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We all have times when we really don’t want to work out.  We are really good at thinking of reasons why we should skip a workout or two or three—I’m tired and stressed and it takes too long and maybe my knee would feel better with a rest and what if the baby cries and how will I get my chores done and now work is texting me…

 

Fine.  Skip one.  We are not going to lose the great gold medal in the sky for skipping one workout.

 

What’s the catch?  Well, we only get to skip one (unless we are truly sick or injured, in which case we wait until our doctor and/or physical therapist clears us to work out again, because that’s just smart.).

 

When we give ourselves permission to skip one and only one, we have to pause and think about things.  Is this the busiest day of my week, or is it only going to get worse?  Am I going to feel better or worse once I get started?  If I do my minimum workout, does it really take that long?  How much more effective will I be when my mind is clearer from my workout?  Isn’t it time that work respected my boundaries?

 

There are definitely times when the right answer is not to work out.  Resting is a valid and useful thing.  But it is also good to think through our decisions.

 

Go play.  Or not.  It’s up to each of us to choose.

Monday Workout: First

I am on vacation this week.  However, anybody who feels like working out without me can lace up their shoes and get moving.  This workout is the one I do with all new clients when they see me for the first time because it is a good indicator of how someone moves and where they are in their fitness journey.  Three rounds!

 

step ups	30
squats	20
curls	10
woodchoppers	30
rows	20
pushups	10
mountain climbers	30
overhead press	20
lunges	10

Do I Really Need to Tell You Number 5?

Need some motivation?  Here are five good reasons to lift some weights:

 

1.     It improves your metabolism.  Muscle tissue burns more calories than fatty tissue.  Building muscle means that our bodies use more calories.

2.     It improves your shape.  Muscle tissue is also denser than fatty tissue.  This means that even if we do not lose any weight, our bodies will be smaller.

3.     It can get your heart rate up.  Weight lifting is not the same as endurance cardio exercise, but as those weights get heavier, the heart gets going!

4.     It improves our bone density.  Falls and broken bones are big risks as we age.  Weight lifting builds our resilience to those dangers.

5.     It makes us strong.  (Of course it does!)  We can impress our friends with our ability to move furniture, open jars, and hoist heavy children.

 

Go play. 

Weight!

I think most of us, when we think of exercise, think of cardio or of sports.  It takes a while to get around to remembering weight training and sometimes even longer to get around to doing any.

 

Sometimes all those weights in the gym can look intimidating.  So can some of the people using them.  I have a news flash:  those weights are for everyone and those other people need to share nicely.  Often, people start with the weight machines.  That’s a good place to begin because the machines have some built-in safety and stability things and there are directions, right there, in words and pictures.  Working with the machines offers a way to get comfortable in the gym, look around, see what else is going on.  And then, after a while, we realize that the machines are pretty boring for both our bodies and our minds.

 

Free weights open up lots of possibilities.  When we use them, we are not artificially stabilized by the tracks of machines.  We have to use our own core to do that.  We have to pay attention because free weights don’t have something protecting us from dropping them on our own feet.  It can be a lot more rewarding and challenging.  It is all right, and even encouraged, that we start small and build from there.  It’s worth the trouble.

Why I Post Workouts Free and Why People Pay Me Anyway

Every week, I post a workout to the blog on Mondays.  Anybody who wants it can use it.  This is also the workout I use for my clients during the week.  So what do they pay me for?

 

For one thing, it is not exactly the workout that my clients do because I tailor it to what each client needs.  The workout I publish on Mondays is the base model.  What my clients do is the custom version that takes into account that one person has knee issues, or another person needs to work on shoulder mobility, or yet another person just doesn’t like jumping moves.  My clients know that I know their bodies and that I will make sure that what they are doing is safe and effective for each of them, personally.

