Fitness

What does Fitness have to do with Sims?

• Fitness can help keep you strong, give you more energy, and help you remain more alert, so that you can enjoy your sims even more.
• Maybe it's upper body strength for sim racing with high strength ffb wheels or heavy load cell pedals
• Or for controlling flight yokes in flight slims and their rudder pedals
• Or perhaps you need to keep a sharp mind for a city sim
• Or keep your energy high for a long session, maybe a 24 hour endurance sim race
• Whatever the sim, keeping your fitness at an adequate level can only serve to help improve your sim enjoyment

How To Start Your Fitness Journey

Starting:

• Just start. Anywhere. Seriously. Just start. Do it today. Start now.
• Write it down.
• Improve on one thing week by week.

My Fitness Journey:

• Today, I am exercising 6 days per week, with one recovery day. Sundays are good for a recovery day and it is good for your soul to rest on the Lord's Day and honour Him by keeping it Holy.
• I have a workout set 4 days per week + treadmill cardio. 2 days per week are just treadmill cardio. 1 day per week is recovery.
• But, I started out 20 years ago running on the spot for 1 minute. And I was winded.
• Trust me, you can do it. Do it today. Start now.

The Fitness Triangle is the key:

• Exercise - Nutrition - Fasting: The Fitness Triangle
• The value of the fitness triangle is that it is the simplest way to know, first, what you should do and, second, when you have to start improving something else
• Exercise includes any activity that burns calories above your basal rate [1] (what your body consumes just to maintain itself)
• Nutrition is what you eat, the nutritional value of it (vitamins, minerals, fats, sugars, etc.), and how much
• Fasting is how many hours per day you are regularly not eating. Put another way, it's your "eating window" per day. My eating window is 6 hours per day.
  • Sleeping hours is just the beginning. Try extending 8 sleeping hours by 1 hour and see how it feels. Keep improving on it week by week. Once you reach 16-18 hours fasting per day, focus on improving a different area.
• It doesn't matter how little you do of each, to start, just start. Then, improve on one thing week by week.

It's All Theory Until You Step On The Weight Scale:

• If your goal is to lose weight then the weight scale is your ultimate source of truth
• If you're losing weight, great
• If you want to lose weight faster, than you need to improve on either Exercise, Nutrition, or Fasting. It really is that simple.
• If you're gaining weight, you also need to improve on either Exercise, Nutrition, or Fasting. It's just that simple.
• And that's why the fitness triangle is the key.

Improving:

• Optimize the thing that still has the most potential gains: Exercise, Nutrition, Fasting
• If your goal is to lose weight, and you're already fasting 18/6 and basically doing OMAD (One Meal A Day) then extending your fasting hours even further will not help you very much. There's only so much more benefit you can squeeze out of that when you're already at that level.
• Instead, you should look to improving Nutrition or Fasting. Perhaps you're eating the wrong thing or you're not exercising enough.

Write It Down:

• Writing down your fitness notes will track your workouts, remind you of what you've already accomplished, show you intervals at which you can measure your progress eg. weight, and will help you know when you need to improve on some area of your fitness work
• I use the Notes app on my phone. At first, it was a simple note just recording what I was doing. Over time, it started include many more things, like goals, reasons why I was even doing fitness work, tips, warnings, reminders, etc.
• Record your health data, such as steps and weight, in the Health app

Keys:

• Consistency
  • You need to be active every day of the week
  • You need to be doing a workout most days of the week ex. 4 out of 7
• Resilience
  • If you miss a day, feel depressed, or suffer a setback like an injury, get back on the workout schedule as soon as possible even if you have to do less
• These keys are huge to your success.
  • You must do these things or you will find you won't be able to make progress.
  • Just keep 'getting back on the horse' no matter what delays or setbacks you may face

Motivation:

• Write down your motivation: Why are you getting fit? What do you want at the end of it?
• Be honest with yourself. Tell yourself what you really want.
• Only your true motivations will help remind you why you're putting yourself through all this.

