The Amazing Stickie is always excited to discover a new way to work her abdominals. Today she is trying out V legs.
She begins lying on her back with her legs straight up in the air. Then, with control, she slowly opens them into a V shape and closes them again.
She finds a set of ten to work well.
People often want to know: what’s the best workout?
I have the answer right here: the one we do.
The absolutely perfect workout might be out there somewhere (along with the perfect planner that is going to transform my life if only I can find it), but I think we’ll do better in the long run picking a workout we’ll actually do. Over time, as we progress, we might refine that workout a bit, or add another kind of workout to our mix, or get enthused about another sport or class.
Not everything has to be optimal. Also, we often leave fun out of our definitions of what is optimal, so the whole concept becomes questionable. Life is short, people! Have fun!
Go play.
I just had a lightbulb moment about goals. It may only be a five-Watt bulb, but I’m going to share it anyway because even a little light is better than darkness, at least when it comes to avoiding tripping over things.
(The digressions have already gotten out of hand and I’m not even started yet!)
OK. Concentrating.
A lot of the literature about goal setting focuses on finite goals. “I am going to do this thing by this date.” Those are perfectly wonderful goals to have. The thing is, I pretty much like the kind of goals that don’t have end dates. I like goals that are more like, “I’m going to explore moving my body in ways that feel good to me and that make me feel good every day for the rest of my life.” Or “I’m going to eat food that is good for my body habitually.”
Over time, those open-ended goals might change. I might need more cardio sometimes, or more weight training. I might discover a new sport I love. Heck, the seasons might change and suddenly I’m doing a bunch more swimming where I used to be skiing.
There is no Great Gradebook in the Sky. We can make any kind of goals we like and change them as often as we want to. Let’s choose what works for us.
Our end-of-month variety workout is boxing based this month. Do three or four rounds depending on time/energy.
straight punch left | 50 |
squats | 30 |
hooks left | 25 |
hooks right | 25 |
pushups | 10 |
straight punch right | 50 |
butterfly crunch | 20 |
uppercut left | 25 |
uppercut right | 25 |
plank | |
The Amazing Stickie is nothing if not efficient. She loves working her lower body and getting a cardio bonus from it at the same time. Today she’s doing tap backs.
She begins in a squat position with her feet directly under her hips. Then she quickly extends one leg behind her, tapping that foot on the floor and then bringing it back to the starting position. She repeats the same sequence with the other leg. Alternating quickly, she does a set of thirty.
Let’s talk about the 600-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. (I looked it up and that is the high end of gorilla weight.) In this case, it’s a metaphorical gorilla. (If there is a real gorilla in the middle of the room, please stop reading and go somewhere safer.) The metaphorical gorilla stands for weight.
Weight is a weighty topic in fitness. We hear a lot, culturally, about the obesity epidemic. Our doctors may cluck about our BMI. It is probably impossible to pick up any women’s magazine without finding some kind of diet or other scheme designed to help us lose weight. Additionally, there are some newish drugs out there that do promote weight loss.
There is not a lot of conclusive evidence that body weight alone is a factor in health. People of all sizes can be strong and fit and healthy. People who “look” healthy in terms of weight can still have heart disease, COPD, high cholesterol, and other diseases that we have been taught to associate with weight.
As a personal trainer and Pilates instructor, I don’t focus on weight unless it is a major priority for my clients. I think there are much better ways to approach fitness than through the lens of weight loss (although I do, in fact, have a certification in the process). I prefer to look on fitness as a process of feeling better in our bodies, of building capability. Many of us, as we become stronger and more active, do naturally get slimmer, but some of us, due to various factors including diet and genetics, don’t. This does not mean that working out is a waste of time.
I’m not here to judge anyone. If someone is motivated by a smaller number on the scale, I support that. But I also want that same person to know that they are so much more than a number.
Go play.
My Wristy Overlord (also known as an Apple Watch) comes in handy for lots of things. It keeps track of my exercise minutes, my calories burned during activities, and the number of different hours in which I stand up during the day. That’s all pretty useful information.
But what I want to talk about today is what it tells me when I don’t work out. Like everyone, I have sick days or days when I fail to prioritize workouts or travel days or days when I just don’t want to do it. My Wristy Overlord does not care about why I did or did not do something. It just tracks.
It turns out that my daily life, when I don’t work out, involves about 11 minutes of exercise-level activity. Similarly, I burn about 350 active calories going about what the physical therapists call activities of daily living. Standing up in twelve different hours of the day is no problem unless I’m so sick that I’m asleep for most of the day.
The other thing the Wristy Overlord does not track is how I feel. Some days when I do Pilates and yoga and play a couple of hours of pickleball and go to tai chi, I feel energized and great. Other times, not so much. The reverse is also true: some days when I don’t work out, I feel tired and others I feel fabulous.
Why am I going into so much detail about this? Who cares? Well, I am not the only one with a Wristy Overlord. I’m the closest example that I can use! The takeaway from my experience that I hope applies to others is this: data is helpful, but not necessarily comprehensive.
Our goal, I hope, is not just to obey our Wristy Overlords, but to be be healthy, happy humans. We are more than our data.
Let’s live.
We’re really working our arms in lots of ways this week! Three rounds.
leg kicks | 30 |
rows | 20 |
YTA | 10 |
| |
squat raise | 30 |
deadlift to curl | 20 |
lateral raise | 10 |
| |
jacks | 30 |
kickbacks | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie loves incorporating exercises from different disciplines into her workouts because it keeps her brain stimulated along with her body. Today she is adding some sun salutations from yoga into the mix. She also knows that sun salutations are a lot like burpees, but without the jumping. They still give her many of the same whole-body benefits of burpees without the impact.