 

I also watch them do the work.  This sounds like a silly thing to pay someone for, but it isn’t.  Some of it is that Mom Look I have that gets people to do things they don’t much feel like doing (works on everything but getting my kid to turn in reading logs, it turns out; I am thankful those days are behind us!).  This is not a small thing, given how many of us want to work out but somehow don’t manage to do it on our own.

 

My watching, Mom Look notwithstanding, is not like everybody else’s watching, either.  I am watching form, to keep clients safe and to make their workouts effective.  I am watching energy level to adjust the intensity of the work in the moment.  I am tracking progress, whether that means increasing weight, increasing coordination, or just better performance.

 

I am happy to offer the workout to anybody who feels like doing it.  I am also here to help if it turns out that folks need more than just a list of exercises.

Monday Workout: Burpees Are Back!

This week we’re doing our due diligence and visiting the burpees again.  They’re not super fun, I know, but they are good for us and we get better at them when we practice.  Three rounds.

 

step ups or high knees	30
flies	20
burpees or pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
rows	20
Arnold press	10
jacks	30
bench press	20
roll out abs or chest lifts	10

 

Three Micronutrients to Boost Immunity

Since we’re (still) living through a pandemic, I thought it might make sense to talk about micronutrients that help boost immunity.  The evidence suggests that supplementing may or may not help, but ensuring that we have adequate amounts of these vitamins and minerals is a good idea.

 

1.     Vitamin D.

2.     Zinc.

3.     Vitamin C.

 

So:  go outside, have some fish, and eat an orange or two.

Mobility vs. Flexibility: YES!

I hear a lot about people feeling stiff (No, not like that.  Get your mind out of the gutter!).  There are at least two things going on there, and we often have some confusion about a couple of common terms.  I’m going to explain.

 

Flexibility is about muscles.  When our muscles feel stiff, we need to stretch them.  This happens when we are stuck in a chair for too long or we do a bunch of exercise and don’t stretch afterwards to help our muscles recover from all that contracting.  Flexibility is a learnable skill, although there will always be folks who are more flexible than others.

 

Mobility, on the other hand, is about bones and joints.  As we get older, mobility can be affected by things like osteoarthritis.  We want to preserve as much mobility as we can and the way we do that is to take our joints through their full range of motion pretty much daily.  Mobility is a lot more structural, but we still can help it along by working on our flexibility and by continuing to move.

 

Bottom line:  moving is still good.  Go play.

Improve Mental Health!

Let’s talk about mental health for a minute or two.  Mental health treatment is out of my scope of practice (I am not a doctor or a therapist; I don’t even play one on tv.).  That said, actual researchers have gathered data on the links between exercise and mental health.  Here’s what they have to say:

 

Cardio exercise improves mood.  Those of us who suffer from depression and anxiety can benefit from getting moving.  In some studies, cardio was as effective or more effective than antidepressants (please note:  do NOT stop taking medication without talking to a doctor.).  It is a helpful adjunct to whatever our healthcare providers suggest we do for our mental health.

 

Exercise also helps relieve stress.  Different kinds of exercise relieve it in different ways, in my experience.  Those of us who need to practice chilling out might want to go to Pilates or yoga.  Those with some aggression to burn might prefer cardio or weights.

 

Finally, that whole Juvenal (yes, I looked it up) healthy mind in a healthy body turns out to be true.  When our bodies are healthy, our minds feel better, too.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Twist!

This week we’re working with the transverse plane (that is, twisting!).  This is good practice for the twists and turns of real life!  Three rounds.

 

overhead curtseys	30
deadlifts or 1 leg deadlifts	20
kickbacks	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
suitcase swings	30
lunge twists	20
pretty princesses	10

 

I think we can all include that fifth reason...

We all have different reasons for working out, and they’re all valid as long as they are really ours (other people don’t get to have reasons for OUR workouts; they can do their own).  Here are five we might find motivating.

 

1.     We want to live longer.  Exercise helps us avoid a huge long list of things that can kill us, including heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, glucose management, and more.

