The gift of faithfulness in workouts is a huge one. When we show up regularly to our workouts, change happens. When we commit to the habit of movement, we really see results. So giving myself the gift of faithfulness is giving my future self a healthier, happier body.
What could be better?
The gift of goodness relates to workouts in several ways.
Perhaps most obviously, a good workout is one that works for us. Maximizing the goodness of a workout is a Good Thing, whether that means we work for maximum strength, increased muscle mass, or just the joy of moving. For me, there are lots of good workouts, whether they involve swimming or weights or spin or Pilates or any of the other things I do that move my body.
Another way goodness comes into it is that there is an inherent goodness or virtue to working out period. Treating our bodies to movement is good.
Then there is the work we do during the workout. When we do good work, we head toward a flow state and that’s just amazing.
What is good about workouts for you?
Workout kindness comes in many flavors.
1. Use headphones. Not everyone wants to jam to your jam.
2. Wipe the equipment. Because no one wants to share your sweat.
3. Put the weights back in the rack. Duh.
4. Let folks work in. You need to rest between sets anyway.
5. Pick up your stuff. You’re a grown-up now and it isn’t that hard.
Kindness is so useful in workouts. I need more of it, myself. It shows up in at least two ways.
One way is in doing the workout itself. Taking care of my body is kind to it, even if it isn’t always fun in the moment. Kindness takes vitamins and flosses teeth. It eats veggies and drinks plenty of water.
The other way is in how the workout gets done. When I’m working out, I am, definitionally, doing hard things. Sometimes I don’t do them very well. I can choose to be kind to myself in that moment and keep an eye on showing up rather than performing to perfection. Very occasionally, kindness can even mean resting instead of working out. Kindness listens to the body.
What’s your favorite way to be kind?
Patience is a gift that I can always use more of. (A friend of mine once said it is a bad idea to pray for patience, because God will send all kinds of patience exercises. I think that is definitely one of God’s ideas of humor.) When it comes to workouts, it’s really key.
I don’t think I’m alone in wishing that workouts gave more instant results. What do you mean I have to do this every day for weeks to see results? Also, learning new things can be challenging. It’s very tempting to get impatient with myself for not getting it right away.
One thing that helps me practice my patience is to keep the long term results in the back of my head while I focus more on the instant gratification. I really do feel better right away when I work out. I may not be instantly stronger or cuter or anything, but I do feel good.
What helps you be patient?
Ways to bring more peace to workouts:
1. Plan ahead. It’s much more peaceful to work out when we have all our stuff.
2. Finish with stretching.
3. Smash the cis/hetero/white supremacist/capitalist/imperialist patriarchy (definitely good exercise, too.)
Peace may not spring to mind as a fitness gift, but let me explain.
When I work out, I burn off negative emotions. Rage workouts are good workouts. Nothing fights the Depression Monster like some nice, hard cardio. If I’m crabby, I really ought to choose the gym every time.
Further, workouts make me tired, and tired people are usually peaceful people. After I’ve worked out, I just don’t have the energy to act out.
Not enough? Fine. I’m also going to give myself peace in my workouts by letting go of my attachment to the outcome. Maybe I didn’t do the best workout ever, but I did a workout. I can be at peace with that.
Welcome to April! I happen to be an April Fool, in that my birthday falls in this month. Naturally, what’s on my mind this month is gifts. (Books. Books are always a good gift.) What do gifts have to do with fitness? Well, I’m making a list of fitness gifts to give myself this month and maybe you’d like to do the same along with me. It’s a virtual party!
I’m not going to start small. The first gift I’m giving myself this month is love. As we all know, love is what love does. So I’m going to love myself with weights and cardio and, weather permitting, swimming. I’m going to love myself with vegetables and sunlight, walks, and sufficient sleep.
But let’s back up a minute. Love can also be expressed in words. I’m going to try to give myself the gift of nice words. I talk to myself in ways I would never talk to someone else. Other people make honest mistakes; I am a mumblety-mumble idiot, except I use other words where the mumblety-mumble is and they’re not nice ones. Love might be giving myself the same grace I give other people.
What would the gift of love be to you this month?
How are we feeling? We’ve spent a month thinking about freshness. Was it helpful? Did we try things that we liked? Hated? Did we learn stuff?
