The Amazing Stickie and Plank with Foot Touch

The Amazing Stickie loves exercises that do a lot at once.  So today she is demonstrating the plank with foot touch.

She begins in plank position, a nice straight line from her head to her heels.  From there, she lifts her hips toward the ceiling, making herself into an inverted V as if she were doing downward dog in yoga.  She reaches one hand back and touches her foot with it before putting it back on the floor and coming back down into plank position.  She repeats the whole thing, using her other hand to touch her foot.  That’s one rep.  Five reps should do it.

Captain Obvious!

Time for another bulletin from Captain Obvious.  Today she would like to let us all know that overdoing our workouts is bad.  We work out because we want to feel better, after all.  When we are sore and crabby, that is not an improvement.  Injury is not a thing we want.

But our culture is always after us to do more and faster and harder.  I get it.  I live here, too.

 

So here’s the mind game to get past it:  Doing the right amount of work is actually the fastest way to our goals.

 

In the moment, here are a couple of techniques we can use to avoid the temptation to overdo.  One is to lean in to perfect form.  To keep the form ideal, we are going to have to slow down.  We may discover, when we do, that ten reps aren’t all that easy anymore and we really don’t want to do eleven, much less twenty.

 

In a similar vein, we can choose a different tempo.  Most of us default to an even balance between the lifting (“concentric,” for your fitness nerds) phase and the lowering (“eccentric”) phase.  Consciously slowing the lowering phase forces us to control what we often think of as the easy part.  It turns out that trying to control gravity is hard!  We get a lot of work in few reps, get plenty tired, and do not feel all that capable of doing more in the moment.

 

Finally, we are allowed to rest.  Our bosses, families, and friends may not give us this message, but it’s true.  We do better when we rest.  I hesitate to say this because it’s pandering to our culture, but we will actually accomplish more if we rest when we need to.  (This is the part where I remind everyone that we are valuable no matter how much or how little we “accomplish” in our lives.  Our value is intrinsic and has no relation to how much we can bench press.)

 

Do enough.  Be happy!

Back at you!

It’s probably completely natural to forget stuff that is not right in front of us.  “Out of sight, out of mind” is a proverb we all know.  But that stuff we don’t see can sneak up on us!

Which is why I’m going to talk about working out the back of the body today.  Our backs, by definition, are not right in front of our faces so we tend to forget them.  Until they hurt.  Which is not ideal.

 

As I’m sure we all recall from our physics (yes, I am joking right now!), for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In the body, that means that what bends needs to stretch.  Muscles work by pulling on bones, so one set pulls us one way and another set does the work in the opposite direction.  We want both sets of those muscles to develop in balanced ways to maintain our maximal range of motion.

 

If we only work the muscles in the front of our bodies, we create an imbalance.  The front muscles get chronically shortened and the ones in the back get chronically lengthened.  If this was just about aesthetics, we could probably learn to live with that, but when muscles are too long or too short, they become less strong.  That is not okay.

 

When we work our backs, one of the first things we may notice is that our posture improves.  (All right, the first thing we might notice is that we are sore in new places.  Once that goes away, we notice the good posture.)  Good posture is something we want because it makes our bodies move more efficiently, helps us breathe more deeply, and even makes us look thinner.

 

Working the back of the body also helps, paradoxically, to reduce back pain.  Stronger muscles can do more before they get achy!  This is also the part where I remind us all that our core muscles do not begin and end with our abdominals.  They go all the way around our bodies.  Working our back muscles works our core, with all the implications for excellent function, balance, and general happiness that implies.

 

Those of us who sit a lot (that’s all of us!) benefit from working the back of the body to counteract the negative effects of all that chair time.  Speaking from personal experience, sometimes my hips need to remember what it means to straighten up; those flexors aren’t going to relax themselves!

 

Those of us who have breasts to support will also benefit from working the back.  It takes a fair amount of strength to carry those around without distorting our posture.

 

Now that we’ve gone over some of the reasons to work the back, let’s talk about how.  We want to throw some lat pulldowns, some deadlifts, some rows, and some reverse flies into our exercise mix to get the muscles of the back of the body in gear.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Balance

This week is all about the balance and the asymmetrical movements.  Three rounds.

