t pay much attention, unless they’d started getting me to upload my sparring footage. And maybe not then.)

Getting back to the fixation on steps, the device makers want to pretend that step counts gives them some sort of deep insight into a human’s movement practice, with a one-size-fits-all target of 10,000 steps.

Weirdly, I don’t think that’s crazy. I mean, steps are by no means the only aspect of a human’s movement practice that’s important, but it’s actually not a bad proxy.

Over an evolutionarily long period, walking and running have been critical to human success. Running and walking were key to our successes in both hunting and gathering, and probably led directly to our big brains.

All three of my devices count steps. All three track walking and running. (They all try to track other activity—cycling, swimming, gardening, housework—but do so pretty poorly. Walking and running, though, they pretty much have nailed.)

In my mid-20s I was working in an office, but getting out to hike at every opportunity, which didn’t come frequently enough. I remember thinking, “If only I could get out and hike a few miles every day! I’d be in great shape!” That turns out not to be true, but it’s not completely false either.

My point here is simply that step counts are by no means a terrible proxy for one’s overall activity level, and 10,000 steps is by no means a stupid target—it’s mildly ambitious, without being out of reach for anyone with a reasonable level of fitness and some spare time. (I admit that I might well think this because I’m a weird outlier. I’m a walker from way back. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the day to walk if I want to. And I have a dog who likes to walk a lot. The upshot is, my daily steps hit 15,000 nearly every day.)

All of which is to say that I find these devices useful. In particular, they’re good at observing that I’m not fully recovered, meaning I should take it easy, even if I’m feeling okay. I find them (mildly) motivating, in that I pretty much never fail to hit 10,000 steps (unless I’m sick, the dog is sick, or the weather is terrible). I find them somewhat entertaining, especially when their praise is so for stuff I consider pretty minimal. (“You’ve met your activity goal for the day!” My Oura ring will say at 10:00 AM.)

In any case, I find them quite harmless. They don’t make me feel anxious or shamed. I’ve seen no sign that they are prompting disordered eating. I’m amused by their fixation on step counts, but not troubled by it. (I occasionally miss my 10,000 steps, usually when I’ve spent the day sitting in a plane, train, or car. I am not bothered when my devices observe that this is the case.) I care deeply about getting in my mobility work and my strength work, even if the devices don’t track it adequately. I take great joy in my movement—click any of the tags over there with “movement” in the name and find yourself taken to dozens of places where I’ve celebrated my movement practice, starting from before I had any devices, and continuing to this day. Finally, I am merely amused if my device dings me for not doing enough, as my Oura ring does if I sit for more than 50 minutes. (In fact though, these past few years, I can only barely sit still that long anyway.)

The key paragraph from the article:

For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.

I mean, I know I’m a movement weirdo, but really? Who would do anything else?

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Sunrise beyond a crossroads

I’m always on the lookout for books that take a more balanced view of sun exposure than “skin cancer bad,” and this looks to be a good one: In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen

From a review in Nature Briefing:

“One study he mentions analysed the skin of lifeguards at the start and end of a summer season during which they were heavily exposed to the sun. By summer’s end, their skin was enriched with microbial “beneficial bugs” that protect against UV radiation. A square centimetre of human skin contains millions of microorganisms, some of which produce compounds that kill cancer cells without harming normal ones.”

Source: The best way to start your day? The science backs naked cartwheels in the sun

I mean, really. We know the UV rays are actinic, as are the blue-green rays (tell your brain it’s daytime), and the red and infrared rays (promote healing at various depths of skin and below the skin). I don’t know about all the other wavelengths, but I’m willing to bet that they all do something.

Humans evolved in the sun, and evolved different skin pigmentation that varied with latitude (and, I suspect, varied with other things as well). The idea that our skin can’t handle a perfectly ordinary amount of sunlight is just silly.

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As you’ll know if you subscribe to my newsletter (sign up in the sidebar), my brother and I are attending SFWA’s Nebula Award Conference in Chicago.

View of the sunset out my hotel window, showing a plane departing from O'Hare at the top center of the image

Today Steven had SFWA board stuff all day, so after breakfast I went to the hotel fitness center for a workout.

Normally I always do a full warmup before a workout. (This is slightly problematic, as too often I just do the warmup, and then need to walk the dog and fix lunch, and end up never getting to the workout.) Today, because the scheduling seemed to work better, I did the workout first, right after breakfast. Then I did my morning exercises in the early afternoon.

That worked out surprisingly well.

One reason it worked out well was that I did most of the workout on new-to-me machines, so I started with reasonably low weights and worked my way up to working weights, which basically amounts to a warmup all by itself. I did:

  • Single-leg Romanian deadlifts with a 25 lb dumbbell 3 x 5 left/5 right (my only non-machine exercise)
  • Shoulder press 30 lbs 1×12, 35 lbs 1×12, 1×10
  • Leg extension 50 lbs 1×12, 55 lbs 2×12, 60 lbs 1×12, 65 lbs 1×12
  • Pulldown 70 lbs 1×12, 75 lbs 1×9, 1×5

I forgot to do goblet squats! There wasn’t a leg-press machine, and I kept thinking, “What can I do to work my glutes?” But I didn’t think of goblet squats. I can do those tomorrow, as well as hitting the other machines (leg curl, biceps curl, and chest press are the ones I didn’t do today).

