I learnt a great trick about exercise: find a podcast or audio book that you really enjoy listening to. Here's the trick: you're only allowed to listen when you're exercising.
Also with food and drink: place friction between the treat and yourself. The easiest example is to not have biscuits / alcohol in the house.
Bonus tip: alcohol free beer is really good these days.
Alcohol free beer was a game changer for me. Also if I can’t avoid it alternating alcohol-containing and alcohol-free drinks.
For exercise your tip doesn’t help me at all. I hate audiobooks and podcasts so that would turn me off more from exercising. Also I want to concentrate on the exercise and not do it halfhearted.
What helped me was to realise how much better I feel after exercising - since then i kinda got addicted to it because I notice how much worse I feel after not doing it for a couple of days.
I agree on the friction. Just not having access to cigarettes is the best way for me to not smoke. I just don’t buy them and bumming one from someone else comes with a degree of personal shame for me that makes me avoid them (in almost all cases).
I naturally don’t like sweet stuff that much - however since I moved from EU to America (not US) it’s been really hard to avoid sugar.
Y’all put that stuff into everything it’s crazy; I gotta watch out like a hawk and go to special stores. In Europe it was so much easier, there are always cheap sugar free whole foods available in every supermarket.
I push hard enough during cardio that I can't really follow a podcast properly.
On the upside, it's only 30 minutes.
While lifting weight I do that since I rest for 90 seconds in between sets, which is actually very boring.
I started reading books during that time and that has been a big improvement.
If you're exercising for cardio, and you're able to follow your book or podcast, you're probably not doing good cardio. OTOH, it's not a bad way to do interval training while watching sports, go hard when they're yammering, slow down when the sports are happening (or, if you're watching soccer, you can go hard most of the time and then slow down for the replay if anything happens, which is unlikely)
> If you're exercising for cardio, and you're able to follow your book or podcast, you're probably not doing good cardio
But on the flip side, even if it isn't ideal, if that tip makes at least one person actually do any kind of cardio at all, even if it's the worst one on the planet, it's still better than nothing.
In fact, I'd probably consider your statement of preemptively shooting someone down like that (imagine being a 3rd reader of the original comment + your response), is massively more harmful to others than parent who at best tried to trick someone into doing bad cardio, which again would be better than nothing.
The majority of your cardio should be LISS unless you have extreme time constraints, but most people can find 30-60 minutes per day to get the recommended time in. This is an intensity at which you can hold a conversation.
If you have time for TV, you have time for watching it from a treadmill.
Maybe our brains work differently, but I have absolutely no problem following a podcast while running, and my race times indicate that I'm doing good cardio.
I do have a hard time with mind muscle connection during weight training if I'm listening to something other than music, though.
> If you're exercising for cardio, and you're able to follow your book or podcast, you're probably not doing good cardio.
Nonsense. Elite distance runners are doing 80% of their miles at essentially a conversational jog with a starkly lower HR than the 20% of intense miles. Cardio exercise under all levels of intensity is optimal, not just easy or just hard.
Also with food and drink: place friction between the treat and yourself. The easiest example is to not have biscuits / alcohol in the house.
Bonus tip: alcohol free beer is really good these days.