The Amazing Stickie and Spine Twist

The Amazing Stickie likes to ensure that she works in all planes of motion to keep herself supple and mobile.  Today she is doing Spine Twist to work in the transverse plane.

She begins sitting on the floor with her legs out in front of her at an angle that is about the width of a yoga mat.  Her arms are raised at shoulder height out to the sides, palms facing forward and elbows soft.  She inhales to lengthen her spine toward the ceiling.  As she exhales, she twists her body to one side, making sure that her arms stay in the same relationship to her torso.  It is as if she is a doll with no moveable joints in her upper body; only her waist can twist.  Then she returns to the start position and repeats on the other side.

 

Stickie does about five reps on each side.

A Moment With Uncle Joe

Today’s post is brought to you by Uncle Joe Pilates:  it’s time to take a deep breath.

We’re going to start our deep breath by standing up.  We’re going to use our good posture, because if we’re all slumped forward, we have a hard time making space in our bodies for the breath.  This means, ideally, that our ears are over our shoulders, which are over our hips, which are over our knees, which are over our ankles.  For most of us, this means we need to pull our heads back a bit, roll our shoulders down and back, tuck our pelvis under a little, and soften our knees.

 

Now we start.  As we take our deep breath in, we can notice that our breastbone lifts, our spine arches just a little, and our ribcage and abdomen expand.  A lot of us think that our breath just expands us to the front, but really the breath opens up the sides and the back of the body, too.

 

As we exhale, the breastbone sinks a little, the spine curves back, and everything else deflates a little.

 

If we do this nice and slowly a few times, we will tap into our parasympathetic nervous system, which helps us relax and rest and recover.

 

Carry on!

Free the Tupperware!

So we’ve done the holiday thing and we’re probably more or less tidied up by now.  All that’s left is… leftovers.  What I like about leftovers is that they’re easy.  No decisions needed!  Throw stuff in the microwave and there we go!

Metaphorically, though, we have leftovers, too.  We may feel a little yucky still from too much pie, or too much gravy, or too much of Uncle Stanley.  Maybe we hardly moved all weekend and we feel stiff.  Or maybe we spent the whole time running around doing things and we feel sore.  It’s easy to sink into those leftovers, too.  We might tart them up with a dollop of guilt or a smidgen of shame or even a little rage, but we’re still feeding ourselves the same metaphorical stuff.

 

Y’all can do what you want with that last bit of stuffing, but I have my bossy pants on and I’m going to tell you that it’s time to pitch those metaphorical leftovers because they’re stinking up the joint.  Whatever happened over the holiday happened.  And now we’re done with it.  We start fresh from right here and right now.

 

We can choose healthy foods.  We can move.  We can even rest if that’s what we need.  We can do this.

Monday Workout: Core and Balance

We have a few things that work laterally today, some changes of direction, and some one-sided work, all of which adds up to a bunch of work on core and balance.  Three rounds.

 

squat to leg lift	30
flies	20
1 leg deadlift	10
lateral bound/side lunge	30
bench press	20
reverse fly	10
jacks	30
curls	20
V sit press	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Rollover

Having worked on spinal extension for the last two weeks, this week the Amazing Stickie decided to do some spinal flexion.  This exercise is not suitable for anyone with osteoporosis or osteopenia.  The Amazing Stickie wants everyone to work within their own personal safe range of motion and to stop if anything feels wrong.

To begin, Stickie lies on her back with her hands at her sides.  She inhales and raises her legs until they are perpendicular to the floor.  Then, as she exhales, she rolls her spine up, bringing her legs over her face until they are parallel with the floor.  She inhales and separates her legs so they make a narrow V shape.  On the exhale, she rolls her spine down, circling her legs as she returns to the position with her legs perpendicular to the floor.

 

Three reps are usually enough.

Attention!

What our personal trainer or Pilates instructor knows is certainly important.  We want them to keep us safe and to know how to get us to our goals.  But it might be just as important to think about how that person pays attention.

One of the things I watch for with my clients is form.  I want to ensure that they are using their bodies in ways that don’t lead to injury.  I’m checking to see that their knees line up right or their elbows are doing the correct thing.

 

I’m also watching for signs of effort.  It’s my job to notice that ten reps are not going to happen safely and to stop the set at eight.  I tune into the energy drops and ask about whether there was food today, or enough sleep.

 

When something unusual happens, a client moves in an unexpected way, I see it and I think about why.  We talk about what is going on.  We move together.  We experiment.  And we learn from the results.