 

1 arm clean and press	30
1 leg deadlift	20
1 leg squat	10
squat raise	30
rows	20
bench dips	10
leg kicks	30
(lunge to) curl	20
lateral plank walk	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Bridge Chest Press

The Amazing Stickie loves a good chest press.  When she goes to the gym with the fancy stuff, she can do decline presses on a bench, but sometimes she wants to work her lower body at the same time as her upper body, so she gets all the benefits of decline presses plus a bunch of glute and leg work by doing bridge chest presses.

To get into bridge position, Stickie lies on her back, knees bent, feet flat on the floor, with her heels in line with her sit bones.  She inhales.  On her exhale, she tilts her pelvis toward her belly button and peels her spine up until her body is a straight line from her chest to her knees.  (People with osteoporosis should not peel up, but rather lift the hips straight up in the air to keep the spine from flexing as much as possible.)

 

For this exercise, Stickie gets into bridge position while holding a pair of dumbbells.  She holds them over her chest with straight arms.  Then she lowers the dumbbells until they are close to but not quite touching her chest.  She lifts them back up over her chest by straightening her elbows.  That is one rep.  Sets of ten are good.

In the Interval...

I am a fan of intervals.  What is not to like about a technique that gives better results in the same amount of time without a lot more pain and suffering?  We all need and want cardio fitness.  Intervals are a great tool for getting us there.

Let’s start with the basics:  interval training involves intervals (fancy that!) in which we work harder.  Classic interval last no longer than a minute, because that’s how long we can work at our maximum effort before we run out of ATP (sorry about the flashbacks to high school biology).  However, longer intervals still have benefits.

 

Sometimes intervals are built in to our workouts.  When we walk or run or bike outside, we discover that the world is not flat.  Those hills we have to climb?  Intervals!  We have to work harder to get to the top.

 

An easy way to build them in when we’re working out somewhere flat is the fartlek.  (If your inner twelve-year-old just snickered, we can be friends.)  To fartlek (heh), we look ahead on our path as we’re walking or running or biking or whatever and choose a landmark, like a big tree or a stop sign on the corner, or a purple house.  We go as fast as we can until we get to that landmark.  Then we choose another one and go at a recovery pace until we get there.  We continue on like that until the end of the workout.

 

Music also provides a great way to build in intervals.  A classic interval strategy would be to go at top speed during the choruses of songs and recover during the verses.  (Back when I used to watch football and had a spin bike in my living room, I’d use commercials as intervals and game play as recovery time.)  Another way to use music for intervals is to choose a characteristic (genre, type of singer, decade) as the trigger for an interval.  We can also choose songs that are our personal sprint songs; whenever those come up in the shuffle, we really amp everything up.

 

I recently learned about a new-to-me way to do intervals for those of us who keep track of things like lap time.  We note the digit of the hundredth of a second and use that, multiplied by 20, to determine how much rest we get before we go again.  So if we finish in a time that ends in .01, we get 20 seconds of rest.  A time that ends in .02 would give us 40 seconds.  A time that ends in .00, though, means we have to go again right now!

 

As always, we want to build up slowly and experiment.  Adding a single interval to a workout does have benefits.  We add another one when we feel like we can handle it.  Eventually, we can spend our whole workout alternating between hard work and recovery intervals (after our warm-up and before our cool-down, of course!).

 

Go play.

Begin

Some concepts just keep recurring in my mind.  They are the ones I keep turning back to when I get in a rut or get sidetracked.  One of those is Beginner’s Mind.  It’s a concept from Buddhism about working on something as if we’ve never done it before, clearing our mind of preconceptions and habits and distractions.  It’s a fresh start.

All of us have times when our fitness goals get obscured by other stuff.  We have actual lives and everything.  Fitness is supposed to enable us to live the rest of our lives better, but the life part is the important bit; sometimes we need to focus on that instead.

 

When it’s time to come up for air, fitness is still there.  We take some deep breaths and we begin again.

 

When we do that, we have to let go of how our body worked before we got sidetracked and how we used to work out when we were in college and how annoying that person was just now in the locker room.  We start where we are.  We pay attention to how the weights feel today, or the way our feet impact on the treadmill, or the angle we use when our arms enter the water as we swim.

 

Today is a new day.  We are new humans today.  We can make today a good start.

Monday Workout: Stability

This week we’re exploring stability in a variety of ways.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
farmer carry	20
YTA	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
mountain climbers	30
flies	20
plank saw	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Underhand Bent Over Row

The Amazing Stickie knows that small variations can make a familiar exercise seem new.  Today she is changing up her usual bent over row by switching her grip.

