We all want to be healthy. Here are five kinds of exercise that will help with that:
1. Cardio: get the heart moving, improve mood, burn calories, reduce stress.
2. Strength: get stronger (duh!), increase metabolism, shape body, reduce fat.
3. Balance/Core: avoid injury, improve grace, feel cool
4. Flexibility: improve mobility, avoid injury, reduce stress.
5. Mind/Body: improve proprioception, relax, avoid injury
Short and sweet today! Go play!
I’ve been doing yoga all month. Yoga was not intended as an exercise thing in the beginning. All those poses are designed to train our bodies so that we can meditate and be still.
Maybe not all of us are that interested in meditating (although it is, in fact, good for us!), but almost all of us could use a little help with that sitting still thing. Many of us have desk jobs and if that isn’t sitting still, I’m not sure what is. (Confession: when I had a desk job, I always made a point of going to ask that question in person just so I could stand up and move around. Copies? Sure, I’ll go make them at the copier way over there…)
Even if the idea of yoga doesn’t make our hearts sing, we can apply the general principle. Which is: we sit better if we also get to move.
Do the workout, then do the work. It helps.
I am pretty sure that I am not the only person struggling with time right now. A lot of us have had our schedules upended, either by having to work more or differently, or not being able to work at all. Some of us suddenly have kids around all the time. Errands have taken on new complexity. And where did all this hair come from?
I confess that I hate change. I like knowing what is going to happen and when. The vicissitudes of life with this new non-schedule are real and impactful. What to do? Routine to the rescue!
Now I know that some of us are groaning right now. Our creative brains don’t want to submit to some routine that is the tool of the patriarchy designed to mold us into perfect little machines. Stop for a second. Take a couple of breaths. That’s not the kind of routine I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the kind that saves energy for the real creative stuff we want to do. The kind that lets us brush our teeth on autopilot and find our coffee mug in the cabinet without having to think about where it might be.
When we add our fitness work to our routine, we don’t have to figure out, every single day, where the heck we’re going to fit it in. We just show up and do it, whether it is between coffee and shower or after dinner and before Netflix. Let’s save our brainpower for the stuff we really want it for and let our workouts happen routinely.
This week we’re playing with the alphabet! This means that we all get a personalized workout! Using the chart at the bottom, do 10 reps of the exercise listed for each letter of your name. If your name is short, do lots of rounds or add your middle and/or last name. If it is long, do fewer rounds.
For example, my workout would be:
J | lunges |
A | squats |
N | burpees |
E | squats |
T | burpees |
(Hmm… that’s a lot of burpees. Crap.) (You may notice that all vowels are squats. This is because everyone should do squats.) My name has five letters, so I should do at least four rounds.
Please note: if one of the exercises listed is not suitable for you, substitute your own! If you have knee problems, you might want to replace lunges with punches. If you want more challenge, you can always do jump lunges or jump squats. You are the boss of you.
A | squats |
B | lunges |
C | pushups |
D | jacks |
E | squats |
F | lunges |
G | pushups |
H | jacks |
I | squats |
J | lunges |
K | pushups |
L | jacks |
M | mountain climbers |
N | burpees |
O | squats |
P | lunges |
Q | pushups |
R | jacks |
S | mountain climbers |
T | burpees |
U | squats |
V | lunges |
W | pushups |
X | jacks |
Y | squats |
Z | lunges |
Got three minutes? Let’s do three things to help our posture and breathing!
1. Find a doorway. Stand in it with arms stretched out to the sides against the door frame. Lean forward, supporting yourself with your arms. You should feel a stretch across your chest and maybe even your shoulder blades pulling together.
2. Lie down on your back. (Hey! The good part!) Bend both knees so that your feet are flat on the floor. Bring your arms up toward the ceiling and put the palms of your hands together. Keeping your hips on the ground and your hands together, move your arms to the left (right shoulder can come up and elbows will stay straight) and then to the right. Keep your head still. Repeat about ten times. Then do the same thing letting your head follow your hands for about ten repetitions. Finally, let your head go the opposite way that your arms go about ten times.
3. Sit on the floor or a chair with your spine upright. Lift your shoulders toward your ears, roll them back and down, and then circle them forward, returning to your ears. Do about five circles and then go the other way. At the end, sit for a couple of breaths with your ears lined up over your shoulders.
These are good things to do any time you feel tense or like your breathing is too shallow. It’s a good series to reset between meetings or before bed.
Posture is not one of those warm and fuzzy words. Maybe it makes us think of walking around with books on our heads, or of screeching drill sergeants, or of grumpy older teachers muttering about respect. Maybe it conjures a sense of bravado, of irritating pretense. It’s still something useful, so maybe we can replace those other images with, say, dancers. The relaxed-yet-straight poses of sitting Buddhas are also a good image to keep in mind for posture.
Or, if some of us prefer a things-to-avoid sort of image: let’s not be that person hunched over the computer screen, shoulders in ears, lower back screaming, chest compressed.
Why? A couple of reasons, actually.
Here’s one to appeal to our collective vanity: we’ll look thinner if we use good posture. Who doesn’t like that?
