First Perfect Activity Week

I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch since receiving it as a Father’s Day gift in 2018. Anyone who has one knows about the three activity rings that show up on your watch as a way to track and encourage the wearer to be active throughout the day.

The inner blue ring is the stand ring and closes if you stand once an hour for 12 hours throughout the day. The second green ring is the exercise ring and closes with 30 minutes of exercise where your heart rate exceeds 95 beats per minute. The outer red ring is an activity ring that closes if you burn 900 calories through moving around. Typically it works out that you close the blue and red ring but the green will only close with exercise.

In all of the time I’ve had this watch I’ve never had a perfect week where I closed all of my rings. This is probably because it wasn’t a priority until I came across others posting about finally closing their rings and the satisfaction it gave. I set out to do the same but constantly ran into barriers.

Many of these barriers involved either being sick, waiting until the last part of the day to exercise and being way too tired, scheduling exercise in the morning and not getting up in time, or just plain being lazy. I decided after some research that my problem was really related to mental blocking.

First off I decided that if I got sick I’d train through it. If I got tired I’d train through it too. If I needed to get up earlier I’d go to bed earlier. All of this seemed to get me closer but I couldn’t close the gap until I admitted that I’d need to exercise at the times when it was the last thing I wanted to do. This happened on Tuesday of my perfect week.

Typically during the winter I spend long periods of time sick. This is just a byproduct of having kids in daycare and school. This past winter I actually had spent little time feeling poorly as the boys started paying attention to where they sneezed and coughed (prior it was usually in my face or over my hands and food). I was pretty optimistic I could accomplish this mini goal for once.

Then the sickness set in. A heavy chest cold with cough started dogging me. After feeling completely frustrated with it I decided to workout regardless. I got on the trainer and knocked out 30 minutes. I felt terrible. My lungs felt like leather bags. But emotionally I felt awesome. For the first time I broke through an obstacle that previously overwhelmed me. I then finished the week with an epic 2000 meter swim that I closed out in under an hour. I have to pat myself on the back for that one.

It’s been a week since this and I’m getting ready to click off my second perfect one. Then I want a perfect month and then a perfect year. I will say that exercising every day for 30 minutes has a noticeable effect on my body. My cardio and leg strength is noticeably improving and it’s positively affecting my stress management.

The next step beyond what’s mentioned here includes rolling in my triathlon training by bumping up my goals to 60 minute exercise times every day. I’ll probably do the extra session in the morning with one at lunch. I can accomplish this with my gym membership and new home gym setup.

Thanks for reading!