2 HOUR study with me! (no music)

2 HOUR study with me! (no music)

2 HOUR study with me! (no music)

STUDY WITH ME! Real time study! [+ delicious vegan donuts!]

I hired a Personal Trainer; 2018 Lifestyle Change

I hired a PT – personal trainer. After two months of going on my own to try and hit the daily exercise targets I’d finally realized that DIY-ing it has its limitations. I was keen to try out some harder and more complex exercise to see if there was a way to fast track my performance.

I’d watched a lot of fitness blogs and I’d seen many cool moves I was keen to learn – mostly just to show off in the gym. Most specifically I was keen to learn to do a ‘box jump’ a movement where you jump on top of a 24 inch box and land in a squat position. The second one I was keen to get started on was a squat rack – a machine which helps you to squat using heavy weights. It’s a very popular machine for fitness bloggers – and I was pretty inspired at this stage.

I’d met the girl I worked with previously on a Friday morning boot camp that the gym ran. I had started going out of general interest – thinking that it might help me figure out how to get more out of the gym. It’s a 45 minute high intensity interval training session (HIIT). HIIT are very popular modern work outs as they raise your heart rate and increase your after caloric burn.

There are two types of calorie burn – there’s active calories and resting calories. Generally speaking, you have to move to burn calories – however, post exercise oxygen intake can increase your resting caloric burn to up the number of calories that you burn overall. This is especially true for those who struggle with metabolic syndromes as was shown in a study in the Scandinavian journal of medicine & Science in Sports (Larsen, Welde, and Martins, 2013). However, this effect can be triggered by any high intensity exercise such as Tabata – a 20 second on 10 second off interval training. For the studies of afterburn effect fast paced cycling was used, where the participant was working at 75-80 percent of their max heart rate.

I had my first session with a personal trainer on a Monday. This was a lot less intimdating than I’d built up in my head. It was more like a work out with a friend than what you see in the movies. We went through some exercises that we hadn’t done before, talked about my performance goals and worked out ways to reach them.

The next training session I was keen to try a box jump. – It was then that I discovered while a lot of these things look easy they really require more control over your muscles than just the ability to jump onto it. I could get onto the box but quickly lost my balance and fell off onto the ground. After that I chose to focus on building my balance instead of falling on my back several more times.

After that minor set back I was thrilled to be given alternative ways of reaching my goals. Previously there’d been a lot of research and work on my behalf- that wasn’t always successful. Making the decision to work with someone else allowed me to tailor my program so that I could see my progression in strength, balance and agility and I could do so without feeling disheartened.

That being said my workouts – while they were good at creating my progression and allowing me to build what I wanted to build better strength and talent in. There still were movements in my routine that I wasn’t thrilled about doing- mostly because while they were good for my body they were so tiring! However, I could see changes in my ability within two weeks Before if there was one thing I never did it was jog. I could sprint – but not jog for a sustained period of time. Within two weeks running for ten minutes possible and something I did.

I’m still working on the routine two months I haven’t achieved my major performance goals yet but hopefully by the endo f the year I’ll be able to update. If you’re looking to make some changes in law school and wondering if it’s worth the effort – I would recommend starting out with a personal trainer – going it alone for a few months is hard. Keeping up motivation and knowing what to do took a lot more time and effort than I had expected – especially I you’re hoping to reap the full benefits of exercise and not just a random achievement.

As of February I have definitely experienced some cognitive benefits. The biggest I’ve found are;

·         Increased focus

·         Better problem solving

·         Increased self discipline

They definitely weren’t immediate changes and I’m not super woman status yet. However, the lifestyle change has definitely increased these areas of my life and I'm looking forward to seeing their impact on my academic endeavours.

I tried a non-detox healthy-yet-flexible diet?

I went on a macros diet. In the past I’ve tried to eat healthy-  even going so far as to be a raw fruitarian for a little while. The idea of nutrition affecting your whole life is something I really resonate with. I think if you eat whole unprocessed foods you feel a lot healthier, happier and have a lot more energy. But – law school makes it hard to follow an unprocessed diet. 