How about one for comfort? Good posture helps reduce tension in the neck and shoulders, improves and/or prevents low back pain, and helps us avoid injury while exercising.
Health? When we hang out in a slumped posture, we inhibit our breathing. News flash: people who can’t breathe die. Sure, we can get by for a long time with substandard breathing, but really, wouldn’t it be nice if we made it easy for ourselves to take a deep breath?
Which brings me to what good posture is. When we are standing up, we want our ears to be over our shoulders, which should be over our hips, which should be over our knees, which should be over our ankles. This is best seen from the side, so find a friend to check it out. A lot of us tend to have our heads forward and our shoulders rounded, but we don’t want to overcorrect and stick our chests out like pigeons. Many of us also tend to arch our lower backs more than is ideal, so we can think about tucking our behinds under us a bit to lengthen the lower back. It should feel kind of good.
At first, good posture will feel kind of tiring. Our muscles are used to a different position and the short ones will need to get used to lengthening and the long ones will have to adjust as well. Keep breathing. It gets better.
Many of us are concerned about weight gain these days. We may feel helplessly under the sway of the refrigerator and the take-out menus. We may be using eating as a coping technique. We may not have our usual options for working out.
I get it. It is not a simple problem or else we’d all have it solved by now. But we can start dealing with it with some simple steps. I’ve been pushing cardio over the last while because of its mood-boosting benefits and because so many cardio exercises don’t require that we have a bunch of stuff—if we have shoes, we can walk or run. However, if we really want to get on top of the weight issue, we need to consider strength training.
Strength training not only burns calories while we do it, but over time it also changes our body composition so that we burn more calories all the time. This is because muscle tissue requires more energy to maintain. In other words, when we have more muscles, we have a higher metabolism automatically.
The manufacturers of fitness equipment and the Fitness Industrial Complex will have us believe that we need acres of equipment and fancy machines and the Magic Bullet Exercise Doodad of the Week. Nope. We can get a good strength training workout in with just our bodies. (Hey! I posted one on Monday!) If we have weights or other equipment, we have even more options. Or the resourceful among us can lift water bottles or jugs, canned goods, or cooperative pets and children (uncooperative ones tend to lead to extra cardio…).
Some notes: do not do strength training of the same muscles two days in a row. Our tissues need time to recover. Always use good judgment and stop if there is pain (the real kind, not the growing kind). If there is soreness over the next two days, use ice or ibuprofen as desired and tolerated.
Go play.
Back to body weight this week. Do two to four rounds as time and energy allow.
jump lunges | 30 |
1 leg squats | 30 |
pushup to side plank | 10 |
jump squats | 30 |
transverse punches | 30 |
1 leg ball wall toss | 10 |
| |
plank | hold |
superman | hold |
Pretty much all of us need to stretch more often. I can hear the complaint from here: “But I don’t have time!!!!” So here are five times we can stretch we don’t even think about.
1. While waiting for the microwave. That’s a whole minute of stretching, or an adequate amount of time to hold a quad stretch on both sides.
2. While brushing our teeth. Clean teeth and looser calves are a great combination. Hold one side while brushing the top teeth, the other while doing the bottom ones.
3. On the way back to our desks from the bathroom. We have to go through a doorway to do this, so we can take a few seconds to stretch our chests by putting our arms across the doorway and leaning forward. (If this is too much of a stretch, do one side at a time.)
4. While cleaning up. Putting shoes away? Hang out in that forward bend for a bit. Dishes to go on the top shelf? Sneak in a triceps stretch.
5. Before getting out of bed. This is the perfect time for a whole body stretch and really, we don’t want to get up that much anyway—we’ve just found a good reason to stay for another minute!
One of the fun things about my work is that I get to try stuff out on myself. I get to experiment for fun and it turns out useful! This month’s experiment is a commitment to doing yoga daily. As of this post, I’m about halfway through. It has been instructive.
Not surprisingly, I’m feeling (slightly) more flexible (I’m never going to be all that flexible—it’s not my gift) and like I have some new mobility in my joints. Which has made me work really hard on my stability. Suddenly my arms and legs are going in directions I don’t expect! Chaos! Wobbling!
Oh, right. I have deep muscles on purpose. They’re for controlling all that chaos and creating balance. Tuning in to what is happening on the inside helps bring order to the outside. What a concept!
I’m also appreciating the way that Pilates and yoga can work together. There are plenty of poses that are not available to my body at the moment, and may never be truly possible for me, but Pilates tools can scaffold the skills for me so I can continue to approximate my way to greatness.
Pilates certainly can scaffold way more than yoga. The refinements it encourages to overall movement patterns can benefit pretty much every other kind of movement. That Joe was a smart guy.
Sometimes we have days that just don’t go right. Maybe we ate something that disagreed with us, or the dog barked at every cat and squirrel all night, or we were out of coffee and we don’t seem to be able to get out of the funk. It might not seem like it, but exercise will probably help.
Caveats: I do not recommend working out when we are actually sick. I do not suggest doing anything super challenging when we are having issues with focus. We ALWAYS need to use our good judgment about what is appropriate for us to do and sometimes that includes hiding under the covers.
