What to do: some principles

When we show up at the gym, it can be hard to decide what to do with all the cool stuff.  Here are a couple of things to think about when we pick up the weights:

 

1.     If you push it, also pull it.  Some people get all into bench press, for example, and get super strong chests, but don’t ever do any rows, so their backs are out of balance.

2.     Work both ends.  Some of us love upper body exercises and some of us love lower body exercises.  We need both, so sometimes we just have to suck it up and get through the ones we don’t love.

3.     Pay attention to the core.  On all sides.  Again, we know a lot about stuff like crunches, but the core goes all the way around the body, so we need to work those lower back muscles and those oblique abs as well.

4.     Put it all together.  As I said earlier this week, it is rare that we use just one muscle, all by itself, in real life.  We need to teach our muscles to cooperate and coordinate, so doing compound exercises like deadlifts, squats, woodchoppers, burpees, and the like help keep us functional.

 

Go play.

Options and an opinion

Assuming that folks don’t want to try anything actually dangerous, I’m completely in favor of experimenting with workouts.  There’s a lot of wiggle room for how to get our workouts done once basic safety is dealt with.  However, I do have preferences and reasons for them.

 

I do workouts in this order:  cardio, weights, flexibility/mindfulness.

 

Here’s the reasoning.  When we begin a workout, we need to warm up.  Cardio is the perfect way to do that.  So we start with some slow jogging before a run, a couple of easy laps before a more intense swim, and the like.  We finish our cardio workout all warmed up for our weight workout!  Hooray!  We lift, lift, lift with those nice warm muscles.  Then, when we’re good and tired, we approach the flexibility and mindfulness stuff.  Now a whole bunch of people want to stretch first, before cardio, before everything.  This is not how I do it for two reasons.  One is that our muscles stretch better after they are warmed up.  Doing flexibility at the end ensures that we don’t pull a hammie stretching that hammie.  The other is a little more academic:  science suggests that stretching before lifting weights has a slight negative effect on how much weight we can lift.  For most of us who are not competing in weight lifting events, this is probably not all that important, but I know that we all feel better when we lift better, so we might as well save the flexibility for the end.

 

All that said, it is always worth trying things another way.  If we really need to prioritize our weights, we can do a brief warm-up and get the weights done first.  If we don’t need to do cardio on a particular day, we can head straight to yoga (any competent teacher will ensure that there is a warm-up built into the class).  Maybe we need to center our minds before we can even consider facing the elliptical machine.  We can try all the options.

Or maybe I'm just weird...

When we lift weights, our muscles do three kinds of contractions:  concentric, isometric, and eccentric (that last one is pronounced EE-centric, not Ek-centric, which pains my English major self, but there it is.).

 

The concentric contraction is the one we usually think about:  the lift itself where we are working against gravity.  The isometric one is the part where we’re holding still at the beginning or end of the lift.  We are using just enough force to keep the weight from falling, but not enough to lift it farther.

 

The one I am interested in today is the eccentric one (and not just because I aspire to eccentricity as a character trait).  The eccentric contraction is the lowering phase where we return the weight to its starting position.  Now it is perfectly possible, though rarely desirable, to get to the top of the lift and let go, allowing gravity to do the work of lowering for us.  This often creates a very loud noise and sometimes dents the floor or any toes that happen to get in the way.  It also does nothing to build our strength.  However, if we focus on lowering the weight slooooooowwwwwwly back to the starting position, we do a lot more for our peak strength and we get bonus points for working our stabilizing muscles extra.  This contributes to good form as well.

 

How does it work in practice?  Let’s say we’re doing bench press.  There we are, on the bench, our dumbbells at our chest.  Keeping them from falling to the floor is an isometric contraction.  We take a breath in, exhale, and push the dumbbells up toward the ceiling for a count of one:  the concentric contraction.  Whatever time we spend with the weights up there is another isometric contraction, usually about another count of one.  Then, if we are emphasizing the eccentric contraction, we lower the weights slowly and with control for a count of four.  Yes, it takes mindfulness and a lot more work; I’m not sorry.  The same 1-1-4 count can be applied to any exercise we want.

