Working out in jeans

Yesterday I did my ten minute calisthenics workout in my jeans.

Not gym shorts. Jeans, and the shirt I had been wearing since breakfast.

I had always assumed the thing standing between me and regular exercise was discipline. It turns out it was laundry.

What I actually want here is small and regular. A yoga mat on the floor, the pull up bar in the doorway, ten minutes, most days. That is the whole plan. There is no event. Nobody is watching.

And the ten minutes was never the hard part. The hard part is everything wrapped around it. Find the shorts. Change. Do the ten minutes. Decide I should probably shower now. Change again.

So it is ten minutes of exercise inside half an hour of admin, and the half hour kept winning. Which is a polite way of saying the ten minutes kept not happening.

So I took the changing out. I walked past the mat in what I was already wearing, did the ten minutes, and carried on with my day.

It worked. The jeans were fine. I was fine. Ten minutes is not hard enough to need a shower, which is the part I had been getting wrong all along. I was budgeting for a workout I was never actually going to do.

Now the part I am less sure about.

Optimising hard against one number is usually how you get into trouble. Here the number is friction, and I am pushing it to zero. That is not obviously the right thing to do. Balance probably matters more than any single measure, and something usually gets lost when the only thing you are improving is how easy you made it.

So I am not claiming this is the answer. I am testing it and learning. Let's see what happens.