Spring Cleaning
Every year around this time we get a primal urge to have some sort of spring cleaning in our lives. The birds start singing, the daylight lingers and buds begin to bloom. I’m not necessarily talking about your house, closet or office. What if our bodies yearn for a more intrinsic cleaning. This year why not spring clean yourself? We can take part in a sort of rebirth that can be done every spring. Take stock in where your health is and where you’d like it to be.
When beginning the ritual of tidying your being, I believe we should start at the center. Go look in your pantry and refrigerator. What do you see? Is it crammed with BPA lined cans of food, boxes of cookies and crackers, and jars of old condiments? Or do you see foods that can nourish your body? Here’s a hint – if you have a jar of basic ranch dressing, it’s a sign that this process may take a while. Pull everything out and check the labels of not just the ingredients but the expiration dates. Make sure you know what food is in your house and start to plan what you want to replace everything you purge with. I understand that eating healthy can be expensive and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Bad health is much more expensive than healthy food ever was.
After you finish, it’s time to make some lists. One list of things in your life you aren't happy with and would like to change, and one list of things in your life you’d like to accomplish. You can think big or small. Next to each item notate what daily habits are helping you accomplish your goals and what habits are impeding your success. I should have warned you this might take a lot of paper. Now, number the goals from easiest to hardest or most time consuming to conquer. If you start simple, it’s easy to keep your momentum going to accomplish more and more. If you know what you are doing to help or hinder your process, you now have a basic outline for success. And in my experience, once a goal is outlined on paper, it becomes much easier to put a plan in action and the obstacles seem surmountable. These lists can help you work through mental and emotional roadblocks that you never realized you had. It can be quite cathartic of you take some time with this.
I’m assuming that one of your goals that you discover is in reference to exercise. If you read any of my articles you knew it was bound to get to this subject at some point. It’s paragraph four so this is probably a personal record for me. Yes, exercise, or better yet train. I’m hoping that your primary goal in this arena is strength. I have found that with just a basic improvement in full body, multi-planar strength, a myriad of ailments seem to disappear. It’s been proven by countless studies to be beneficial in countless ways that you don’t need me to list off but are none the less indisputable. I once had a gentleman salesperson at an unnamed homewares store tell me (even though I didn’t ask) that he didn’t exercise because it was his belief that we only have so many heart beats and he didn’t want to use them all at one time. I can’t help someone like that. No one can. The only defining moment we have a definitive amount of heart beats is the second after your last one. Until then, it’s not too late to begin a program to get stronger. Learn to plank, pull, push, rotate, squat and carry. If you practice what I consider the six foundational movement patterns, your life will get better. You can start to clear the cobwebs of immobility. No one ever wants to be limited by poor health and almost everyone has the power to do better. Train better. Feel better. Be better.
