The Amazing Stickie and Book Opening

The Amazing Stickie enjoys twists, and not just in plots!  Today she is working on Pilates by doing book opening (see what I did there?).

She begins lying on her side with her arms stretched in front of her at shoulder level and her knees bent.  As she inhales, she lifts the top arm and arcs it over her body until it is resting on the ground.  Her lower body, however, stays still.  The end position looks like her top half is lying on her back and her bottom half is lying on her side.  Then she exhales and brings herself back to the starting position.  She usually does four or five repetitions on each side.

 

A variation of this exercise is called Around the World.  From the starting position, Stickie circles her upper arm up over her head along the floor, through the end position of the basic exercise and then down toward her feet before coming back to the start position.  As she moves her arm, she moves her head to keep her hand in view, which entails raising it off the floor as she gets to the part where her arm moves toward her feet.  The whole time, her knees stay pressed together and still.  She does two to four reps on a side.

Look! A Pretty Picture, Too!

Today I’m going to keep it simple.  If you can, when you read this, stand up and stretch for a minute.  Take a couple of deep breaths.

Feel better?  I hope so!

Go Play

I feel like I talk a lot about how good it is to try new things in fitness.  It’s also good to let old things go when they don’t serve us anymore.

I’m probably thinking about this because I’ve recently been doing my spring cleaning (yes, I know it isn’t spring, but fall cleaning doesn’t have the same ring).  I’ve been purging worn-out clothes and weird coffee mugs, craft projects that didn’t exactly succeed, kitchen gadgets I don’t like, and all kinds of other stuff.  Except books.  The books stay.  But I digress.

 

Sometimes our old fitness patterns wear out.  We find that we don’t like lifting heavy anymore and want something that focuses on endurance, or balance.  Maybe we want to dance instead.  Or maybe we loved taking ballet for years, but we find that we don’t love it now the way we used to.  It is all right to stop doing things.  Yes, even if you bought a bunch of expensive stuff to do it with.  Sell it or give it away and move on to what gives you joy.

 

Carrying the weight of guilt or of expectations does not build fitness.  It just makes us tired.

 

Go play.  At whatever you want.

Monday Workout: Sneaky

There are some sneaky core exercises in this one.  Guess where they’re hiding!  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
flies	20
YTA	10
squat raise	30
curls	20
truck driver	10
clean and press	30
1 leg squat	20
V sit press	10

The Amazing Stickie and Dart

Today the Amazing Stickie is working on Pilates by doing dart.  This is a spinal extension exercise, so it makes her feel good.

She begins by lying on her belly with her arms down by her side.  She inhales and peels her upper body up off the floor segment by segment while lifting her arms behind her as if she were trying to touch her toes.  Then she exhales back to the starting position.  After a couple of reps like that, she inhales to the top position and then pumps her hands up and down with her arms straight a few times before lowering back to start.

 

She does as many reps as feel good.

You're Getting Sleepy....

There’s a current in our culture that glorifies hustle.  We’re all supposed to be doing productive stuff all the time and maximizing our output and streamlining our processes and whatever.  One way this manifests is that we brag about how little sleep we get.  This is not ok.

Sleep is essential to health.  Depriving people of sleep is a torture technique, y’all.  Let’s not engage in self-torture!  We deserve to be healthy and happy humans.

 

Not convinced.  Sigh.  Fine.  Getting enough sleep will make us more productive in our lives in general and will contribute to optimizing our fitness.  Weight workouts are fabulous, but our muscles get stronger when we sleep afterwards, during the repair phase.  Also, we do better in the workouts themselves if we begin well-rested.

 

Go play.  And then get some sleep.

Consent

Since I work almost entirely online, the issues around tactile cuing, for me, are pretty academic.  However, since I’m doing my continuing education on flexibility and stretching and there is a big chunk about assisted stretching, here’s the deal.

Within my scope of practice as a personal trainer and Pilates instructor, I can’t do massage or adjustments (the province of licensed massage therapists and chiropractors, respectively).  I can’t diagnose or treat injuries, and so will not feel that bump or that swelling or whatever.