2.     We want to live better.  None of us particularly want to live to be 215 if the last half is all about wheelchairs, diapers, and drool.  Active people tend to have a better quality of life as they age.

3.     We want to look cute.  For some of us, this is all about muscle tone.  Others of us would just like to fit into cuter clothes.

4.     We want to do something else that requires our fitness.  Maybe we want to do a hiking trip through Europe.  Maybe we want to check out 57 books from the library at once and get them all to the car.  Maybe we want to play tag with our puppy or child or grandchild.  Fitness is useful for all of those things and more.

5.     We want better sex.  Do I need to explain this one?  I didn’t think so.

 

Go play. 

I don't care about your attitude

There is a strong trend or pressure or theme in our society about having a positive attitude.  You read about people who feel that they beat cancer by thinking positive or visualized their way to great wealth and happiness or whatever.  I am not going to opine about whether those stories are true or not, but I am going to say that it is not all that important to have a positive attitude during a workout.

 

Workouts are challenging.  They’re supposed to be.  We are, on purpose, pushing our bodies to do more than they’d choose to do on their own (bodies are really really good at finding the easiest way to do something).  We do not need to project our inner ballerina while we work out; we are not performing for an audience.  It is all right to sweat and swear and whine about how hard things are.  Smiles are not essential to the process.  We do not have to put pressure on ourselves to do the hard thing and project enjoyment the whole time—workouts are for bodies, not for character development.

 

That said, it is definitely all right to celebrate that record lift or new fastest time.  It is all right to make silly jokes and to take ourselves lightly while we lift heavy.

 

The important bit in all of it is that we show up and do the work.

No pain, no... Yeah, I don't buy it

I am, perhaps, a little countercultural for a personal trainer.  I really hate the slogan, “No pain, no gain.”  A lot.  Pain is there for a reason, and the reason is not to make us stronger, but to make us stop when we need to.

 

This is not to say that working out is always as comfortable as lying in bed or as fun as a birthday party.  Sometimes we do have to do some things we’d rather not.  Very few exercises actually hurt (looking at you, hamstring curls with the TRX) if we are doing them correctly.  I will always be honest about exercises that may not be the most pleasant, I will explain why I want us to do them, and, if they are not appropriate for the person in front of me, I’ll substitute something else.

 

We need to understand the difference between discomfort and pain.  Discomfort is the feeling we have when we’re out of breath because we’re doing some challenging cardio or when our muscles are fatigued on the last rep of a set.  Pain is the feeling that accompanies injury—the sprained ankle, the broken arm, the torqued back.  When we feel pain, the appropriate response is to stop what we are doing, period.  It is not something to push through or buck up under or whatever macho suck-it-up phrase we want to use.  If we do keep going when there is pain, we are asking to make our injury worse, our recovery longer, and our lives more miserable.

 

Discomfort, on the other hand, means that we are doing what we need to do to grow.  We need to put up with it during our workouts, but once the workouts are done, I am a big believer in making it go away.  That might mean rest, or Ibuprofen if that is something we can take, or extra hydration, or a hot bath or shower, or ice.

 

It doesn’t have to be horrible, dear ones.

Monday Workout: Balance

We had a bit of a break from balance exercises, but now I’m back to them because they are so beneficial to our daily life.  Three rounds.

 

squat to leg lift	30
curls	20
pushups	10
mountain climbers	30
1 leg deadlift	20
skullcrushers	10
lunge punches	30
1 leg squat	20
Russian twist	10

 

Six Ways to Sleep Tight

 

Getting enough sleep is hard.  Here are six ways to make it a little easier.

 

1.     Cut down or eliminate the caffeine.  This may sound like crazy talk to those of us who worship at the local Starbucks.  Kicking the habit can be awful in the short term, but in the long term it can help us build a better relationship with sleep and a more realistic idea of what we should be doing.

