Terrifying!

For Halloween, I present some of the most common fears people have about working out and maybe some ways to cope with those fears:

 

1.     It will be too hard.  If the workout IS too hard, we don’t have to do it.  We are grown-ups and no one can make us.  We can go at our own pace, even if that pace is not the one we think we should be using.

2.     It will be embarrassing.  There are a couple of ways to deal with this one.  One is to embrace the embarrassment.  (Looking at me, every time I’ve gone to Zumba.)  Another is to work out at home or in a less-populated area of the gym or with people we trust to be kind to us. (BTW, there is a special place in hell for people who make fun of anyone working out, right next to child molesters and people who talk in the theater.) (Yes, that was a Firefly reference.)

3.     It won’t work.  Working out once is not going to transform us instantly.  It does take some time and some determination to make change.  I can say for sure that working out works better than not working out.

4.     It will work.  All of a sudden we are stronger and faster and more powerful!  Our friends and family will look at us differently!  Some of them may not like our new more awesome selves.  I’ll be blunt here:  anybody who does not want us to be our best selves does not love us.  They can go pound sand.  We don’t need that negative energy.

5.     I won’t like it.  Maybe not.  But there are tons and tons of different kinds of workouts out there.  We’ve all seen bad movies, but we don’t conclude that all movies are terrible; we just pick something else next time.

6.     I won’t know what to do.  Guess what?  There are lots of people who would love to help us with that (me included!).  The internet is full of workouts.  Gyms have helpful staff and orientation programs and actual instructors who give classes.  No one expects us to know what we are doing at the beginning; it is more than okay to get help.

 

Now the music at the gym?  That can be truly scary.  Best I can say is bring headphones. 

Food Fight?

With Halloween rapidly approaching, we have officially arrived at Food Season.  It is never easy to make healthy food choices in our sugar-and-fat-and-salt-obsessed culture, but between now and January, we are going to be basically bombarded with cake, candy, gravy, pie, latkes, bacon, stuffing, and chocolate.  How do we survive?

 

Like with everything else:  we pay attention.  Of course we want to have some of Aunt Gertrude’s special peanut brittle, but we can notice that we’re actually satisfied with a few bites rather than an entire pound of it.  Note:  this means we can have some LATER!  Also note:  if it does turn out that we want a whole pound of it, the world will not end.  We will still be valuable human beings, worth far more than whatever number the scale shows us.

 

We also practice our tact.  “Yes, Aunt Gertrude, it is truly delicious and I love that you made this for me.  I just want to save some to share with Cousin Jimmy, too.”  A lot of people (myself included) think that loving people means feeding them.  We have to be sure to acknowledge the love even when we decline the third helping.

 

We move.  It is not possible to out-exercise an entire cake, but our good exercise habits will help burn off some of the extra calories.  Cardio is good, but doing some weight training will also improve our metabolisms.

 

Worst case?  We enjoy our holidays.  I hope we savor all the good parts and skip the less good parts.

One sick workout??

I’ve had a cold for the last week or so, which means I have been thinking about whether or not to work out.  Here are some general guidelines for anyone in a similar situation.

 

First, we want to avoid “sharing” our illness with others.  This means skipping the gym workouts and the non-virtual classes and training sessions.  Having a home-based or outside workout for this situation is a good idea.  No one will like us if we share our germs, and this is especially true in pandemic times as flu season approaches.  I hope we have all learned a lot in the last while about taking care of other people’s health by staying away from them when we are sick, but it is never bad to be reminded.

 

Now that we’ve got public safety out of the way, we can address the personal issues.  One of the first things to keep in mind is that IT IS OKAY TO REST.  Sorry to shout, but it can be hard to be heard over the noise of the Protestant Work Ethic and all that advertising telling us we’re not doing enough to be fabulous and the general ick of the white-supremecist-imperialist-cis-normative-heteronormative-capitalist patriarchy.  Our bodies need more sleep when we are sick.  Fighting off bacterial or viral invaders takes a lot of energy.  If we don’t feel up to working out, we don’t have to do it.  The workouts will still be there for us when we feel better.

 

If we don’t feel like we need to rest all that much, it is still a good idea not to go for a personal record of any kind while we are sick.  Skip the hill route, substitute a walk for a run, do the body weight workout, or do restorative yoga.  This is one time when a light workout is definitely better than a challenging one.

