Gifts: Love

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?

Fresh: Praxis

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.

Fresh: Pilates 2

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!

Fresh: Pilates 1

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.

Fresh: Strength 2

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.

Fresh: Strength 1

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.

Fresh: Cardio 1

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!

Fresh: Take Out the Trash

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.

Fresh: Mindset

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!

Love Month: More

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.

Love Month: Love your tummy

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.

Love Month: 6

Quick reasons to do Pilates:

 

1.     Increased mobility

2.     Increased flexibility

3.     Better balance

4.     Better posture

5.     Better efficiency

6.     Fun

Love Month: Love your muscles long

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. 

Love Month: Love your muscles strong

Another way we can love our bodies is to love our muscles strong.  Yes, I realize that this means weight work, but again, love isn’t always nice even while it is being kind.

A digression that is sort of relevant:  when I was in high school or thereabouts, my dad was sure I would not survive on my own because I couldn’t open jars myself.  My days as a 90-pound weakling are behind me now.  I can even open jars for other people.  Strength training for the win!  Also tasty jam!

 

We all know that strength is practical.  Not only do we have to open jars, we also have to carry groceries, lift kids, move the furniture around, schlepp the laundry, and so on.  Doing those same tasks will build skill and ability, but we get their faster with strength training.

 

As I mentioned last week, strength training is good for our bones.  It also helps us maintain a healthy body mass distribution:  more lean tissue is good for us!

 

Need more reasons?  It’s good for posture, it makes us look better, and it increases our sense of personal power.

 

Sometimes love looks like barbells.

Love Month: 6

Jumping is great for both cardio fitness and bone strength.  Here are six things to try:

 

1.     jacks (regular, plyojacks, plank jacks)

2.     burpees

3.     box jumps or depth jumps (jumping on or off a fitness box)

4.     jump squats

5.     jump lunges

6.     lateral hops (extra fun with a BOSU

Love Month: Love your bones strong

Most of us probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about our skeletons, but another way we can love ourselves is to keep those bones strong.  There are a couple of good ways to do this.

One is to eat right, including plenty of calcium.  Y’all know what to do there, right?

 

Another is to work with weights.  Those dumbbells do more than make our muscles strong!  Bones increase strength in response to stresses like lifting weights.

 

Choosing the right cardio can also help.  Bones get stronger in response to impact with the ground.  That means that swimming, while great for cardio, has less of an effect on strengthening bones than walking.  Exercises that include jumping (jacks, jump lunges, jump squats, box jumps, burpees, etc.) help with this, too.

 

Go play.

Love Month: Love your heart strong

One way we can love our bodies is to love our hearts strong.  In other words, we can make sure we do some cardio.

Cardio has a reputation for being boring, but it doesn’t have to be.  Sure, it’s boring to walk on the treadmill for half an hour, even (or in spite of) the tv being on.  It’s a lot less boring to do intervals that get our heart racing.  Or, we can take the walk outside where there is plenty of variety.  Even better, we can mix up the kinds of cardio we do; some days we can walk, others we can swim, still others we can bike or play sports or do Zumba.

 

Doing the cardio is one part of the love.  The other part is making the cardio as pleasant as possible.  The above-mentioned variety can have a role in that.  So can workout buddies, good music, time in nature, and workout clothes that are comfy and make us feel good.

 

Need more help?  That’s what I’m for!  Poke me!

Love Month: 3

How to show yourself some real love:

 

1.     Eat breakfast.

2.     Sleep enough.

3.     Move your body.

Love Month: Love is kind, but not always nice.

Captain Obvious would like a word here.  Love isn’t always nice.  (I’m not talking about abusive relationships here.  That’s well out of the scope of my practice.  If you feel like you’re in one, PLEASE get some help because nobody deserves that.)  We always see the cozy bits of love in popular culture, the snuggles and the chocolate and the laughter.  But sometimes love has to do hard stuff, like getting a toddler to bed or wearing that ugly bridesmaid dress or, more relevantly for my purposes, moving the body for its own good.

Love takes responsibility for the maintenance stuff.  It pays the bills and does the grocery shopping.  Nothing says love like finding enough toilet paper in the bathroom.

 

In a fitness context, that means that when we love ourselves, we push ourselves the right amount.  We acknowledge the parts of ourselves that want to roll over and sleep another hour and then we get our butts out of bed and work out anyway.  We eat the veggies first.  We meet our friends for a walk rather than an ice cream.

 

That bit about the right amount is important.  Love is also smart.  There are some days when love does the math and realizes that we do, in fact, need the extra hour of sleep.  Notice I said “some days.”  Love keeps the score and gently kicks us out of bed if we’ve missed too many gym days.

 

Love is kind, in the deepest sense.  It gets us to do stuff for our own good.

 

Go play.

Love Month: Motivation

I personally am not a fan of Valentine’s Day, as I’ve said over and over for years.  (No shade on my husband, who is a wonderful human I happen to love EVERY day of the year.)  However, love is a great thing and February, for better or worse (see what I did there?) in the popular consciousness is about love, love, and more love.

 

Love can provide powerful motivation for us.  In fact, love is the very best motivation there is for positive change in our lives.  I’m spending this month discussing how we harness love to make our fabulous selves even better.

 

A whole lot of people embark on a fitness routine because of negative emotions.  We work out because we feel ashamed of how we look or because we feel inadequate.  We try to punish ourselves into what we think of as good behavior.  Spoiler alert:  it mostly doesn’t work, and when it does, it does not make for a holistically healthy human.

 

When we work out from a place of love, we are far more equipped to deal with the fact that working out is often hard and unpleasant in the moment.  The negative brain will tell us that we are having a hard time because we actually suck and we see proof that we are never going to get better and on we go from there.  Doesn’t really help with the weight lifting, right?  When we are motivated by love, we tend to talk to ourselves more like we’d talk to a kid we love:  oh, honey, yes, this is difficult, but you’re going to feel better at the end and it is so important to take care of yourself.  And then:  look at you!  You did it!  I am so proud of you for persisting!  I know which voice I’d rather work out with.

 

Go play.