Mustard, pickles, whatever...

Recently, I started to learn how to play pickle ball.  I figured that I could run around waving a paddle and looking like an idiot while making some friends.  Turns out, I was right, especially about the looking like an idiot part.

 

The good thing is that I know about Beginner’s Mind.  It’s one of those Zen kind of concepts that presumably are good for the soul, but that’s not my area of expertise.  I find it to be super useful in my actual area of expertise, fitness.  The short version is that when we start something new, we know we don’t have a clue.  This allows us to be open to new ideas and experiences and techniques.  It frees us from the expectation that we’re going to be good at whatever it is for a good long time.  We can play around.

 

Play is serious.  Just because we’re playing, we don’t throw out effort and rules and everything.  We can try hard, but we have the understanding that what we are doing is intended to be fun.  When it stops being fun, we can stop playing, or change the game so it becomes fun again.

 

When we exercise, we want to give our best shot and we want to pay attention to safety, but that’s pretty much the whole enchilada, right there.  If running isn’t fun anymore, we can try biking or swimming or pickle ball.  Go play.

Monday Workout: Do You

When we have a body part that is not cooperating the way we’d like it to, we want to give it the right amount of movement in the right sort of way to encourage it.  There are certainly times when the right answer is to hold something still (this is why, for example, casts were invented), but a lot of the time, a gentle amount of motion is a good idea.  If, say, knees are feeling uncomfortable, we can bend more at the hips in the clean and press and limit the knee movement and we can make the squat in the squat raise small.  If, on the other hand, shoulders are grumpy, the overhead motions in the various exercises can be less overhead and more lateral.  In other words, modify as needed!  Three rounds.

 

1 arm clean and press	30
bench press	20
curls	10
suitcase swing	30
flies	20
overhead press	10
squat raise	30
1 leg deadlift	20
femur arcs	10

 

Snickersnack!

If we want to cut down on the sugar in our lives, what are we supposed to snack on?  Here are some ideas.  (Sugar hides in an awful lot of things, so this list comes with a caveat:  read the labels on any prepared foods and skip those with added sugars.)

 

1.     Nuts.  They’re a good source of protein and healthy fats.  They DO have a lot of calories, so we need to pay attention to quantity.

2.     Popcorn.  Full of fiber, which makes us feel full. 

3.     Celery and (your favorite nut) butter.  Celery has fiber and nut butters have all the good qualities of nuts.  DO check the nut butter label and choose one that has just nuts and maybe salt in it and not a bunch of added oils and sugars.

4.     Veggies and hummus.  Tasty, fibrous, full o’vitamins, and with a dash of legume protein!

 

Yum. 

Didn't we just do this?

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing yet another fitness blog post.  (And maybe folks are tired of reading yet another fitness blog post from me, or have stopped reading entirely because really?  Another one?)  Fitness is both incredibly simple and incredibly not.  There is plenty to say and plenty worth repeating.  But sometimes I just don’t feel like it.

 

Turns out that working out can be just like that.  We all get tired of working out, or even thinking about working out.  It seems like we just did that yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.  It’s not that hard:  do some cardio, lift some weights, stretch, blah blah blah, except it IS that hard because we have to find our shoes and decide whether to bike or ellipt (that’s a verb, right?) and count reps and get sweaty.

 

However.  Once we’re done?  Oh, yeah!  THAT’S why we do it.  We feel tired, sure, but the good kind.  Our little endorphins are doing their mood-altering thing.  Our muscles are building themselves back stronger.  Our lungs and heart are better at getting the good stuff into our bodies and the bad stuff out.

 

The message here?  Just start.

Hey, Sugar...

Let’s talk about sugar.  I love sugar.  It’s not just me, either.  Babies prefer sweets because hey! calories!  Brains prefer glucose as a source of energy and, like all those -ose words, glucose is a sugar.  (All right, otiose is not a sugar and it’s not sweet either, and I’m sure there are other exceptions, but otiose doesn’t usually turn up on food labels.)

 

However, the thing about sugar is that, aside from calories and some instinctual comfort, it doesn’t have a lot to offer us, all by itself.  This makes it tricky for those of us—ahem—all of us—who need to pay attention to avoiding too many calories.

