Hi Reader!

Happy Lunar New Year and start of February. We survived the first month of the year! 🎉

Adventures

If you've been thinking about trying backpacking for the first time, you might be worried about whether you're fit enough to do it. You could have the same thoughts if you haven't been backpacking for a while, want to increase your trip duration and mileage, or have struggled on past trips.

I remember doing a frantic online search after my first trip to increase my fitness for future backpacking adventures. I foolishly hadn't spent much time thinking about my level of physical fitness before my first trip. I was already pretty active, going to the gym 5-6 times per week. It had always looked so easy when I saw photos and videos of other people backpacking, so I figured I'd have no problem.

After packing up and arriving at the parking lot for my first outing, my friend and I (also her first time backpacking), wandered around the large lot trying to find the correct trail head. After around five minutes of walking with our loaded packs for the first time, we realized how hard it was. We were nowhere near prepared. Oops. 🫢

Adding to our general physical unpreparedness was the fact that I didn't know I should have been minimizing the weight of our backpacks as much as possible. I thought, "if it fits, it's fine!" We made some seriously questionable packing mistakes, but that's a story for another day. You can see the trip here if you'd like!

Knowing what I know now, I put together a list of my top 10 exercises I would have done to have been better prepared for that first trip, including my top 4 stretches to do on the trail. See the list below or check out my post for explanations of why I included these exercises and my favorite variations of each one.

Squats
Lunges
Step-Ups
Plank
Deadlifts
Calf Raises
Supermans
Cardio
Hiking-Specific Training
Flexibility and Stretching

Backpacking is a full-body workout, so any exercise you can get will help. This list is a good starting point to hit the major muscle groups you'll use most, in addition to ramping up your endurance for those long days on the trail.

& S'more

I recently read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, who is most famous for his book Deep Work. In his newest publication, he goes over his three guidelines for boosting your productivity while avoiding burnout.

Do fewer things.
Work at a natural pace.
Obsess over quality.

Frankly, I found a lot of his tips to be similar to what he wrote in Deep Work, but framed in a slightly different way -- more in touch with the anti-hustle culture of our current world. Regardless, it was a nice reminder to keep my focus narrow and produce the highest quality work possible. For me, that means long-form videos and this email.

It feels like my mentality around creating videos has been to grind out more hours of editing to push out as many videos as possible. I really wanted to stick to a weekly posting schedule, even if that meant I wasn't 100% happy with the videos I was publishing. I knew I should be trying to improve with each video, but wasn't sure what that meant for my specific channel.

For the first time in a long time, I've been actively learning more about video production and editing. I'm drawing inspiration from some of my favorite channels to watch and trying to figure out how to create the ideas that pop into my own head. It might mean slowing down my posting schedule in the short term, but hopefully accelerating my growth in the long term.

After finishing my next video, I plan to switch from iMovie to DaVinci Resolve. I had gotten so deep in a rut of my editing process that I wasn't questioning whether the tools I was using were the best for the job. iMovie has served me well enough over the years and I'm thankful for the easy entry to editing. I'm sure the learning curve will be steep with Resolve, but I'm excited to dive in!

Knowing that my defined focus is to grow as a long-form video creator, it's a simple decision to invest the time and effort into something with a delayed payoff like learning a new software. I've just started dipping my toes into watching tutorials and I can already see that Resolve has so many tools I've been feeling the absence of in iMovie.

Stay tuned to see how my first attempts come out very soon.

Where in your life could you be accomplishing more by doing less?

Thank you for reading and I'll catch you in the next one ✌🏻

Happy adventuring,

💚A