Thursday List: 5

Things I am grateful for, for real.

 

1.     Awesome family and friends.

2.     Eggs.

3.     Murder mysteries.

4.     Cardio exercise, especially spin and swimming.

5.     Sweaters.

 

Obviously not an exhaustive list.  What’s on yours?

Gratitude 2

I have a Secret Weapon that helps with gratitude practice.  I learned it from the amazing and talented Bronwyn Emery of Live. Write. Be.

(This is a plug for Bronwyn and her coaching services.  She is an awesome and talented person with a gift for drawing good work out of people who write.  Check out what she has to offer here.)

 

If gratitude practice in the classical sense doesn’t work, may I recommend What Went Well and Why.  Here’s how it works.  Every day, you notice three things that went well and you write them down and then you also write down why they went well.  The trick is that you have to say what you did to make that thing go well.

 

Let me give an example.  Let’s say you notice that you had a fabulous workout.  That went well.  When it comes to why, you don’t get to say it was because your trainer is amazing.  You need to look at what you did and maybe you’ll write that it went well because you actually showed up instead of crawling back in bed or because you have finally figured out how to breathe and do pushups at the same time or because you didn’t let how mad you were at your boss derail you, but in fact used the rage as power.

 

What I like about this practice is that not only does it train us to notice the good stuff like gratitude does, but it also builds a sense of agency in us.  Things went well and it wasn’t all blind luck or other people being fabulous, but rather because we did stuff.

 

Try it!

Gratitude 1

For Reasons, I tend to resist gratitude practice.

By Reasons, I mean that gratitude practice doesn’t play particularly well with my depression.  The Monster gets gleeful when I look around at my life and all the many blessings I have because he gets to point out that I have all that and I am still a depressive and that’s just messed up on a whole different level.  I mention this in case anybody else has a similar Monster.

 

My experience notwithstanding, there is research that says that practicing gratitude is good for us.

 

In point of fact, even I benefit from it at the times when the Monster is under the bed or wherever he goes when he’s not actively sitting on my chest.

 

It doesn’t have to be complicated.  I can be grateful that there are dogs sleeping under the tables on the patio at the café where I like to write blog posts, or that there is a moon in the sky when I get up in the dark, or that it is not actually possible to stab annoying people through my computer screen when they say irritating things in Zoom meetings.  There aren’t rules, really.  I can be snarky and grateful at the same time!

 

The point of the practice is that we notice.  We have, evolutionarily, a negativity bias.  Times being what they are, it is not surprising that many of us conclude that everything is terrible.

 

That might even be mostly true.  But, again, there is sunlight on raindrops and hot cocoa and the sound of little kids laughing.

 

Let it transform us.

Monday Workout: Distraction

There is a fair amount of weight-bearing on the arms in this workout.  That’s all right:  the hamstring curls will distract us.  (Or, as always, we can choose to modify.  We are adults and can make our own good decisions.)  The short circuit means—you guessed it—four rounds.

 

1 min cardio
mountain climbers	30
renegade row	20
hamstring curls	10
burpees	10
flies	20
plank to pike	10

 

Thursday List: 3

Experiments to try:

 

1.     Eat a new food.  This can be as simple as trying a veggie you’ve never had or as complicated as taking a trip to the library to check out a cookbook for some kind of cuisine that is new to you.

2.     Have a movement snack.  You know that time in the afternoon when you think about having a cookie or another cup of coffee just to get through whatever the afternoon holds?  Try taking a five minute walk, or doing a minute of squats, or a few stretches instead.

3.     Turn off the extras.  This one can be hard.  Instead of jumping on the treadmill or bike or elliptical or whatever and plugging in to the music or TV, just go.  Even better, take the workout outside and do it without the distractions.  You might learn stuff about the content of your head or about how your body works or other things I haven’t thought of yet.

Experiments 2

As I mentioned yesterday, I like experiments.  Probably because I like learning things.  There is one important prerequisite to experiments, though.  I have to remain unattached to the outcome.  Or, in other words, I have to be willing to fail.

This is not easy.  We live in a world of picture-perfect everything.  Social media could give us the impression that everyone in the entire universe is well-groomed, acne-free, and stylish.  Spoiler alert:  I live in the blooper reel as well as the highlight tape.

 

I suspect that everybody does, but some of us hide it better than others.

