Mental & Emotional Wellness, Part 1

The final wellness piece is mental and emotional health.  (This is where I put in the disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist.  I can give general advice about mental and emotional well-being, but please seek professional help from those other folks as needed.  I’m here for support, not for diagnosis or treatment.)

Today I’m going to talk a bit about supporting cognitive function.  Tomorrow I’ll touch on some of the emotional stuff.

 

We tend to assume that cognitive decline is inevitable as we age.  Not so fast, y’all.  We have a bunch of tools we can use to keep our brains working.

 

A couple of the tools are kind of un-tools:  quitting smoking and preventing head injury.  If you smoke, I’m sure you already know it is not the best choice for health.  Maybe this one more reason will make the difference?  (Quitting smoking is hard.  No judgment if you haven’t got there yet.)  The head injury part may not be something we can control, but we can reduce our risk by doing smart stuff like wearing helmets when biking or skiing or the like and by working on our balance to avoid falls.

 

The positive tools all kind of work together.  We want to get regular exercise (Hey!  That works well with the balance work we want to do anyway to keep from falling!).  We want to get enough good sleep (a virtuous cycle with our exercise, which promotes good sleep, and good sleep helping us exercise again!).  We want to keep our brains active.  This can mean anything from doing puzzles to reading to learning a new sport (look!  There’s that exercise thing again!).  We also want to support our mental health.  There are, again, lots of ways to do that.  We can journal or hang with friends or take a walk with those same friends (dead horse beating:  exercise with friends!).

 

Essentially, when we live an engaged, healthy life, our brains thrive along with our bodies.

Monday Workout: Four

You know what happens when we have a shorter circuit:  four rounds!

 

1 min cardio
db to knee	30
bench press	20
shoulder tap pushups	10
squat to leg lift	30
row	20
V sit press	10

Thursday List: 5

Need a few more tips for sleeping?  I got you:

 

1.     Move every day.

2.     Don’t over-nap.

3.     Meditate or reduce worry some other way.

4.     Stick to a schedule.

5.     Avoid late night meals and snacks.

Sleep, part 2

I’ll start with a confession.  I have really struggled to put together an evening routine.  Morning routine:  no problem.  Evening rolls around and I’m like, “Routine?  Is that even a thing?”  But, knowing the benefits, I keep working on it and I’m making a bit of progress.

(The benefits are:  I feel more prepared for the next day, I fall asleep faster, and I sleep better.  Also, my teeth are brushed.)

 

What kind of stuff goes into a bedtime routine?  Surprisingly, best results come from starting up to 8 hours before bed.  (OK, so it’s not like we just stop doing stuff at 2; we just tick off a couple things then.)  Around eight hours before bed, we might want to stop with the caffeine.  While it is probably better for us not to have nicotine ever, if we are users, we want to try to stop using around the same time.

 

Around an hour before bed, we want to turn off the tv, shut down the screens, and stop working.  This supports our melatonin production by limiting our exposure to blue light and also helps us turn down the stress.

 

If possible, a half hour before bed we can dim the lights further.  When we are in an environment that is about candlelight-bright, we stimulate dim-light melatonin onset, which in turn helps us to have an uninterrupted night of sleep.  Then we can take a hot shower to relax our bodies further.

 

When we turn in, we will sleep best in a cool, dark, quiet room.  This may require interventions like a sleep mask, ear plugs, a noise machine, or the like.  Preparation helps.

Sleep, Part 1

We can’t be well without sleep.  There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a torture.  Some of us might want to have words with the current culture about this, because there is a lot of pressure out there to do All The Things even at the expense of sleep.

While there are certainly times when we’re not going to get enough (like, say, when we have a new baby), we can strive to get our seven to nine hours.  I realize this may mean terrible sacrifices, like waiting a whole day to watch the next episode of that awesome show or putting away the phone at bed time, but when we wake up with actual energy, we might find it worth it.