 

Consent is mandatory.  If I think I can help a client with a tactile cue (say, putting a forearm along their spine and the back of their head to encourage good alignment during a pushup or plank), I will ask every time if it is all right for me to touch them.  Even if it has been all right with them the previous four hundred and sixty three times.  This time might be different.  I try to be specific when I ask for consent:  Is it ok for me to put my arm on your spine?  If it is ok with you, I am going to put my hand here by your knee; see if you can press into my hand.

 

It is 100% all right for a client to tell me no at any point.  This is true not only about touch, but about any exercise that they do not feel comfortable or confident about.  My clients trust me to keep them safe and I trust them to tell me the truth about how they feel.

 

Tactile cuing and assisted stretching can be helpful, but they’re not essential to a client’s fitness.  I have more than one tool in my chest.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: The Whole Thing

The whole body has to work for this one.  And yes, there are burpees.  Three rounds.

 

plie bend extend	30
Arnold press	20
burpees	10
kb swings	30
kb twist	20
kb 8s	10
clean and press	30
reverse fly	20
femur arcs	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Prone Press

The Amazing Stickie loves spinal extension exercises for many reasons.  Maybe the biggest reason is that spinal extension helps her inhale deeply, which makes her feel happier.  The Pilates prone press is a simple spinal extension.

 

Stickie begins lying on her belly with her hands under her shoulders.  She had to experiment with a couple of positions to find the right place for her hands.  Some people find it works better with the hands a little lower.  Then, as she inhales, Stickie begins to tilt her head up as if she were watching a ladybug crawling away from her.  The rest of her spine keeps following her head as her arms extend.  She goes only as high as is comfortable in her body.  Some people only straighten their arms a little bit.  Others go all the way up to straight arms.  She tries to ensure that each segment of her spine is moving.  She, like a lot of people, often does most of the work with her neck and neglects the part of her spine between her shoulder blades.  Perhaps because of this tendency, Stickie has had an uncharacteristic lapse in form in the second picture; she has overcompensated for her tendency to do most of the work with her neck by looking down.  At the top of the movement, she should be looking forward.

 

Stickie exhales to come down to the starting position.

 

Stickie usually does three or four repetitions, but sometimes she feels like only one and other times she does five or six.  Her spine lets her know when she’s done enough. 

Enabling!

One of the questions I ask new clients is what they do for fun.  Sure, it’s a standard getting-to-know-you kind of question, but when I ask, it’s for a good reason

Which is:  my job is to make is possible for my clients to do whatever it is they do for fun.  If, say, they love gardening, I want to make sure they can lug heavy plants places and that they have good strong backs for digging.  If they have toddlers, I’m going to be working that cardio because they’re going to need lots of endurance for running around.  Even if what they love is sitting on their behinds reading books all day, I know that I need to pack all the essentials into their workouts so they can live long enough to clear off the to-read shelf.

 

What do you love to do?  I can help.

Moooooooom, Do I Have To?

As a NASM-certified Personal Trainer and a NPCP-certified Pilates instructor, I have to do continuing education.  This is a good thing.  I love learning new stuff and my clients get fresh things to do.

However, I do bitch about my homework and sometimes about the structure of my continuing education courses.  The point of all this education is to serve clients, to help them get to their goals, and to keep them safe.  I love all the nitty-gritty bits and even the random factoids.  However, super technical definition questions on the quizzes and tests do not help me train my clients better.

 

It is theoretically possible that one of my clients will ask me to explain the difference between bound water and bulk water in connective tissue, but I doubt it.  The practical application of the difference is to ensure that we stay hydrated.  That’s something I’ll tell my clients.  (OK, fine.  Bound water in connective tissue is in liquid crystalline formation, which increases viscosity, thereby promoting flexibility and elasticity.  Bulk water is the rest of the water in the tissue; when there is inflammation or edema, the proportion of polluted bulk water in the fascia is larger.  Happy now?)

 

What I want in my education is practical, useful stuff for my clients.  I love some academic details, but those aren’t what make me a good trainer or instructor.  Test me on what matters, people!