 

Cardio is normally one of my favorite things because of its mood-boosting properties.  However, when just plain breathing is hard because we’re congested or coughing, it is best to choose something like stretching or yoga or light weight-lifting or Pilates.  Our bodies are working hard enough fighting the snot.

 

Another thing to consider is how well our brains are working.  When we are fuzzy-headed from congestion or from decongestants, we may not have the focus to keep ourselves safe while working out.  When in doubt, skip the workout; it’s much better to miss one workout than to get injured and miss lots of them.

 

Finally:  drink lots of water.  This is always true, but especially when we are sick.

Monday Workout: Back at it!

I’m back!  Ready to work?  Good!  Three rounds:

 

jacks	30
rows	20
Arnold press	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
pushups	10
lunge punches	30
flies	20
pretty princesses	10

  

The WORST!

I usually keep stuff positive, because it’s just good practice, but today, just for fun, I’m going to list my least-favorite exercises.  (Guess what?  I do them anyway!)

 

1.     Lunges.  I really hate doing lunges.  They’re hard.  They challenge my balance.  I have to think about how I align my feet and knees and about where my shoulders are in space.  They make my butt sore.  Once I made up a whole song about hating lunges to get through a very long set of walking lunges.  It was a terrible song, but not as terrible as doing lunges.  But, yeah, I do them because they DO challenge my balance and make me think and all that.

2.     Burpees.  Nearly everybody hates burpees.  Doing burpees well requires lots of stamina and a fair bit of coordination.  A sense of humor doesn’t hurt either, as the body tries to go along with what I’m asking it to do.  Practice makes them easier, but so far not more fun.  Unfortunately, avoiding them just makes them worse.

3.     Plyojacks.  Every time I do a set of 30 plyojacks, I question my own sanity around the fifteenth rep.  By the third set of 30, the question has been answered definitively:  yep, I’m crazy.  Also tired.  However, they burn a boat-load of calories, increase metabolism, and build endurance.

4.     The Hundred.  As much as I love Uncle Joe Pilates, when I do the hundred, I conclude that he was not always a very nice man.  Ow.  And yet, it is a great exercise for the core and it helps me figure out how to breathe under challenging circumstances.

 

Agree?  Disagree?  Have some to add?

Stressing Fitness!

Moving always makes the list of stressful life events and I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment.  Even a good move is hard on the body and the soul.  However, I am noticing with this current move, the other kind of moving I do helps.

 

Sure, there is the practical bit:  when I lift weights, I get stronger, so I can schlepp more books and boxes and why-do-we-even-have-that-family-gradunzas.

 

The part that seems even more useful right now is what exercise does to manage stress.  I rely on cardio to boost my mood.  I need the weights to take the frustrations that build up in even the best-planned move.  And, of course, I need the exercise to burn off the stress eating I do (hey, nobody’s perfect!).

 

When the move is all over and I’m back to my regular life, I hope I remember how much exercise helped.  I hope I can keep working on my stress-resilience through exercise.

 

Anyone else?

Gratitude!

It might just be me (I doubt it!) who goes around complaining about what my body can’t or won’t do.  News flash:  I am 53 years old, not 23, so some stuff is out of warranty, so to speak.

 

Today, however, it is time for me (and anybody who would like to join me) to express some thanks to my body for all the things it does do.  In some ways, I could kick my own 23-year-old butt thanks to the workouts I’ve put in over the last 30 years, but that’s not even what I mean.  All by itself, my body remembers to breathe.  It keeps my heart beating and processes the food I eat.  When I work it, it recovers and repairs whatever I break.  It carries me from place to place.  It lets me experience this magical world.  What a gift!

 

What I can give my body back is some decent care.  I can feed it healthy food and give it rest when it needs it.  I can remember to stretch it.  I can reduce the bad kinds of stress I put on it and increase the useful, exercise kinds.

 

I am grateful.

Monday Workout: Body Weight

I’m not at work this week because I’m working on moving.  In other words, my personal workout will involve hefting eighty gazillion boxes.  Assuming everyone else would rather have some other kind of workout, I offer this one in my absence.  It is all body-weight exercises, so there is really no excuse.  A sturdy step is useful for this circuit, but if one is not available, substitute marching or running in place.  Three or four rounds, depending on energy and time:

 

step ups	30
squats	30
pushups	10
jacks	30
1 leg squats	10
lunge punches	20
pretty princesses	10
brains	10

 

The clothes make the worker-outer?

