Goal Month: Resolutions Vs. Goals

As I mentioned Thursday, I’m not much of a resolution person.  This is not because I’m lazy or lacking in ambition, not because I’m already absolutely perfect and don’t need to make any changes.  It’s because resolutions don’t work.

What does work?  Goals.  I’m going to talk about goals for the entire month of January because there’s a lot to talk about!

 

Today I’ll talk about the difference between a goal and a resolution.

 

A resolution is a general statement about what we’d like to be or do.  We say we’d like to be thinner or richer or nicer or cuter or the like.  Sometimes we even get a bit specific—we want to lose the traditional ten pounds or something.

 

Goals, on the other hand, get real.  We take that desired ten pounds of weight loss and we add some strategy and tactics to it.  We think about what actually has to change to get us from here to there.

 

Need help?  You know how to find me.

Reflect: Mental and Emotional Well-Being 2

When it’s time to address our mental and emotional well-being, we might need or want help.  That help can come from lots of places:  family and friends, wellness coaches, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, among others.  Choosing who to ask will depend on the scope of the issues.

As a wellness coach, I can help my clients identify strategies to reduce stress, improve relationships, increase mindfulness, and promote joy.  Talk to me if you are interested!

Reflect: Mental and Emotional Well-Being

Almost done with the year!  Go us!  This final week, we’re going to take a look at mental and emotional well-being.

Taking the time to look around our lives and see how things are going in this area can be a little dicey.  It can be hard to acknowledge that we’re not quite where we’d like to be.  Let me just say:  I see you doing hard stuff over there.

 

We may realize that we’re being eaten alive by stress, or that we could use a little work on our relationships, or that a pursuit that used to fill us with joy is not fun anymore.  Whatever it is, the first step to change is recognition.

 

You can do this.  And I’m here to help if you need me.

Reflect: Sleep and Recovery 2

Sleep and recovery are a little different than the skills we’ve been working on so far.  For one thing, they’re inherently pleasant.  You’d think that would make them easier to prioritize, but no.

Here is your takeaway:  you, you wonderful human you, deserve to rest when you are tired, to sleep when you are sleepy, and to recover as needed.  Some people, some forces in our culture, will try to deny this, but they are wrong.  Fight the power:  go take a (short) nap.

 

To improve our sleep, we might have to admit that our moms were right.  We need a bedtime.  When we are consistent about when we go to bed and when we get up, our bodies adapt and we fall asleep more quickly.  Please note:  the bedtime and the wake up time need to be at least seven hours apart.  Planning to be underslept is not good planning.

 

Setting that bedtime and wake up time can make us feel really efficient because look:  we just implemented a recovery technique!  Two things at once and we accomplish them in bed?  Sign me up.  However, our bodies do need more than sleep.  We might need to think about what kind of food would help our bodies recover, or whether we’ve had enough water recently, or if massage might help.

 

It can feel overwhelming when we take stock of how much recovery we could use.  Baby steps.  Treating ourselves with love takes practice.

Reflect: Sleep and Recovery 1

So:  we’ve spent three weeks talking about and maybe working on various aspects of fitness.  We might be tired.  Time to talk about sleep and recovery.

The two are related.  Sleep is a great recovery strategy.  A whole lot of us don’t get enough sleep and we don’t get good sleep.  How to tell?  Do you wake up rested?  QED.

 

Recovery is a broader concept.  It’s all the things we do to help our bodies feel better after we work them.  It includes things like nutrition and massage, foam rolling, and, a concept I would really like to introduce to my Wristy Overlord (aka Apple Watch):  rest days.

 

We will know if we are recovering enough if we are not constantly sore.

Reflect: Strength 2

Those of us who would like to gain some strength will perhaps not be surprised to learn that, like all the other skills we’ve been talking about this month, habit and routine help.

When we’re first starting out, we might want to commit to one weight workout a week.  We’ll see more progress when we increase to two non-consecutive days a week.  Most of us don’t really need more than three weight workouts a week, but that will depend on our goals and on how we structure our workouts.

