Not the Easy Way

Some portion of us got up Monday morning, took a look at the scale, and went into Vengeful God(dess) mode.  Now that it is Tuesday, we’re tired from all that frenetic exercising and we’re not feeling better or thinner or lighter.

 

May I suggest a different approach (and maybe theology, although that is well outside my area of expertise)?  How about some love?

 

When we treat ourselves with love, even when we make less than optimal decisions, we are much more likely to succeed and we’re definitely going to be happier.  Starting from love helps us begin right now—we can’t change the past, so yelling and carrying on about it is not going to make a difference.  Love is a forward-looking thing that can envision our better selves.  It encourages us to take steps, even hard steps, to move toward our ideals.  (Note:  ideals, in this context, have little to do with the weird body-image messages we get from our culture and advertising, but everything to do with our personal values for health, beauty, and happiness.)

 

Starting from love, we recognize that we have time to make incremental changes, ones we can live with in the long term.  We are able to balance our long-term need to build good habits with our short-term need not to croak over dead while working out.  We can gently remind ourselves, as if we were our favorite toddler, that while cookies are delicious, we do also need to eat the occasional vegetable.

 

Perhaps what I am trying to say is that we’re not letting ourselves off easy when we begin from love.  We are giving ourselves a reason to choose the best options, which will sometimes be pie and more often sweaty breathlessness.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Oblique

This week we’re working some obliques with cross-body movements.  These are good for stability.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
rows	20
curls	10
squat to leg lift	30
deadlifts	20
pushups	10
overhead high knees	30
lunges	20
Russian twist	10

 

Grateful!

It’s time for the annual gratitude list, focusing on fitness things.  Here are ten things I am thankful for:

 

1.     My body.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but it is one amazing gizmo.  It breathes!  It moves!  It lets me experience the world!

2.     Food.  I have plenty of access to healthy and nourishing food.  Also, food is tasty and makes me happy.

3.     Clean water.  So much of the world does not have access to reliable, clean water.  I can stay hydrated, cook food, and even get clean!

4.     Health care.  This could be several gratitude items, but the one that is top of mind right now, not surprisingly, is vaccinations.  Not only do I not have COVID, I also do not have polio or measles or chicken pox or smallpox or diptheria.  My children did not die when they were small from preventable diseases.

5.     Outside.  Walking, hiking, swimming, and biking out in the world are joys in my fitness life.  Nature is beautiful and restorative.

6.     Spin bike.  Or as I often call it, the Magic Mood Machine.  Cardio in general is good for moods, but my spin bike in particular is excellent.

7.     Uncle Joe.  Pilates, that is.  He created a system that makes my body feel so much better.

8.     Uncle Patanjali.  He’s the author of one of the basic yoga texts.  Yoga helps address the challenges my mind and body present.

9.     Weights.  They make me stronger and they do not mind when I take my bad moods out on them.

10.  Getting to work with wonderful clients.  I am very very lucky to work with such strong, funny, smart humans.

 

What are yours?

How to Modify

Workouts are not one-size-fits-all.  I mean, I’m not going to try to do a marathoner’s workout because I like continuing to breathe and I’m not going to get what I need from a workout geared toward someone who has been bedridden for the last year.  That part is obvious.  However, even workouts that are designed for people with more or less our level of fitness may need modifications to be right for the individuals we are.  Here are some ways to customize the exercises to make them optimal for us.

 

If we have an injury, current or chronic:  we may need to make some substitutions.  Folks with bad knees will want to avoid jumping.  People who have recently given birth may also prefer non-impact exercises to avoid leakage.  Those of us who are older and may have bone density issues will want to avoid spinal flexion.  These are only a few examples, but the basic principle is that if it hurts, don’t do it.

 

If the workout is too hard:  we have some choices to make, depending on how it is too hard.  If we are too out of breath, we need to tone down the cardio by moving slower, moving smaller, or resting more.  This is another place where lower- or no-impact exercises can help.  If our muscles can’t cope with the load, we can, obviously, use smaller weights, but we can also do fewer repetitions.  Also, there are many ways to work the same muscle groups.  If, for example, a renegade row is too challenging, we can do a bent-over row instead.