Let’s talk about workout basics, like what the heck we’re supposed to wear.  Short answer:  whatever we want, as long as we’re safe.  Longer answer:  here are some things to consider:

 

1.     Shoes.  We don’t have to wear them if we’re doing yoga or Pilates or various other kinds of exercise, but if we’re playing sports or biking or running or lifting weights, it’s a good idea to wear supportive and comfortable shoes.  It is worth experimenting to find the right shoes because nothing makes a human miserable faster than blisters.

2.     Socks.  They help with that blister thing.  They also add some cushion.  Some people love their cotton socks, but there are some spiffy new athletic fibers that can help with the stinky feet thing and also keep our feet feeling drier.

3.     Pants.  Or shorts.  Old-school Rocky-style gray sweats are certainly an option, but again, cotton tends to get wet, heavy, and smelly as we work harder.  Pants can have wicking fabric, extra support, and even pockets!

4.     Shirts.  Again, that ratty t-shirt that the kids gave us as a joke ten years ago is a perfectly acceptable workout shirt, but we deserve something nicer and less sopping if we want it.  I will give a plug here to bike shirts, which very often have big pockets at the small of the back, which are super handy for workouts that don’t involve bikes, too.

5.     Support garments.  I’ll let the male-identifying people discuss their underwear among themselves, but those of us who identify as female need to make sure that we have bras that both allow us to breathe and to feel secure no matter how hard we work or how high we jump.  Also, synthetic fabric undies are less likely to get truly uncomfortably damp and/or baggy.

6.     Other layers.  Folks who work out early or late may want a warmth layer or a visibility layer.

7.     Cute stuff.  No, our workout clothes don’t have to be cute, but it can provide a needed boost to our confidence to have an outfit that looks as good as it works.

8.     Activity-specific stuff.  If we bike, we need a helmet.  Swimmers might want goggles or caps.  We want to get the stuff we need to make what we do fun as well as useful.

 

Go play.

Spinal Tap AND Steve Austin???

Not every workout has to go to eleven.  I say this a lot, but I seem to need to keep saying it.  I blame the white supremacist heteronormative capitalist patriarchy and its tool, the Protestant work ethic.  To be clear:  yes, I want everyone to work out and to do a good job of it.  No, I don’t want every workout to be the hardest one ever or to leave us wiped out for the next three weeks, or worse, injured.

 

We are valuable humans even if we keep lifting the same five pound weights forever.  We are worthwhile whether or not we ever succeed at running around the block, or a mile, or a marathon.  There is no moral superiority to be gained by mastering the secrets of Zumba or yoga or spin class.

 

In other words, there are no grades for workouts.  We do not have to be the six-million-dollar people (better… stronger… faster…).

 

What we do have to do is show up.

 

Get your gear and go play.

Maybe a different kind of rest?

I spend a surprising amount of time, given my profession, telling people to rest.  However, sometimes when we’re feeling low-energy and tired, we don’t actually need rest; we need to get moving.

 

I know we’ve all had days (or maybe even weeks!) where we’ve had a lot on our minds and we feel stressed out.  We may have “treated” ourselves to less healthy foods as a stress management technique, or leaned on the caffeine to make up for the sleep we can’t seem to get.  It is tempting, at that point, to crawl under the covers or cocoon ourselves on the couch, but if we want to get our minds and bodies back to life, we’d do better to throw on some shoes and go for a walk.

 

I am not saying that we shouldn’t sleep when we need to, or that we should go run a marathon to beat the fatigue.  I AM saying that some moderate exercise and maybe a dose of fresh air is the kind of break we need even more.  Cardio, once we get started, increases our energy level and boosts our mood.  Our brains start to work better.  Going outside literally changes our perspective (bonus points for going outside into a natural setting, where “forest bathing” can occur to soothe our souls).

 

It takes determination to get started when we feel blah or worse.  We can talk ourselves into it by giving ourselves stupidly easy goals, like walking around the block one time.  We may discover that that is enough; we’ve earned our nap at that point.  We may, however, realize that we feel better already and we’d like to do another lap or two.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Sneaky!

I love exercises that challenge the core in sneaky ways.  The single arm clean and press, by virtue of being asymmetric, does just that!  Mountain climbers are obviously a cardio move, but core recruitment is definitely happening at the same time.  The row part of renegade rows is actually the easy bit; it’s the balance/core work that makes them hard.  Three rounds.