In one of my previous lives when I worked in nonprofit as a coordinator of a service learning program, I spent a lot of time thinking about praxis, which is, as my old French teacher would say, a ten-dollar word. Praxis, in pennies, means the union of theory and practice, in which we think about things, try them out, and then think about what happened. Then we go around again based on what we learned the first time.
So: what do we want to keep from this month? What can we let go of? Where are we off to experiment next?
I’d love to know what y’all are doing out there! And, of course, I’m here for all your wellness coaching, personal training, and Pilates needs.
Another way to refresh the Pilates experience is to take it out of the studio and into the world. This is in line with Uncle Joe’s general philosophy.
What does that mean? It can mean anything from thinking about how we are moving while we are weight lifting in the same way we do while we are doing Pilates—focusing on what our bones are doing, on how and when we exert effort, on the quality of the movement itself—to watching the flow of our breath in line at the grocery store or while we wait for the microwave to beep.
Pilates, like all fitness, is not intended as an end in itself, but rather as a means to a happier, healthier, more zestful life. (Zest is a word that Uncle Joe liked a lot!)
Go get zesty!
Pilates, like all practices, can fall into ruts. We show up, we plop down on the reformer and we go through the motions. Uncle Joe would applaud that we showed up and yet be disappointed in our behavior, maybe.
One of the easiest ways I’ve found to wake up in Pilates is to switch equipment. For a lot of the repertoire, there are versions of the exercises for use on the reformer, or trap table, or ladder barrel, or chair, or spine corrector, or mat, or all of the above. When we move from one piece of equipment to another, we may find ourselves in a different relationship to gravity. We may experience resistance in different ways. We may learn different qualities of motion.
If we are habitual users of the equipment, doing a mat workout can be instructive. Similarly, mat class habitués may find enlightenment in using the equipment.
Change is good in this context, friends.
Another approach to freshening our weight workouts is to adjust the variables. These include the number of reps, the number of sets, and the intensity (or what weight we use as a percentage of our single rep maximum).
Captain Obvious would like a word here. We don’t want to increase all the variables at once. If we choose, for example, to do a lot more reps, we’re going to need to choose lighter weights. We need to be fresh-minded (yes, I just made that word up), paying attention to our bodies as we work to know when we have had enough.
Again, we don’t have to switch all the variables for all our workouts. Making one a week or one a month different can be plenty to keep our bodies entertained and growing.
When it comes to strength training, freshness can be a challenging concept. Strength training is one of those things that thrives on habit and routine. The trick is to make change part of the routine. In fact, without a certain amount of freshness, our strength training can’t get best results because our bodies develop in response to the stresses we put on them. If we’re always doing the same things the same way, we stop growing.
One easy way to freshen things up in the weight room (ok: not just by cleaning it, although I am 100% in favor of cleanliness and fresh air in the weight room) is to try a new exercise. If finding a new exercise seems like a lot of work, make it even simpler and try a variation on an exercise already in your repertoire (e.g., swap the regular squats for jump squats, sumo squats, prisoner squats, goblet squats, or any of the other million different kinds).
Another approach is to combine exercises into compound movements. This is where we do things like lunge-to-curl or push presses. Not only does this give us a new take on the component parts, but it also works more of our bodies at once, which is just efficient!
Go play.
This week, I’m going to talk about refreshing our cardio exercise.
When most of us think about the gym, what we think of are those long rows of treadmills and other cardio machines. We think: boring. We think: I can think of so many other ways to spend half an hour or more.
Good news: cardio doesn’t have to involve any of those machines unless we want it to.
Literally anything that gets our heart rates up for a reasonable amount of time counts as cardio. So, yes, helping your cousin move definitely counts. The kind of yard work many of us need to do at this time of year in which we have to haul a bunch of new dirt and compost for the garden and we make 500 or so trips to the green bin to dump in weeds and other stuff we’re clearing out counts. Pretty much anything that involves heavy lifting counts.
If our lives don’t happen to involve any of those above activities, we still have lots of non-machine things to choose from, including a bunch of sports and other outdoor activities.
A couple of rubrics: keep it fun, get breathless, and do it often!
An inherent part of freshening our mindsets is taking out the trash. I mean, how many times have we come home from the store with a bunch of new produce and found that we have to get the sad wilted lettuce and the other expired stuff out of the way before we can even put what we bought in the fridge?
