I like physical exercise and to move my body in my everyday life. To be able to carry out a project like NVCtrip I guess a prerequisite is to enjoy exercising with your body. So, how does my training discipline look like?
The base of my physical training is an everyday life with a lot of movement and avoiding being still for longer periods. There are a lot of research of the dangers of a sitting lifestyle, here you can read about some of them.
When I “have to” sit I try to stand up and walk a couple of steps every once in a while. Sometimes though I feel a little awkward and I submit to the norm. As a help I have a watch that buzzes and show a red sign when I’ve been still for an hour. A couple of years ago I heard that boys in their teens ought to walk 14 000 steps a day in order to be healthy. I then decided that the goal for me would be 15 000 steps a day including any exercise that counts my steps. It’s often not too hard for me to reach this goal. Sometimes, for example if I have a day full of meetings or if I bike a lot (my watch doesn’t count steps when biking) it can be a challenge for me. I then need to take a late walk or if I’m at work, take the remaining steps in the basement when the duties of the day are done (don’t tell my colleagues).
During my NVCtrip I will bike for 7-8 hours or walk for 8-9 hours a day. Even if my movements during the trip will be quite low intense I need to adapt my body to more movements than in my usual life. One step in this direction is to increase my daily steps. Starting from January first I will walk 1000 steps more each day and increase that goal each month until the end of June when I will start the NVCtrip. So this month (January) I have walked at least 16 000 steps each day. In February I will walk at least 17 000 steps each day and so on until June when I will walk 20 000 steps each day.
In the mid-February I will travel up north visiting my friends in Piteå and participate in a cross country skiing race, Andörjan. Therefore my training in the beginning of the year looks a bit different. Every second day I go to the gym and work out 30 minutes on a ski trainer and one to two times a week I use a cross trainer. To prepare myself for biking I try to do spinning twice a week. And now and then I take a run. Three to four times a week I do strength training, mainly with dumbbells and barbell.
When I’m not preparing for a specific race I run approximately three times a week between 30 to 70 minutes. And when the weather gets better I change spinnig to outdoor biking, sometimes up to three hours at a time. I could bike outdoors in wintertime, but in this case I’m quite comfortable and prefer biking when the bike is not getting to dirty and muddy with snow, dirt and salt.