Typical fruitarian spread

My law school is literally five minutes from the nearest dominos – and they don’t charge delivery to the law school library so you know pizza is my life source when it comes to exam time. And sadly, all that processed food took a much heavier hit against my body than I realized.

Noticing that I was more sluggish, and had way less motivation to get things done than usual I determined that I should go on a detox. I started doing a bit of digging to find the best detox for me – having such an affinity for fruit I was keen on a juicing diet – but there’d been a lot of discussion around me about a bone broth detox. But the more reading I did – the more hesitant I became – about both juice cleanses and bone broth. Lately there’s been some hit back against detox diets, with nutritionists claiming that a healthy body can detox itself – and these diets are just a new form of starvation diets. I’ve linked in that sentence an interesting article from “the conversation” which I thought was a good starting point for research into detox diets.

By the end of my research spiel I’d definitely wiped going on a detox off my mind – but I still felt anxious going into a grocery store to try and figure out what exactly was going to make my body healthy and ready for another semester of law school. Because I wasn’t really looking to lose weight, mere calorie restriction didn’t seem like a reasonable option – especially since you can eat anything on calorie restriction – it’s just how much or little of it you eat.  I was more interested in fueling my body on for study – and there’s not a lot of ‘diet plans’ for that.

So after a bit more prodding around (admittedly on the fitness side of youtube and Instagram) I found out about an eating lifestyle called ‘if it fits your macros’. Often shortened to IIFYM is a modern day way of eating that focuses on three key nutrients known as macros – fat, protein and carbs. These three nutrients are essential for your body and help you live a healthy life.

An easy way to try this method out is to download the myfitnesspal app on your phone and simply enter in the foods you eat. It’s basically like a more advanced style of calorie counting – but unlike calorie counting I was looking at the nutritional value behind the foods I was eating. Because I was paying more attention to nutrients it wasn’t so much that I could eat processed junk through the whole day-  because I’d run out of fat and carbohydrate quickly.

As of writing this article I’ve been on IIFYM for about five months. It’s been okay – it’s definitely a learning curve. When I first started I had to drop about half the amount of fruits and vegetables I was eating – which I thought was super counter intuitive because obviously fruits and vegetables are good for you.

However – they don’t have a lot of fat and protein.  So I had to turn to pintrest to find some alternative recipes to hit the optimal amount of fats and proteins for someone like me. To increase fats and proteins I found myself eating a lot more fish, beans, tofu, kidney beans and avocado. These healthy options for fats and proteins added a lot more variation to my non exam time diet – and most of time I’m not really interested in eating out.

foods I actually ate while doing IIFYM

When it comes to eating out – the app on your phone is the most amazing invention since the dawn of time. My fitness pal (not sponsored) has a great inventory of restaurants and take out foods like pizza, sushi, pasta and dumplings so when I ate out I just entered roughly what I ate and had a good idea of the nutritional break down of the food.  – I could even track my weekly take out night and over time I learned how to eat in the week so that one night of heavy sodium pizza didn’t leave me feeling sluggish and headachy.

An interesting feature of macros dieting that definitely confused me at first is that it is highly individualised. For example a law student may need more proteins and fats because proteins are important for making hormones and enzymes, and fats help the absorption of certain essential vitamins like A, E, and K. While carbohydrates are less useful overall as not so much energy is expended throughout the day. However, an athlete will need to consume more carbohydrates and proteins to help repair tissue and fuel their body to replace the energy they’ve expended. Additionally, your macro requirements may vary from day to day – for example I exercise everyday except for during exam time. So pre-exam time I need more proteins and carbohydrates to fuel me throughout the day, but during exam time I need more fat to help store energy and absorb vital nutrients to fuel my brain.

Unlike a detox the IIFYM diet is intended to be a way of living. It is design to fuel your body well and allow you to indulge in treats because you wish to and not because you’re desperately craving them. I’m still doing the IIFYM lifestyle – and hoping to continue it for a lot longer. I may have struggled to lose some of my fruit intake in the beginning – but I definitely don’t regret it!

