Uncle Joe wants you to stand up straight.

Good posture is not a particularly sexy idea.  The cool kids slouch.  We curl up in comfy chairs.  We hunch over our desks.  And it isn’t good for us.

 

Uncle Joe (Pilates, that is) encourages us to buck this trend.  This is only partly because he was obsessed with breathing.  When we don’t have good alignment in our bodies, we can’t breathe as well, which affects everything from our cognitive function to our energy levels.

 

Another reason Uncle Joe wants us to get ourselves in line has to do with efficiency.  He was all about efficient movement and that starts with having correct length-tension relationships in our muscles.  What the heck are length-tension relationships?  Our muscles have an optimal default length when they are not contracting.  When they contract, or shorten, they move our bones.  If our muscles are too tense or too slack to begin with, they can’t exert as much force and we don’t move as well, as much, or as efficiently.  We end up doing a lot more work.

 

Good posture helps protect us from overuse injuries.  When we get out of alignment, our parts wear out faster (just like tires on a car!).

 

If all of that is too high-minded to be motivational, here’s one more reason to acquire good posture:  we’ll look thinner.

 

We can do it!

No stressed-out corpses

Lately a lot of people I talk with seem to feel overwhelmed.  Maybe it is cumulative exhaustion from more than a year’s worth of pandemic.  Maybe it is the relief that is starting to come from the better news about vaccines.  Even good change is stressful.

 

So when we get to our workouts, we need to begin slowly and we need to be patient.  I admit, this is not my favorite way of being in the world.  I love to jump right in and try to do all of it Right Now.  Except that doesn’t work for fitness.  Fitness works best when we build it as a habit, so we need to make sustainable habits.

 

Starting slowly might mean choosing a ridiculously easy goal, like maybe walking for five minutes a day.  Once we have that habit, we definitely want to build on it, but we have to be careful not to get into the mindset of more-is-better.

 

Let me digress for a moment:  I have and wear an Apple Watch to track my movement and exercise and standing (I don’t care that much if I stand up in 12 different hours during the day, but it’s part of the package, so I do it.)  I call it my Wristy Overlord because it is always telling me what to do and God forbid that I should end a day without completing my circles!  The Wristy Overlord, when it sees that I have met my movement goal all week, tries to get me to agree to a higher movement goal for the following week.  It wants me to get on the endless upward staircase to failure, because at some point, I won’t be able to meet the increased goal.  Every week, I talk back to the Wristy Overlord and tell him that I have set my goals at my minimum acceptable levels ON PURPOSE because I know when I’m going above and beyond; what I need to know is whether I have done just enough or not.

 

Whether there is a Wristy Overlord involved or not, we all feel a certain amount of pressure to achieve more, faster, and better.  This can cause us to push ourselves beyond what is desirable.  We do not want to be very fit stressed-out corpses.  We want to be happy human beings.  It is true that we sometimes have to do unpleasant things to be healthier, but we want to strike the right balance between what we need to do and what we like to do.

 

Go play.  The right amount.

Monday Workout: Ouch!

We don’t do hamstring curls that often because it is rare that we use our hamstrings all by themselves.  They don’t like it; they are cooperators by nature and they complain a lot when we do hamstring curls.  (I am a truth-teller:  hamstring curls hurt, but they’re supposed to; you will not be damaged, but you may want to call me some colorful names.)  All that said, every once in a while we need to do them because they help protect and/or strengthen our knees.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
squats	20
pushups	10
plank jacks	30
renegade rows	20
hamstring curls	10
overhead curtsey	30
1 leg deadlift	20
Russian twist	10

Five

We all have our favorite workout tools and toys.  Here are some of mine:

 

1.     The right water container.  Mine happens to be a travel cup I was gifted at Burning Man, but I’ve had other favorite cups and bottles before.  This one is insulated, red, and the right size.

2.     The right music.  This varies from day to day, so I am glad that my phone holds so much!  In general, I like loud and fast for spin and mellow and calming for yoga.

3.     Actual workout clothes.  I was a latecomer to the workout clothes thing, but once I realized that wearing workout fabrics instead of whatever old cotton t-shirt was lying around meant that I was not an entirely soggy mess at the end, I was sold.

