While I am on vacation, here is a no-excuses body weight workout. Use a medicine ball and an outside wall if available for the ball wall toss, or a soft ball inside. Four rounds.
jump lunges | 30 |
1 leg squats | 30 |
pushup to side plank | 10 |
jump squats | 30 |
transverse punches | 30 |
1 leg ball wall toss | 10 |
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plank | hold |
superman | hold |
I am off from now until after Labor Day. Time away from the blog will, I hope, give me a chance to find some fresh ideas and some new inspirations. I will post workouts on the Mondays, so that everyone can work out without me, but otherwise, see you in September!
At the risk of sounding too woo-woo (it happens to me; I lived in Berkeley for twenty years), let me suggest that sometimes we choose our workouts by listening to our bodies.
This is not as far-out as it sounds. A way to quantify it would be to consider heart rate variability (HRV). If we have a smart watch or other device, we can track HRV and work out harder on days it is above our average and less strenuously when it is below.
However, relying on a device to tell us how we are does not build our ability to figure out what we need ourselves. The listening I am thinking about does build that ability. We wake up in the morning, check in with the body, and decide what we need, whether that is cardio to boost our mood or stretching to recover from a previous workout or weight-lifting to improve our strength. One note: most of us, upon waking up, will have the first thought that what our bodies really want is to go back to sleep; we need to wait for the second thought before we decide.
Go play.
We get better at what we practice. (I hope this is not some big revelation to everyone!) From this premise, I have two points I would like to make.
First, practice does not mean just showing up and going through the motions of our workouts. That just makes us better at doing a half-assed job.
The second point is related to the first. Good form is crucial, because when we are practicing, we are learning form along with improving our fitness. We don’t want to imprint bad form in our minds and in our muscle memory if we can help it. A second set of eyes on us, especially a trained set of eyes, can help us know if we are practicing good form. That said, our form doesn’t have to be perfect from day one; we can refine it as we get stronger/more flexible/more fit/more knowledgeable.
Go play.
We are working on our asymmetric exercises this week, which helps improve our balance and our core strength. Three rounds.
kb swings | 30 |
kb twist | 20 |
kb 8s/overyets | 10 |
| |
1 arm clean and press | 30 |
(lunge to) curl | 20 |
pushups | 10 |
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woodchoppers | 30 |
rows | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
Sleep can be a scarce commodity in our world. Here are four ways to promote better sleep.
1. Ditch the caffeine. Yeah, I know. Many of us just can’t cope without our morning coffee, but doing the work to wean ourselves off of it can be worth it.
2. Get some exercise. Working harder, paradoxically, can help us feel more rested because it promotes easier and deeper sleep.
3. Turn off the light. Yes, even the little ones on the computer monitor. We sleep best in the dark.
4. Make it a habit. We tend to do best when we go to bed and get up at the same time every day.
All of us face stressful times every once in a while. (If stress gets chronic, that’s a whole different story for another day.) It’s really easy to decide that we’re going to cope with the stress with a pint of ice cream on the couch, but if we can manage it, there are better options.
One of those options is making sure we get in some cardio. Cardio improves mood, helps us sleep better, and makes our brains work more effectively. We get bonus stress-busting points if we can take our cardio outside in the fresh air, so stressful times are a great time to go for a walk or a run or a swim.
Another important self-care option when we are under stress (or any time, really) is making sure we drink our water. Dehydrated people are crabby people. Or, to put it another way, we don’t need our bodies to be stressed while our minds are already trying to cope with stress. Feeding ourselves healthy food on a regular basis helps, too.
Finally, stress is tiring. We are allowed to rest. In stressful times, it is all right to nap and to do what we can to ensure that we get our full nights of sleep.
Fitness pretty much comes down to this: move, eat, drink, and rest.
The goal of fitness, in the largest sense, is promoting optimal health. I like to focus on the positives, but today, I want to discuss some of the negative things that fitness helps us avoid. Our vocabulary word is comorbidities.
Comorbidities are conditions that make it difficult for us to be healthy. There are lots of them, but here are a few of the most common and how fitness helps us reduce them.
Heart disease is a very common comorbidity. When we do our cardio exercise, we are reducing our susceptibility to clogged arteries and heart attack. We also improve our lung function, which helps us avoid things like COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).