 

In general, we don’t want to work the same muscle groups two days in a row.  The way strength training works is that we do damage to our muscles when we work them and they heal stronger.  (That’s an oversimplification, but it gets the point across.)  People who want to work out on consecutive days do things like alternate between upper body days and lower body days.

 

The specifics of our workouts will be dictated by our goals (remember:  endurance, hypertrophy, max strength, power), but the mechanics will work similarly.  We will do a number of reps of an exercise at a weight.  We’ll increase the reps until we’ve hit the target for the kind of goal we have, then we’ll increase the weight, reducing the reps back to our starting number.  In short, we’ll alternate increasing reps and weight.

 

A trainer can help plan and track all that data.  You know how to find me!

Reflect: Strength

There are both formal and informal ways to evaluate strength.  (Spoiler alert:  there’s a workout in the last week of the year designed for evaluation!)  Hit me up if you want to talk about getting into the nitty-gritty.

Some of the evaluation of your strength training routine will depend on what your goals are.  There are, very loosely, a few categories of goals:  endurance, which is exactly what it sounds like, hypertrophy, which is a fancy word for building big muscles, max strength, which again is exactly what it sounds like, and power, which is exerting a lot of force in a short period of time.  If the weights you use are getting heavier over time, you’re probably doing fine.

 

Another way to think about how well the workouts are working is to see how our everyday tasks are going.  If schlepping the groceries is not a problem, great!  If you need to move the couch and you can, also great!  Problems lifting the Pekinese?  Maybe not so great.

Thursday List: 6

Need some balance exercises?  Here are some.  Do both sides.

 

1.     Stand on one foot.

2.     Single leg squat.

3.     Single leg deadlift

4.     Calf raises and single leg calf raises.

5.     One leg dumbbell pass.  Stand on one leg holding a dumbbell.  Pass the dumbbell from hand to hand around your body five times in each direction.  Then change legs.

6.     Do anything on a BOSU, wobble board, or turntable.

Reflect: Balance and Flexibility 2

What do we do if our balance and flexibility are not where we’d like them to be?  Well, we practice.

 

Balance is something we can practice almost anywhere.  It’s a great thing to work on while brushing our teeth or waiting for the microwave.  One of my clients works on her balance waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store (she’s one of my heroes, just sayin’).  First we practice standing on one leg.  Then we try single leg squats.  Calf raises on two legs and then eventually on one leg are also great.  Just be sure when you’re first starting out that there is something available to hang on to if you need it.  Use as little support as you can while still feeling safe.

 

Flexibility is also one of those things that thrives on routine and habit.  A few stretches at the end of a workout help a surprising amount.  If we want more, Pilates is fabulous for gently inducing flexibility, as is yoga (hire your friendly Pilates instructor!).

 

The more we gain these skills, the more we see them percolate holistically (periodic reminder that I am from Berkeley and am allowed to use that word) into our lives. 

Reflect: Balance and Flexibility 1

This week, we’re going to reflect on flexibility and balance.  Today we assess and tomorrow we address.

Flexibility makes life a lot easier, both literally and metaphorically.  (Sometimes a little literal flexibility can help us achieve some metaphorical flexibility too!)  For those of us who do not have osteopenia or osteoporosis, testing flexibility is pretty darn simple:  reach for your toes.  If they’re farther away than they used to be, it’s probably time to work on flexibility.

 

Balance also makes life easier and is also pretty easy to assess.  Stand on one foot.  Now stand on the other one.  How long can you stay there?  (Yes, I know the second foot is harder.  Our bodies like success, so we do the easy side automatically.)

 

These two skills, together, help us react to the unexpected in life.  If there’s anything we can expect, it’s the unexpected.  Flexibility and balance help us bounce back when we suddenly find ourselves walking off a curb we didn’t notice or when we have to dodge a rogue shopping cart in a parking lot.

 

Building them into our routines is 100% worthwhile.

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.