The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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So...last week I expressed skepticism at the idea of exercise boosting one's mood. I got some good responses about what to do (lift, more intense exercise, etc.) but I wanted to hold off on some of them because it's basically a law of the gym that, if I do any strength training, I overreach and injure myself.
So...I overreached and injured myself! I can't even be mad this time because it's so absurd: I deliberately didn't touch weights and injured myself doing...Kegels - which was supposed to be light work. I was literally doing 5 a day and I still managed it. Low WIS + CON is a helluva combo.
But! It did give me an opportunity to test out if I feel worse without exercise and...eh?
I was annoyed on Monday, but I honestly can't tell if that was just my usual cyclical moroseness and depression and stress at work.
One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio. Not much harder (a 16:8 schedule is pretty easy) but I just feel hungrier (which might explain why I'm more irritable). Still not sure exactly why moderate-to-vigorous cardio would make me less hungry. Maybe it's that I'm just wasting an hour and a half working out and walking home that I would otherwise been thinking about food?
Anyways, besides that I do feel somewhat uncomfortable not being able to go to the gym because working out early was becoming a keystone habit and I feel like I'm losing that progress. But I don't feel significantly worse.
In retrospect I should have kept a log right after the injury. But low WIS strikes again...
If you're weak to the point of injuring yourself doing kegels then you should probably get help from a physical therapist. Try to look for a clinic where they profile themselves as working with sports injuries, the others are usually garbage and might not offer adequate in house exercise facilities.
Boosting this.
I lead a fairly active lifestyle, making sure to get adequate exercise. But on a friend's suggestion, I went to see a PT about my posture, which has turned into a multi-month journey into addressing various imabalances and weakeness that I never thought about because I took many things for granted, eg. a painful left knee while running, problems with stretching my hamstrings etc.
Turns out, I was using my body suboptimally, which lead to favoring certain parts over others, which then lead to minor but evergreen injuries. A good PT can easily spot these and, given their experience, figure out a good plan for addressing these problems.
As far as how to find a good PT, the only heuristic I've learned is to look for people that had training at the https://instituteofphysicalart.com/. Not sure if true, but I get a vibe from them that they are the rationalists of the PT world.
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