 

Try it!

Monday Workout: Compound

I am a little obsessed with compound exercises, which are pretty much the opposite of what all those weight machines at the gym do.  Compound exercises use lots of muscles and move lots of joints, so they are more challenging, more metabolism-boosting, and more like real life, where we rarely just use our biceps or our hamstrings all by themselves.  However, please adapt to YOUR body—if your knees can’t do lunges, do the curls alone, for example.  Three rounds.

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb overyets	10
woodchoppers	30
lunge to curl	20
renegade row	10
squat to leg lift	30
1 leg deadlift	20
pretty princesses	10

Nosy!

I ask my clients all kinds of nosy questions when we start working together (not that I necessarily stop after that, but eventually they get used to me…), but I do it to help me figure out how to make their workouts better for them.  In the spirit of DIY, here are a few of those questions and why I ask them so others can play along at home.

 

1.     What do you do now for exercise?  This gives me an idea of what the person in front of me likes to do and where we are starting from.  If they run marathons for fun and climb mountains every Thursday, I will design a very different workout than I will for someone who tells me they walk to the kitchen from the couch during commercials.  It also gives me a hint or two about where they might need to be encouraged—someone who lifts weights every day but never ever stretches might need a little help with flexibility.

2.     What have you done in the past?  This question allows people to remember that back in the day they really loved rollerblading or basketball or flamenco.  That can spark some interest.  It also lets me know what their bodies remember doing, which helps me know what skills I can build on.

3.     What do you like to do?  Notice that this is not the first question.  When I ask it first, I generally hear, “Nothing.”  The other benefits of this question are pretty obvious:  I want to design workouts that my clients don’t hate and sneak in the stuff that they don’t love but need to do anyway.  And even if they answer me with totally non-fitness-related stuff, I know what is important to them, which helps me know how to motivate them.

 

It is rare that the answers I get from asking these questions stick to the topic.  I usually get a lot more information about what they really hate, how many kids or grandkids they have, when the busy times of day or week or month are for them, how they broke their arm in third grade, and all kinds of other stuff.  This is important work.  I don’t work out with bodies; I work out with humans who have needs to meet, tastes to consider, and hearts to make happy.

Basic and fancy

While I firmly believe that variety is one of the keys to success in fitness, I also firmly believe that it is key to have some basic plans as go-tos.  This is not unlike meal planning for a family.  We all have staples like flour and salt and sugar and pantry basics like pasta and rice.  Most of us have at least one emergency meal ready to pull out at a moment’s notice—spaghetti night often happens this way at my house.  (Yes, there is also the call-the-pizza-man method, which definitely has a place, but should not be relied on as a major source of nutrition.)

 

Our fitness staples are our basic cardio, weight, and flexibility exercises that we can do pretty much no matter what.  They might be walking, body weight squats, and forward bends, for example.  The pantry basics are what we get from those staples:  a 30-minute interval run, twenty minutes of squats and pushups, a few sun salutations and five minutes of meditation.  Then we can spice things up with our trips to the fitness grocery store or farmer’s market—we do a little Zumba one day, hit the machines at the gym, do a heavy weight workout, or take a different Pilates class.  We have the basics so we don’t starve; we have the other stuff so we can enjoy eating.

 

No surprise:  I vote for both.

Sadly, the cake is metaphorical...

In high school, I was blessed to have a Czechoslovakian French teacher (yes, I went to high school a long time ago, before the Czech Republic and Slovakia were things).  Whenever somebody used a particularly stuffy phrase, he would call it a “five-dollar word” and then ask what we meant.  Unpacking five-dollar words is a very educational experience and I ended up learning a lot about English as well as French.  Today’s five-dollar word is synergy.  It is one of those words that gets used all the time in flavor-of-the-month business concepts where management is trying to disguise the fact that they really just want everyone who doesn’t want to be “downsized” or “outsourced” to work harder for longer for less money—“We need to work synergistically across departments…”  This has given the word a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve.

