I humbly offer them for your consideration:
1. Three full-body workouts a week. The results? I'm not just stronger in the gym. I'm stronger in life.
2. I've been lifting consistently for 5 years. Not perfectly, just consistently. That's the real secret of success -- time and patience.
3. We need more recovery time, not less, as we age. Three gym sessions a week gives my 74-year old muscles 48 hours between workouts. This leaves me with more energy to push hard in each session.
4. I stopped chasing soreness. Being sore doesn't mean you had a great workout. Progressive overload does.
5. A bedroom conducive to sleep. Make sure your sleeping environment is as comfortable, cool, dark, and quiet as possible.
6. Routine. Stop chasing new fads or programs. Give sensible habits time to become ingrained habits. The problem is, we start our new athletic lives with almost as much frequency as Mark Twain gave up smoking (thousands of times) and with about the same success.
7. Exercise covers a multitude of dietary sins. Nutrition is a very controversial subject, but few will deny that we get unhealthier eating rather than fasting, or that our intake of refined sugar is unnatural. Having earned our daily bread, we can turn it into daily health. The athlete doesn't stop eating junk food and start training. He starts training and finds that he has stopped eating junk food. He starts lifting and finds he is eating the right things in the right proportions.
So there you have it -- 7 things I've done to get relatively fit. Great tasks depend on small things. Our health, then, depends on the day-to-day choices we make about the supposed "minor" details of life. The athlete knows this more than many. You don't need to do everything. Find the practical thing you can repeat. The mental differences? I'm not exhausted. I'm not stressed. I'm not white-knuckling my way through an exercise program I hate. The physical differences? More muscle definition. Better body composition. And, by the sheer grace of God, I'm in the best shape of my life.