 

When we get enough sleep, our bodies and our brains work better.  Sleep time is when our tissues repair themselves from our workouts so we wake up stronger.  It’s also the time when we consolidate the things we learn during the day.  Our brains do housework while we’re unconscious (isn’t that nice of them?) and we don’t really want to get in the way of them taking out the garbage.

 

Tomorrow:  bed time routines!

Monday Workout: Coordinate!

When we do compound exercises like the lunge to overhead press, we have to work all of our body parts together.  Sometimes it may feel like we have too many to coordinate, but we’ll get it with practice.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
(lunge to) overhead press	20
curls	10
kb swings	30
kb twist	20
kb 8x	10
woodchoppers	30
flies	20
scissors	10

 

Thursday List: 5

One way to eat healthy food is to choose what’s in season.  Here are five September veggies to try:

 

1.     artichokes

2.     eggplant

3.     ginger

4.     sunchokes

5.     sweet potatoes

Nutrition, part 2

Food is one of the joys of life, in my opinion.  It’s also necessary!  Choosing foods that are both good for us and fun to eat helps us live a happy life.

So how do we do that?

 

In general, we want to choose foods that are close to how they occur in nature.  Eating an apple is going to be better for us than eating an apple pie.  And sour apple candy isn’t even food and may not have any actual relationship with apples.  This principle means that whole grains are better for us than processed grains, that fresh veggies are on the whole better than canned, that fresh fruit is better than jam, etc.

 

However, we also want to consider that food is more than just fuel for our bodies.  Food is part of our culture and our social interactions.  When we’re considering apple pie, we may need to remember that our grandpa baked it with love and we get to hear him tell stories while we eat it.  That feeds us, too.  If we get so hung up on eating the “right” things, we may skip going out with friends and that’s not good for us either.

 

Most of the time, we want to choose real food, minimally processed, and cooked in ways that are good for us.  Sometimes, not so much.

 

Or, as my personal guru, Cookie Monster, says:  “Healthy food makes me a healthy dude” and “Cookies are a sometimes food.”  

Nutrition, Part 1

A third pillar of wellness is nutrition.  We can’t be well without proper fuel.  Today I’m going to go over macronutrients and tomorrow I’m going to talk about actual food.

There are three macronutrients:  protein, carbohydrates, and fats.  When we eat food, we’re ingesting some combination of these three.

 

Protein is crucial for building and rebuilding our bodies.  If we don’t get enough protein in our diets, we have trouble healing from injury.  Those of us who would like to change our body compositions toward more lean tissue also need protein in order to do that.  Vegetarians and vegans need to be careful to ensure that they are getting good sources of protein because most non-animal proteins don’t have all the essential amino acids we need to get from our diets, but it’s not that complicated.

 

Carbohydrates get a bad rap these days and a lot of them don’t deserve it.  Unless we have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, there is no reason to avoid our friends the whole grains.  Carbohydrates are a good source of energy for us.  Also:  veggies!  We love veggies!  Quality matters in carbs, though.  There’s a big difference between getting carbs from vegetables and whole grains and from a box of donuts.  When in doubt, choose the carbs with more fiber.

 

Fat is also essential for our bodies to function.  It is a dense source of calories, which is important when we are doing lots of exercise.  Quality matters here, too.  In general, the best fats for us are the ones that are liquid at room temperature.  Those are the unsaturated fats.  Saturated fats are solid at room temperature.  Focusing on getting our fats from healthy whole food sources like nuts and seeds, oily fish, and the like is a good way to get what we need without overdoing it.

 

We don’t sit down to a nice plate of protein, carbs, and fat, though.  We eat food.  I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Monday Workout: Balance Mood

Apparently, I’m in a balance kind of mood.  We’re working balance directly with the one-leg exercises and indirectly with the shoulder tap pushup, the quadruped lateral raise, and the plank.  Three rounds.