 

1 arm clean and press	30
flies	20
renegade rows	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
mountain climbers	30
squats	20
Russian twist	10

Five Tasty Things

We all get hungry.  One of the keys to staying healthy is choosing good snacks.  Here are five that I like right now:

 

1.     Apples.  Crisp, sweet, full of fiber, relatively low in calories.  Pair well with nut butters or cheese for a protein hit as well.

2.     Nuts.  Healthy fats, a bit of protein, and some tasty salt!  What is not to like?  But watch portion size because there are tons of calories to be found here.

3.     Hard boiled eggs.  Again, a good source of protein with some fat to keep us feeling full.

4.     Fruit and yogurt.  The protein/fat/carb combo here helps us stay satiated without eating too many calories.  Choose low sugar yogurts for best results.

5.     Pretzels.  This one is not peak nutrition, but when we want something salty and relatively low in fat, pretzels beat chips every time.

Not an easy out

Pilates can be deceptive.  Sometimes it seems like we’re not doing that much when we do the Pilates exercises.  We rarely get out of breath and we may or may not get sweaty, so we get it into our heads that Pilates is “easier” than weight training.  If we’re looking purely at calories burned, that might be true.

 

However, because Pilates focuses in so much on how we move and not just on how much, we have to use our brains even more than we do during weight training.  A lot of weight training is about big muscles and brute force.  Pilates is about little shifts with smaller muscles, about refinement of technique, and about breath.

 

It is absolutely true that I sometimes offer Pilates as a gentler option to clients who are not feeling up to a big cardio/weight workout.  I do it because I know that those clients have the mind space to concentrate, to explore the connections between bones and muscles and nerves, to move with intention.  We may not go hard, but we do go deep when we do Pilates.

 

What we end up with is improvements in proprioception, core control, balance, alignment, and overall form.

 

Check it out!

Exercise Exorcism

One of the things that makes working out more complicated is that we are not simply bodies.  We’re also great big bags of emotion and thought and experience.  All that mind stuff can either help or hinder our workouts.  The good news is that we can use various techniques to ensure that things go in the “help” direction.

 

This last week, one of my clients (who actually suggested this blog post, so I’m not violating privacy here) showed up to her workout just after a pretty major disagreement with someone.  That meant that she had tons of adrenaline and energy flowing through her, but that her ability to focus was somewhat impaired by anger and frustration and hurt.  We dealt with the demons by performing exorcism by plyojacks.  (I have not tried to exorcise any actual demons and I don’t recommend trying that at home, with plyojacks or any other exercises.  Consult a professional in case of actual demon possession.  That is well out of the scope of my practice.)

 

In other words, we channeled all that (negative) nervous energy into cardio.  It took about a minute.  Her heart rate got up, which made her breathe heavy instead of the shallow breathing of stress.  The air and floor took the pounding without damage.  The work was just hard enough that there wasn’t room in her brain for all the icky thoughts.  And, as I keep saying over and over, cardio is a proven mood-improver.  We broke the cycle of Bad Stuff and were able to get on with the rest of the workout.  At the end, she had accomplished a lot with her body and her mind was in a calmer state.

 

Sometimes, I need to take a client in a different direction.  A person shows up with the low energy of sadness.  We can go gently, then, adding in some breath-focused exercises from the Pilates repertoire that help soothe and then energize.  We focus on exercises that are familiar.  We don’t go for the big challenge, but for success.

 

To be clear:  I am not a therapist, doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, or mental health professional of any kind.  I am a personal trainer and Pilates instructor.  Nothing I do is a substitute for professional help with mental health issues.  Exercise, according to science, can help with some mental health issues, but please talk to the appropriate folks to get the real help you need.  My purpose here is to suggest complementary behaviors, not to treat or correct any conditions.

 

When in doubt, just keep breathing.

Monday Workout: Lunges

One of the easiest ways to make an exercise more challenging is to add a jump to it.  Lunges (even though I hate them) are good for us because they are a compound exercise that requires core recruitment for balance and a lot of coordination to ensure we use our knees well.  Jump lunges do all that while getting our heart rate up.  Note:  if jumping is not appropriate in your body, don’t do it.  Plain lunges are, as I just said, still awesome.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
squats	20
1 leg squats	10
woodchoppers	30
deadlifts	20
lateral raises	10
(jump) lunges	30
rows	20
pretty princesses	10