 

If the workout is too easy:  we can increase the challenge.  From a cardio standpoint, if we want more challenge, the easiest way to do that is to add jumping.  Plain squats become jump squats.  Step ups become jump ups.  It is also possible to increase the cardio aspect of a workout by making movements bigger.  This is the cardio difference between overhead presses and clean and presses.  Heavier weights can also add more cardio to the mix.  And there are always cardio intervals:  throw in a minute of jump rope or a quick sprint on the treadmill between sets of weights for cardio fun.  The solution if the weight part is too easy is not always just throwing more weight at ourselves, although that does often do the trick.  It depends on what our goals are.  Many of us may find that we get the challenge we want from doing more compound exercises and fewer isolation exercises (lunge to curl versus bicep curl, for example).  In general, when we increase weight, we want to reduce the number of repetitions until we get used to the new weight.  Then when the new weight gets easy, we add reps, alternating our way upward to greatness.

 

If we really really hate a particular exercise, most of the time we don’t have to do that one.  There are a lot of exercises out there and we can usually find a different way to attack the same problem.  There are very few things we just have to suck up; this is a good thing.

 

Ultimately, I encourage everyone to experiment and see what works.  As we work out more, we will need to continue to experiment as our capabilities expand.

 

Go play. 

(Not) Crunch Time

There are a fair number of misconceptions floating around out there about what our core muscles are and what they do and how we are supposed to work them.  I could write a very long post about that, but none of us has that kind of attention span.  Instead, I’m going to focus on one that I really dislike:  we can flatten our stomachs by doing crunches.  It’s a particularly sneaky misconception in that it is not entirely false, but definitely misleading. 

 

First of all, we cannot out-crunch a bad diet.  Doing a thousand crunches a day (and who has that kind of time?) will not help if we are living on Snickers bars and gravy.  The biggest step we can make toward a flatter stomach, if that is one of our goals, is to begin or recommit to healthy eating.

 

Second, crunches are not a good exercise for everyone.  Anyone with bone loss should avoid exercises with flexion (curving the spine forward, like we do when we bend over to tie our shoes).  Crunches can be challenging for people with low back pain as well.

 

Then there is the whole issue of form in crunches.  When we put our hands behind our heads and use our arms to yank our skulls forward, we are not getting the optimum bang for our exercise buck.  I teach crunches (which are called “chest lifts” in Pilates) very differently than many of us learned back in our P.E. days.  Yes, we put our hands behind our heads, but the only reason our heads lift when we do chest lifts is because they are attached to the top of our spines.  Instead, we focus on pulling our breast bones down toward our feet.  This focuses the work on the area of the abdominals just below where those of us who identify as female have our bra straps in the front.  Additionally, when we try to force ourselves up too high, our abdominals tend to puff out in the area between our navels and pubic bones.  It is important to take a moment to think about spreading the lower abdominals out across our bodies to encourage them to stay flat as we work them.  We also need to work with our breath when doing crunches:  we want to exhale as we curl up and inhale as we return to the starting position to allow for best recruitment of muscles.

 

Finally, crunches tend to focus on the upper abdominals.  We need a more comprehensive approach to our abdominals to assist our goal of flattening the stomach.  I suggest, at the very least, adding an exercise like femur arcs to target the lower abdominals and one like brains to recruit the obliques.

 

Let’s be effective.

Monday Workout: Core

This week we’re continuing to work on exercises with a sneaky commitment to our core and balance.  When we do asymmetric exercises, our bodies have to work harder to stabilize, which is good for us.  Also, we are remembering that our core muscles are not just in the front of our bodies—those reverse flies help us learn to recruit the core muscles in the back.  Three rounds.

 

(jump) squats	30
flies	20
1 leg deadlift	10
mountain climbers	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
1 arm clean and press	30
reverse flies	20
pretty princesses	10

On Balance

Balance is both a talent and a skill.  I can’t help the talent part, but here are some exercises to practice to build it as a skill.  (Note:  safety is key.  Have something nearby to hold if needed.)

 

1.     Stand on one foot.  Basic, I know.  A good time to do this is while brushing our teeth in the morning, since we are standing there anyway.

