I want to be a fairy princess, or maybe a barbarian...

Halloween is a day when we get to pretend to be something we aren’t.  Or maybe it’s a day when we choose to express a part of ourselves that we usually keep inside.  Either way, it’s a day of possibilities.

One possibility we can try on is living like a person who prioritizes health and well-being.  This might not sound as edgy as dressing up like a vampire or a monster, but, trust me, it’s just as countercultural.

 

What if, just for this one day, we decide to move because we love our bodies and we like them to feel good?  What if we feed ourself food that nourishes our bodies and souls while still being delicious?  What if we give ourselves permission to play, to rest, and to sleep?

 

I admit that the results could be scary, indeed.  We may discover that we like opting out of the all-stress-all-the-time cycle.  We may feel so much better eating real food that we no longer feel drawn by the siren song of drive-through fries.  We may not need to do so much retail therapy when we can regulate our emotions with cardio.

 

Change is scary, but it can be wonderful, too.

Monday Workout: Halloween!!!!!

This week, our workout dressed up for Halloween.  We didn’t even have to torture the exercises too badly to fit into the acrostic!  Depending on time, do two to four rounds.

 

H - high knees	30
A - Arnold press	10
L- lunge	20
L - lateral raise	10
O - oblique crunch	10
W - woodchopper	30
E - extend triceps	20
E - elbow plank
N - narrow squats	20

 

The Amazing Stickie and Leg Pull

Today the Amazing Stickie wants a challenge for her shoulder flexibility, upper body strength, and core control, so she’s doing the Pilates Leg Pull.  (No, this does not mean that Uncle Joe is going to play a joke on her!)

As with many Pilates exercises, there are options for Stickie to choose.  The starting position is sitting on the floor, hands slightly behind the hips, legs extended in front of the body.  The position of the hands is where the choices come in:  Stickie can have her fingers pointing away from her body, out to the sides, or towards her body.  Different positions will feel differently for different people, but generally folks find it most challenging to have the fingers pointing toward the body and least challenging to have them pointing to the sides, but the best way to find out which way works best is to try all three!

 

Once Stickie has chosen a hand position, she lifts her pelvis toward the ceiling, pressing her feet into the floor.  Basically, she is doing an upside down plank.  The main part of the exercise starts now.  On an inhale, Stickie lengthens one leg and lifts it toward the ceiling.  She keeps her pelvis stable (i.e., she doesn’t let her butt sag down!) as she lifts.  Then she exhales as she lowers her leg back to the upside down plank position.  She alternates legs and does about ten reps on each side.

Apple?

This post requires all my usual disclaimers:  I am not a doctor, therapist, nutritionist, or dietician.  Please check with any/all of those other kinds of folks for advice from people with more education and training than I have.  That said, the general comments below are within the scope of my practice.

What we eat affects how we feel.  (Thank you, Captain Obvious!)  Even if all that changes is that we don’t feel hungry anymore after we eat, we have changed our state of being.  Since we’re going to make a change anyway, it might as well be a good change.

 

It is both easy and hard to eat healthy food in our culture.  We have an incredible abundance of food and a boggling number of choices.  (Digression:  I used to worry that my kids didn’t eat a particularly varied diet.  Then one day they were discussing whether Ethiopian food or sushi was better.  I relaxed.)  Unfortunately, a lot of the choices we have are not ones that are particular good for us.  Food deserts exist.  Food insecurity is a big problem, exacerbated by all kinds of societal pressures right now.  We are stressed and it is way easier to get ice cream at the drive-through than it is to get a real, healthy meal cooked.

 

It's worth it, though.

 

We need to try to eat a non-potato vegetable fairly often.  We need to drink water.  We need to eat food that still looks more or less like it did when it started, not like a sad and pummeled version of itself pumped up with sugar, salt, and a bunch more chemicals.

 

Try an apple.  They’re in season.

Go have a healthy snack

An awful lot of us walk around feeling tense all the time.  Not in the psychic sense (although that is true, too, but beyond the scope of my practice to address), but in the physical, my-muscles-don’t-move kind of way.  In doing my homework on flexibility and stretching, I learned that there are some not-so-obvious potential causes of that tension.

Of course, we have the usual suspects:  mental and physical stress and physical deconditioning.  Most of us need to address those as actual or potential problems all the time.

 

But sleep deficiency can cause excessive muscle tension.  Maybe we need to rest more!

 

Another pair of interesting factors:  dehydration and poor nutrition.  Drinking enough water and eating healthy snacks can improve how tense our muscles feel!  How cool is that?

 

We all know that feeling of tension we have when we’ve worked out too hard and everything in our bodies declares that we are never moving again, ever.  However, when we don’t move, our bodies also don’t like it and our muscles get tense.  We have to find the sweet spot.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Change? Change!