 

While all sugars more or less process the same in the body, sugars that exist in whole foods already are better choices.  Which is to say a bowl of strawberries is better than a bowl of strawberry jam (processed with sugar) or strawberry ice cream (ditto).  The strawberries have vitamin C, manganese, B9 (folate), and potassium in them, so they’re more than just a pretty berry with a sweet aftertaste.

 

Sugar consumption, of course, is an issue for folks with diabetes (both kinds).  It seems to increase inflammation in tissues.  Some folks find that eating more sugar leads to more hot flashes in populations who experience them.  Also, sugar can be addictive and thus challenging to wean ourselves away from.

 

Please note:  I’m not saying to avoid all sugar everywhere all the time.  Just make good choices.

Monday Workout: Lunges are good for us

Another fun batch of compound exercises for this week.  If your knees don’t like lunges, just do curls.  If your brain doesn’t like lunges, too bad:  they’re good for you.  Three rounds.

 

step up	30
(lunge to) curl	20
Arnold press	10
squat to leg lift	30
rows	20
kickbacks	10
jacks	30
1 leg deadlift	20
brains	10

 

Five Ingredients for Success

Working out is great, but there are some things we can do that are NOT working out to make those workouts better.  Here are five:

 

1.     Drink water.  Hydration is essential to our bodies’ processes.  Enough water will help us work out better and longer and recover faster.

2.     Eat.  Those of us who decide to work out to lose weight sometimes don’t eat enough.  We want to choose nutrient dense foods to fuel our workouts.

3.     Wear the right shoes.  No one wants shin splints or a sprained ankle or plantar fasciitis.  Heck, we don’t even want blisters.  (Sometimes, like when we do yoga or Pilates, the right shoes are no shoes at all.)

4.     Use safety equipment.  Those strong legs we are developing while biking won’t do us a bit of good if we crack our skulls open.  Wear the helmet—or the knee pads, or the life jacket, or whatever.

5.     Have fun.  Most workouts do NOT have to be drudgery.  Take a friend, turn up the music, get silly, whatever it takes to make it more like play.

Warning!

It is entirely possible that workouts should come with a warning label.  Not because workouts will make us sore or tired, although they most likely will if we are doing them right.  Workouts can be addictive.  They can be a gateway drug to a whole new kind of living.

 

We start with maybe a little walk around the block.  That leads to longer walks, or maybe even some running.  We get better shoes.  Our muscles get stiff, so suddenly we start stretching.  We realize that we like our runs better when we have a good breakfast first.  One day we wake up and there we are:  eating our veggies, drinking water, pumping iron, and high on cardio.

 

The good news?  Most of us can get addicted to working out with no real ill effects—I mean, most of us feel worse from taco-and-margarita night than from the average workout.

 

Go play.

Issues...

In the book group I belong to, we are reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.  The premise is that Harold gets a letter from a former coworker, Queenie, who is dying in hospice, roughly 500 miles away in Scotland.  He writes back, but on his way to the mailbox, he decides he needs to deliver the letter in person and he just starts walking, right then.  He’s wearing boating shoes.  He doesn’t have his cell phone.  He doesn’t tell his wife.  I’m not done reading the book yet (although it is really hard not to read ahead!), but so far it is lovely.

 

(I’m not suggesting that any of us start out on a 500-mile trek with no preparation and bad shoes.)

 

In the portion I read for last week, Harold struggles.  He gets blisters and shin splints.  He gets tired and discouraged.  And, as he continues to walk, he finds himself remembering hard times in his life, difficulties with his wife and his son, failures.

 

I mention this because the phenomenon is familiar to personal trainers, Pilates folks, yoga teachers, and body workers.  Harold has “issues in his tissues.”  In other words, sometimes when we work our bodies, it releases emotions and memories and past traumas.  This can make the hard work we do with our bodies harder.

 

Knowing that this is a real phenomenon can help us cope.  Continuing to move our bodies (with kindness!) and to breathe can help, too.  Working out is no substitute for therapy or medical care, but it is a useful adjunct.