2.     Play one-leg catch.  We need a friend for this one and a soft ball.  I use a Koosh ball.  Both of us stand on one leg and toss the ball back and forth.  Then we switch legs.  This is more difficult than just standing on one leg because we’ve added movement and coordination to the mix.

3.     Do calf raises.  Stand with feet hip distance apart and rise up on the toes and come back down.  When that gets easy, try doing it on one leg at a time.

4.     Do single leg squats.  This is the opposite of a calf raise.  Stand on one foot and bend and straighten the knee of the standing leg.

5.     Do single leg dumbbell passes.  Stand on one leg holding a light dumbbell or kettle bell (start with 3 or 5 pounds).  Pass the weight from one hand to the other around the body five times in one direction and five times in the other direction.  Then repeat on the other leg.

6.     Do single leg deadlifts.  I call these drinking birds, after the toy.  Stand on one leg and bend the torso forward as the other leg lifts up behind.  Return to start and repeat five or ten times; then do the other leg.

 

For all of these exercises, make sure that the abs stay engaged.

 

Go play.

Older but better.

We are all, God willing, going to get older.  What we do now can help determine how well that process goes.

 

First, we can make sure that we’re getting our cardio exercise.  Cardio helps us maintain or reach a healthy weight.  It increases our endurance.  It reduces stress, improves brain function, and lifts our mood.  Not incidentally, it contributes to heart health.

 

Then we can lift some weights.  As we age, our muscle mass drops unless we work on it.  Weight lifting improves our metabolism, helps with our bone density, and assists us with what physical therapists call Activities of Daily Living, like opening jars and moving furniture.

 

Additionally, we can work on our flexibility and balance.  Flexibility work (like yoga and Pilates) can help us increase or at least preserve our range of motion so we can do things like pick up stuff from the floor or turn our heads while driving.  Balance work targets our core muscles.  It helps us prevent falls and other injuries and generally move through life with more grace.

 

Let’s not go gently!

Is Your Trainer Fit?

I have mentioned before that I am not the right trainer for everyone.  There are people out there who need different things than I can provide.  Here are some ways to tell if a trainer is a good fit.

 

Does the person have the knowledge/education/training to keep us safe?  All of us should ask if the trainer we are talking to has a certification (NASM or ACE or similar) to be a personal trainer at all.  It is also worth asking about a trainer’s specializations and continuing education.  For example, people with an extensive injury history might want to know that their trainer knows about corrective exercise.  Older folks might want to know that their needs are understood and planned for.  That’s just basic.

 

Does the person know how to get us to our goals?  If we are just getting started on our fitness journey, we want someone who knows how to move us along gradually so we don’t burn out or get injured.  If we are training for an event like a marathon or a century ride, we want someone whose workouts facilitate those goals.  If we are trying to lose weight, we might want to seek out someone who not only has the skill to plan our workouts but also the appropriate knowledge to help us make good food choices.

 

Is the person likeable?  I know likeable is a very fuzzy term, but I’m using it on purpose.  We have to feel comfortable with the person training us.  Some of us want rah-rah cheerleading trainers.  Some of us want a more matter-of-fact approach.  Some of us (I find this hard to believe, but it seems to be true) want someone to yell at us until we do our work.  How much does the person talk?  Does the person give enough information?  Too much?  Not enough?  Do they give understandable directions and demonstrations?  When we are struggling, do they understand how to motivate us?  Most importantly, does the person listen and hear what we have to say about what we need?

 

Finally, is the person reliable?  We need to know that our trainer is organized enough to show up for our workouts as scheduled and to communicate with us when there is a problem.  This is a surprisingly rare skill.

 

Do not hesitate to ask lots of questions.  When we pay good money for training, we should know that we are getting what we need.

Monday Workout: Old Favorites!

Sometimes I forget about an exercise for a while and then I remember it and get all excited.  This week, we return to the clean and press AND we get to (have to?) do YTA.  Three rounds.

 

clean and press	30
deadlift	20
lateral raise	10
squat to leg lift	30
lunge with twist	20
YTA	10
standing mountain climbers	30
rows	20
quadruped	10

 

In the bag!

