by Micah McKamie
During all of the time I had to meditate during quarantine, I had a huge realization about my fitness ideals. Before I became a runner, I had always wondered how people made time for staying in shape. How was it that people prioritized the gym over spending time with friends or making memories? What it came down to was that these people had prioritized themselves and not the act of working out.
A lot of people have this kind of dedication, and some people don’t like gyms or running, but still want to stay fit. Just like coming to cannabis, starting a new fitness journey can be a scary task. There are new clothes, equipment, diets, and lingo that come along with the territory and you may not always feel comfortable in a public fitness setting. Finding the time to implement this new lifestyle becomes a workout on its own. The truth is that without dedicating some sort of time to working out, it’s pretty hard to motivate yourself to do any of it.
The idea of time, though obscure, isn’t about the minutes – it’s about the mindset. Keep your fitness at the forefront of your mind and utilize those fleeting moments. It’s not a bad thing if you don’t think of this time as useful. Many people see “down” minutes as just time they have to get past to get to the thing they really want to do. However, these minutes can change your life.
It was hard at first to learn how to make these minutes a priority, but eventually, it became a passion. I started getting to appointments early so I could do some bodyweight exercises or a circuit in their parking lot or doing dips on a bike rack as I walked past it because I had a minute or two. It’s all about how you frame these moments in your mind. Are they trash or are they useful? If you are doing nothing else besides scrolling through social media consider doing some squats, wall sits, or something to enhance your self-esteem and well-being.
Now I know that this article is about Training Through Terpenes, so where is the cannabis, might you ask? Training Through Terps helped me conquer the obstacle of where and how to implement these workouts during down moments. If you’re high, you don’t care about what people are doing or thinking around you. Take a nice long drag off of your vape pen, eat an edible early, smoke a joint and do some burpees in the grassy yard of your real estate agent, or take a dab in your car and do yoga at the park. It’s all about being in the moment and prioritizing your fitness needs over the anxiety of being in public. We have been told our whole lives to not think selfishly but when it comes to your health and well-being, you should be selfish.
Fitness is about choices. It’s about taking the time to prioritize yourself over all of the little distractions in life, and that can be an issue even for athletes. How do you fit your workouts around your responsibilities? A lot of hardcore athletes finally get their name out there, start a business, and then their fitness falls off. It’s all about where you put your time and prioritizing the minutes you waste.
So I started timing everything! I probably looked like a crazy person, but I would time the seconds in a day where I was sitting still with nothing to do. Waiting in a grocery line, on the phone with customer service, and even at work, there were times where we got everything done and everyone else was on their phones that I was thinking to myself, “I could be doing pushups.”
The time added up quickly! The seconds turned to minutes and then hit an hour….. Finally at the end of the day, as I lay down to go to bed, I had accumulated one hour and fifteen minutes of exercise time that could be utilized. That’s enough time to improve your fitness levels! Now, we aren’t talking about exponential growth, but even on the low end of this amount of time (30 min), you can maintain your current fitness.
What if I don’t want to do your workouts in public? Well, during covid lockdown I moved all of the furniture out of my living room to have more clear space for fitness activities. This made me adjust how I was seated and positioned during my normal TV time. What I found as I laid on the floor watching Bob’s Burgers was that I could get some amazing workouts done during the commercials. Push-ups, sit-ups, flutter kicks, and burpees became my normal commercial activities.
The average American watches nearly 4 hours of TV every day!!!! If you watch 4 hours of TV every day, you get about 80 minutes worth of commercials. That’s nearly an hour and a half of fitness! The thing I loved about this and even after I moved my furniture back into the room, is that just putting yourself in a position to utilize these wasted minutes could really allow you to not just maintain but to exceed your fitness goals.
What if commercials weren’t just for bathroom breaks and social media?!? What if you could get your entire workout in during your usual downtime? We can all agree that commercials are uniquely awful and most of us spend our time trying to drown out the horrible thirty-second runs for prescription drugs and adult diapers and don’t really see the minutes that tick by.
Time a 20-minute run right before you watch your shows, stop upgrading to commercial-free streaming, and use those minutes to get you a badass HIIT workout in. Do something as simple as flutter kicks during that time, add in planks and squats, and you have yourself a pretty solid fat burner and core workout for an evening. Every time you hear the commercial, you should be thinking I want to do push-ups!
The next Gassed Up Fitness Event will be on April 17th at Medicann Dispensary off of 39th Street in Bethany! Come join us for the 420 festivities that include giveaways, live music, food trucks, vendors, and The Sesh, Oklahoma City’s first official cannabis hangout. It will be a day of cannabis, community, and breaking the stigma!