 

Synergy is when multiple things interact to have a greater effect than we expect.  Kind of like cake:  eggs, flour, sugar, butter and then suddenly a taste celebration!

 

Eventually, I will get to the point.  Which is:  we want to do different kinds of workouts because we get a synergy going.

 

On a basic level, this means that when we do cardio, we make our weight workouts better and vice versa.  Our work on flexibility improves our performance in other areas.  However, that’s not the whole story.  When we combine things like Pilates with our weight workouts, we create results we could not expect—the precision of Pilates and the way it builds connections between our brains and our muscles helps us lift weights with better efficiency and form, while lifting those weights improves our strength to execute the Pilates exercises.  Additionally, by mixing up what we do, we keep our bodies slightly confused, which is a precondition for growth.  But wait!  There’s more!  Working out in a variety of ways helps us prevent overuse injuries since running is not the same as swimming is not the same as yoga is not the same as biking is not the same as lifting weights.

 

I particularly like the results of fun cardio plus weights plus Pilates and/or yoga because that gives us everything we need to burn calories, improve metabolism, boost mood, get flexible, strengthen our muscles, and relax our bodies and minds, but I always encourage experimentation.

 

Go play.  A bunch of ways.

Monday Workout: Unstable Variety

This week we are exploring a bunch of ways to create and therefore cope with instability.  This is practical because life likes to throw us curves (and sometimes off of curbs!).  When we work under unstable circumstances, we improve our ability to adapt and we strengthen our core.  And sometimes it is even fun!  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
bench press	20
round lunges	10
1 arm clean and press	30
1 leg deadlift	20
1 leg squat	10
jacks	30
kickbacks	20
roll out abs	10

Friday Reading Repot: The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score:  Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is only tangentially related to what I do, but it is related enough that I think it is worth discussing in this context rather than in my regular monthly book post on my personal blog.  The central thesis of the book is that traumatic events change our bodies and change our brains.  We live after trauma differently than we did before.

 

Dr. Van Der Kolk cites tons of data and provides pictures of brain scans, EEG readouts, and plenty of other things to support his thesis.  He, as a psychiatrist, doctor, and trauma researcher, then interprets this data to suggest how to treat trauma survivors effectively.  In most cases, our culture simply throws a bunch of labels at people and gives them drugs.  Drugs certainly have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and the like, but they are not the whole story.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is also not an answer all by itself.

 

What Dr. Van Der Kolk suggests is a more holistic approach, one that reconnects sufferers with their bodies, helps to reassure their survival brains that they can find safety, and reignites the ability to play, laugh, and create.  One of the many treatments that he has found to be effective is yoga, with an emphasis on the pranayama and meditative aspects, but he also mentions Pilates as a useful tool to help the mind and body attune to each other.

 

It is not an easy book to read—story after story of people who have had to deal with horrific events can be tough to take—but it does shed some interesting light on how we function and how we might want to approach helping those of us who need it most.

How

Yesterday I wrote about how getting started is the hard part.  Today, I offer some ideas about how to make that hard part easier.

 

1.     Plan ahead.  All right, so some of us might find this even harder than starting the workout, but it really does help.  This might mean putting out the workout clothes the night before so we don’t have to be entirely awake to put them on.  It might mean packing the gym bag before bed.  Sleeping in morning workout clothes is also totally acceptable.

2.     Reduce the thinking.  We are really good at talking ourselves out of doing stuff.  If we build the habit of working out, we don’t have as much time to talk ourselves out of it because the body just starts on autopilot.

