2024 wasn’t the best year. Normally, I don’t make a lot of New Year’s resolutions. I’d much rather change things over time, implement a new way of doing things when the time is appropriate, and not just save it all up.
However, given the nature of the previous year, tagging things to be changed for the new year just makes sense.
I figure I’ll do at least two of these, one focused on movement, and the other on diet and other changes.
I actually implemented all of these during 2025-beta. I knew that the new year would start better if I’d already worked out many of the kinks in the system beforehand.
The other thing I’ll point out: I had a bacterial infection for the last six months of 2024. I was on four courses of different antibiotics over the course of six months trying to get rid of it. The last one, which finished just before Christmas, was finally successful. While I was able to start some of the movement changes before then, they became a LOT easier once the infection was finally gone.
Walk Every Hour
My Fitbit, AKA the Tyrant of Movement, has reminders for me to get in at least 250 steps every hour. I turned off those reminders for much of the year as getting up like that was just One Thing Too Many. Toward the end of the year I turned those reminders back on and started respecting them again. It’s a small thing. Short walks every hour (or riding the pedal machine for five minutes), ten times per day.
It’s a small thing, but I know it’s good for me.
7000 Steps Per Day
I work better with carrots than with sticks. The Tyrant always celebrates when I achieve a milestone.
I had set my milestone for 10K steps per day. But I was NEVER hitting that goal. It got so bad that I didn’t even want to try because I knew I wouldn’t make it.
However, getting in 7K steps is just as good, according to the science. Sure, 10K is better, but the majority of the health benefits that you’re looking for by walking show up at 7K.
By changing my goal to 7K steps per day, I’m actually hitting it, and feeling so much better about myself.
Hopefully by midyear 2025 I’ll be able to up that back to 10K. We’ll see how the year goes.
20 Minutes Pedal Machine Every Day
I’ve been getting up and riding my pedal machine for 20 minutes every morning. I even brought it over to TH2 from the main house.
Why 20 minutes? Because the Tyrant rewards me for that amount of effort.
It isn’t a lot. There’s no resistance on the machine. I’m just moving my legs up and down for 20 minutes. Not really even getting my heartrate up.
It is MOVEMENT. And all movement is good at this stage. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself, so that I won’t judge myself too harshly for this goal.
I’d like to get back to walking a mile before breakfast every day. I probably won’t start that until it gets nicer out.
Getting Back to the Gym
Back in October, I joined a gym. I was really good about going for the first four weeks.
Then November happened. November was bad.
I didn’t get back to the gym in December either. I wasn’t happy with the routine I’d set up. I’m changing my routine so that the gym will be easier and better for me.
I haven’t started going back yet. I’m going to try to go back in a couple of days, with the new routine.
I’m starting off with sprint training again. I didn’t actually like doing the sprints, but after just four sessions I could already see improvements to my stamina. That was enough to keep me going.
I was walking for 10 minutes, doing sprints for 9 minutes, walking for 10 minutes, then going back home. Having such a short workout was really good for me.
Now, I’m going to walk for 20 minutes, so the Tyrant will give me a reward for going to the gym. Then do the 9 minutes of sprints, 10 minutes cool down. It means adding 10 minutes to the total gym time, but I think that will be okay.
Eventually, I’ll increase the amount of sprints I’m doing, but only to 12 minutes, with different ratios of sprint versus recovery time.
Sometime after that, I’ll add in resistance training. Right now, that’s One Thing Too Many. I want to take smaller steps so that my routine is sustainable.
Standing While Writing
Honestly, this is probably one of the biggest, best, most important things I can do for myself, in terms of my health.
I used to stand all day long. I’d write standing up, then I’d do production work standing up. I wouldn’t sit down until the evening, after dinner.
In 2020, I messed up my knee. Badly. Got a knee replacement in 2021. Have never gotten back to standing, though. I might have started trying to do it earlier, back in 2024, but give the shit of that year, it wasn’t going to happen.
In the fall, I rearranged TH2 to better accommodate standing while writing. I now have a desk that’s really easy to move up and down.
I started trying to stand while writing during the 2025-beta period. Wasn’t very successful at starting out writing and standing.
Eventually figured out that if I sat for the first hour of writing, I could stand for the rest of the time. I’ll get back to standing for the entire session, but I’m not there yet, and that’s okay. Then, after I manage standing for the entire writing session, I’ll move back to trying to stand for most of the afternoon.
Sitting On The Floor
A test that physical therapists sometimes use to assess a person’s ability to move is to have them sit down on the floor without using their hands, then to get back up again.
I lost that ability when my knee went bad in 2020. After the knee replacement, I diligently practiced until I could do it again. I vaguely recall that it took me some amount of time to get there, possibly as much as six months.
Sometime during 2024, I lost that ability again. It became really obvious doing the tiling given how much my hips hurt after doing that work for a while.
So every night I’m now sitting on the floor for between 30-60 minutes. I’m frequently painting with watercolors at that time, so I generally need to get up and down at least a couple of times. It will take me a while to rebuild those muscles. But I’m hoping that by the middle of next year, I’ll be strong enough to be able to sit down on the floor and get back up again without using my hands.
Lazy Fit
I have an app on my phone that I paid for called Lazy Fit. It’s less than 10 minutes of movement every day. It’s very easy movements, chair aerobics, doing different exercises on the bed, or walking in place.
I started this back in November. I’m not sure how long I’ll continue with it, though I paid for a year of it. It helped me start moving, which was what I really needed. It’s quite frankly too easy at this point. I’m considering continuing to do the chair exercises, though doing most of them while standing. We’ll see. Doing the 20 minutes on the pedal machine may end up replacing this, and I’m okay with that.
Things I’m Not Doing
The Tyrant has a new feature, where it monitors your cardio load for the day. I am NOT paying attention to that currently. One Thing Too Many.
Beating myself up for the bad days. This is a life goal for me, quite frankly. However, I haven’t nailed my sleep. So there are mornings that are going to be hard (like this morning, when my Fitbit registers that I barely got 6 hours of sleep last night).
Adding more. This is enough change. Anything else honestly becomes One Thing Too Many. I need to get these habits a bit more solidly under my belt before I try to do more.
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So how about you? What sorts of movement changes are you planning on implementing in 2025? What are you NOT doing, which is honestly just as important?