She begins standing in good posture with her arms overhead. From there, she bends forward with her hands on the ground and her body making an inverted V (downward dog, for you yogis and yoginis out there). Then she flattens her body into plank position and lowers herself slowly toward the floor, like the lowering phase of a very slow pushup. After that, she extends her arms and arches her back (keeping her shoulders down!) into an upside down backbend position (cobra or upward dog, depending on how high she lifts). Pushing her behind up in the air, she returns to the inverted V position and from there curls up to standing again.
With practice, Stickie has made one position flow into the next in a relatively seamless sequence.
Do five to ten reps.
Today’s five-dollar word is neuroplasticity. It means that we have the ability to learn new things.
For a long time, as we know from the proverb about old dogs, people believed that there was an end to our ability to learn. Since then, we’ve learned better (ha!). People can learn throughout their lives, given the right circumstances.
What does this have to do with fitness? If we are doing fitness right, we should be learning new things often. We want to create the right environment for our bodies and our minds to adapt and learn.
The very short version of what we want is novel experiences plus successful and fun movement. We need our workouts to be hard enough that we have to pay attention to what we are doing but not so hard that it’s all suffering and failure.
Go play, and play hard!
This is one of those posts that comes with my usual disclaimer: I am not a doctor, physical therapist, or other medical professional. I do not diagnose or treat illness or injury. I am just a personal trainer and a Pilates instructor. Medical treatment is crucial to our wellbeing and we should not hesitate to seek medical advice as needed.
Now that I have said that, I need to say something else. We are not a diagnosis.
What do I mean? I mean that even if we have a diagnosis from our doctor that says we have osteoporosis, or a rotator cuff tear, or plantar fasciitis, we are still strong and powerful humans with tons of ability and potential. When we show up to work out, we obviously want to move safely, but we also want to work to the best of our ability.
Every diagnosis is a generalization. How plantar fasciitis plays out in my body is not the same as it plays in anybody else’s body. We unique unicorns need to acknowledge our diagnoses and then explore what that really means, gently and carefully, in our own bodies. We may discover that we can do a lot more than we thought.
We want to respect the expertise of our doctors and also our own expertise as the only ones who have ever lived in our own bodies.
Go play.
Small variations can be interesting! We’re trying out prisoner squats this week. Three rounds.
push press | 30 |
flies | 20 |
burpees | 10 |
| |
kb swings | 30 |
kb twists | 20 |
kb 8s | 10 |
| |
prisoner squats | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
quadruped | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie has amazing arms, natch. One way she keeps them amazing is by doing YTW. (The exercise is named for the shapes the arms make. Neither Stickie nor I can say why that W is not an M.) (You can feel free to call it whatever you like!)
Stickie begins in a slight squat. She raises her arms, with or without small weights, into a Y shape with her upper arms in line with her ears. Then she opens her arms out into a T shape. Finally, she bends her elbows so that her upper arms stay parallel to the floor and her forearms point down toward it.
Ten or so reps should do it.
Recently I watched yet another Pilates video. The discussion ranged over a wide variety of topics, but the one that stood out to me was the tyranny of correctness.
Of course when we do Pilates (or any other kind of workout, for that matter), we want to achieve correct form. However, that achievement takes time and practice. I often say to my clients (and myself!) that we are approximating our way to greatness.
What’s more important than form? Self-efficacy. Not one of us is perfect. Most of us are not going to look like the picture in the book. What we can do is to do the best we can right now, today. We, as movers, need to feel that we are capable. We need to make the attempt to do hard things.
Our teachers help us best when they celebrate what we can do and encourage us to keep trying. The goal is always going to be out there, somewhere beyond where we are now.
Good thing we’re strong and powerful!
One of the things I do in my copious spare time (ha!) is to watch Pilates videos. Some are fabulous and full of useful insights and some not so much. Recently, however, the discussion I watched included the idea that many of us are “chasing health.”
What the speaker meant by that was that we work out, we eat our vegetables, drink our water in pursuit of some abstract idea of health. Our doctors threaten us or we read some magazine article about the hidden dangers of [insert random aspect of modern life here]. Off we trudge to the gym in order to avoid something Much Worse.
This is not sustainable.
Maybe we aren’t at a place where we love going to the gym, but we want to try to go because of how it makes us feel good in our bodies. We want to enjoy ease of movement. We want joy in our lives.
Fear doesn’t give us that.
Find the joy.
I love compound exercises because we get more work done in less time, plus we exercise our brains coordinating all that movement! Three rounds.
woodchoppers | 30 |
upright row | 20 |
pushups | 10 |
| |
overhead step ups | 30 |
squat heel lift | 20 |
Arnold press | 10 |
| |
lateral bound or side lunge | 30 |
skullcrushers | 20 |
Russian twist | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie is a stickler for good form. She knows that the good morning exercise is very similar to a deadlift, but because of the way the weight is carried it can actually help improve deadlift form. To do good mornings, Stickie uses a weighted bar. If no weighted bar is available, a broomstick is a useful tool.
Stickie begins standing in good posture with her feet about shoulder width apart. She holds the bar across her back slightly below the top of her shoulders. Then she hinges forward at the hips and straightens back up. The bar helps her to keep her upper spine straight, which keeps her lower back from having to do too much work.
Sets of ten are good.
It’s time for a periodic reminder: drink water!
Dehydrated people are crabby people. Dehydration also contributes to injury. None of our body processes run as well when we are dehydrated. Plus we eat less when we’re properly hydrated.
Need another reason? We get to stand up more often because we need to use the bathroom when we’re drinking enough.
Do it.