3.     Know the routine.  This might be as simple as:  it is morning, so I do spin.  It can get more complicated, too, if we need it:  Tuesdays are for lifting, Wednesdays are for Pilates, Saturdays are for biking with friends.

4.     Keep it fun.  We are always more likely to do stuff that we like to do and there are so many exercise choices out there that we can probably find something we enjoy, or perhaps someone to work out with who makes it better.

 

Go play.

Physics, Economics, and Yoga, oh my!

The very hardest part of working out is getting started.  In economics, I believe this is called opportunity cost.  In physics, it’s about overcoming inertia.  Uncle Patanjali, in the yoga sutras, phrases it slightly differently:  To begin is the victory.

 

Knowing this, we can strategize about how we can begin.  Maybe we need to negotiate with ourselves, as a woman I met in the gym a while back suggested:  just go LOOK at the weights.  Then the hard part is done:  we’re there, in the gym.  Picking them up and working with them is relatively easy after that.  Some days I tell myself I just have to do spin for five minutes; by the time that five minutes is done, I have remembered how much I like spin and I feel the energy surge I get from doing it.  The point is to make beginning stupidly easy, so that we have as few barriers to starting as possible.

 

Again, physics explains this with the same idea of inertia.  While bodies at rest tend to remain at rest, bodies in motion tend to remain in motion.  Just start.  It gets easier from there.

Literal and Figurative, As Usual

Math is not my favorite subject.  (Sing with me, in your best Cookie Monster voice:  “C is for Calculus, that’s good enough for me…”)  That said, it is darn useful, both in the literal and figurative senses, when we approach fitness.

 

In the literal sense, we use math to do things like calculate our target heart rate for cardio.  (Here’s the equation for the quick-and-dirty version:  220-your age=your maximum heart rate.  Multiply your maximum heart rate by .65 to get the bottom limit for your training range and by .85 to get the top limit.  Then check to see if you are in that range during your workout by counting your heartbeats for a minute.)  Math helps us figure out what percentage of our single rep max we are lifting today, allows us to add up our workout minutes to a weekly total to compare to our 150-minute target for basic health, and shows us whether we can spare the calories for that extra scoop of mashed potatoes.

 

Figuratively, we “do the math” to decide what workouts work for us.  If we find that our workouts make us tired in the short term, but give us more energy in the long term, we can say the math says it is a worthwhile investment of our time.  If the scale doesn’t seem to be budging, we might do the math and realize that we need to cut some calories or increase our workout intensity.  Or, we may discover that we have nothing left for our real lives when we’re done with our workouts:  the math says we’re overdoing it, since the point of working out is to make everything else in our lives more enjoyable.

 

The good news is that there are tools out there to help us with some of that math.  There are apps to track workouts and calorie counts.  Our phones and wristy overlords can tell us our heart rates.  Heck, most of us carry around a calculator all the time if we want to be more old school about the math.  (If we want to go REALLY old school, I’m sure we all have pencils and paper.)  The figurative kind of math is less conducive to outsourcing the difficult bits, but that’s all right; difficult bits build muscles in our minds as well as bodies.

 

So the take-away is:  Do the math and then go play.

Monday Workout: Up and Down

Admittedly, getting up and down off the floor is a way to increase cardio, but I still like to batch exercises so that we can get down and stay down, mostly, and then get up and stay up, mostly.  As always, substitute with exercises that work best for YOUR body (For example, if you don’t do well with weight bearing exercises on your arms, substitute regular jacks for the plank jacks and regular rows for the renegade rows; use the pushups to increase your arm strength, but modify to your ability.)  Three rounds.

 

plank jacks	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
squats	20
Arnold press	10
lunge with twist	30
deadlift	20
pretty princesses	10

A drinking game?

Now that we’ve made it to spring, it’s time to remind ourselves of all the good reasons to drink more water.

