My First Tiny Experiment
As I was reading Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book, I decided to follow her advice and try out a tiny experiment in my own life.
What I read: Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Published March 4, 2015.
The truth is I’m not quite done reading the book referenced here. I’m nearly finished. I referenced Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book in my “Lifelong Curiosity About Yourself” post and will comment on the entire book soon.
However, I didn’t need to finish the book to begin engaging in what Le Cunff calls “tiny experiments.”
Rather than set goals, Le Cunff suggests we instead run tiny experiments throughout our lives to improve ourselves and our life generally. As I wrote in “Stop Dangling Carrots,” and other writings, I am no longer a fan of setting life goals and instead align much more with Lc Cunff’s strategy of creating tiny experiments throughout my life to learn about myself and gain new knowledge and skills.
Although I wrote in that post that I now create tiny experiments throughout my life, I never approached them as “experiments” per se until I began to read Le Cunff’s book and decided to try out an official tiny experiment. So, I did.
My first experiment was a simple one. In her book, Le Cunff mentions that 10 days is often an appropriate length of time to give a tiny experiment a try so that was the timeframe I used to launch an experiment to improve my fitness.
Despite a long history of being an avid exerciser, I’ve been incredibly lax about physical fitness in recent years. I want to correct that. Thus, the tiny experiment.
Experiment Hypothesis
By doing just one simple exercise series for a minute or two a day it will kickstart my commitment to exercise and prompt me to do more.
The Experiment
For 10 days I committed to doing just one specific two-exercise series. I did five slow bodyweight squats followed by five slow push-ups.
Here is the form I used for bodyweight squats.
Here is the approximate form I used for the push-ups (press-ups).
Results
After 10 days of doing the simple series without missing a day, I came to some useful conclusions as I reflected on the experience.
Because of a past right knee injury and past injuries in both shoulders that require me to adjust certain movements, I’m better off doing exercises slowly while adhering rigidly to good form.
While the squats form was good for me as the video illustrates, I needed to move my hands directly under my shoulders and not wide when doing push-ups to avoid the twinge that tells me I’m moving my shoulder in ways I shouldn’t. This corresponds to guidance yoga teachers will give you when doing such pressing up movements because it best aligns with our physiology.
I found myself on many days doing more than a single series. Two of the 10 days I did the series three times. Three other days I did it twice.
I’m noticeably stronger. By the ninth and tenth days, the squats were much easier to do as were the push-ups. I had gained strength.
The biggest result was that, as I had hypothesized, by committing to a single, simple, and short exercise series, I was prompted to take better care of myself generally. I found myself walking more each day. I found myself watching my diet a bit more closely. Creating a simple ritualistic exercise series that was easy to stick to ended up creating a better sense of commitment to my fitness and health generally.
Conclusion
For me (I try to not speak for others), this type of simple exercise commitment did indeed prompt me to not only do that specific exercise sequence but also encouraged me to otherwise do things to improve my health and fitness as a meaningful cascading effect.
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