2.     Get in some cardio.  There is a pretty strong correlation between getting enough exercise and improved sleep.

3.     Find a mindfulness practice.  One of the big barriers to falling asleep is what I call Hamster Head—that little rodent won’t stop running through all the things on the to-do list or the litany of embarrassing things I’ve done since I was three or random song lyrics.  Learning to meditate can help chill that little beast out.

4.     Turn off the tech.  I’ve been working on this one myself.  Instead of binge-watching more cop shows in the evening, I’ve been doing some old-fashioned reading with an actual book.  I’m falling asleep faster.  (Note:  this is anecdotal evidence and not scientifically valid, but real scientists have done studies that indicate that turning off the screens an hour or so before bed improve sleep latency, which is the time between going to bed and falling asleep.)

5.     Schedule it.  This one can be hard, especially for those of us who enjoy sleeping in when we can.  However, bodies like routine, so if we practice going to bed at a regular time and getting up at a regular time, our bodies adapt and learn to sleep during those hours.

6.     Get comfy.  Some of us want all the pillows.  Some want cool sheets.  Some need total darkness.  We can take the time to find our own best practices for sleeping and create that environment.  When I was sick as a kid, my mom would come in and smooth out the sheets and untangle the blankets, which made the bed comfortable again; now we get to be our own moms.

 

As we say in our house, don’t bite the bedbugs; they hate that.

Defining Rest

Yesterday I wrote a little about how we need to temper our enthusiasm for working out with periods of rest.  Today I want to dive into what rest looks like, because it doesn’t always look like lying on the couch like a slug (although there are times when that is a perfectly valid way to rest!).

 

When we first start working out, we want to be building the habit of working out as much as we want to be building up our endurance and our strength.  It is better to do short workouts almost every day than one long workout and then nothing until the next Monday rolls around.  For fresh-off-the-couch fitness enthusiasts, I recommend starting with fifteen to thirty minutes of cardio on five days of the week and maybe one weight workout per week.  That leaves one day for the couch.

 

As we get more fit, our workouts can get longer and/or more intense.  We may not have a couch day every week, just days when we take the intensity down a lot (walk versus run, yoga instead of heavy weights, etc.).  We also may realize that things that used to be workouts aren’t really all that strenuous anymore—that walk to the coffee shop that used to take half an hour round trip now takes half the time and we don’t even sweat—so now it counts as activity rather than exercise.  Activity can be a form of rest, too.

 

One kind of rest that should be (but isn’t, here in Reality Land) nonnegotiable is getting enough sleep.  It is hard to fit our 7 to 9 hours of sleep in with all the other things we have to get done, but without it, we are hamstringing our ability to make progress with our workouts, not to mention the even more important parts of life.

 

Work hard and then get some rest!

Beware Enthusiasm!

I am enthusiastic about… enthusiasm!  I love it when clients want to work and learn and grow because then we can focus on getting stuff done and I don’t have to reach into my bag of motivational tricks (they are invisible and came with my personal training certification, just like all the invisible Pilates tools that came with that certification!).  However, even enthusiasm has a Dark Side (loud breathing optional).

 

The darker side of enthusiasm is obsession.  None of us can work out all the time, and we shouldn’t.  Growth requires both work AND rest.  Our bodies use pain to send us this message; that soreness after a hard workout is notice that we need to rest before doing it again.  When we ignore those bulletins from our muscles, we are risking injury.

 

It is hard to be patient when we are excited about all the new shiny workouts we get to do.  It is worth it.  Slow, steady tortoise progress is not as thrilling as hare-brained all out sprints, but we know who won that race.

 

We can use our enthusiasm as power for the long haul.

 

Go play and then rest.

Monday Workout: Oblique

This week we are working some obliques with the single arm clean and press, the woodchoppers, the renegade rows, and the quadruped.  This is good for making our waists look trim and for our balance.  Three rounds.

 

suitcase swings	30
flies	20
Arnold press	10
1 arm clean and press	30
deadlifts	20
renegade rows or rows	10
woodchoppers	30
lateral raise	20
quadruped	10