Reflect: Cardio 2

So:  yesterday we took a look at where we are in our cardio fitness.  If we’re not quite where we’d like to be, I have good news:  we can make a good amount of progress by the end of the year.

Of course, all good news has a dark side.  You have to do stuff.  I’m going to use walking as my example, but this system works for whatever kind of cardio we happen to like.  Walking is just accessible to most folks and doesn’t require any stuff besides good shoes.

 

When we start, we want to build consistency more than anything else.  Cardio is a habit.  It thrives on daily or near-daily feeding.  In the first week, you want to make a stupid-easy goal that you can do for six days in a row.  Depending on where we’re starting from, this can mean anything from walking around the block slowly one time to spending half an hour walking.  The key thing is that we have to do it six days in a row.  That last day, we get a rest.

 

The second week, we just add a little more:  one interval.  If our first week was a five minute walk, our second week is two minutes of walking at regular pace, one minute going faster, and two minutes of walking at regular pace.  Or, if we’re going around the block, the first two sides are at regular pace, the third side is faster, and the last side is back to regular.

 

After that, we add a little more time or distance or another interval each week.  (It’s easier to add intervals when we’ve already built up a little more time or distance.)  The overarching goal remains consistency.  This has to feel manageable.

 

What if it isn’t?  I got you.  Let’s say you miss a day.  OK:  restart the clock.  You need six days in a row. 

 

Let’s say that week one goes great and week two is OK, but week three is suddenly harder than you could possibly imagine.  Hang out at the week two level until you are ready to progress.  No one is watching.  You can take as much time as you need.

 

Tomorrow:  some motivation for the process.

Reflect: Cardio 1

News flash from Captain Obvious:  it’s December and that means we’re coming up on the end of the year.  That means we have an opportunity to reflect on where we are and what we’ve done over the last year and maybe also an opportunity to choose some gifts for ourselves for 2026.  Over the course of the month, I’ll talk about a bunch of different things we might want to evaluate and celebrate.  This first week, I’m going to talk about cardio.

Cardio exercise is not the main focus of my work with my clients for the very good reason that it’s dumb to pay me to watch cardio.  Of course, the kind of workouts I design do get people’s heart rates up and clients will be getting some cardio intervals built in to their weight workout.  It’s just not the main goal.

 

Ideally, the time my clients spend with me working out is not the entirety of their workout time.  I sincerely hope they are getting in some cardio and maybe more weights when they’re on their own.

 

Cardio fitness is one of the things that first pops into mind when folks think about what being fit means to them.  We all know what it’s like to get to the top of a long hill feeling out of breath and unclear on our reason for continuing to live and it’s not a good feeling.  We all like to feel like our hearts and lungs are up to whatever it is we have in mind.

 

There are actual assessments of cardio fitness.  (If you want one, let’s talk.)  But most of us know when we’re at the level we’d like to be.  Take a minute or two and think:  are you where you want to be?

 

If so:  good on you.  If not, I have some suggestions tomorrow.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Shift

Things change.  (I know.  I should dress up as Captain Obvious for Halloween.)  But sometimes we kind of freak out when they do.

Let’s say we’ve imagined ourselves in an ideal future where we’ve met our goals (like I talked about yesterday).  We’ve been working along toward making that real.  And then something happens.

 

Sometimes what happens is a bad thing, like getting injured or needing to care for a family member.  Sometimes it’s a good thing, like getting whisked off to Paris by a handsome partner for a month of debauchery.  Sometimes it’s just… different.

 

When the changes are good or bad ones that happen in our circumstances, we know pretty much how to adjust.  But when we’re trucking along toward a goal and the goal turns out to be not what we want after all, sometimes we get stuck.

 

It is okay to change the goal.  I’m going to yell it:  IT IS OKAY TO CHANGE THE GOAL.

 

We don’t need to justify it.  We don’t need to rationalize.  We just want something else now, something different. 

 

When that happens, go for it.  Change that goal.  Do you.

Vision and Goal

Halloween week is a great time to pretend.  Everybody’s doing it!  Your kids are dressing up as anime characters you’ve never heard of.  Your boss is pretending to be Glinda the Good Witch.  The guy who delivers your packages is wearing bunny ears.

We can do all those things, but I’m suggesting that we pretend in a different direction.

 

We’re going to pretend we have reached our personal goals.  (If your goal is to be Glinda the Good Witch, that’s awesome and I probably can’t help with that.)

 

Take a few minutes.  Get quiet.  Maybe grab some paper if you’re a person who likes thinking by writing or drawing.  Take a couple deep breaths and let them out.

 

Now:  imagine.  You have achieved it!  You’re whatever it is you wanted to be.  How does it feel in your body?  Warm?  Cool?  Relaxed?  Powerful?  Purple?  (No, I don’t know what purple feels like, but I wanted to make sure that everybody knows that what it feels like in your body only has to make sense to you.)

 

What does this newly achieved world look like?  Calm and peaceful?  Joyous and noisy?  Lively?  Natural?

 

Who is with you?  Are they the folks who have been cheering you on?  Cool people you met along the way?  Are the haters there, sufficiently cowed by your new awesomeness?

 

Roll around in all this a bit.  All this stuff is the fuel that will get you to the reality.

Time, part 2

That relationship to time that I was writing about yesterday is about the future, too. 

Most of the time, when we work out, we want to be in the present moment.  That’s the one we have influence on.  That’s where change happens.  If we’re working with a trainer, our trainer will help us stay focused on what we’re doing in the moment.

 

But.  We also need to have a little bit of consciousness of the future.  That’s where motivation comes from.