 

Paying attention is what makes progress.

Play

I recently finished doing a continuing education course on flexibility and stretching.  One of the most interesting and useful things in the course was the attitude of the people demonstrating the assisted stretching techniques.

These were trained professionals.  They knew what the heck they were doing.  And yet, they brought a sense of exploration and play to what they were doing.  As they moved their “client” through the stretches, they talked about trying little shifts to find more movement.  They were never silly or inappropriate, but they were light, willing to go where the client’s tissue led, experimenting gently to find the most range of motion for the client.

 

So often we go into our workouts heavy, with a sense that this is serious.  We have to be productive and efficient and thorough and it’s going to be hard and terrible.  What if, every once in a while at least, we went in thinking about how we get to play today?

Monday Workout: Planes!

We are working in several planes today.  This is good for our global mobility and it’s practical because real life can come at us from all directions!  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
skullcrushers	20
curls	10
woodchoppers	30
deadlifts	20
lateral raise	10
plank jacks	30
renegade row	20
chest lift	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Swan 2

This week, the Amazing Stickie is building on what she did last week.  Swan 2 in the Pilates repertoire is an extension (pun intended!) of Swan 1.  (You can find the directions for Swan 1 in last week’s post!).

Stickie gets into the starting position by lying on her belly with her hands under her shoulders.  She extends her elbows and brings her gaze forward and up as if she is watching a little bug crawl away from her, ending up with arms straight and her back curved evenly between her cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spine (a.k.a. her neck, torso, and lower back).

 

Now the fun starts.  Stickie bends her elbows slightly and then lifts her hands, allowing her body to rock forward and her legs to leave the floor.  In other words, she keeps the curved shape of her body and tilts the whole thing forward as if she were the rocker of a rocking horse.  Then she tilts back to the starting position, stabilizing with her hands.  She does this until she stops having fun or until she has completed five reps, whichever happens first.

Stretch Out Sleep

I know I bang on a lot about getting enough sleep.  What can I say?  It’s my countercultural side coming out.

 

Not having enough sleep and not having enough good sleep puts us at a higher risk for chronic disease, impairs our cognition, and makes us more likely to get hurt.

 

I realize that we can’t all sleep as much or as well as we’d like.  We have important stuff to do.  We’re stressed out.  We are always behind.  We say we’ll sleep when we’re dead, not really grokking that we’re more likely to get dead if we don’t get enough sleep.

 

One thing that can help:  stretching.  Whether it is the relaxation that comes from stretching or just the fact that we’ve moved our bodies, stretching improves our ability to sleep well.

 

Plus it feels good. 

Ten Bucks for Words

Proprioception has long been one of my favorite five-dollar fitness words (Does everybody have a teacher in their past who would call any fancy-pants vocabulary five-dollar words?  Or is it just me?).  In small-change words, proprioception is our sense of where we are in space.  It keeps us from bashing into things, mostly, and it is what makes us know where our feet are, even if they are under the desk where we can’t see them.

Now I have learned another word that gets to be proprioception’s friend:  interoception.  This is our sense of how things are inside.  Interoceptors in our body keep us posted on whether we are cold, tired, hungry, sore, and the like.

 

So far, we just have some fun facts.  Here’s the cool part:  when we do mindful exercise, like stretching and yoga and Pilates, we not only boost our proprioception, but we also tune in more to our interoception, which in turn gives us a more generalized sense of wellbeing.

 

Short version:  work out and feel better!

Monday Workout: Fresh!

By now, our usual format should feel fresh again!  Our friends the compound exercises are keeping us moving and building up our metabolisms.  Three rounds!

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
leg kicks	30
rows	20
pushups	10
push press	30
kickbacks	20
femur arcs	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Swan 1

Today the Amazing Stickie is working on spinal extension, so she’s doing Swan 1.  Yoga practitioners will know it as Cobra, but the Pilates process is a little different.

Stickie begins lying on her belly with her hands by her shoulders.  As she inhales, she begins to curl her spine up, beginning with her head. She imagines she is watching a ladybug crawling away from her and she follows its path with her head.  Her elbows gradually straighten and Stickie feels that her breastbone is pulling forward.  This keeps her from using her neck too much by helping her thoracic spine to do its fair share.

 

She exhales to reverse the process to come back down.  Three or four reps is about right.

Spicy!

I am a big believer in variety.  It’s not just that I get bored, either.  It turns out that variety is good for us.