Now that that is out of the way, here is why exercise might help. There are the mood-elevating benefits of cardio that I’m always banging on about (because they are REAL!). There is the character-building thing that comes with doing the responsible and good-for-us task even when we don’t feel a lot like it. But one possibly overlooked good reason to work out is that it is a finite thing. We show up, we do the thing, and then we are done, feeling tired, but also virtuous and maybe even slightly more in control of at least some small part of the universe. This is not something to be sneezed at in our current unpredictable world.
Go play. It will help.
This week, we have choices. Fine. We have choices every week. But this week, I will not be telling anybody what to do, but rather providing options for everyone to make their own workout taking into account their own bodies and the tools on hand. The format is the usual 30-20-10 in which there are three sets of three exercises making up one round; we do three rounds. To make up a set of exercises, choose one from the 30 column, one from the 20 column, and one from the 10 column. I suggest choosing the 10 from the ab exercises after the space in the 10 column in the third set, but I certainly will not be looking over anyone’s shoulder to see what got picked! Have fun!
Choice Workout: Choose three from each column | ||
| ||
30 | 20 | 10 |
woodchoppers | squats | med ball rescues |
mountain climbers | lunges | round lunges |
jacks | deadlifts | lateral raise |
plank jacks | bench press | skullcrushers |
jump squats | fly | YTA |
jump lunges | row | pushups |
ball slams | kickback | burpees |
overhead high knees | curls | |
opposite knees | reverse fly | |
clean and press | ||
1 arm clean and press | | Russian twist |
| pretty princesses | |
| brains | |
| femur arcs | |
quadruped | ||
| | roll out abs |
1. Do it faster. We can make the whole workout at a faster pace, or we can add bursts of speed to our cardio or weight workout. The body gets surprised, the brain has to work a bit more, and everyone is tired and happy at the end!
2. Make it unstable. We can do whatever it is we’re doing on a BOSU, stability ball, turntable, squishy mat. We can work one side of the body at a time. We can try standing on one leg and then the other. Sometimes it’s as simple as running on the beach where the sand is not nearly as regular as the surface of the treadmill. Instability recruits our core more. We have to concentrate. We learn stuff!
3. Put it in water. This can be a literal adaptation, as in we can do water walking or water running or water aerobics instead of land walking, running, or aerobics, or we can just try swimming as a switch from our usual cardio. One of the great things about swimming is that it compels us to consider the breath, which is essential to our wellbeing.
4. Switch teachers. Sure, we are comfortable in that yoga/spin/bootcamp/Zumba/Tabata class. We’ve been taking it every Thursday for a year now. Comfortable, for the body, is an invitation to avoid change, growth, and development. See what a different play list or series of exercises does to wake up body and mind.
5. Try our friends’ workouts. Maybe our buddy has been going on and on about that amazing bike ride. Maybe she’ll shut up if we just try it. And maybe it will, in fact, be just as amazing for us. Or maybe another friend loves yoga. Get him to take you along. Worst case, you get to hang out with a friend.
6. Take it outside. Or inside. If we always work out indoors, we could use a little fresh air. If we’ve been outside so much that we’re functionally feral, maybe we could enjoy the air conditioning for a bit.
As always, be safe and have fun.
Recently, I have been having a lot of chats with people who think they should be doing more exercise. They say it like a lot of people talk about how they probably should get a colonoscopy. I am sure that there are people somewhere for whom there is not one single form of exercise that is the least bit fun, but nearly everyone can find something to do that is both enjoyable and beneficial to the body.
It might take more than one try to figure out what that activity might be. People who like to be outside are probably not going to bond with hot yoga, but skiing might be exactly the right sport for them. Carpal tunnel syndrome and rock climbing are not a match made in heaven, but a more leg-intensive activity like roller-blading might be just the thing. Someone might imagine that getting sweaty is the very worst thing about exercise until they hit that club with the awesome music and dance all night long.
We do not have to commit to that one true exercise for life. In fact, that’s almost always a bad idea because it causes us to overuse some parts of our bodies and underuse other parts. We might want to consider commitment to experimentation instead—it can be a lot of fun.
If we have only a limited attention span or time allotment for exercise, the very first thing we should choose is to do cardio. This is especially true when things are stressful and it seems like we should not be wasting our time with something as frivolous as exercise.
Cardio is pretty much the best stress-buster I know. It gives us a positive outlet for nervous energy. It boosts our mood. It burns calories, improves our lipid profile, helps us sleep better, and helps us concentrate when we’re done. Also, there are a lot of ways to get cardio in and a whole bunch of them are free.
Consider yourself invited to walk, run, dance, swim, bike, rollerblade, skip, or climb stairs. Chase the dog or the kid. Anything that gets the heart rate up and makes us breathe heavy counts (if you choose an NC-17 activity, please make sure you get consent and you take appropriate precautions).
Go play. It’s a good thing.
mountain climbers | 30 |
lunges | 30 |
plank jacks | 10 |
windmills | 30 |
1 leg deadlifts | 10 |
side lunges | 20 |
| |
quadruped | 10 |
V sit | hold 30 sec |