I love our usual workout template, but sometimes we need to do things differently.  This is a short circuit, so we’re going to do four rounds.  And sorry/not sorry about the burpees.

 

1 min cardio
suitcase swings	20
ball bench press	20
lunge to curl	20
kickbacks	10
burpees	10
pretty princesses	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Mermaid

The Amazing Stickie knows that life does not always move straight ahead.  She prepares for this by doing exercises that work sideways and with twists, like the Pilates Mermaid.

Stickie has no knee problems, so the starting position is not a challenge for her.  Those of us who do have knee problems can modify by sitting crisscross applesauce or with our legs extended out in front of us.  Stickie has one leg bent in front of her so that her shin is parallel to her hips.  The other leg is bent so that her knee is next to her first foot and her other foot is tucked back by her hips.  Stickie, having an ideal body, has no trouble keeping both sit bones on the floor in this position while keeping her spine nice and straight.  Those of us who do struggle can prop up the side that does touch the ground to keep things even.

 

From this starting position, Stickie inhales and raises her arms to shoulder level, keeping her shoulders away from her ears.  As she exhales, she bends to the side away from her feet, one arm coming overhead and the other arm reaching toward the floor.  She does not twist her spine forward or back.  She moves as if she is pressed between two panes of glass.  As she inhales, she returns to the starting position.

 

After doing several reps, Stickie performs the counter stretch, in which she side bends toward her feet.  Then she repeats the whole thing with her legs set up the other way.

Balance

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about how we are whole bodies, I’d like to point out that one of the implications of this is that we need whole body strength and whole body mobility for good function.

Because we move as whole bodies and not as disembodied legs or backs or arms or heads, all of our parts need to coordinate with each other.  If one of our knees doesn’t bend particularly well, the motion has to come from somewhere else (i.e., the ankle or hip, as the joints on either side of the knee).  When one of our muscle groups is significantly weaker than another, the rest of the muscles need to take up the slack for us and we end up trying to do everything with our neck muscles (the codepence champs of the Muscle Olympics!).  In the short term, this is all fine.  We want our body parts to cooperate with each other.

 

In the long term, though, we set ourselves up for imbalances, inefficiencies, and injuries when we let some parts slack off and other parts do more than their share.  This is where corrective exercise, flexibility training, and Pilates come in.  They help us restore the balance so we can move with grace and efficiency our whole lives (in our whole bodies!).

Thank You, Captain Obious!

I have put on my Captain Obvious hat this morning:  we move with our whole bodies.

Maybe it’s my Captain Should-Be-Obvious hat.  We tend to think about our bodies in segments, limbs, sometimes even systems.  We do curls and think:  I am exercising the muscles in my arm.  In truth, we are using our whole bodies, integrating all those different kinds of tissues to lift that weight.

 

What that means, practically, is that stuff that happens in one area of the body affects everything else.  Imagine, for example, that I have a blister on my left heel.  The problem is just right there.  Except now I’m walking differently because my heel hurts.  This changes the way my knees and hips work and the way my spine aligns itself, how my shoulders orient themselves and how my arms swing, even the angle of my head on my neck.  That one blister can give me a headache or aggravate lower back pain.

 

Of course, there are times when it is useful to use our gift for analysis to break down our body into parts, but sometimes we need to remember the whole.  We’re a lot more useful as entire human beings than as just a collection of arms and legs.

Monday Workout: Dip! (Sadly, not the kind that goes with chips)

Both dips and kickbacks work our triceps.  If you choose to do dips, make absolutely sure that the bench/chair/table you choose is heavy enough not to shift when you do the work.  We want our discomfort to come from doing the work, not from getting injured!  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
1 leg deadlift	10
mountain climbers	30
rows	20
round lunges	10
leg kicks	30
dips or kickbacks	20
Pretty princesses	10

The Amazing Stickie and Scarecrow

The Amazing Stickie loves to work on spinal extensions while keeping her shoulders healthy and mobile, so today she is doing Scarecrow.  This exercise has a lot of parts, but Stickie has found it worthwhile to master them.

She begins lying on her belly on the floor with her arms in a cactus position (upper arms out at shoulder level, forearms extended alongside the head).  Stickie’s nose is hovering just off the floor.

 

As Stickie inhales, she extends her spine (spinal extension = backbend) keeping her arms in line with her head.  The curve of her spine comes not from her lower back and not from her neck, but from the segment of spine between the two (thoracic spine).  She keeps her body in this curved position and straightens her arms out so that they reach over her head, still in line with her ears as she exhales.  She inhales and brings her arms back to the cactus position, but maintains the spinal extension.  Finally, she exhales and lowers her torso back to the mat.  Phew.  That was a lot.

 

While it is helpful to breathe in the way Stickie does, it is all right if the breathing doesn’t match up with the movements as described.  It might work better for some of us to learn the movements and then add the breathing once we know what we’re doing.

