Thursday List: 10

A few exercises that can be done one side at a time:

 

1.     single leg deadlift

2.     single leg squat

3.     single leg calf raise

4.     lunges

5.     bench press

6.     curl

7.     overhead press

8.     row

9.     fly

10.  kickback

Miscellaneous: Symmetry and Asymmetry

Humans, you might think, are pretty symmetrical, if you were to divide us in half along the line of our noses, breastbones, and on down.  We’ve got an eye and an ear on each side, an arm and leg apiece, for the most part.  Functionally, though, not so much.  Most of us have a preferred hand to do things with, a stronger leg to stand on, and even a preferred eye.  These preferences shape our shapes, so to speak.  What’s strong gets stronger and what we use less dwindles.  That’s normal, and yet it causes problems for us.

 

What can we do about it?

 

We can train asymmetrically.  That is, we can work one arm or leg at a time.  Think about, say, single arm clean and press, or doing curls one arm at a time.

 

I love asymmetrical work for a variety of reasons.  One is that it demands more stabilization, so it automatically strengthens our core musculature and improves our balance.  I mean, right there is enough reason to do it!

 

Another reason to work that way is that our strong side can’t help the other side.  We see exactly where we are on each side of the body.  (This is why I prefer to have clients do things like bench press with dumbbells rather than barbells.  It’s not strictly asymmetric training, but each arm has its own burden to bear by itself.)  Getting the less strong side to do its fair share of the work helps us avoid overuse injuries on the other side.

 

Yet one more reason to do it:  it challenges our brains to flip from side to side.  We get smart as we get strong.

 

Go play.

Miscellaneous: Balance Factors

I’m a little obsessed with balance.  It’s just so important for our long-term health and safety.

Balance depends on several things.

 

One is basic strength.  If we only have one leg to stand on, it had better be a pretty strong leg.  All of our usual strength training habits are good for this one.

 

Flexibility and mobility also play important roles in balance.  We don’t spend our lives like statues.  Our balance has to be a dynamic thing.  That means we need supple muscles and good range of motion at our joints to adapt to changing conditions.

 

Perhaps the most interesting factor in developing balance is novelty.  Our brains really like new experiences and new ways of doing things challenge our bodies to adapt.  That means that some days we need to do tree pose and other days we want to play games with the BOSU or try a slack line.

 

When we play, we learn.

Monday Workout: 3D

As three-dimensional beings, it’s good to remember that we can move lots of different ways.  We are working laterally, sagitally, and diagonally today.  Three rounds.

 

step touch	30
bench press	20
Arnold press	10
suitcase swing	30
rows	20
pushup with shoulder tap	10
woodchppers	30
Bulgarian split squat	20
plank saw	10

 

Thursday List: 5

What to do:  a review

 

1.     cardio

2.     strength training

3.     flexibility work

4.     balance work

5.     fun stuff

Miscellaneous: Righting Response

Because I am a responsible trainer and Pilates instructor, I keep up with my continuing education.  I often learn little tidbits that I like to pass along.  Recently, an instructor in a course I was taking said that when we are training balance, we actually want to lose our balance from time to time.

I thought:  WHAT?

 

Here is the thinking.  When we are unstable and we lose our balance in a safe environment, we train our righting response, or, in other words, our bodies learn how to catch us.  This, I think, is akin to learning how to fall in martial arts training.

 

The broader lesson is this:  learning comes through mistakes and failure.  If we are succeeding at everything we are doing in our workouts, we are limiting our growth.  I am NOT saying that we should do unsafe things, just that we can push ourselves just a little bit past our comfort zone in order to enlarge that very zone.

Miscellaneous: Walk to School

This month’s blog is going to be about the random little items I learn or questions I am asked.

Recently, one of my clients asked me about ankle weights.  She walks her kids to school, so she was wondering if the weights would help her maximize what she had to do anyway or if they were just a gimmick.

 

What I told her is this:  there are better ways to get bang for your buck out of this daily activity.  Here’s why.

 

Ankle weights are not very heavy.  They won’t result in much strength improvement, but they will increase fatigue. 

