I know this whole body weight workout thing is getting a little old, but until we can all hit the gym again, it keeps us moving. Do three or four rounds, depending on time and energy.
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 |
We continue to live in difficult times. Here are three kinds of exercise to deal with different kinds of stress.
1. Strength training. If we feel powerless, working to make ourselves stronger physically helps. Also, we can take out any negative feelings on the weights because they don’t mind.
2. Cardio. Nothing helps mood more than getting the heart rate up. It also helps our brains function better.
3. Yoga/Pilates. Slowing down and paying attention to the breath helps calm us. Some of us are good at meditating. The rest of us can use a little help. Breathing consciously while moving is a good way to transition ourselves into the peace-inducing process of meditating.
Go play.
When I was in college, I used to joke that the format of a lot of my non-literature courses consisted of presenting two opposing views, a bunch of discussion, and the conclusion that we need both views in some combination. While I don’t know if this is a valid way of instruction, it did prepare me to embrace the paradoxes of life. The one I have in mind today is about how well we do things.
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Yes. To both of those.
Some of us don’t like to work out because we think we are not good at it. Maybe we are right and maybe not. I am not here to tell anyone how to feel, but at some level, it doesn’t matter. Working out is good for us, even if we do it poorly. We do lots of things we don’t like that have much fewer benefits for us. It is okay to be slow/awkward/new/confused/weak/whatever. The workout will take us however we are and leave us a little better (and tired). The culture will have us think that we shouldn’t do anything we aren’t experts at. We’ll always be able to find (jerky) people to make fun of our mistakes. Let’s take away their power and do stuff that makes us better.
Want an example? I am not a great swimmer. I can’t seem to figure out how to breathe on the left side. I’m slow. I’m not skinny. If I put in a bunch of time, hired a coach, practiced a whole bunch, I could probably overcome most of those issues and get to be a better swimmer. Or I can just get my butt in the pool and go, knowing that the exercise is good for me and that I will feel pleasantly sore and chlorinated at the end. (Fine. I know I can’t go to the pool right now, but it’s still true in principle.) It is all right to be bad at it.
However, as I keep swimming, I notice stuff. I figure out that some parts hurt if I use them wrong. I think that it might be a good idea to learn what good form might be so I don’t injure myself.
The same stuff applies to weight lifting. It is all right to be bad at it. We don’t have to lift heavy or do a gazillion reps. We need to pay the minimum amount of attention to form and safety and after that we can just show up, do the work, and get out of there.
We need to let go of our ideas of perfection in order to show up. Once we’re ready to work, we can think about improvement in a kind and gradual way.
Go play.
I write my blog ahead of time, so I hope that by the time this post gets published the air quality has improved. If so, go workout as usual and think of this as information for the next batch of fires (hi, climate change!). If not, here are some thoughts about how to get a cardio workout inside in fire season during a pandemic when it is hot.
Those of us who have cardio equipment and air conditioning are golden. Carry on, folks, as usual.
Those of us who have cardio equipment who usually rely on fans and ventilation from outside to make the workout tolerable are still in pretty good shape. We may find ourselves hotter than usual and we may find that we want to take the intensity down a bit until we can throw open all the windows and doors. We want to pay attention to staying hydrated even more than usual and watch ourselves for overheating.
If we do not have the blessing of cardio equipment on hand, we still can work out. (Keep in mind the tips above for those of us who don’t have air conditioning.) We just have to be a little more creative about it. The most important tool will be a timer. This is one of those times when we can all give thanks for intervals because they help us avoid boredom. What we want to do is this: pick out some cardio exercises (jacks, burpees, step-ups, mountain climbers, woodchoppers, high knees, jump lunges, etc.) and alternate minute segments of those with minute segments of walking around the house. If we pick five different exercises, we’ll want to do two or three rounds of the whole thing to get 20 or 30 minutes of cardio in.
All of us need to remember that our bodies and minds are stressed right now. We may not be able to work out as hard or as long as usual. This is okay. Doing even a little bit will help our moods and our bodies.
Be safe and go play.
woodchoppers | 30 |
squats | 30 |
good mornings | 20 |
lunges | 30 |
jump or hop ups | 30 |
punches | 30 |
| |
Russian twist | 10 |
femur arcs | 10 |
Yesterday I wrote about why we might want to get the sugar out. Today, I offer some tips on the how.