Getting organized to go to the gym can be stressful.  Here are six things to make sure we have in our bags:

 

1.     Mask.  Going to the gym is a lot less healthy when we share germs.  I know it’s uncomfortable, but so is dying.

2.     Water bottle.  Dehydrated people are crabby people.  They also perform worse.

3.     Toiletries.  What exactly we bring depends on how elaborate our routines are, but shampoo, comb, and deodorant seem like the minimum.

4.     Extra clothes.  Sure, we need regular clean clothes for after the workout, but sometimes stuff happens even before that and we need something to wear that doesn’t have food/blood/sweat/whatever on it.

5.     Plastic bag.  For dirty and messy stuff.  If we’re not getting dirty and messy, why are we going to the gym at all?

6.     Headphones.  Not only can we listen to what we want to listen to while we work, we can avoid annoying conversations (whether ours or other people’s!).

 

Now go!

Whine away...

One of the things I used to say to my kids a lot was that they didn’t have to like doing whatever it is I needed them to do, but they did have to do it.  It may have annoyed them (I have it on good authority that I am the Meanest Mom in the Entire Universe, so I’m sure I annoyed them often!).  I thought it was important, though, and I still think so.

 

There is a lot of pressure around us not only to do hard things but to do them with a positive attitude.  This may be because it helps other people avoid feeling bad for not giving us a hand or for not overthrowing oppressive systems or something.  Point is:  there is plenty of pressure out there and life is hard enough without pretending that we feel great about doing difficult stuff.  We may feel proud of ourselves afterward.  We may like what we got out of the experience as a whole.  But we don’t have to like the process.

 

It turns out that sometimes allowing ourselves to dislike things (like, say, lunges) takes away some of their power.  I can do more lunges when I don’t have to smile and pretend they’re fun and I can even have enough energy left to remember why I’m doing them anyway:  they work my lower body and core and balance and burn a bunch of calories.  Whining can be entirely good for us.

 

As long as we do the work.

Enthusiasm, cookies, minimums, and the dark side

Every gift we have has a darker side, as we all know.  Cookies:  delicious, but so many calories!  Speed, but then we feel impatient.  Cars, but then we don’t walk as much and we get mad at traffic.  All fine examples, but the one that is plaguing me today is enthusiasm.  Maybe I am not alone.

 

I get excited about stuff.  Spin is great!  Weight lifting is great!  I love yoga!  Oooh!  Shiny Pilates!  Oh, yeah, and I want to ride my bike and ski and rent a kayak and and and.  I run around trying to Do All The Things and suddenly I am very very tired.

 

I could just become enthusiastic about naps, which is not a terrible idea; I, like nearly all of us, could use more sleep on a regular basis.  However, there is another way to cope:  the minimum.

 

I’ve talked about this a lot from various perspectives, but today the minimum protects us from the excesses of our enthusiasm.  We have those times when we’re convinced that we should do that AND that AND that AND that other thing over there, too, until we are exhausted, overwhelmed, and inclined to feel inadequate for not finishing everything.  The minimum is the basic amount we need to do to be healthy and sane.  It is a widely applicable system, but I’ll confine my examples to fitness since that’s the scope of my practice.

 

We all need to find our own minimums.  The general guidelines for health suggest that we need about 30 minutes of moderate cardio exercise about five days a week.  If we have not been moving at all, that might be way too high for a first minimum and we might want to choose something like walking to the mailbox or around the block.  Those of us who have been working out regularly may find that we need that cardio every day and that there are some stretches that really make life a lot better when we do them daily.  Others of us may not need to set a cardio minimum, but we know we need to lift weights on Mondays and Fridays to feel like ourselves.  The key is to make it something we can achieve even when we’re having a terrible day.  Maybe everything possible went wrong, but darn it, we did five whole minutes of yoga; if we can manage that, we can cope with whatever else comes up.

 

Go do just a little.  It’s enough.  And we are enough, too.