Type 2 Diabetes is another increasingly common comorbidity. Both cardio and weight training help keep this one away. Cardio increases glucose tolerance in the body and weight training increases lean body mass.
While I believe that healthy bodies come in every size, excess body weight can, in some circumstances, put us at higher risk, so overweight is considered a comorbidity. Our work at the gym helps us avoid overweight or reduce it when we also work on eating foods that are good for us.
We want to have long, happy, and fun lives. Working on our fitness now will help us live better.
Sometimes life gets busy or complicated. For those times, I keep a stockpile of old workouts just in case. This workout is all kettlebell, but can also be done with a dumbbell if you don’t have a kettlebell. Three rounds.
kb swings | 30 |
kb twists | 20 |
kb 8s | 10 |
| |
kb one arm clean/press | 30 |
kb goblet squat | 20 |
kb overyets | 10 |
| |
kb overhead high knees | 30 |
kb overhead triceps | 20 |
kb pushups | 10 |
Eating in season helps us with our healthy diets. Here are seven things to eat in August.
1. Summer squash. Also, if we don’t eat them, they will take over the world.
2. Tomatoes. Caprese anyone? How about some fresh tomato sauce?
3. Corn. On the cob, in relish, in soup!
4. Cucumbers. Maybe with some hummus?
5. Melons. All of them. So yummy.
6. Stone fruit. Peaches! Plums! Apricots! Hooray!
7. Blackberries. Cobbler anyone?
I am, in many ways, an extremely lazy person. Left to myself, I might not ever get off the couch. So how is it that I manage to exercise every day? I make it easier to exercise than not to exercise.
Spoiler alert: there is some work involved, but it’s mostly at the beginning.
What I do, and what I encourage my clients to do, is to make a habit of exercising. Habits take some work to establish, but once they are there, we can rely on them to keep us on track. I don’t have to think about exercising; I wake up and do it as part of my morning routine, just the same way I brush my teeth and eat breakfast.
The work of building a habit is mostly research on what works for us. I am one of those annoying morning people. If I want to make sure something gets done, I schedule it for the morning. I’m also a person who loves to check things off of lists, so I have a workout sheet that allows me to do that. I keep the list in a specific place, so I don’t have to run around looking for it when it’s time to work out. I am particularly lucky in that I wear workout clothes all the time, but for those of us who don’t have that luxury, prepping our gym bags ahead of time as part of our routine is helpful.
Another tool to use when we are in the process of building a habit is accountability. This can be as simple as the aforementioned list. However, some of us benefit from having an accountability buddy, whether that person is just someone to tell we’ve done our workout or someone who shows up and does it with us. Sometimes our commitment to showing up for other people is easier to honor than showing up for our own good.
We can tell a habit is a real one if we skip doing it and feel weird. How weird does it feel to forget to brush our teeth? When skipping a workout feels like that, we know we’ve been successful.
We can do it.
I am all about enthusiasm. If I like something, it’s not going to be a secret and I might blur the lines between enthusiasm and obsession. I hope I am not alone in this, because if there’s no excitement in life, what is the point?
However, we (going out on a limb here) can’t let our enthusiasm overwhelm our good sense. When we discover a new kind of workout that is super fun, we can overdo that one thing and neglect our other important fitness tasks. What do I mean? For example, we may discover that rollerblading (or swimming, or skiing, or basketball…) is the Best Thing Ever. We wake up ready to go practice. We tell all our friends about how great it is. We do it every day, maybe even twice a day. Then suddenly we discover that we are stiff and sore and tired. Or we realize that the Best Thing Ever would work better if we were a bit stronger or more flexible.
I am not here to rain on anyone’s parade. I’m just reminding us all (yeah, me, too!) that just because the Best Thing Ever is fabulous, we still need to put in our time with our stretching (yoga, Pilates) and our friends the weights. This will help us avoid repetitive stress injuries, stay strong, and keep mobile.
Go play, in lots of ways!
I almost forgot to have Christmas this summer, but I remembered at last! (Sorry about that, folks who really wanted me to forget entirely and forever!) It is time for the 12 days of Christmas workout, the one we do twice a year, once in the summer and once in December.