1. Taper. Sugar is addictive. We may find that we have headaches or we might be irritable as we cut down the sugar on our way to cutting it out. Some of us can deal with cold turkey, but others of us might want to be a bit more gradual about it. Maybe we start by making breakfast a sugar-free meal, or we cut out that after-dinner ice cream before we move on to more aggressive measures.
2. Cook from scratch. As I mentioned yesterday, almost all prepared foods have sugar hiding in them. Making our own salad dressing can be easy and fun and cheap. We can simmer our own spaghetti sauce. Slow cooker oatmeal is better for us and cheaper than instant, sugary packets.
3. Make the non-sugary beverage a treat. Put a slice of lemon in the fizzy water. How about some mint in that pitcher of water in the fridge? Beware the fruit juice, though, because it has a lot more concentrated sugar than whole fruits.
4. Cheat, but carefully. This will require some experimentation. Some of us can manage a weekly dessert without falling headlong into the candy aisle, while others can’t. Some of us can have a bite of our kid’s or partner’s or parent’s sweet thing without needing to get our own. Maybe we can deal with a teaspoon of sugar in the morning tea, but anything more flips us into total sugar indulgence.
5. Eat the fruit. In general, the sugar that occurs naturally in food tends to be a reasonable amount. When sugar accompanies the fiber, vitamins, and minerals in actual whole fruits, we get some nutritional bang for our caloric buck. It is okay to enjoy food and eating. What we want to do is eat a variety of foods. So please do not take this as license to eat all watermelon all the time.
We can do this.
My name is Janet and I’m a sugar addict. I am not unique in this. I think all of us have those foods that are our dietary downfalls, the things that we had better not have in the house or we will eat all of them, all at once.
There are a couple of things about sugar in particular that make it problematic. One is that sugary foods often don’t have a lot of other nutritional value. We get sweet calories and not much else. On the whole, most of us don’t need any extra calories of any kind and we’d all do well to make the calories we do get serve multiple purposes.
Sugar is also pretty much ubiquitous in our food supply. It’s in almost every processed food, from spaghetti sauce to crackers to salad dressing. Notice that none of those foods are things we think of as sweets. If we set out to purge the added sugar from our diets, we have a lot of work to do. Unless we really love reading labels and we enjoy the process of discovering new synonyms for sugar (hint: honey and agave nectar and corn syrup and a lot of others are still sugar), the fastest way to get the added sugar out is to cook and eat from whole foods.
Sugar contributes to one of the hot buzzword problems of our time: inflammation. Inflammation has been implicated in all kinds of stuff from diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis to cancer. Basically, a chronic inflammatory response in the body leads the immune system to attack healthy tissues leading to nasty results. There are all kinds of drugs that help with inflammation, including our old friend aspirin, but dietary intervention can be very effective. Anecdotal evidence is not the same as actual proof, but in my personal bodily chemistry set, I have a lot less muscle ache when I cut the sugar.
Then there is sugar’s relationship to one of the big health issues that a lot of us face: metabolic syndrome. A growing number of folks suffer from multiple chronic diseases: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol/triglycerides. Most of these have a high correlation with obesity. While there are multiple factors that contribute to obesity, we can’t ignore that excess calories don’t help.
Now, I admit that all the good reasons in the world can’t always compete with say, chocolate chip cookies. We have a built-in love for sweet stuff. This is where we have to put on our big-person pants and deal. I am not a fan of motivation by stick, so here are some positive things to focus on while we make adjustments:
We will feel better. Our base-level sense of well-being will improve. We’ll get up in the morning less stiff, less sore. Stuff we haven’t been able to do (hi, bike!) may become available to us again.
We will look better. Sure, it’s not the most important reason, but it would be all right if our beautiful insides were reflected in our beautiful outsides.
We will live longer. We have good stuff to stick around for: love, adventure, grandchildren, a real haircut…
Let’s do it.
One of the things that happens in my line of work is that I talk to people about what hurts a lot. It is beyond the scope of my practice to diagnose or treat injury or illness and I always believe that we should consult the appropriate professionals. I can and do provide information and referrals and suggestions about self-myofascial release, massage, chiropractic services, stretching, supports, and other exercise practices that may help. For most people, rest, ice, and Ibuprofen are our friends.