When we spring clean our homes, or clear out our closets, we go through and figure out what needs to go. What is worn out? What doesn’t fit? What hobbies have we grown out of? What’s broken?
Sometimes we learn, as we make space, that what we really needed wasn’t a bunch of new stuff, but rather the space itself.
In a fitness context, this can mean anything from letting go of ideas about ourselves (“I’m too ___ to do that thing I want to do.” “It takes too long.” “People will look at me funny if I…”) to rethinking what dinner looks like (hint: if it is mostly nutritious and tastes good, it can be whatever you want). Maybe we’ve gotten tangled in a complex system of workouts and we just need to make it simple for a while. Maybe, dare I say, we can put away our gizmos and trackers and just move for a bit to see how that feels.
My trash might be your treasure. There are so many useful paths to take. The key is that we use our big brains to evaluate what is actually serving us as we live our healthy, happy lives.
Go play.
In March, we’re ready for spring. I’m going to focus on fresh (freshness, refreshment, all the variations) because that’s the essence of spring to me.
This week, it’s all about the mindset. We all have mind-habits the same way we have other habits. Our thoughts as well as our actions fall into ruts. What I am suggesting here is that we try a new thought-road or two this month and see where we end up.
For example, I had a conversation recently with someone about things we wished we had learned about earlier in our lives. For me, it was growth mindset, or the idea that how we work at things is more important than how innately talented we are. Growth mindset is still a pretty fresh path for my little brain. It is in the process of transforming the way I think about failures and about experiments. I feel like there are a lot more options in the world than there used to be. Obviously, this applies to fitness, but it’s one of those places where fitness is only one of many useful contexts for an idea.
Finding new mindsets means having new experiences. We learn new stuff because we’ve talked to someone or read something or gone somewhere or seen something.
Where might we like to explore? I’d love to hear ideas!
Still want more ways to love yourself? How about these?
1. Talk nicely to yourself. You are amazing!
2. Give yourself a break. Sometimes we all need one.
3. Be grateful. We all have some blessings lying around in our lives.
4. Hug somebody. It’s good for both of you!
5. Do a favor. We can all use a bit of good karma, plus an instant mood boost.
All of this love for our bodies requires appropriate food. We can’t do our best cardio, strength, balance, and flexibility work on a diet of Cheetos and whiskey. Here are some general ideas for how to eat for self-love:
Drink water. It’s good for hydration, calorie free, and essential to so many body processes. If it seems a little boring, throw a slice of lemon in there, or try fizzy water.
Eat those veggies. They really are good for you. They fill us up, give us essential nutrients, and don’t have too many calories.
Get enough protein. Choose wisely here, though. We want to eat low on the food chain for our own health and for the health of our ecosystems.
Change it up. There is no perfect food. We need to eat a variety of foods to meet all our needs. Plus it’s fun and tasty.
Quick reasons to do Pilates:
1. Increased mobility
2. Increased flexibility
3. Better balance
4. Better posture
5. Better efficiency
6. Fun
Yesterday I wrote about strong muscles. Today, I need to add a bit about long muscles.
OK, not necessarily long. Muscles at optimum length. Bear with me here. In our muscles, there is a relationship between length and tension. That relationship produces strength in action. A muscle with an optimal length-tension relationship is as strong as possible. One that is too short (contracted) or too long (released) can’t do its best work.
It’s true that most of us walk around with a lot of muscles overly contracted. (PSA: this is a good time to lower your shoulders away from your ears.) What we may not realize is that this means we are also walking around with a lot of muscles overly stretched. For every muscle group that bends something, there is a group that extends it and vice versa. When some are too tight, some are too loose. We need to balance everything out.
So what do we do? Let me introduce you to my favorite “uncle,” Uncle Joe Pilates. Pilates (and yoga) as a practice does a great job of teaching us to use the right amount of force at the right time. We may notice the increased flexibility more, but the increased strength in the opposing muscles is there, too.
Don’t want to do Pilates? That’s cool. Do some stretching at least, making sure to stretch both sides (e.g., both quads and hamstrings) for best results.
(I’m a Pilates instructor. You can make an appointment with me!)
Go play.