 

On the other hand, the idea of adding weight to the equation is not a bad one.  She could consider rucking.  Rucking is basically walking with weights on your back (as in rucksack).  Throwing a dumbbell (or, hey, a bunch of books!) in a backpack for the walk will make the walk burn more calories and increase strength, endurance, and core strength.  Rucking vests are also a thing, but personally I tend to try to use what’s on hand first before buying more stuff.

 

Another way to amp up that morning walk is to rope the kids in to some interval training.  Kids often do this naturally when walking with (slow, boring) adults.  They’ll run to the corner and wait for the adult to catch up.  Making the walk an interval for the adult would be more like everybody running to the corner, walking safely across the street, walking briskly to the next corner (or skipping, or hopping, or whatever), walking safely across the street, running to the next corner, and so on.

 

A third way to add value to the morning walk is to use the wait times.  Those traffic lights are things we all have to wait for.  Might as well get in some squats or some lunges or some jacks.  Maybe even some balance work.  The kids might join in or they might just roll their eyes at how embarrassing parents can be.  Either way, that’s a win.

 

Monday Workout: Opposites

Sometimes it is fun to do an exercise and its opposite back to back like we do this week with the flies and reverse flies.  Punching forward and then kicking back has a similar feel.  Three rounds.

 

db kicks	30
flies	20
reverse flies	10
kb alt arm swing	30
kb hammer curl	20
kb halo	10
(lunge) punches	30
kickbacks	20
side banana	10

 

Thursday List: 6

I try to avoid buying needless gadgets.  That said, there are some tools that can be really useful for building balance.

 

1.     yoga block

2.     strap

3.     roller

4.     BOSU

5.     turntable

6.     balance board

Back to Basics: Putting it Together 2

There are lots of ways to put together a week’s worth of workouts that incorporate all the things we need to do.  This is good, because we all have different lives, bodies, and preferences.

Those of us who particularly love one kind of workout will have to make more of an effort to squeeze in the other stuff.  For example, it is often the case that folks who love lifting find it challenging to get around to doing flexibility work.

 

I have two suggestions for tactics.  The first one is to find ways to make it fun.  Maybe some of us really detest weight lifting.  But doing it while catching up with a friend?  That could be kind of awesome.  If the idea of treadmill time reminds us that it was first used as a punishment, maybe we’d do better getting our cardio from playing basketball or swimming or dancing.  Cue Mary Poppins singing “A Spoon Full of Sugar.”

 

The other suggestion is to find some accountability and/or community.  Classes and teams are popular for this reason.  People make friends.  In the case of classes, there’s also reduced cognitive load because we show up and someone tells us what to do.

 

Getting in our workouts can stimulate our creativity as we look for ways to get everything done and have a good time.

 

Go play.

Back to Basics: Putting it Together 1

We’ve spent the month going over the basics of the various kinds of exercises that are beneficial for our bodies.  The thing is, we need to put the kinds together for maximum benefit.

If that sounds overwhelming, stop for a second and breathe.  Any exercise is better than no exercise and starting with what is manageable is always a good idea.  (Also:  it is my job to put things like this together, so if you need help, you could hire me.)

 

A person who has been exercising for a while might have a weekly workout schedule that looks something like this:

 

Monday:  cardio and stretching

Tuesday:  cardio warm-up, weights and stretching

Wednesday:  cardio and stretching

Thursday:  cardio warm-up, weights and stretching

Friday:  cardio and stretching

Saturday:  yoga or Pilates

Sunday:  rest

 

Notice that resting is right in there, looking important, because it is.  We don’t want to overdo things!

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: I did not

Month end means a short circuit.  My clients have figured out that doing a short circuit four times is not easier than doing a longer circuit three times.  Did I say it would be?  I did not.  The point in doing a different shape of workout is that it challenges our bodies in different ways.  Four rounds.

 

1 min cardio
tap backs	30
bench press	20
squat pop up	10
woodchoppers	30
renegade rows	20
scissors	10

 

Thursday List: 8

Things that can use stretching!

 

1.     Hamstrings (aka, the back of the thighs/knees)

2.     Calves

3.     Quads (aka the front of the thighs)

4.     Back

5.     Chest

6.     Wrists and arms

7.     Neck

8.     Whatever else feels stiff or restricted

Back to Basics: Balance

Balance work is, like flexibility, both essential and often neglected.  The statistics on older people who fall are not pretty.  Hint:  we are all getting older.