Sometimes, though, as a human rather than as a professional, I want to suggest looking at the bigger picture. If what we are feeling in our bodies requires a lot of palliative care all the time, maybe we need to make a bigger shift. If our stress levels require us to manage them with vigorous cardio and strength training and Pilates and yoga and stretching and meditation and a whole bunch of massage or self-myofascial release, maybe it’s time to think about what life changes might help. Fitness is not just about what we do with our bodies; it’s about feeling good as a whole person. Perhaps we wouldn’t need so much stress reduction if we addressed the toxic relationships or found a less soul-killing job or figured out how to reduce the debt load. Maybe if we took the time to cook real foods for ourselves we wouldn’t have to burn off so many French fries during our workouts.
Let me be clear: I believe deeply in self-care. I believe most deeply in the kind that makes it so we don’t have to do quite so much of it all the time. Let’s do the work to make a healthy life.
Go play.
I love battle ropes, but we are still stuck in pandemic-land, so we get yet another body weight workout. As always, we can modify for more and less difficulty by adding instability or jumping, by adding weights if they are available, or by increasing the speed of work. Three rounds of this should be about right, but if time and energy allow, more is also good.
squats | 20 |
1 leg squats | 10 |
lunges | 20 |
pushups | 10 |
punches | 20 |
| |
pretty princesses | 10 |
brains | 10 |
My personal training certification program was full of fancy little acronyms for things. A lot of them did not stick in my brain, but one of them seems like a useful thing to share this week, since I’ve been banging on about what sort of workouts we should choose for ourselves. It’s called the FITTE principle, and it is another way to think about the kinds of questions I want us to use when we evaluate what we’re doing.
FITTE stands for Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type, and Enjoyment. We all know what those words mean in regular life, but let me zoom in a bit for the fitness context.
Frequency is about how often we work out. While it would be nice to work out once and be done for life, that’s not how it actually works. If we’re just getting started, we want to do three to five days of cardio a week. Once five days is easy, we can add a strength training session or two. And in my ideal world, we’d all make time to stretch every day.
Intensity is how hard we work. We want to work hard enough to get sweaty and breathless and maybe even a little sore, but not so hard that we pass out, vomit, or refuse to get out of bed the next day. If we are the kind of people who love charts and graphs and math problems, we can calculate our max heart rate in beats per minute (220-our age) and then aim for keeping our working heart rate between 65 and 85% of that. If we are not those people, we want to work hard enough that it would be hard to sing, but we can still talk.
Time is how long we work. It tends to be inversely proportional to intensity. That is, if we’re going to work really really hard, we won’t do it for quite so long, like a sprint; if we’re going to work less hard, we can go longer, like a marathon. We would like to make sure we get about 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise.
Type is what we do. In the broader sense, this is cardio or strength training. In the narrower sense, it’s boot camp or swimming or circuit training or quality time with the treadmill.
Enjoyment is the one that most of us kind of skip. We suck it up and exercise because we’re supposed to and we don’t want to have a heart attack or buy bigger jeans. But there are so many kinds of exercise out there that taking the time to figure out one that is actually fun is totally worth it.
Go play.
It is theoretically possible that the perfect workout exists. If we find it and do it, we will be the Most Fit Ever and we will never have to search again. I expect the workout is right next to a cute bathing suit, a non-stressful dentist appointment, and ice cream that is both edible and calorie free.
Admittedly, some workouts are better than others. The Very Best Workouts are… the ones we actually do. Those are the ones that make us fitter and stronger and leaner and all the other good stuff.
What that means is that we need to take some very basic things into account and then get to work. Are we sweaty at the end? Did we spend at least some of the time breathless? Did we have fun? Were we a little sore the next day? If yes, awesome! Carry on.
Every month or six weeks or so, we need to ask those questions over again because if we are doing our workouts, we will be stronger and fitter and all the things and we’ll need to adjust to keep challenging our bodies. But again: we need to make sure that we really do the work. (Say, for example, that someone makes The Very Best Running Workout. I don’t care how fabulous it is; I won’t do it because I hate running. It is not the Very Best Workout for me. I need one that I will do, not one that challenges my ability to come up with reasons why I’m not going to work out today.)
Go play.
One of the things I try to do every August is a deep house cleaning. Every single time, the hardest part is not the cleaning; it’s dealing with the accumulation of junk. Obviously, there is a metaphor there for fitness.
Sometimes what we need to do most is to strip away the excess. Maybe that means getting rid of that secret cookie stash. Maybe we stop looking for the absolutely perfect workout and do the one we have the time and energy for today. Maybe we don’t need to find the socks that match our workout top. And I’m almost entirely positive that whatever that new fitness gizmo is, we don’t need it.