 

step up (to back lunge)	30
1 leg deadlift	20
1 leg db pass	10
db kick	30
good morning	20
shoulder tap pushup	10
squat to leg lift	30
quadruped lateral raise	20
plank	10

 

Thursday List: 7 More

So:  it’s time to recover.  What are we going to do?  Here are some ideas:

 

1.     Sleep.

2.     Eat.  Preferably something with actual nutrition in it, but something is better than nothing.

3.     Chill.  The fancy term for this is “quiet wakefulness.”  It can mean anything from meditating to reading to staring into space.

4.     Light movement.  This would be something like gentle stretching or a bit of a stroll just to keep the muscles limber and lithe.

5.     Hot or cold.  Or both!  Some folks like alternating sauna and cold plunge.  Some folks swear by ice.  Others are all about the heating pad.  Do you, but consider that ice is generally great for reducing swelling and heat is generally very soothing.

6.     Stuff that pushes on the body.  On the expensive end, we have massage.  Somewhere in the middle we have percussive therapy (the massage guns range in price, but the most expensive ones I saw in a quick visit online were about $150 and most were significantly cheaper).  For the budget minded, we have foam rollers and all their various relatives.  All of them help our bodies release tension and allow us to build flexibility.

7.     Other stuff.  That can be things like acupuncture or going outside or doing puzzles or looking at art.  If it feeds your soul, it’s good for recovery.

Recovery and Healing, Part 2

When we are “just” sore from whatever kind of movement we’ve been doing, whether it is our first steps around the block or our hardest, heaviest weight workout to date, we need to take some steps to recover.  Heck, even if we are not sore, we need to make sure that we give our bodies space and time and care for recovery.  Bodies like that.

The low-hanging fruit of recovery is pretty much stuff we should be doing anyway:  eating food that is good for us, getting enough sleep, and taking time for mental relaxation.  (This may be time to give ourselves a pat on the back:  we were doing an awesome job without even thinking about it!  Go us!)

 

If we need something a bit more direct, we have even more fun options, ranging from light movement (think yoga and stretching of a very gentle stroll) to massage to foam rolling. 

 

I want to be clear about something.  Often in our hustle culture, we absorb the attitude that we don’t have time to recover.  Our societal anxiety about being and doing enough can make us feel like rest is a waste of time and frivolous.  This is not true.  All of us deserve to rest and recover because we are valuable humans even if we do exactly nothing more with the rest of our existence.  And, if that turns out not to be convincing, I’ll give y’all’s Protestant work ethic a reason to recover:  it will make us more productive in the long run.  (I like the first reason better.  We are all beloved children of God or essential parts of the universe or however you prefer to phrase it to yourself.)  Bottom line:  work and then rest.

Recovery and Healing, Part 1

Another aspect of wellness is how we deal with recovery and healing.  That’s the focus for this week.

When we start getting more movement into our lives, we sometimes get sore.  And most of us, at some point in our lives, will have to deal with some kind of injury that requires us to pay attention to healing.  Recovery and healing often have similar aspects, but they are not entirely the same.

 

Today I’m going to be Captain Obvious and say:  if you are injured, seek medical attention.  DIY is all well and good, but most of us aren’t actually doctors.  Get a professional to check you out and then follow their advice.

 

Tomorrow:  dealing with non-injury recovery.

Monday Workout: Bonus Core!

This week, we have a bunch of exercises that work the core while we do other stuff.  Bonus points!  My favorite!  Three rounds.

 

suitcase swings	30
flies	20
renegade rows	10
db circles	30
bench press	20
front raise	10
mountain climbers	30
skullcrushers	20
brains	10

 

Thursday List: 7

Because there are so many kinds of movement out there, here are some general ideas about kinds of movement we might want to try:

 

1.     Outside:  walking, hiking, running, kayaking, skiing, swimming, frisbee golf, tennis, pickleball, rollerblading, etc.