Monday Workout: Kettle Bell

I love kettle bells because they work the whole body.  Exercises that work the whole body burn extra calories and build our metabolisms.  Also:  fun!  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
1 leg squat	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
jacks	30
renegade rows	20
femur arcs	10

 

Number Five Might Be the Very Best

 

Following on yesterday’s how-to-stretch post, here are my five favorite stretches:

 

1.     IT band stretch.  All of us who sit a lot need to stretch our IT bands.  To do it, we lie on our backs (yay!) and then extend one leg up toward the ceiling, possibly with a strap around our foot (less yay!).  This is only the first part.  Our hamstrings are now stretching, which is good, but not what we came for.  Now we take that leg across the midline of our bodies, allowing the pelvis to follow.  The outside edge of our leg from the hip to the knee will probably scream, so we need to go slowly and gently.

2.     Quad stretch.  There are a couple of ways to do this stretch, but I’m going to focus on the one where we get to lie down.  This time we lie on our side.  We bend the top knee as if we were trying to kick ourselves in the butt with our heel and grab that foot with our hand.  The front of the thigh will stretch.  This stretch is improved by keeping both knees next to each other.  Extra flexible people may need to press their hips forward and/or push the foot hard into the hand holding it.

3.     QL stretch.  For this one, we sit up with our legs spread out wide and our spines nice and straight to begin.  We want to lift our ribcage up off our pelvis and then bend to the side, reaching toward our toes.  That’s just the start:  the inner thighs and possibly the intercostals and obliques at the side of the ribcage we are stretching away from may feel the effects, but it’s the next part we’re aiming for.  Now we want to round our upper body toward our foot as if we were trying to put our belly on our thigh.  I grab my foot with my same-side hand and put my other hand on my thigh.  At the same time, we press the hip we are stretching away from into the ground.  This stretches the QL (quadratus lumborum), which is a deep back muscle in the lower back, one that gets tense and sore when we sit a lot.

4.     Chest stretch.  Again, there are several ways to do this one, but the fun one is to stand in a doorway with forearms against the doorframe.  Then we lean forward, opening the chest and feeling a lovely stretch across the whole thing.

5.     Neck stretch.  This is a stretch that can be done seated or standing, but it’s pretty useful when we’re stuck at our desks, so I’ll focus on that one.  We begin sitting up nice and straight.  For many of us, this may mean sitting at the edge of our chair, feet flat on the floor.  We tilt our head to one side, pulling the head toward the shoulder with the arm we’re tilting toward.  The other hand reaches down toward the ground; the energy out that hand makes a difference to the stretch.  After we hold a while, we can turn our head toward our bicep (the Kaepernick variation!), still pulling the head down with our hand.

 

What are yours?

Stretch Goals

I spend a good chunk of time encouraging people to stretch.  Almost no one does enough stretching, so from that perspective, any kind of stretching is good stretching.  However, in the interest of promoting optimal behavior, here’s a basic primer on how to do it:

 

There are at least two kinds of stretching:  static and dynamic.  Static stretching is the kind where we hold a stretched position for a while, like when we bend over and touch our toes.  Dynamic stretching is when we move through stretched positions, like when we twist back and forth at the waist.  Both kinds are good for us.

 

When we do static stretches, it is important to begin with warm muscles or at the very least to go slowly at first.  Taking our muscles to their maximum stretch first thing is a good way to pull something.  So:  we begin gently, stretching our muscles to the point where we feel a little tension.  NOTE:  stretching is not supposed to hurt.  It may be slightly uncomfortable, but if we hit the pain point, we are going too far.  Once we find that little bit of tension place, we need to hang out for a while.  Most of us are really impatient.  We stretch for about a second and say, “Done!”  Ideally, we stay in the stretch for thirty seconds to a minute.  For most of us, a good marker for that amount of time is about five deep breaths.  This gives our muscles some time to adjust to the stretch.  We may find that after those five breaths, we can go a little farther into the stretch without pain and repeat the process.  This allows our bodies to build flexibility in a gradual and sustainable way.

 

Dynamic stretches, in my experience, don’t build flexibility as well, but they do wake up existing flexibility.  I like them as part of a warm-up.  It’s what dancers do at the barre before getting to the actual dancing.  Just like with static stretches, the goal is to take the muscles to a place where they feel a little tension, but not pain.  We go gently to that place and out of it, not with quick bounces like some of us were taught eons ago in P.E.

 

Ultimately, any stretching is better than no stretching, so we should do the kind that appeals most to us.

 

Go play.