By Joel B. Belinan
January is the month when many individuals usually complain of having gained weight. Obviously, the culprits are the holiday season’s revelries. Unfortunately, instead of using such gained weight for people to restart their fitness regimen to get back in shape, they fail to get the momentum. Indeed, it’s really a challenge to return to one’s usually early morning run, then do their usual workouts like zumba, taiboo, taichii or in our case, boxing at the park. This is even aggravated by the dipping temperature during this time of year which makes it doubly harder to get up early morning. There were other instances when avid runners or sports enthusiasts, in general, lost their momentum due to lockdown restrictions as experienced during this pandemic.
The thing with these problems is, the longer the individual cannot fight off that laziness to get up and get back to his/her usual workout to sweat out, the harder it will be. In theory, it’s ideal for people to get back to their early morning outdoor exercises this January but in reality, we are seeing a lesser number of people doing it. In the past, the number starts to normalize in the middle of February when the weather gets a little warmer. Even in our boxing or kickboxing group, our number becomes less during this season.
The danger is that once we could not fight that tendency to stay late in bed, it becomes a permanent bad habit. And we should be forewarned that a sudden stop of one’s regular exercises especially if one is used to hard workouts, it may result not just in overweight but obesity within a very short time. Remember it is doubly harder to lose weight than to gain. What I may be able to attain reducing for two months or more can easily be offset by just a couple of weeks’ hiatus from my physical exercises including uncontrolled eating. This might be the reason why Bruce Lee once said that skipping a day’s training is like a two-step backward.
Now, the problem is how to return? My usual advice to my fitness buddies is just set your mind to get up early at 5:00 AM. Despite the hardship of getting up early with the temperature at 12 degrees centigrade or as low as 8 degrees centigrade just don’t mind such things. Just get up. I used to take as an example the issue of stopping the habit of smoking cigarettes or cigars or vapes. In many forums, I usually hear doctors or counselors advising people to slowly reduce their consumption daily. Unfortunately, I also heard some people who said that when they reduce their cigarette consumption it becomes even tastier to them that it really becomes harder to stop. In my personal experience, when I decided to stop smoking including drinking alcohol and even eating meat and fish and becoming a vegetarian more than 30 years ago, I just completely stopped. It’s the same kind of mindset if you want to get up early regardless of whether it’s cold or not.
One thing that works is peer influence like when three friends agree to do their early morning workouts together. With the aid of our favorite social media, one starts pestering the others as early as 4.40 AM. I also saw my son Miko easily getting up early to meet up with his barkadas to go for a road run. For others, it helps a lot when they join a group, such as a running club, bikers group, and in our case, our so-called Burnham Park boxing squad or the bigger one, the Burnham Park Team.
Among martial artists, viewing motivational videos can also be of great help. These videos are easily available on social media. One should select a video that addresses your problem, for example getting back to your usual early morning boxing or kickboxing training. Or videos that show a very sharp and powerful punching, but such can only be attained by having all those preparatory workouts like stretching, running, shadow boxing before working on the pads or, if in the gym, on the bags. So for those having a hard time getting up early, let’s set our minds and just get up early and get back to our outdoor work-outs. **