2.     Teams:  baseball, softball, football, hockey, soccer, field hockey, basketball, etc.

3.     Solo:  running, biking, swimming, skiing, gym machines

4.     Mindful:  yoga, Pilates

5.     Heavy:  lift, lift, lift!

6.     Classes:  Zumba, aerobics, HIIT, core, TRX, etc.

7.     Lifestyle:  housework, gardening, dog-walking, kid-wrangling, etc.

Movement, Part 2

Yesterday I talked a little about the difference between movement and exercise.  We may want to start with movement and dip into exercise later, but we might have some beliefs that hold us back from doing either one.  Let’s talk about some of those and see if we really need to keep those beliefs.

We might think that movement has to be hard or painful to be effective.  I personally would like to have words with the person who came up with “no pain, no gain.”  Pain is an important message from our bodies that we are doing something potentially dangerous.  We do not want pain while we are moving.  In fact, doing some moving can help us reduce the amount of pain we have in our bodies. 

 

(I’m not going to lie and say that all exercise is always super duper fun and never ever uncomfortable because that’s just not true.  Discomfort is not the same as pain.  Our hamstrings will pretty much always complain when we do hamstring curls.  I will always hate lunges.  But, in general, most of the time movement and exercise should be somewhere between tolerable and great.)

 

We might think that we have to join a gym and figure out all those weird machines and fling dumbbells and make grunting noises to get in our movement or exercise.  Nope.  Things like dancing count.  Half an hour of tag is a great way to move.  Team sports count.  So do swimming and skiing and hiking.  Gardening definitely counts as movement, and, depending on what we’re doing, may be exercise, too.

 

We might think that we have to be good at whatever movement we do.  I can say for a fact that I am a terrible swimmer.  And I don’t care.  I love swimming.  My swimming counts as movement. 

 

A related belief might be that people will make fun of us for being bad at whatever we are doing or for how we look while we do it.  I can’t promise that people will always be kind, but I can say that most people are too busy worrying about their own stuff to pay much attention to anybody else.  Also, blowing off jerks probably counts as movement.  And do we really want the Mean Girls and Boys out there to keep us from feeling good?  Don’t let them win!  (Please note:  gym anxiety is real and serious.  It is totally all right for us to prefer to move by ourselves in private either forever or until we build up the confidence that we need to move with other people.)

 

Perhaps there is a theme here and that is:  there are lots and lots of ways to move.  It’s a fair bet that most of us will be able to find some kind of movement that we don’t hate.  I’m also willing to bet that all of us will feel better when we do make the effort to move, even just a little bit.  Experiment!

Movement, part 1

Over the summer, I worked on a certification as a Wellness Coach.  It is not surprising that movement is an important aspect of wellness and one that plays well with what I already know and do.  However, movement for wellness is a little different than what I usually do with my personal training and Pilates clients.  I’m going to explore what wellness-directed movement looks like in my posts this week.

 

The basic distinction I want to make is between movement and exercise.  Movement is the larger category and includes exercise, but you don’t have to do exercise to get moving.  One way to think about the two is that often exercise has a particular goal—to improve strength or cardio, to get more flexible.  Movement is a little more free-floating.  A stroll around the block at a leisurely pace is movement, but it may or may not be exercise, depending on the level of fitness of the walker in question.

 

Movement is really good for us.  Our bodies work better when we move them and our brains do, too.  I know there are a lot of us who don’t like exercise, whether it’s because we had a terrible experience in gym class or because we think it has to involve giant weights and big sweaty guys or any of a million other reasons.  But movement can be as simple as dancing around the kitchen with the kids when our song comes on, or taking the dog around the block, or challenging your partner to see which one of you can slide farther down the hall in socks.

 

Especially when we’ve been best friends with the couch for a long time, it’s important to realize that any movement, even a quick stand-up stretch between meetings, will help us.  We may find that we want to move on to exercise eventually or we may not, but we’ll be better for the effort.