 

Experiments, like practice, require that we do things we’re not familiar with and maybe not good at.  We can’t control the outcome.  We might get sweaty or messy.  We might even cry a little.

 

But we might also discover something beautiful or useful or amazing.  There was a time before I tried sushi, for example.  My first experience was not entirely successful, but I was willing to try again and now I will eat it any chance I get.

 

Similarly, the first time I went skiing, it was mostly about crashing, but there was something there that kept me coming back.

 

What would you like to try?  What’s worth failing at for a while?

Experiments 1

Recently, I did a little experiment on myself.  (OK, that’s almost always true.  I like to experiment.)  For a long time now, I have routinely worked out as one of the first things I do in the morning.  However, what with the dark mornings and various other stuff going on, getting up early enough to get the workout in before work and the rest of my responsibilities was proving challenging.  So I tried sleeping in a bit and doing the workout in the afternoon.

The thing about experiments is that no matter how they turn out, we learn stuff.  What I learned is that working out in the afternoon doesn’t work for me.  It just doesn’t.  I have ideas about why, but that really doesn’t make much difference.  The point is that I learned that I have the habits I do for the very good reason that they work, most of the time.

 

Changing the workout time was not the solution I was looking for.  But I would not have known that had I not tried.

 

What might you want to experiment with this week?

Monday Workout: More or Less

This workout has some options built in.  Want to make it more challenging?  Add a back lunge to the step ups.  Need things a little easier?  Sub in plain pushups for the shoulder tap ones.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
deadlifts	20
skullcrushers	10
suitcase swings	30
rows	20
shoulder tap pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
V sit press	20

 

Thursday List: 5

Need to troubleshoot?  Here are some good questions to ask.  (Alternatively, I am a wellness coach and you can hire me to help figure stuff out!)

 

1.     How is my sleep?  If we’re not sleeping, we can’t really expect anything else to go super well.  Both our bodies and our brains need sleep for proper function.

2.     What am I eating and drinking?  Despite my high school experience, it is not sustainable to run on Coke and donuts.  If our most frequent vegetable is French fries and we drink coffee by the pot, we might have an obvious culprit.  Even if we do generally eat pretty well, we may find that we’re not getting enough protein or we’re hitting the afternoon cookies a little too hard.

3.     What am I doing about my stress?  Yep:  I am assuming we have stress.  But if we have nurturing relationships, good practices like meditation, and time to relax, stress can be mitigated.  (Bonus points for activities that will help to dismantle the systemic sources of much of our stress.  Smashing the white supremacist cis-hetero imperialist capitalist patriarchy is good exercise, too.)

4.     Am I giving my body a break?  In addition to sleep, our bodies need recovery time.  We need rest days between workouts.  We need restorative practices like massage.  Yoga helps.

5.     When did I last have some fun?  Sometimes we just need to do something frivolous to restore our energy.

Troubleshooting 2

So if we are still stuck after we’ve checked that we are, in fact, doing what we say we are doing, we have to take a closer look at our routines to see how to adjust them to get back to making progress.

This is where all those wellness categories come into play because we are not just exercise machines, but human beings.  And, because we are humans and complicated, it might take a little while and a few experiments to figure out what is going to work.  (Yep:  we’re exercising our patience again, unfortunately.)

 

When I notice a client having a hard time with a workout, I start with two questions:  how are you sleeping?  and did you eat today?  Usually the answer to those questions reveals the issue.

 

It takes a bit of time to go through what’s happening in our sleep and diet and recovery and mental health, but it’s worth it.  That’s how we figure out how to make stuff better.

Troubleshooting 1

Sometimes we get stuck.  We have our healthy routines and we are ticking our boxes and yet we are not making the progress we think we should be making.  I’m going to talk about troubleshooting this kind of thing today and tomorrow.

Today we’re going to look at our performance with a slightly critical eye.  (Critical, in this instance, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be mean to ourselves—that never helps—but rather that we are going to evaluate what we are actually doing.)

 

Often when we stop making progress, it turns out that we’re not doing what we think we are doing.  We may have cut a few corners on our workouts or skimped on our sleep.  We may have declared that we needed a treat more often than we thought we were.

 

Sometimes all we need to do to reboot our progress is to notice what we are doing and align it more with what we think we are doing.  We might be losing because we’re cheating.  That’s okay.  We can fix it.