Exercise:

• Remember: Warmup -> Workout -> Stretch
  • Warmup includes natural, range of motion body movements with no weight, pressure, or holding. Sometimes called dynamic stretching.
    • Warmups also "warm up" your joints, muscles, tendons, and other tissues to help them ease into your workout-level effort
  • Stretching includes more than just natural, range of motion body movements, may include extra weight, pressure, and holding. Sometimes called static stretching.
    • Always do stretching after your workout
    • Stretching of this type temporarily weakens muscles which you need at optimum performance for your workout for the best results and to avoid injury

Nutrition:

• Diet:
  • Protein first, vegetables second
  • More real, whole meats (beef, pork, chicken, etc.)
  • Mix up your food: Don't get bored of just eating beef all the time. Mix in pork or chicken.
  • Less junk food
• Vitamins:
  • ...
• Minerals:
  • ...

Fasting:

• You can think of this as fasting, even dieting, and you can also think of it as an "eating window", the number of hours per day you allow yourself to eat
• You can drink non-calorie drinks. Coffee and tea are great and both can alleviate hunger pangs.
• You probably shouldn't do extended fasts
  • I've fasted for 11 days before and had a raging appetite for the next month which gained all the weight back
  • Regular, everyday, sustainable fasting that just becomes your normal is the best way to results

Tips:

• Develop muscle mass with resistance training with something as simple as rubber resistance bands you can buy cheaply
  • Muscle mass will burn calories repairing and maintaining itself that would otherwise get deposited as fat
• Break up workout sets into multiple per day if they become overly long or intensive
  • For example, when I got above 10,000 steps per day, I found it was better to do half the steps in a set in the morning and half in the evening.
  • This also provides recovery healing time and reduces the chance of repetitive stress injury.
• Use A Recovery Day
  • For health and mental wellness, a recovery day is very valuable.
  • A recovery day is a day where you do significantly less of your usual fitness work. For example, my recovery days are just getting 50% steps in. I just do steps and avoid doing the other exercises.
  • Do not push yourself on recovery days even if you feel 100% fine. Your body needs rest and it is healing internally in places you can't feel. The point is to rest. It's okay, give yourself a break.
  • There is something very right about making Sunday your rest day, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. And God will honour your choice. For even God rested on the 7th day.
• Check Your Weight Weekly Up To Monthly But Not Shorter Or Longer
  • I check my weight every 2-4 weeks
  • My workout notes in my Notes app, show me when I've done 8-16 days of workouts and that's when I know to check my weight
• Loose Shoelaces Are Good Actually (On a treadmill at least)
  • I have been tying my shoelaces pretty tightly my whole life, including on the treadmill where I get most of my steps in
  • Over 10,000 steps, I was experiencing sharp pains in multiple locations on my foot. Often they would disappear but come back again. This happened every workout no matter how often I tried to get used to it.
  • But, one day, I did my laces up much looser, barely even snug, and all the pain went away.
  • Bottom line, your foot is the thing doing the step, all your shoe is doing is providing a soft, consistent place to land. That's why loose shoelaces help with the pain.
  • I can't make a recommendation on shoelace tightness for outdoor walking or running. I suspect you need somewhat tighter laces on natural ground.
• Sim Racing = 1000 Steps = 300-calorie burn?
  • I had the thought that, eventually, I'm going to reach my fitness goal and I won't need to workout so much just to maintain the fitness level that I've achieved.
  • That made me think of how to maintain that fitness level with natural activity. And sim racing, with high strength ffb wheels, is certainly a workout of its own.
  • I suspect 1 hour of active sim racing might be the calorie-burn equivalent of 1000 steps although ~300 calories seems high, so I can't say for sure.
• Do what is sustainable over personal bests
  • Results will come with the fitness work you do every day, not the personal bests you do every once in a while

Cautions:

• Limit improvements to less than 10% per week
  • Meaning: Do not increase duration, weight, sets, reps, steps, etc., by more than 10% per week or you will likely hurt yourself and have to waste time recovering
  • Increase only one thing at a time when improving: Weight or reps or sets but not two or more at the same time
  • Reset exercise modifiers when improving: For example, reset treadmill include to 0 when improving.
• Minimum 6 hour recovery between workouts
  • Preferably 9+ hours if you can manage it
• Do not exercise 3 or more times per day
  • You will likely not get in the minimum 6 hour recovery and healing time needed between workouts
  • This is not a universal rule for everybody. 3+ workouts per day might work for somebody but for most, keep to 1 or 2.