I change my study habits; Lifestyle Change 2018

Lifestyle changes are all about making a change for a more positive you. The aim of them is to become more efficient, productive or attractive in some way. Generally we know that by doing something ie. Running more, we will become more efficient at it. However, there are some categories of self improvement that are not as clear cut. The most obvious of which is academic achievement. There’s been a lot of focus on smarter study – but whatever that is, is generally elusive to the press and the scientists themselves. What had been a common feature of universities is that they will provide three avenues of learning one subject

·         Lectures

·         Tutorials/seminars

·         Readings

Their claim is that all three must be completed in order to have learned a subject to a sufficient level. This is obvious in error as few students ever bother to complete the one, let alone the three, areas.

The second claim is that by attending in-person one will gain greater benefit from tutotirals and lectures than listening online. There is little evidence to this effect – especially little on how students between 16-25 find learning in real life as compared to online.

The third claim is that written notes not typed notes create more pathways in the brain that facilitate the learning of the subject.

I’m curious to see if I make a lifestyle change in regards to my study patterns – will I see a grade improvement?

At university there are multiple ways you can study; I like to catagorize them into three broad categories.

The Ghost

The ghost is the student that does the work, does the readings but never goes to lectures. Those things are recorded – why bother turning up if you’re not going to be graded!? The ghost’s logic is if they’re only there to get a degree the real experience of a university has no meaning. They’re just there to do the work, get out and get paid.

These students are very self-driven and enjoy being able to cruise through the course on their own – without any interference from the lecturer. Unless there’s a graded tutorial required you’ll never see this student. They either hide out in their room or tuck themselves into a cosy corner of the library.

If you end up in a group assignment with this person you better make it clear you’re not there to do all the work – because they’re not doing more than what they have to. If you keep doing the work for them they’ll cruise on through.

Should have but didn’t

Much like the ghost student this kind of student never turns up to lectures. But they also don’t do the readings, they rarely make it to tutorials and they’re pretty blasé about the final exam. In reality Ps get degrees and working harder than 50% is a waste of time.

Their work ethic affords them a lot of free time and they’re often richly involved in university life. Things like sports, languages, pub crawls – this kind of student is all over it. But…their grades suffer for it. To see this student getting any higher than a C is a rare sight.

Lecturers warn you that you can’t do a class without the readings, the classes and the lecturers – but these guys know from personal experience – a bit of common sense can get you places. – That and a few late nights of cramming before the exam.

The Over Caffeinated

The lectures, the readings, the additional readings, the supplementary notes – most common in freshers, this kind of student has done it all. There’s nothing you can surprise them with – in fact if there is anything that’s potentially unusual about the course they’ve probably already emailed the convenor to confirm that was the intention, worked out a draft answer and they’re double checking it now.

This kind of student spends hours studying each day. Sometimes at the expense of their own free time – and as much as we like to claim that we don’t – we’re all a little jealous of the fact that they have such amazing self-discipline.

I personally fall somewhere between a ghost student and the over caffeinated – as most students probably wouldn’t fall directly into one category or another. The difficutly of the course, the amount of interest you have in it, whether it’s semester one year one or semester two year five – all play a huge role in determining how much time you’re going to invest in this academic endeavour.

I’ve always been curious – as a chronic non lecture, tutorial avoiding, and generally work minimising student – if I did all the readings, attended all the lectures, tutorials and did every piece of additional work – would I obtain the elusive HD?

This semester is the beginning of my third year – the very point of the up hill marathon to finally getting my law degree. One should never start a marathon aggressively – but in law school the harder you work – the more you can hope for a job at the end of it.

So this semester I am going to take three courses – a full

time load – and for each these I will complete all recommended and supplementary readings, attend all lecturers, all tutorials and all seminars.

Wish me luck!

In total it adds up to 46 hours of work (approximately) per week. This is calculated following the course guides but in all honestly it’ll probably add up to more, so I’m preparing for this. Over the course of the semester I will be tracking my grades and then combining them at the end of the semester into one average grade. This will then be compared to the average grade of the prior semester in which I would listen to lecture recordings, attended the minimum number of tutorials and never did readings.

So in six months time we should have an allegorical response to the question ‘if I tried harder-  would I do better?’

If you’d like to join me on my lifestyle journey then you can connect with me on Instagram, tumblr, twitter or facebook!

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Twitter: @underagelawyer

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