 

Stickie usually finds that three to five repetitions of this exercise are enough.

Flow

I am one of those compulsively on time people.  Which, here in the real world, means that I’m early for everything because I have planned for traffic, earthquake, tsunami, kidnapping, and a few million other eventualities.  The clock in my mind is always ticking.  Most of the time, I think of this as a feature and not a bug, but.

It makes it hard to get into flow.

 

Why is this important?  Flow is the state in which we do our best work.  We’re fully present with what we’re doing.  We’re both totally mindful of what we’re doing and totally mindless about it because everything comes together.

 

Of course, our ability to find flow is increased by mindfulness practices like Pilates, yoga, and meditation.  It’s right there in that word:  practice.  As we practice, we get better.

 

One other thing that helps me (and maybe other people, too) is to try to find at least some fairly large blocks of unstructured time.  If I know I have a day off, for example, I know I don’t have to be watching the clock while I’m working out to make sure I am done in time for the next thing on the list.  It can be hard to find those blocks, but it is so worth it!

Chill

So here I go being countercultural again:  we need to break up with stress.  I know there’s a whole hustle movement out there.  I know times are hard and we have a lot to do.  But here’s the thing:  it makes us weaker.

Muscles are strongest when they begin from an optimal place.  In fancy fitness jargon, this is called proper length-tension relationship.  Muscles that are too long and relaxed are what we usually think of as weak ones, but muscles that are too tight and short are also not capable of their best work.

 

There are many ways to get our muscles to their appropriate length-tension.  Some of our muscles need to wake up and do some work; others need to chill out.  Corrective exercise, Pilates, massage, self-myofascial release can all help.

 

You know where to find me if you want my help!

Monday Workout: With Variations!

Possible variations on the step ups in this workout include jump ups, single leg step ups with a balance at the top, plain step ups but with weight held either at the sides or overhead, and more!  Whatever you choose, do three rounds!

 

step ups/variations	30
1 leg squat	20
spiderman pushup	10
squat heel lift	30
flies	20
lateral raise	10
deadlift to curl	30
Arnold press	20
brains	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Spine Stretch

The Amazing Stickie wants to have supple hamstrings and a flexible back.  One way she works toward this is by doing Spine Stretch in Pilates.

Spine Stretch is the Pilates version of the forward bend we all know from stretching or yoga, but with its own special Pilates flavor.  The goal of this exercise, as Stickie knows, is not to touch the nose to the knee, but to hinge forward from the hips, minimizing the rounding of the spine.

 

She begins sitting on the floor with her legs out in front of her, feet flexed.  Of course, she has excellent posture with her ears directly over her shoulders, which are directly over her hips.  She holds her arms out in front of her at shoulder level (zombie arms!).  She inhales and elongates her spine even more, then exhales and hinges forward from her hips.  Since she does not want to curve her back unnecessarily, Stickie often thinks of this movement as taking her breastbone toward her toes.  Then she inhales and returns to her starting position.

 

Stickie usually does five to ten reps.

That Word: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

I’ll begin with a disclaimer:  I am an English major who last took a physics class in high school; Newton makes some sense to me, but, not being Richard Feynman, that quantum business does not.

In normal conversation, inertia means something akin to glued-to-the-couch.  The thing is, the term comes from Newton, who said, more or less, a body at rest tends to remain at rest and a body in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force.  That’s inertia, baby.  It’s not just the part where we remain at rest.

 

This is good news.  It means that starting is the hardest part.  Once we get moving, it’s easier to keep going than it is to stop.

 

Let’s find the energy to get started!

Fear, Scars, Tools

Recently I listened to a webinar about fascia (which was fascia-nating, natch!).  One of the presenters made the comment that scars keep growing.  I don’t think she meant it literally, although that’s possible.  It made me think.

Injuries are troublesome.  They keep us from doing the stuff we want to do.  But even after they’re physically healed, they can keep affecting what we do.  Some of that has to do with scars and scar tissue.  We are not going to be exactly the same.  But a lot of it has to do with how our brains have changed.

 

We’re a little more anxious after an injury.  We hesitate.  We overthink movements that used to be smooth and unconscious.  We keep the injury alive in our heads long after it is gone from the body.

 

Fear is a tool that helps keep us safe.  It also can hold us back unnecessarily.  We need to remember that we are in charge of our tools.  We can choose when to use our fear to keep us safe and when to discard it to move freely.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Weight Bearing

The last set in this workout is all weight-bearing on the arms.  If that is not appropriate, sub regular jacks or regular rows for one or both of the first two exercises.  Three rounds.

 

kb alternate arm swing	30
kb bottom up press	20
kb halo	10
split squat pulldown	30
bench press	20
lateral raise	10
plank jacks	30
renegade row	20
plank	10