 

1.     It makes us nicer.  Dehydrated people are grumpy people.  Drink up and avoid arguments!

2.     It makes our brains work better.  In fact, almost all of our body processes work better with enough water.

3.     It helps us eat less.  We get confused sometimes between hunger and thirst.  Water has no calories, so it’s always worth it to try drinking some before we dive head first into the spaghetti.

4.     It detoxes us.  I’m not big on the whole idea of detoxes, unless it’s just about knowing we have a liver and kidneys.  But those organs work better when there is water to move the systems along.

5.     It helps us keep cool.  No one likes to be too hot.

 

So find a good glass, ice if you like, some lemon, whatever helps, and drink up.

No need for pointy sticks...

Most of us don’t worry about brushing our teeth.  It’s just something we do on autopilot.  Maybe we aren’t so good about flossing and we need the hygienist to threaten us with her pointy sticks to spur us on to better things, but the brushing we have covered.

 

We want our basic workouts to be like brushing our teeth.  We don’t have to think about them or plan for them; we just do them.  Oh, it’s morning:  I brush my teeth and go for a run.  The work day is done:  I am going to lift weights now.

 

To get to that point, we need practice.  We need to make sure we have the workout equivalent of toothbrush and toothpaste available.  For some of us, this means sleeping in our workout clothes or having them right there when we roll out of bed.  Others of us need to make sure the gym bag is packed along with our lunch and our other work things.

 

Eventually, starting or ending the day without a workout will feel as weird as forgetting to brush our teeth.

How to make it harder...

Yesterday when I posted the workout, I mentioned that as we get more fit, we need to make our workouts harder.  However, we might need some guidance about when and how to do that.

 

When we notice that our cardio workouts aren’t making us as breathless or sweaty as they used to, it’s time to make them harder.  We have a couple of choices about how.  We can go longer (this is probably how people end up doing marathons and definitely how I ended up doing century rides).  We can make the work more intense (increase the tension on the stationary bike, add hills to a walk or run, up the pace on the swim).  We can add intervals if we aren’t already using them or decrease the rest period between intense intervals if we are.  Here’s the thing:  don’t do all those things at once.  I know it is tempting, but that’s asking for a crash.  For most people, time is a limiting factor, so I suggest adding a few minutes every week or so until the workout time is about an hour.  After that, the shifts should come in intensity, unless of course the goal is a marathon or other endurance event.

 

With weights, we want to increase the number of repetitions or the weight we are lifting.  Obviously, we are not going to lift the same weight a hundred times.  Most people who want to be building general strength are going to be doing something between 8 and 15 reps (fewer if the goal is to increase 1 rep max, more if the goal is general toning).  When the larger number of reps at a weight becomes easy, we increase the weight and drop down to the lower end of the rep range, gradually building up to the top end.  Then we increase the weight again and reduce the reps.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Another way to increase the intensity of our weight workouts is to add cardio intervals—a minute of running or spinning or jumping rope between sets makes everything harder.

 

In everything, it is important to pay attention to what the body says.  We want our workouts to be hard but not torturous.  Gradual increases in intensity are best.

 

Go play.  Hard.  But not too hard.

Monday Workout: Harder

As we get more fit, we need to make our workouts harder to keep the process going.  This is why burpees are back.  Also, they get easier the more we practice.  (It is totally all right to call me names or swear or both the whole time.)  Three rounds.

 

overhead curtsey	30
squats	20
burpees	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
jacks	30
rows	20
quadruped	10

Five landmarks

Standing up straight is not as… straightforward… as just throwing back our shoulders and sucking in our bellies.  We need to line up our body landmarks.  Imagine looking at yourself from the side.  We want these body parts to line up:

 

•      Ear

•      Shoulder

•      Hip

•      Knee

•      Ankle

 

For most of us, our ear tends to be a little too forward, as are the hips.  When we bring our heads back over our shoulders, it gets easier to bring our hips to the right tilt to lengthen the lower back a bit.  Beware the tendency to stick out the chest—it is not any better than caving it in; we want the happy medium.