 

Keep breathing.

Monday Workout: Sneaky Core

This week we are doing some work with our obliques and our back muscles while we happen to be working other stuff.  Core work goes way beyond crunches!  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
flies	20
YTA	10
1 arm clean and press	30
bench press	20
curls	10
overhead curtsy or march	30
deadlifts	20
pretty princesses	10

Compounding the Issue

I am big on compound exercises, which are exercises that use multiple joints and muscle groups at the same time.  Here are some reasons why:

 

1.     They’re efficient.  We get more workout in less time when we do compound exercises.

2.     They amp up our metabolism.  Whether that means increased weight loss or an extra cookie is up to the person working out.

3.     They’re practical.  Anybody who has ever moved understands that very few things in the real world are shaped like barbells and dumbbells.  When we need to use our strength in our regular lives, we don’t often use just one muscle group all by itself.

4.     They’re more fun.  This one might be debatable, but I’m going with it.  When we have to coordinate the movement of multiple body parts, we have to use our brains and that’s way more interesting than just waving some dumbbells around.

Captain Obvious, At It Again

We get better at what we practice.  Thanks, Captain Obvious!  I had no idea! 

Yeah, I know.  We all know that, but sometimes we forget that it applies to fitness.

 

This means that if we always spend half an hour on the cardio machines, we will get good at doing half an hour of cardio, but we are not getting better at doing anything longer.  And, unless we are actively choosing to vary the speed and incline and resistance levels on the machines, we are not getting better at adapting to varied environments.

 

When we stick to our old favorite weight training routines, we get stronger at those specific exercises.  Depending on what those favorites are, we may be building endurance or strength or muscle size or power, but if we don’t switch things up, we’re not building the other ones.

 

The implications are twofold.  First, we need to know what we want to get out of working out and then choose exercises that help us practice for those outcomes.  Marathoners need different workouts than sprinters and power lifters are going to choose different exercises than folks just figuring out the difference between dumbbells and barbells.

 

Second, variety is good for us.  Even when we choose a workout in line with our goals, we will need to mix things up so we can practice adapting to different circumstances.  Adaptability is a basic skill that underlies all our movement in the world, fitness and regular.

 

I’m here to help anyone who needs to sort out the best kinds of workouts.

Same Muscles, Different Choices

We all have the same muscles, but we don’t all need to work them in the same way.  Fortunately, there are lots of ways to vary exercises to get each of us the right kind of work. 

For example, let’s take pushups.  I think most of us are familiar with regular pushups and the version with the knees on the ground, which are usually called modified pushups.  Those of us who have a hard time getting up and down from the ground can do wall or TRX pushups.  Those of us who want additional challenge have lots of choices:  we can raise our feet, add instability with a BOSU, add asymmetry with a medicine ball under one hand, add a renegade row between reps, and so on.  Additionally, we can choose to work the same main muscle groups in an entirely different way by doing bench presses (or any of the many variations of them) instead.

 

Even if we have a favorite version of an exercise, it can be interesting to try a subtle variation just to see how our muscles work slightly differently.  This would be the case when we keep our elbows next to our bodies when we do whatever pushup version we like and we find our triceps working more.

 

One of the things I offer my clients is tons of options, variations, modifications, and choices.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Variation

This week we’re trying a variation on kettle bell swings:  the alternating arm kettle bell swing.  It works like the usual version except that we hold the kettle bell in one hand and at the apex of the forward swing, we swap it to the other hand.  Of course it is all right to substitute regular kettle bell swings as desired.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
squats	20
pushups	10
alt arm kb swing	30
rows	20
reverse flies	10
mountain climbers	30
skullcrushers	20
femur arcs	10

Three, Plus One More

Some of us are better than others at going outside.  If we need a little inspiration to make it out the door, here are three reasons to do it.

 

1.     Vitamin D.  The sun is our best source of this essential nutrient.  D helps keep our bones strong, reduces inflammation, supports our immune system, and keeps our brains working.

2.     Forest bathing.  Spending time in nature has been shown to reduce heart rate, lower blood pressure, and zap stress.