4.     Protective gear.  For me, that’s wrist and elbow braces and the right shoes (when I’m not doing Pilates or yoga).  When I’m on my outside bike, that means a helmet, too.  Sunscreen, bug spray, hats, and masks also qualify in this category when needed.

5.     Foam rollers and other SMR tools.  They make every workout better because they help me get the kinks out of my muscles.

 

What are yours? 

Mine isn't yours

Sometimes people ask me about my workouts.  I am happy to tell them what I do, but I try very hard to emphasize that MY workout should NOT be their workout.  I am older or younger than whoever is asking.  I have a different injury history.  I have different skills I’ve acquired over my lifetime and my own set of aptitudes.  Heck, I have different stuff on hand to use for my workouts and I definitely have my own preferences.

 

It goes against so much in our culture to avoid comparing what we do to someone else’s deeds.  We have been trained from the start to compare and compete with each other.  (Spoiler alert:  life goes better if we cooperate instead.)  We even compete with ourselves in not-so-healthy ways.  I can only work out with the body I have today.  Sometimes this is good news (I am stronger now than I was in my twenties) and sometimes less good news (I pay more now if I don’t do enough warming up).  It is all right to say that today’s workout was not as hard as yesterday’s or that we want to work a bit heavier tomorrow, but mostly we just want to show up and do our best with what we have available in the moment.

 

Go play.  Your way.

Wiggling is good exercise...

I love making plans.  Plans are like slightly more practical fantasies.  They hold out the promise of achievement and progress and all those seductive words that speak to my Protestant-work-ethic soul.  Do this and be better!

 

What I am learning is that the best plans are not as tidy as my fantasies would prefer them to be.  I—and I will venture to say we—need some wiggle room.  If I say I will get up at 5 every morning and I’ll do my cardio straight after breakfast and then weights and then stretch, I’m not exactly lying, but I’m not going to do exactly that every day.  There will be a day when I forget to set my alarm and don’t wake up anyway.  There will be a day when I have a cold.  There will be the day after a hike that turned into an accidental death march.  It’s a good idea to leave some slack.

 

Maybe my plan is something more like this:  I will do 30 to 60 minutes of cardio in the morning 5 to 7 days a week; I’ll lift weights 2 or 3 times a week; I’ll do yoga as often as possible and for sure on days when I skip the cardio.

 

For this to work, I have to be happy with the minimums and not totally wiped out by the maximums.  Thirty minutes of cardio on five days a week meets the minimum requirements for general health.  Two weight workouts is enough for folks who are not professional athletes.  A guaranteed two days of yoga (assuming I miss two cardio workouts) is a reasonable minimum.  If I hit the maximums and I’m totally trashed, I can adjust the maximums down until I get stronger or fitter or whatever.

 

And (bad news alert!) even the best plan doesn’t work if we don’t actually do the workouts.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Back!

This week we’re thinking about core in a different way.  Most of us think of core exercises as ab exercises, and that is true, but not the whole story.  There are stabilizers in the back of the body, too, as we notice when we have to balance or do asymmetrical exercises.  We’ve got deadlifts to target those back of the body muscles and single arm clean and press and round lunges to practice using all our stabilizers.  And, of course, we have pretty princesses to cover the traditional ab exercises.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
deadlifts	20
Arnold press	10
1 arm clean and press	30
flies	20
round lunges	10
squat to leg lift	30
curls	20
pretty princesses	10

 

Do more with fewer

Another efficiency technique for workouts is using compound exercises because they work more muscles in less time.  Here are five of my favorites:

 

1.     Overhead squats

2.     Deadlifts

3.     Lunge to curl

4.     Clean and press

5.     Woodchoppers

 

All of them use multiple joints and will get heart rate up as well!

Fitting it all in...

Yesterday I mentioned that we need to do cardio, weights, flexibility, and core and balance work.  How are we supposed to fit all that in?

 

Circuit training.  And specifically, high intensity interval circuits.

 

High intensity intervals are the key to getting a lot of cardio in a short amount of time.  We do minute-long bursts of exercises that get our heart rates elevated and then recover with less-intense exercise for a minute or two.  If we use that recovery period to lift weights and work on our core and balance, we just need to finish up with stretching at the end and voila!  It’s a little more complicated than that, but not that much.

 

Here’s how we plan.