Wellness

Grounding The Internet: Putting The Internet Back In Its Room

Covid lockdowns became a time when social media, such as X, became a critical outlet to counter authoritarian tyranny. Over time, my social media use increased to an excessive number of hours per day. I knew I would be better off finding a way to reduce the time spent staring at my phone. This information is the result.

Steps to begin moving the Internet off of your phone and back into your home on a computer you can't carry around with you:

• A video thumbnail caught my eye one day and its thumbnail said this: the internet lived in a room
• The video was The Internet Used to Be a Place
• The idea caught me more than the video, itself, although its worth watching, too
• I grew up in the time before smartphones when the Internet did 'live in a room', so to speak, and those were better, healthier times, not just for me but everybody since the advent of the smartphone and especially infinite scroll social media apps
• It got me thinking about how to begin moving the addictive part of the Internet back into a room and onto a computer that I wouldn't always have with me and so help me break bad habits

Putting The Internet Back In Its Room: A Checklist

1. Level 1 - Addict
   1. Limit app screen time for problem apps eg. most likely social apps
   2. Gradually reduce screen time limit eg. to about one hour
   3. Setup social access on your home computer ie. using a web browser
2. Level 2 - Student
   1. Move social icons off your main home screen
   2. Fake apps with website Home Screen bookmarks
   3. Move all apps possible off home screens to the app library
3. Level 3 - Master
   1. Remove remaining social app bookmark icons from main home screen so you have to swipe at least one screen to get them
   2. Reduce apps to fit only on the main home screen
   3. Eventually delete social apps from your phone
4. Level 4 - Sage
   1. Reduce main home screen to only critical apps ie. move apps to other screens or the app library so that your main home screen has a few icons as possible
   2. Clear out App Library of unnecessary apps
   3. Move to a dumb phone

At The End:

• What you should end up with is a minimal phone experience, without having to go to a dumb phone (unless you wish), which you now have the discipline and willpower to use in a healthy, responsible way while still retaining access to important apps at the appropriate times

Goals:

• Moving back to the web: Apps are addictive and invasive. Websites are more easily isolated and constrained by resources and privacy protections.

Notes:

• You can still use social but it should be via the browser where there is greater resistance to use, less features to get you addicted, and it should still be time limited on your phone
• You will need to keep important apps like banking apps, authenticators, messaging apps, etc but they can be moved to the App Library
• Limit YouTube screen time even though it’s not considered social if you’re staring at it more than 1h: You can still use it to listen to podcasts with the screen off.
  • Screen time limits work for cases like this because they only track time while the screen is on the app and not while it’s in the background.

My Progress:

• I have completed Level 3 but have not made any progress on Level 4
• The process so far has taken a month or two, at first very slowly, and then quite quickly in the last few weeks
• I feel like it's getting easier to 'background' the addictive apps on my phone and save it for the home computer

Questions:

• Why this works if the apps are still on your phone?
  • First is an increased barrier to entry, no matter how small (ie. moving an app off the home screen), will tend to reduce your usage. It's petty human behaviour and the trick can work.
  • Second is an app in the app library requires you to at least swipe a number of times or search for it, increasing the barrier of entry, and giving you less incentive and more time to think if you really ought to be using the app
  • Third is bookmark apps tend to be just a little slower and a little less feature-full then native apps and this reduces the incentive and reward-tricks apps use to keep you using them
  • Fourth is psychologically you know you still have access to the apps if you really care that much so there is less angst about it

Tips and Tricks:

• If you feel anxious about removing an app or moving an app off your home screen:
  • Move it to a second or third home screen and see how you feel over the next day or two. If you don't miss it, remove the app or move it to the app library.
• You can set screentime limits even for websites in a browser ie. Look for the domain name in the Screen Limits app ie. X.com
• You don’t have to delete messaging apps even though they’re considered “social” unless they’ve become addictive
• Having a slower phone is actually advantageous as its slowness creates more resistance and encourages you to close apps to save resources

Key Terms:

• Friction / Resistance / Barrier to entry: Easy psychological trick to break habits

If you need more to be convinced:

• The Attention Economy Is Everywhere. Self-Hosting Is the Escape. (Video) - Well done video describing the problem and the solution(s)