I write a lot about what happens when I try new things, even if I don’t like them.  I do like the sensation of being a beginner again, of having too many body parts and too much to think about in order to accomplish the task at hand, whether that’s tai chi or pickleball or whatever I decide to learn next.  That is a useful kind of variety, but it’s not the only kind.

 

We also need variety in the things we do regularly.  Cardio junkies need some weight training and gym rats need some stretching and couch surfing champions need to go outside and play from time to time.  At an even more granular level, we need to mix up the kind of cardio and the kind of weight training and the stretches we do so that it isn’t all swimming all the time or all power lifting.

 

The reason behind this is pretty simple:  bodies respond to the challenges we give them.  The more different kinds of challenge we present ourselves with, the more adaptable we become.  Adaptability is our very best insurance against injury.

 

Go play some other way today.

Flock to Class

I went to Zumba exactly once.  I could cope perfectly well with making a fool of myself by not knowing what the heck I was doing, but I kept running into other people and that was not OK.

Recently, I learned about why that happened.  Or, more accurately, I learned about how to apply the rules of flocking or schooling behavior (in birds and fish, respectively) to large groups of humans attempting to take a fitness class.  (Spoiler alert:  it does not require the exclusion of inexperienced or relatively uncoordinated participants!)

 

A flock or school is a structure in motion that is defined by three basic parameters.  They are separation, alignment, and cohesion.

 

Within the flock, each bird uses its kinesthetic senses to maintain separation from other birds.  This is not a perfect system, but it’s pretty good.  Some birds need a little more space than others.  In a fitness class, setting things up so that participants have a reasonable amount of space around them is a good start.  In a Pilates class, for example, the instructor can influence this by setting up mats in advance.

 

The second parameter, alignment, means that each individual bird in the flock is approximating toward the direction the flock as a whole is flying.  As the leaders of the flock change their direction, the rest of the flock follows along.  Again, in a group fitness situation, an instructor can create success by clearly defining the front (or redefining it, if the instructor wants to shake things up and make what was the back of the class the front, or even spiral the focus of the class around the room over time).

 

Finally, the flock uses cohesion.  All the birds are doing the same thing, more or less.  Fitness instructors can promote this behavior by ensuring that every participant can see either the instructor or another experienced student at all times.

 

None of this will work, of course, if the space allotted for the class is too small for everyone to move reasonably freely.  It might be time to take it outside or to schedule more classes to alleviate the crunch.

 

Above and beyond all this, it is a good idea to explain that this is a game with simple rules, that we are playing.  We all do our best to follow along. 

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Four

I am enjoying switching things up, so here’s another short circuit.  Choose your favorite cardio for the minute at the top of each round (high knees, step ups, jacks, etc.).  Short circuits mean four rounds. 

 

1 min cardio
squat raise	20
flies	20
truck driver	10
mountain climbers	20
YTA	10
roll out abs	10

The Amazing Stickie and Leg Pull Front

The Amazing Stickie loves exercises that are related to plank because of the way they help her build upper body strength and whole body stability.  Today she is doing the Pilates Leg Pull Front (still not a joke by Uncle Joe!).

She begins in plank position, hands directly under her shoulders, body a straight line from the top of her head to her heels.  She inhales and then, as she exhales, she lengthens one leg away from her body and up toward the ceiling, keeping her knee straight and maintaining the plank position.  Then she lowers the leg and repeats on the other side.  She usually does about ten reps.

The 3 Stooges Version?

As I have said before, I took up tai chi some months back.  I still have tons and tons to learn, which made me think about learning styles.

We all have them.  Some of us like to be told how to do something.  Others like to be shown.  Some of us need to move our bodies to imprint the ideas in our brains.  Yet others like to talk themselves through things.  And, of course, most of us are some combination of all those different ways of learning.

 

As I try to learn the sequences of movement in tai chi, I find that I need both brain engagement and body engagement.  I want to know how many repetitions there are of a particular sequence.  I need to hook movements to images in my mind (much to the horror of my tai chi instructor when I described one motion as “pie to the face.”  This does not capture the warrior nature of tai chi, apparently.).  And I need to do the sequences over and over and over so that my body knows what to do all by itself.

 

Remaining a learner helps me when I am on the other side of the equation, teaching clients new exercises or helping them refine their performance of familiar ones.  I need to stay awake and aware that one client may need to know what something is for, another may want to know what muscles are working, another may just need to see the movement a few more times.

 

We can all learn.