 

First we plan a warm-up.  This is about five minutes (more if we are older, stiffer, recovering from injury, or beginners) of gentle movement, something like brisk walking or light jogging, and maybe a stretch or two toward the end.

 

Then we pick a few cardio exercises.  Think of things like jacks, mountain climbers, step-ups, jump squats, woodchoppers, anything that gets the heart rate really moving.  (Don’t do them yet!  We’re still planning!)

 

We need some weight training exercises now.  We want to pick more or less the same number of upper body and lower body exercises, so we might choose squats, bench press, deadlift, and flies.

 

Next, we need a couple of core and balance exercises.  This is where we might do multi-directional lunges and crunches.

 

(We’ll save most of our flexibility exercises for the end.)

 

Now that we have all our parts, we put them together like this:  cardio interval, lower body exercise, upper body exercise, core and balance.  Then we repeat with the other cardio, weight, and core/balance exercises we picked.  I usually create a circuit of about nine exercises and repeat it three times with rests spaced before the cardio intervals, but experimentation is good.  Finish with some SMR and stretching and call it a day!  Most people can finish what I’ve just described in under an hour.

 

Go play.

All the parts...

Every part of our fitness work helps every other part.  That’s good news, mostly, because it means that whatever we do is good for us.

 

However, it also means that when we make sure to get in cardio and weights and flexibility work and core and balance work, it’s even better for us.  How does that work?

 

I’m glad you asked.  (Even if I just pretended you did, because I really want to tell you!)  Cardio work is our foundation work.  We need basic cardio fitness to do pretty much everything else.  Weight training is what makes us stronger, obviously, and faster, not so obviously.  It’s where we start to see the real changes in our bodies.  Flexibility work ensures that we get and maintain a healthy range of motion in all of our joints—we want our fabulous muscles to be able to move us more than a few inches.  Core and balance work takes all the gym stuff we do and helps it apply in the real world where things are a lot less predictable.

 

Maybe that sounds a little overwhelming.  A lot of us already feel like we don’t have time to fit fitness in and now I’m saying there are a lot of kinds to do, too.  Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to make it work without spending forever working out.

Monday Workout: Aggression!

This week we’re getting some aggression out on the weights.  Lunge punches are excellent for mood management, metabolism increases, and coordination.  Three rounds.

 

lunge punches	30
bench press	20
1 leg squat	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
jacks	30
overhead press	20
Russian twist	10

Possibly inspired by my mosquito bite...

The weather (mostly) is getting nicer.  Here are a couple of things to consider before taking the workout outside.

 

1.     Sunscreen.  The kind that doesn’t drip into our eyes when we sweat is good.

2.     Hat.  Even more effective than sunscreen!  And it hides our workout hair!

3.     Bug spray.  Hiking and mountain biking and trail running are all great, but less great when we become a roving buffet for the local insects.

4.     Layers.  Our days may start out or end up chilly.  We may need a jacket and then… not.

5.     Snacks.  The middle of nowhere may not have any on offer, so bring your own noshes and gulps.

6.     Safety plan.  Some of the more remote places we get off to don’t have cell reception.  Make sure someone knows you are going and when to expect you back!  Bring identification, a little cash, and a credit card.

 

Go play outside!

Joe Knows

One of my favorite concepts from Pilates is the idea of the right amount of effort.  When we move according to Joe’s principles, we use only the muscles we want to work and we exert the exact amount of force we need to accomplish our task.  It’s both beautiful and efficient.

 

In practice, this means that we don’t do a gazillion half-hearted reps of an exercise in Pilates.  We do five or six good ones.  We pay attention to things like letting our neck relax and not help with every single movement, no matter what.  We unclench our eyebrows and open our fists.

 

This does not mean that we are not strong.  It means that we are strong in smart ways.  We know how to use our powers for good.

 

Go play.

Get used to it...

I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of trying something and… hating it.  It’s hard.  We don’t feel competent.  Our feet (or arms or legs or whatever) hurt.  We are out of breath, and we want a snack, and now would be a really good time for a nap.

 

Sometimes that first impression is right and we are going to hate that thing forever.  But sometimes, we just need to give ourselves a chance to get used to whatever it is we are trying.