For those of us who don’t know how it works, or who have forgotten, or tried to forget, here’s how it works: on the first “day,” we do one push press. Ta-da! We have reached day two. Then we do two goblet squats and one push press. Day three involves three overhead presses, two goblet squats, and one push press. We continue, trying to take our rest breaks between the days, until on the last round we do everything from the plyojacks to the push press.
(Feel free to call me names while you do this one.)
1 push press |
2 goblet squats |
3 Overhead press |
4 1 leg squats each leg |
5 deadlifts |
6 burpees |
7 pushups |
8 renegade rows |
9 mountain climbers |
10 jump lunges |
11 kb swings |
12 plyojacks |
Sometimes I joke with my clients that we are playing Workout: The Drinking Game. This is because I am always reminding everyone to drink water. Here are four good reasons to do that:
1. It makes us nicer. Dehydrated people are crabby people.
2. It helps us avoid headaches and nausea. Do I need to say more about that?
3. It helps us eat only the calories we need. We often think we are hungry when really we are thirsty. Drinking first ensures that we are not solving the wrong problem when we eat.
4. It makes our bodies work better. Pretty much all of our body processes function best with optimal hydration.
Go drink.
Every once in a while, I see that meme come around that asks people to describe what they do badly. There are lots of ways to do that for my job, but one I am fond of is that I make people do what they don’t want to do for their own good. The reason it is a bad description of my job is that I actually don’t make anyone do anything.
When things are going right with my work, I design a workout for my clients and they do it, but it’s not that simple. As they move through the exercises, we collaborate. If I see a form compensation, we discuss what’s happening. They may say that a weight feels too heavy or too light, or I might notice that myself. For any number of reasons, an exercise I have selected is not the right one for the current circumstances—it might be a good day to avoid jumping or the day after lugging boxes or the dog might have got underfoot causing a twisted ankle. We adjust.
Even with everything going right and all the appropriate adjustments, some parts of workouts are not very fun (looking at you, lunges, burpees, and hamstring curls). Then it is my job to provide the motivation to get through those parts. For some clients, this is a focus on what the exercise is for. Sometimes clients just need to know that they don’t have to pretend to like the exercise. Ultimately, I can’t make anyone do an exercise. We are adults and consent is an important aspect of life generally. I suggest, based on my education and experience, but in the end, clients have to choose to do the work.
Let’s play.
When we learn something new, ideally we progress through several stages. Before we begin, we are unconsciously incompetent. We don’t even know what we don’t know. It doesn’t last very long, because we absorb a bunch of information and suddenly we have reached the next stage.
It’s called conscious incompetence. In other words, we know we don’t know what we are doing. I am fond of conscious incompetence because a lot of growth happens in this phase. We discover that we have way too many body parts to control at once. We have to build new mental maps of our bodies and space. Some people find this very frustrating. Those people often quit, deciding that they don’t have a talent for whatever it is they are trying out. It can be hard to look foolish or to accept that we are, for the moment, bad at this new thing. However, learning to accept this temporary situation allows us to grow through it.
If we keep working, we eventually arrive at the next stage, which is conscious competence. We know what to do and we manage to do it as long as we concentrate. We develop a lot of mantras for our performance in this stage (“Abs in, back straight, eyes forward.”). This stage can last a long time because as we progress, we find more things to refine in our form.
Our eventual goal is unconscious competence. This does not mean that we can do whatever we are doing in our sleep, but rather that correct form is embedded in our minds and bodies in such a way that we don’t have to think about every separate bit of our form.
The key to moving through the various stages lies in our mindset. If we believe that we are learning skills and that mistakes are a normal part of learning, we set ourselves up for positive learning experiences, even on days when things are not going particularly well. This is the growth mindset. Conversely, if we take every mistake as a sign that we have no gift for what we are doing, we are adopting a fixed mindset and limiting ourselves to what we can already do rather than allowing ourselves to stretch and grow into new abilities.
Let the mistakes go and keep playing at the new skills.
This week we’re putting our focus back on some balance moves. If, for some reason, single leg deadlifts and squats are not appropriate for you, you can always do the two-leg version. Three rounds.
step ups | 30 |
renegade rows | 20 |
pushups | 10 |
| |
suitcase swings | 30 |
1 leg deadlift | 20 |
1 leg squat | 10 |
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squat raise | 30 |
kickbacks | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