 

As usual, she stands with her feet about hip-distance apart with her knees slightly bent.  She hinges forward at the hips being careful to keep her spine straight or even slightly extended (not curved over.  The Amazing Stickie will never have a little old lady hump in her back.).  She holds her dumbbells with an underhand grip and rows them up toward her armpits.  She feels her shoulder blades come together on her back as she does this.  Then she lowers the dumbbells back down.

 

Sets of ten to twenty are good, depending on the weight of the dumbbells. 

Grit, Pro and Con

Yesterday I wrote about flow and how great it is when everything just feels right with our workouts.  Today I’m going to talk about those other days, the ones when everything is just too @#$% hard to do.

 

Grit is an important skill to have in our toolbox.  When we use it, we get stronger and we build character.  It can help us lift that last rep or finish that last mile.  Heck, sometimes it can make us do that very first step of showing up at the gym.

 

It’s also, like many tools, potentially dangerous.  Grit is no substitute for good judgment.  We do not want to use it to keep working when we are injured, for example.

 

We want to keep paying attention.  A workout that starts out terrible can, once we’re going, feel fabulous.  Then there are the ones that show us that what we actually should be doing is taking a rest day.  If we’re just mindlessly going through the motions, we will miss the distinction.

 

So, yes, I believe in persistence, but the smart kind, that knows when it really is a good idea to do a little stretching and call it a day. 

Go With the Flow

In the usual usage of the words, we tend to want to avoid altered states of consciousness while working out.  Alcohol and weights should not mix.  Other drugs, too, seem counterproductive to the enterprise.  However, there is one altered state of consciousness that actually helps our workouts:  the flow state.

 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (no, I have no idea how to say his name, nor spell it without looking very carefully) wrote the book on the flow state, Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  When we are in flow, things seem like they’re just working, like we can do our best without undue effort.  It’s a kind of peak experience in which all the things we’re not doing fall away.  We are doing what we’re doing, and nothing but what we’re doing.

 

In a fitness context, this is related to the runner’s high.  When we’re in flow, we feel like we could work out all day long, or run for hours, or swim for days.  We feel fabulous.  All the things that we struggle with most days are not a problem when we hit flow.  Of course we want flow.  It feels fabulous in the moment and it helps us want to work out again in the future.

 

So how do we get there?  Good question!  And I will give my favorite answer:  we experiment.  Different people find that different things trigger the flow state, so what works for me may not work for you.

 

On a basic level, we want to do all the things we normally do to make working out simple for us.  Rolling out of bed to find our gear right there and ready is a good start.  Plugging in our devices before bed so they are charged when we really need those workout tunes is another one of those things.  Those of us who like to hit the gym after work would want to make sure the bag is stocked with clean clothes, appropriate snacks, and all that good stuff before we leave home.

 

For most of us, flow comes when the workout is not too easy or too difficult.  If it’s too easy, we zone out and start making shopping lists or wondering what possessed that person at work to say that terrible thing or fixating on burritos.  If it’s too hard, the feedback from our bodies overwhelms us with please-stop-now messages.

 

There is some evidence that the mindset we go in with can contribute to flow.  When we bring our curiosity with us, we take an attitude of “I wonder how far I can go?” instead of “when the heck is this going to be over?”  Leaning into the sensations we get during the workout can also help us develop flow—what happens when we try to do the movement this way instead?  What if I concentrate on the alignment of my knees?  That mind/body connection thing is real!

 

Some people find that the right music helps them flow; others find it distracts.  Interruptions from texts and calls are almost always flow-busters.  I recently read something that suggested that rewarding ourselves before the workout can potentially help us hit flow (haven’t tried this one myself, and I suspect it depends on the reward, among other things).

 

One note of caution:  while flow makes us feel like we can keep going forever, we do actually need to use good judgment about when to stop.  We want to quit before we are totally exhausted and ensure that we get plenty of rest.

Go play. 

Monday Workout: Amp!

This week we have some choices to amp things up.  Try something new!  Three rounds.

 

step up or power step up	30
bridge chest press	20
lateral raise	10
curtsy or skater jump	30
rows	20
hip rotations	10
woodchoppers	30
skullcrushers	20
side banana	10