 

I’m a practical person, so I want to know how much of a chance is needed.  For a person starting from the couch, it will take about a month to work up to the recommended 5 days a week for 30 minutes of cardio exercise, or possibly longer.  That said, a month in it should feel a lot more manageable.  With weight training, it depends on how many times a week a person is lifting and what kind of weight training they’re doing—a simple endurance routine twice a week will probably be all right before a month is out.  A person doing max strength work may take a little longer because the challenge placed on the body is more.

 

No one likes a good dramatic stomping-off more than I do, but let’s make sure we really want to do it before we go.  (It’s really embarrassing to come crawling back afterwards…)  Let’s give our workouts a chance to work before we give up.

 

Please note:  this does NOT mean that we should not stop immediately if something is actually painful, not just unfamiliar and uncomfortable.  We do NOT want to be injured, nor do we want to get used to working impaired.  That is not fun.

 

We can do this.

Monday Workout: Burpees are back...

This week, burpees return.  We don’t do them that often because almost everyone hates them, but it’s time to kick things up a bit.  I promise there won’t be any next week.  Three rounds.

 

standing mountain climbers	30
rows	20
1 leg deadlift	10
woodchoppers	30
kickbacks	20
burpees	10
squat to leg lift	30
curls	20
pretty princesses	10

How to...

Falling asleep is not always easy.  Here are a couple of things to help with it:

 

1.     Practice.  Having a bedtime that we stick to trains us to get sleepy.

2.     Keep it dark.  We tend to respond to darkness by getting sleepy.

3.     Keep it cool.  We sleep better in cool rooms.

4.     Eat lightly.  I think we’ve all had the experience of a big dinner that made us sleepy at first and then awake later.

5.     Make it comfy.  A good pillow, a blanket that works, a tranquil room, good smells.

6.     Reduce or eliminate the caffeine and alcohol.  This one might be tough on us, but both caffeine and alcohol change the quality of our sleep.

 

Snooze happy!

Take your teddy...

Most of us don’t get enough sleep and a lot of us don’t get enough rest, either.  It is not easy to do, in part because our culture glorifies busy-ness and stress.  We look askance at anybody too relaxed—don’t they know how difficult it all is?

 

I’m not downplaying the difficulties we are all facing in these uncertain and plague-ridden times.  And I hesitate to suggest yet one more thing to add to our endless to-do lists.  Except that this one helps with all the other ones:  go to bed on time.

 

I’m not saying that we all need to be tucked up virtuously by 8 p.m. or anything.  That would be silly.  We all have different rhythms to our lives and some of us are just hitting our stride then.  What I am saying is that we do better when we have a bedtime and stick to it.  Ideally, that time should be seven or eight hours before we have to get up again.

 

We might have to do some negotiating with ourselves and other people to make this work.  Maybe we’ll have to stop after two episodes of that great show.  Maybe we’ll have to explain that it is all right to do a few dishes in the morning instead.  At first it might be hard to go to sleep at our new bedtime.  We might lie there resentfully feeling like a fractious toddler who is definitely not tired, not one bit, no way.  We’ll have to practice.

 

But once we start getting the sleep and rest we need, we might find that we’re not so crabby, we make fewer mistakes, and we feel better.  We find focus that we’ve been missing.

 

I could be wrong.  Try it out and see.

Not nice

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just figure it all out, even if it took a while?  Then we’d be done with the figuring and we could get on with the doing.  Sadly, it does not work this way.

 

For one thing, change happens.  The workout that transformed us over the first few months is too easy now.  The stuff we used to do when we were younger and indestructible is Not a Good Idea nowadays.

 

For another, boredom is the enemy.  We need to strike a balance between having good habits and falling into autopilot ruts.  When we manage to bring both our bodies and our brains to work, we do better.  There are days when we simply have to run or bike or walk a different route or we will explode.

 

Finally, we want to use feedback.  We learn new things from reading.  We discover new stuff about our bodies as we work.  We want to incorporate new knowledge into what we are doing, experiment, evaluate.

 

So, as usual, I’m suggesting a more difficult path than just showing up and doing the same thing over and over and over, but my way is way more fun.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Jump!

This week we’re taking our squats up a notch by adding the jump.  If your knees don’t like jumping, just use weights and do regular squats, or do squats to side leg lifts.  Three rounds.

 

jump squats	30
bench press	20
round lunges	10
overhead high knees	30
flies	20
pushups	10
jacks	30
deadlifts	20
Russian twist	10