 

Say, for example, that I’m doing burpees.  I don’t like burpees.  Almost nobody likes burpees.  They’re hard and uncomfortable and we get sweaty and all that.  If we are too much in the present moment while doing burpees, those of us who are sane are going to say enough of this and stop.  But if we remember that our goal is to have enough stamina for a marathon or for a marathon game of tag with our kids or grandkids, we will keep going.  We use our future goal to fuel our present work.

 

Some goals are better than others, but I can’t say definitively which ones because the best goals are the ones that motivate each of us.  Mine are not yours.  It’s worth spending a bit of time visualizing your future awesome self doing whatever it is that inspires you.  That will get you through the burpees.

Time, part 1

It helps to have some perspective on time when we want to create a healthy relationship with fitness.

When we get started on a program, we need to think a bit about the past.  A good trainer will ask about what we’ve done before, what we liked, what we didn’t like, what injuries we’ve had, and a bunch more stuff about what has already happened with us.  This data helps a trainer keep us safe and also to create a program for us that suits our needs and desires.

 

Once that’s done, our job is to forget about the past.  We also have to keep forgetting it on a daily basis.

 

What do I mean?

 

We’re working out today.  The only relevant body is the one we’re in right now.  It doesn’t matter if we used to weigh 700 pounds.  It doesn’t matter if we used to be the world champion.  We are who we are today.  We need to work with the limitations and capabilities of this moment.  Focusing on where we used to be just distracts us from what we’re working on right now.

 

Some days go better than others.  Some days we can do All The Things and other days not so much.  The only thing that matters in each workout is that we do the best with what we’re working with this time.

 

Go play.

Novelty!

(Yesterday I talked about the power of routine.  Today I’m moving on to the value of novelty.)

So:  there we are with our healthy routines in place.  Monday we lift weights.  Tuesday we do Pilates.  And so on.  Nothing we’re doing is bad, but it’s all a little… dull.

 

Novelty to the rescue!  Our brains and our bodies like shiny new stuff.  We can add a fresh tweak to our routines and suddenly we’re not bored anymore.

 

There are lots of ways to do this.  We can throw a new exercise into our weight session or change up the tempo.  We can go work outside if we’re normally gym rats or the other way around.  We can experiment with a new class or sport or piece of equipment.  The point is that we give our brains and bodies some kind of different challenge to wake them up and help them grow.

 

What should we try next?

Routine!

My brain thrives on two opposing things:  routine and novelty.  I am probably not alone in this, so I’m going to talk about how those two forces affect our workouts, routine today and novelty tomorrow.

Routine is, well, routine.  It has the reputation of being boring, but that’s also its power.  Routine doesn’t require a lot of thought or energy once it’s established.  We can just float along with the flow we’ve established.  Oh, it’s Monday—I lift weights on Mondays.  I don’t have to get up in the morning and figure out when and how I’m going to work out.  I just go.

 

The trick is to build a routine that is good for us.  Weights on Mondays would be an example of a positive routine.  A post workout meal of French fries and ice cream might be a less positive routine.

 

When we build healthy routines, we are doing our future selves a solid.  Our potentially tired self doesn’t have to think too much and maybe even before we’re fully awake, we’re at the gym and getting going.

 

Try it!

Physics!

Yesterday I mentioned the connections between all our body parts and talked a little about how they interact.  Today I’ll give another reason to work on range of motion in all the different parts.  It’s physics.

Don’t worry:  there is no math in what follows.

 

The physical principle that we care about in this instance is that distribution of motion allows distribution of force.  That means that when we have an amount of force, we can put a lot of force in a few places, or a little bit in a lot of places.  That second option is usually better in our bodies.

 

Take, for example, our knees.  There they are, sandwiched between our hips and ankles, trying to mind their own business.  That’s fine as long as the hips and ankles do their part.  However, if our hips get stiff and restricted from too much sitting or our ankles get too used to wearing heels, they can’t move as much.  That makes the forces we generate when we walk land on our knees.  Over time, that force wears our poor knees out. 

 

The good news is that we can loosen up the tight places and give our knees a break.  Pilates is fabulous for this, but stretching, SMR, and massage also help.

 

Want to try Pilates?  You know how to find me!

Dry Bones

In the old song, the ankle bone’s connected to the knee bone and the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone and so on.  The anatomy might be a little questionable, but the overarching theory is correct:  our bodies connect.

This is not just a bulletin from Captain Obvious, as much as I like those.  The fact that the different parts of our bodies connect has implications for how we move.  If, for example, we have an ankle that doesn’t have much range of motion, that changes how our knees work.  How our knees work, in turn, impacts how our hips work.  We may feel pain in our lower backs while the problem might be somewhere else in the body entirely.

 

As a result of this connection, I try to ensure that every workout involves as much of the body as possible.  When we work all the parts, they tend to work together more smoothly.

 

Go play.

Mental & Emotional Wellbeing, Part 2

Emotional well-being comes from lots of places and practices.  We face a variety of challenges in our present lives and there are useful techniques we can use to deal, either as preparation or as recovery.

If, for example, we struggle with stress (who doesn’t?), we can prepare for stressful situations with a technique called conscious breath control.  This is exactly what it sounds like.  We pay attention to our breath and we choose to slow it down to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system.  If we’ve been stressed, we can choose any of a variety of meditation techniques to chill ourselves back out.

 

When our emotions are all over the place, or if we think they’re going to be, we have other options.  To prepare, we can use positive affirmations.  Recovery from emotional chaos is helped by mindfulness, simply acknowledging our present state and letting it be what it is without glomming on to it.

 

When we face difficult decisions, we can prepare by brainstorming.  In the aftermath, we can recover by allowing ourselves to daydream about other possible outcomes we might want.

 

What works best for you?

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.