In con-related news, I have successfully registered! I have a name badge, a program, and tickets for a promised book bag.

I’m expecting Steven’s board-related activities to wrap up shortly, and then we’re talking about heading out to a margarita bar. Or, if his thing runs too late, maybe just having a beer here in the hotel.

I personally am very flexible in this regard.

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A while back someone among our local group shared a link to a set of books they’d found on the internet, with interpretations and drills for Meyer’s Art of Fencing. Word among the local group was that the people behind the books publish stuff “based on interpretations that are… subject to debate,” and suggest taking all of it with a grain of salt.

What caught my eye, though, was not the interpretations, but rather the suggested drills.

They reminded me of the sort of drills you find in a certain class of music texts, where they’re going to go on to the advanced stuff, but they want to make sure you’ve got the basics down, so they’ll have exercises like, “Play every major and minor scale in every key for every octave.” Which, you know, if you can’t do it pretty smoothly, you’re going to have trouble doing the advanced stuff, so you might as well know that right from the start.

And that’s what these drills are like. One is to stand in each guard and cut, thrust, or shift to every other guard. Then take a few quick notes. Did moving from that guard to this or that other guard seem easy and comfortable? Did it seem like it would be useful, or just leave you open for your opponent to take some advantage?

The next drill was to stand in each guard, and then execute each of Meyer’s cuts and thrusts. Again, take some notes. What seemed like it worked?

Drills like that don’t seem like they would depend on the author’s hot takes on anything about Meyer. In fact, they seem great on every level. I can get an idea of what might or might not work. I can get some practice doing each of the cuts and thrusts. I can spend some time standing in each of the guards.

Those are all things I can benefit from.

So I started doing some drills along these lines today, starting with Right Ox and Dempfhau.

Me standing with my rapier in the guard of Right Ox
Me in Right Ox
A Meyer rapier fencer in Right Ox
A Meyer rapier fencer in Right Ox

I want to get a little lower in my fencing stance, and maybe hold my sword a little more forward, but it doesn’t seem as bad as I imagined.

Although Meyer doesn’t say so anywhere I’ve found, Right Ox is the guard you’d find yourself in at the end of drawing your rapier from a sheath. (Thibault says this, I think.) If your opponent drew before you, the very next thing you might need to do is fend off an attack, which suggests to me that Dempfhau might be very useful. So that’s one thing I drilled: Dempfhau from Right Ox followed by a thrust into Longpoint, followed by falling back down on the sword that I’d dempfhaued, and then moving to Iron Gate or back into Right Ox.

Besides that, I did some moving from Right Ox to several other guards (High Guard, Left Ox, Low Guard (on the right and on the left), Iron Gate, Plow, and Longpoint). I need to look more at the low guards and at plow, but the point of the drill is to start putting in the time, not to already be doing everything perfectly.

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This is my “long” run for the week. It’s very short because my previous long run (of a bit over 4 miles) left me worn out for 6 days.

Assuming I recover okay from this one, it’ll start the new standard I can build on for ramping up long runs over the summer.

Came to 3.32 miles in 47min 58s.

Map of today's run

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I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.

When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.

(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)

Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.

I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:

  1. Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
  2. Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recovery capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from

So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.

Me doing a kettlebell swing

So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.

Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.

I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)

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Most members of my HEMA club have painted their fencing masks in some way that’s meaningful to them.

I had long wanted to do so, but the thing I wanted to paint—the face of a sloth—was going to require at least three shades of brown, which I feared might be difficult to find. But when I finally went and looked on Amazon for acrylic paint markers, I found a set of acrylic markers in 12 different shades of brown!

I ordered them, they arrived yesterday, and I have painted my mask:

My brother confirms that I have met my goal:

https://wandering.shop/@stevendbrewer/116352448528001358/

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For the first couple of years I was doing longsword, I had real trouble keeping my arms extended and pushing my hands up (due to a lack of strength, lack of endurance, and lack of the habit).

I did all manner of training to work on this—exercises for arm strength, especially overhead pushing, endurance training for those same exercises, and of course sparring to train the habit. (See in particular Fitness training for longsword.)

I’m not there yet, but it no longer seems to be my worst problem. Here’s a sparring match with one of the better fencers in our local group:

I’m not quite all the way there, so it’s a thing to keep paying attention to, but it’s no longer my biggest problem.

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Just a smidgen longer than my previous long run, but this time I added some intervals along about the midpoint, where I ran hard for one minute, and then spent two minutes recovering, and repeated for a total of 5 times. Probably not the smartest choice (embedding that in a long run), but I enjoyed it anyway.

My fitbit says I did 4.75 miles in 1:13:26.

Just a spot where you can choose which part of the footpath to follow