3.     Variety.  Our brains and bodies like novelty.  That’s where the growth happens.  The world outside changes more than the world inside where we control everything from the temperature to the light.

 

Still not working?  All right.  Mom says we have to go play outside. 

Roll for Damages

Yesterday I wrote about pain not being the same as damage, among other things.  However, we don’t really want either one, so today I’m going to discuss ways to avoid damage.

 

Maybe the best piece of advice in this context is that we need to use our good judgment.  I mean, that’s always good advice, but what I mean is that we need to engage our critical faculties when we go do our fitness things.  This might mean realizing that we are not twenty anymore, or that it has been a while since we lifted weights.  It might mean that we warm up even if we think warming up is boring.  While we are in the middle of whatever it is we are doing, we need to check in with our bodies to see if we’re getting tired or if we’re starting to feel the strain.  A lot of the time, we get plenty of warning that we’re pushing things too far before we actually injure ourselves.  Oh, yeah, and that safety precaution stuff?  Like wearing a helmet or a life jacket or appropriate footwear?  Do it.

 

The other big piece of the solution is building good habits.  Coming to our workouts rested and fed and hydrated is a good start.  Practicing balance, building a strong core, and enhancing our flexibility are also important.

 

Sometimes injuries happen anyway, but we don’t want to create situations in which it is easier for them to occur.

 

Play nicely.

What a Pain

Recently, I spent some hours in a workshop about pain.  I had high hopes that I would come away with some spiffy new exercises to wave around and POOF! Pain would vanish from my clients’ bodies and my own.

 

Sadly, pain does not seem to work that way.  There is no magic wand.  However, there was some good information.

 

For one thing, pain is not the same as damage.  When we think about it, we know this is true.  To use an extreme example, phantom limb pain is a feeling in a body part that no longer exists.  Pain does correlate with damage, but even that is not as strong a relationship as we might think.  For example, a literature review of studies of people without low back pain and the MRI images of those people found that, depending on the age of the subjects, from 37% to 96% of the people showed degenerative disks in the spine.  In other words, more than a third of younger people and nearly all of older people showed tissue damage without pain.  Conversely, plenty of people feel lower back pain without observable damage.

 

So what is pain?  Pain is an interpretation made by the brain of data from nociceptors (nerve endings that detect “noxious” sensations) in the body.  The sensory data is like a smoke alarm; it is the brain’s job to decide if there’s a fire or if someone is just cooking bacon in the kitchen again.

 

Please let me be clear:  while pain is a function of the brain, it does not mean that pain is all in our heads.  We are reacting to real stimuli in the real world.

 

What we can do about pain is to change our reactions.  Sometimes it is as simple as not doing something that hurts.  Other times, we need to learn more about what we’re feeling.  When we first start to exercise and do a bunch of squats and our thighs start to burn, we might interpret that sensation as pain; later, once we have had the feeling often, we might interpret it as a sign that we’re getting in a good workout.  The sensation has not changed, but our interpretation has.

 

After we have had an injury, the picture can be more complicated.  Damage has occurred.  But, as we saw above, damage and pain don’t always go together.  The longer it has been since we had the injury, the less likely our pain is to be correlated to tissue damage.  In other words, if our injury was more than three months ago, the tissues are probably all right (of course, we should check with our doctors for actual diagnosis and treatment!).  The pain we feel can come from all kinds of other things, like changes in movement patterns, muscle guarding, and fear of injuring ourselves again.  What we need to do in this instance is move.  Notice that I did not say we need to move the part that hurts.  Moving any part of the body will help reduce pain in the whole body.  We need to increase our sense that we are safe in movement (lots of ways to do this, including working with a trainer, taking things slow, making movements small, etc.).  And we need to look critically at the sensations we are having—discomfort is not the same as pain—so that we can retrain our brains to be less reactive.

 

Maybe I wanted a magic wand and got a bunch of tape measures and hammers and screw drivers instead, but tools are better than no tools.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Twist!

We are doing some work in the transverse plane this week.  In other words, there will be twisting!  Three rounds.

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
squat raise	30
row to kickback	20
curls	10
overhead curtsy	30
Arnold press	20
Russian twist	10