Monday Workout: Back to Back

This is a great workout for back strength.  Both the kettlebell swings and the good mornings work the whole back of the body.  The tap backs are not far behind (heh).  We need our back strength for the renegade rows and lateral raises as well!  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
renegade row	20
lateral raise	10
kb alternate arm swing	30
kb hammer curl	20
kb halo	10
tap backs	30
good mornings	20
brains	20

Thursday List: 4

Here are more ways to build in intervals in our workouts:

 

1.     Add hills.  These can be real hills if we are walking/running/hiking/biking outside or pretend ones on the treadmill.

2.     Mix in a minute of cardio when weight training every so often.  This can be something as simple as jumping jacks or we can hop on the treadmill and run for a minute.

3.     Make it complicated.  We can amp up our usual lunges, say, by adding a bicep curl to overhead press.  Squats can acquire an extra leg lift to the side each time.

4.     Change the tempo.  Do most of the workout at an even tempo, but every few exercises make it faster before returning to normal.

More on Interval Everything

Yesterday I wrote about how pretty much all our workouts have, inherently, a relationship with interval training.  I gave some examples of what that might look like, but today I want to talk a little more about how we might use the concept when we work out.

When we are doing our strength training, the exercises we do lie on a continuum from simple to compound.  The more joints we are using, the more compound the exercise.  The more compound the exercise, the more muscle groups we are using, the more calories we are burning, and the more body parts we need to coordinate to move successfully.  In our analogy to interval training, then, our most compound exercises are our intense intervals and our simpler exercises are our periods of relative recovery. 

 

In practice, this can take a variety of forms.  One way to structure our intervals would be to superset an exercise with a more unstable version of the same exercise, such as regular squats followed by BOSU squats, or deadlifts followed by single-leg deadlifts.  Another way to create this kind of interval is to superset a compound exercise with a simpler one, like following squats with bicep curls or Arnold presses with hamstring curls.  (Note:  when doing strength training, there is also actual rest that has to happen.)

 

In Pilates, our interval training would likely take on the character of doing related exercises that build toward a more complex version, followed by an easing off.  So we might begin with chest lift and explore our way along until we are doing something like the long stretch series on the reformer or hamstring 3 on the chair or any of the tendon stretch versions, ending with something that brings us into extension like the rolldown reach on the spine corrector.

 

The common element here is that we understand and plan around the natural flow of our energy to get the most out of our workouts.

 

Go play.

It's all intervals

Over the last long time, I’ve written a lot about interval training because it really is good for us.  (Quick review:  in interval training for cardio, we work really hard for about a minute and then work less hard for as long as it takes us to get our heart rates down a bit.  Then lather, rinse, repeat until we are done with our workout.  It burns more calories in less time and produces quicker results in terms of cardio fitness than steady-state cardio.)

There is an underlying principle, though, that I’m thinking about today.  We can’t always go to 11 (no matter what Spinal Tap says).  This is a built-in condition in interval training.  Our bodies simply can’t go at maximum intensity for more than about a minute because we run out of ATP and have to use slower energy pathways.  (Sorry about the biology flashbacks.  I promise there won’t be a quiz.)

 

When we are doing other kinds of workouts, we have the same limitations on our energy, which is one reason why we rest between sets when we lift weights.  But it is not just our energy systems that max out.

 

A few examples.  Let’s say we’re lifting heavy.  We are unlikely to set new personal records for more than one lift in any workout.  Our bodies use up our energy and strength and general oomph as we go along and toward the end we are not making as much progress.  This is also a good reason to mix up our workouts so that we don’t always do the same thing first.

 

Or let’s say we’re doing Pilates.  While we need to concentrate on what we’re doing throughout our Pilates work, some exercises are more complex than others.  We want to ensure that we have the attention and energy to concentrate on those, so we want some exercises in our series that have a lower cognitive and/or physical load.

 

The short version is that we need to allocate our mental and physical resources wisely as we work out.

Monday Workout: Across and Asymmetric

This week we’re doing some things across the body and asymmetrically, so we get bonus points for core and balance.  Three rounds.

 

ball kicks	30
flies	20
curls	10
alternate knees	30
bench press	20
db thrust	10
1 arm clean and press	30
rows	20
pretty princesses	20