Fitness certainly has its complexities; this is why I have a job. But it is also very simple: get sweaty, lift stuff, stretch, and don’t eat too much crap. If we keep that in mind, we might discover that we’ve got a lot more space than we thought.
August seems like a good time to get back to the basics, so this week, we have a Pilates mat workout. It should take about half an hour if you take your time. If you hurry, you can be done quicker, but that’s not really the point, is it? Do as many reps of each exercise as seems good to your body. Remember to breathe.
pelvic clock |
|
bridging |
|
dead bug/femur arcs |
|
chest lift |
|
hundred |
|
dart/press up/swan |
|
scarecrow |
|
quadruped |
leg pull |
|
leg pull front |
|
side kick |
|
mermaid |
|
saw |
standing roll down |
Here are four things to do for our health that get us out of being stuck at home, at least briefly.
1. Walk/run/bike the neighborhood. Take the dog. Or the kids. Or the spouse. Or find a friend and do it in a socially-distanced and responsible fashion. Even if all you see are cars and concrete, at least it is not the same walls.
2. Go to the farmer’s market. Or the produce stand. Get some veggies and some fruits. Your nutrition is important!
3. Stand in the sunshine. Or sit there. Maybe read or do some gardening. What do we get out of it? Vitamin D, which is an essential nutrient and one that most of us could use more of. It helps keep our bones strong and aids our immune system. Also, a little sunshine feels good.
4. Visit the beach. Please remember to wear your mask and to keep a safe distance from other people. The negative ions in the air make us feel good. Bonus points for swimming, digging in the sand, sailing, rowing, paddleboarding, or kite sailing.
Go play.
I know I repeat myself. It’s not just because I’m a mom. It’s also because we often need to hear things a few (or a few hundred) times before they sink in. Today’s repetition: we work out with the body we have today.
Today’s body is amazing, all by itself. It breathes! It digests! It feels! It thinks! It even moves us around!
However, today’s body may not be the body we happen to want it to be, in this moment. We may find it to be more tired than we’d like. Or surprisingly flabby in places. And when did that exercise get so hard? Have our ankles always done that? Maybe we remember some other day, when we were younger/thinner/stronger/more flexible. This is not that day. We are not going to do what that body did. We are going to do what this body can do, which will make this body even more awesome for next time.
While we are working out with today’s body, we need to focus on what we are doing. That phantom body of the past is just a distraction. Even that ideal body of the future is not a useful thing to keep in mind in the moment. We need to be present, to do this work on this day to the best of our ability right now.
Go play. And don’t make me tell you again. (Just kidding: I’ll tell you again.)
We all have our own rhythms in our lives. Cue Thoreau and his different drummer, which is lovely, but not what I mean. What I mean is this: we need to find the times when we work best and we need to avoid over-criticizing ourselves when we try to do stuff in the times when work is naturally more difficult for us.
On a daily basis, this means that we all have a preferred time of day for working out. I am happy to work out in the morning, but if my only choice is an evening workout, I am—how to put this—grumpy.
That daily rhythm is fairly easy to perceive, but there are larger ones, too. I know better than to start anything on a Thursday. In fact, I have gone as far as calling Thursday the Official Day of Getting Nothing Done. If I don’t do anything, cool; I expected that. If I somehow manage to accomplish things anyway, I get to feel like I’m extra-special.
Which brings me to August. August is the Thursday of months. It is the low point of my personal energy and enthusiasm. Now, when it’s a whole month that is problematic, flat out quitting is really not the best choice. Enter the extremely low standard. Maybe it’s a walk around the block most days. Or five minutes of yoga. Or one day of spin each week (obviously not on Thursday!). What we want is to create a feeling of success amidst the general suck-i-tude (no, that is not really a word, but I’m sure it makes sense).
In all of it, evenings, Thursdays, and Augusts, we need to be kind to ourselves and remember that we are valuable even when we don’t do all the things.
I’m ready to pretend we’re back to normal. So this week’s workout is TRX-based. Maybe not everyone has a TRX available. Good news! The exercises work just fine on the ground. If you have TRX, two rounds are probably enough; if not, do three or use your good judgment. Actually, always use your good judgment.
TRX | |
squat row (mid) | 20 |
mountain climber (mid calf) | 20 |
| |
clock press (long) | 20 |
overhead squat (long) | 20 |
| |
crossing balance lunge (mid) | 20 |
plank (mid calf) | 30 sec |
| |
low row (mid) | 20 |
burpee (mid calf) | 10 |
| |
crunch | 10 |
hamstring curl | 10 |