With my clients, I make sure that we work on having a strong core.  This means more than doing a few ab exercises.  The core is all the trunk musculature, all the way around.  We can’t neglect working those deep back muscles that support and move our spines.

 

Additionally, I make sure we do asymmetric work.  When we work one side of the body differently than the other (in a one arm clean and press, for example), our bodies have to figure out how to stabilize us.  And, of course, this means straight-up balance work, like single leg squats, single leg deadlifts, and the like.

 

Pilates, by nature, enhances both core strength and balance.  Yoga, likewise, is a great practice for those who want to improve balance.

 

The best thing for balance?  Practice.  I often suggest using the time we are standing around anyway to practice balance.  I have at least one client who has taken me up on this (and told me about it).  She works on her calf raises while she’s waiting in line at the grocery store.  (Because she is awesome, she thinks of the amusement caused in her fellow shoppers as bonus points.)  I can say that her constant practice has yielded results, both in her actual balance and her confidence.  Those of us who don’t want to practice in public can use tooth-brushing time, microwave time, or commercials time for mini-practice.

 

Go play.

Back to Basics: Flexibility

Most of us could use to be a little more flexible.  And yes, I do mean this both literally and figuratively.  I find that literal flexibility does tend to encourage figurative flexibility because it teaches us to deal with the discomfort inherent in the process.  But I digress.  My wheelhouse is literal flexibility.

First, I need to explain that flexibility and mobility are related but not the same.  Flexibility is about the ability of our muscles to flex and extend.  Mobility is about how much movement is available at our joints, or in other words, it’s about bones.  Bones and muscles work together to create both movement and stability.  I’m not going to talk about mobility today, even though it is certainly a worthy topic for some future date.

 

OK:  flexibility.  I’m pretty sure that many of us have had negative experiences of stretching.  We may have had that teacher who decided we weren’t stretching enough and exerted unnecessary force to increase our stretch to an uncomfortable or even damaging degree.  We may have not been taught that discomfort and pain are not the same thing, or even that sometimes discomfort is productive.  That can make it hard to work on flexibility.

 

Others of us have the opposite problem.  Stretching feels good, so we skip it.  How can it possibly be good for us when it feels fabulous?

 

Still others have issues with making stretching a priority.  There’s already so much to do!  We need to cardio and we need to weight and now we need to stretch too?  (Yes, I just invented those verbs.  I’m a little sorry, but not much.)

 

The bottom line is this:  stretching is good and doesn’t take long and shouldn’t hurt.

 

When we stretch, consistency is key.  Doing five minutes a day is better than stretching for an hour once a month.  I’m sure we all waste more than five minutes somewhere in the day.

 

Here’s the process, using a hamstring stretch as an example.  For this particular hamstring stretch, we’re going to lie down on our backs and use a strap.  To begin, one leg will be bent with the foot flat on the floor.  The strap will be around the other foot, which will be raised off the floor.  I’m not going to specify how high because this is the part where we have to pay attention.  We’ll lift that leg gradually and we will stop when we feel tension in the hamstrings.  Notice I said tension, not pain.  Pain is actually bad for flexibility because our muscles freak out.  If we move into tension and hang out there a bit, our muscles realize that nothing bad is happening and they relax.  We can move in and out of tension gently (not bouncing, like they taught us in my youth).  We can explore different angles of attack.  Muscles have multiple fibers and small variations in position can stretch different fibers.  It’s kind of cool, really.  Once we have explored the tension, we can change the stretch by extending the bent leg along the floor.  This increases the stretch, so we may need to lower our stretching leg a little to avoid pain.  Hang out and explore again.  The whole process, on both legs, should take maybe two minutes.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: K-needs

Some of us have knee issues.  The knee-friendlier versions of exercises are the second ones where there is a choice.  This is your periodic reminder that you can always substitute exercises that work better for your particular body.  I am not the boss of you.  But do three rounds.  If you want.

 

squat to leg lift/ticktock	30
(lunge to) curl	20
1 leg db pass	10
1 arm clean and press	30
skullcrushers	20
renegade rows	10
farmer carry	30
squat heel lift or calf raises	20
plank with toe touch	10