The Amazing Stickie loves exercises that help her prepare for other exercises! Plank to pike was an exercise she used when she was building up to do renegade rows, but it is also a great exercise all on its own.
She begins in plank position, a lovely straight line from her heels to the back of her head, her hands directly below her shoulders. Then she lifts her behind up in the air until her body is the shape of an inverted V. From there, she returns to start.
Ten reps make a good set.
Strength training improves posture. As we increase our strength and we balance out the strength of various parts of our bodies, our posture gets better. Part of this is focus on form because as we pay attention, we hold our bodies with better alignment. Part of it is that in order to lift heavy stuff, we have to coordinate our bodies efficiently and good posture is efficient.
Good posture is good for us because of that efficiency. It also helps us breathe. And who does not want to look thinner? Good posture makes us look better and leaner.
Lift and thrive!
Want to increase stamina? Surprisingly, hitting the treadmill for hours and hours is not necessarily the way. When we do weight training, especially with fairly heavy weights, we automatically get benefits in our endurance.
Essentially, by getting stronger, we also get more durable. Lifting heavy is, of course, not intended as cardio exercise, but I don’t think there is a person out there whose heart rate does not go up while squatting to a one-rep max.
Lift to win!
This week we have a couple of new exercises to keep things fresh! Three rounds.
suitcase swings | 30 |
rows | 20 |
alternating crossbody front raise | 10 |
| |
woodchoppers | 30 |
kickbacks | 20 |
db pullover with bridge | 10 |
| |
mountain climbers | 30 |
curls | 20 |
brains | 10 |
Today the Amazing Stickie is working on balance by doing tick tock. She knows that this particular exercise is also a great way to warm up her body before she gets into heavier work. She begins standing up tall. Then she leans to one side, lifting the opposite leg up. From there, she rocks back the other way, lifting the other leg as she transfers her weight to the first leg. Essentially, she goes back and forth like a pendulum, which is where the name of the exercise comes from.
For variety, sometimes she stays on one side for a while, holding her leg up or pulsing it up and down.
Thirty or so is a good number to do.
Use it or lose it, baby. When we work with weights, we help maintain our flexibility, mobility, and balance.
Flexibility is how elastic our muscle tissue is. We think of it, often, as whether we can bend over and touch our toes. Flexibility definitely has a role in that process—those of us whose hamstrings protest about the process could use a bit more in the flexibility department—but mobility is also key. If the many joints of our spine or our hip joints don’t have any mobility, we’re going to be out of luck bending, no matter how flexible our muscles are.
Balance is what keeps us from falling over when we try.
All three of these skills are enhanced when we do strength training. (There’s a theme here: we adapt as we work!) Moving our bodies and our weights through space requires that we deploy our flexibility, mobility, and balance in appropriate degrees to meet the needs of the task at hand. Practice makes perfect.
Go practice!
Next on our list of effects of strength training: improved joint function.
How many of us find that we have a knee or a hip or a shoulder that doesn’t always behave the way we’d like it to, or the way it did back in the day? Most of us, right?
Strength training to the rescue!
So, first a disclaimer. We cannot actually strengthen joints. Joints are intersections where bones come together. They’re more of a location than an actual thing. When we talk about strengthening joints, what we really mean is strengthening the muscles and other tissues that surround joints.
Many of the joints in our bodies are synovial joints. We don’t need to go into all that that means, but we do need to know that the way that nutrition gets into synovial joints is through movement rather than through our circulation. Feed the hips and give them a shake or two!
Our bodies, by nature, adapt to the challenges we give them. When we give our bodies weights to play with, we get stronger and our joints adapt to their new reality. We want to ensure that we give our bodies appropriate challenges: no 300 pound deadlifts on the first day, babe. We increase our weights gradually, allowing our tissues the time they need to grow and change.
Similarly, we become what we do. When we take all of our joints through their full range of motion on the regular, they like it. They habituate themselves to that kind of movement and it gets easier.
Go do it.