Monday Workout: Weight-Bearing

The middle set of this round involves a lot of weight-bearing on the arms.  Modify as needed!  Three rounds.

 

squat to leg lift	30
bench press	20
front raise	10
skier jumps	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
flies	20
brains	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Side Kick

The Amazing Stickie has amazing hips and strong glutes.  One reason for this is that she loves to do the Pilates exercise side kick.

She begins lying on her side with her legs stacked on top of each other.  Ensuring that her pelvis does not tilt forward or backward, she lifts her top leg with her foot flexed and lowers it.  She does a set of ten and then does the other side.

 

There are (at least) two more variations of this exercise that Stickie is not demonstrating.  Both begin in the same position and the hips remain neutral throughout.

 

For the first variation, Stickie lifts her top leg a few inches and then kicks it forward and back.  It is particularly challenging to keep the pelvis still while kicking to the back, but Stickie uses her strong core muscles to achieve greatness.  This exercise can be done with the foot pointed or flexed, or changing from pointed to flexed.  Stickie likes to experiment.

 

The second variation is called developpé, so Stickie’s friends who take ballet will have an idea of what to do.  Stickie begins by externally rotating (aka turning out) her top leg from the hip socket.  She points her toe and draws the toe up her calf to her knee, which means her top knee bends.  Her legs look like a lying-down letter P, more or less.  But she is not done!  Without changing the angle of her thigh, Stickie extends her knee so that her toe is pointing out into space (like a lying-down letter V).  Then she lowers her straight leg back down to the starting position.

 

For all of these exercises, sets of eight to ten are good; then do the other side.

What? I Don't Remember That...

There are many reasons to love Ted Lasso.  The show demonstrates the power of love and positivity, gives us hope for second chances, and even encourages a healthy attitude toward mental health issues.  But I’m here to talk about the goldfish.

One of the players on Ted’s team screwed something up.  The details escape me.  Ted reminded the player that goldfish reputedly have very short memories.  (I have not fact-checked this because it’s a metaphor and metaphors don’t have to be factual to work.)  He said the player should be a goldfish and just keep playing, letting go of the mistake instead of letting worry about the past mess with the present and future.

 

I bring this up because for me, September is a time of new beginnings.  In theory, the hot and lazy days of summer are over and we can return, fresh, to our lives.  It helps, sometimes, to have goldfish mind when it comes to starting again.  We can forget how much ice cream we ate.  We can let go of the missed workouts.  We can start fresh.

 

Get swimming, goldfish!

Uncle Joe, Noted Efficiency Expert

Somehow, efficiency has gotten a bad rap.  I mean, who doesn’t want to get the work stuff done quickly and then get on to the fun stuff?  (Hint:  it’s our broken system in which finishing tasks quickly wins us… more tasks.  But I digress.)

In fitness, there are two kinds of efficiency we want to pay attention to, because they do in fact make the work get done better so we can do fun stuff.  The first one is structural efficiency.  Structural efficiency is kind of an elaborate description of alignment.  If we begin our motion from an aligned place, everything goes better.  Specifically, we want our basic standing position to have our ears aligned over our shoulders, which should be aligned over our hips, which should be aligned over our knees, which should be aligned over our feet.  Nothing should be twisty or tilted.

 

Functional efficiency is the efficiency of movement.  It is recruiting the right muscles at the right time with the right degree of force for the task at hand.  We don’t want to waste energy swatting a fly with the kind of effort we’d use to hit a home run.  Nor do we want to struggle to move the couch because we can’t get our legs to cooperate.

 

There are many ways to build our structural and functional efficiencies.  One of the best and most fun ways is through Pilates.  Uncle Joe has lots of tricks to teach us about aligning ourselves and portioning out our power in appropriate doses.

 

Want to try?  Hit me up!

Monday Workout: All The Things

This week we’re doing a fair amount of overhead work, plus a little balance and twisting.  Three rounds.

 

push press	30
rows	20
1 leg deadlift	10
leg kicks	30
skullcrushers	20
kb bottom up press	10
reverse lunge twist	30
bench press	20
pretty princesses	10