Captain Obvious says...

I’m putting on my Captain Obvious cape for this one:  doing the same thing over and over is boring.

Worse, it has diminishing returns.  Assuming that we’re all not as afraid of boredom as I am.

 

When we do the same workout, or the same kind of workout, every single time we hit the gym, it is, of course, easier.  There’s a reduced cognitive load.  In other words, we don’t have to think about what we’re doing.  Our bodies know what to do and they get on with it, brain optional.

 

The thing is, bodies are efficiency experts.  They don’t want to work hard unless we make them.  They’re always saving something in case we have to run away from a hippopotamus or something.

 

One way to get bodies to work harder is to give them something novel to do.  (No, not a novel to read.  That’s for AFTER the workout.)  Trying a new sport or a new piece of equipment or a new class or a new instructor wakes the brain up.  We have different challenges for our bodies to face.  Our bodies move differently in Zumba versus swimming.  At least I hope so.

 

We are going to like some kinds of moving more than others.  It is perfectly okay to have favorites.  We just need to throw ourselves a monkey wrench from time to time.

 

Go play.

The Jerk Has a Point

Accountability is a great thing.  I can make up all kinds of fabulous goals while I am sitting there by myself.  We all can.  Pretty soon we’re floating on a cloud of perfection, basking in the sun of our intentions.  And then some jerk comes and asks us when we’re going to do the work to make it real.  Sigh.

The jerk has a point, though.  We have to put in the work to make our dreams.

 

Accountability comes in many forms.  Those of us who wear Wristy Overlords (that’s a fitness tracker or Apple Watch, y’all) have an accountability tool right there at the end of our arms.

 

If W.O.s are a little too passive-aggressive for our taste, we can get a friend to help us.  Choosing the right friend, however, is key.  First of all, we need to make sure that we’re not going to get mad at our friend for doing what we ask.  It is not cool to fly off the handle at them when they ask us, nicely, if we went for our walk today.  We also need to consider if the friend we’ve chosen will ask us.  We all have some wonderful friends who love us to death, but can’t possibly remember to check in about the workout on any regular basis.  Some of our friends will not be supportive of our goals and so should not be our accountability buddy; they’ll be telling us “supportive” stuff about how we’re just fine the way we are and so on, but not pushing us to do what we’ve decided we need to do.  It is often best to choose a friend who also wants to be held accountable so we can do it for each other.

 

Finally, we can hire somebody.  I am right there, through my clients’ workouts, holding them accountable to their goals.  Sometimes the fact that they pay me is what makes them show up (I hope to keep it fun enough and effective enough that that’s not the ONLY reason, but it is all right if it is.).

 

Need my help?

Happy...

I may have mentioned once or twice or several thousand times that I am not a fan of Valentine’s Day.  However, I will seize the opportunity to talk about how we show love to ourselves.  Hint:  it does not involve our own personal two pound box of chocolate, even if it is pretty and heart-shaped.

We’ve been conditioned not to love ourselves.  People who love themselves don’t necessarily need wrinkle-remover or expensive perfume (no shade thrown on those things if we are into them).  Anxiety sells.

 

Truth is, anxiety sells even in fitness.  A large proportion of the folks working out are doing it because they are worried.  Their partner might leave if they get fat.  They can’t afford to be ill, or injured.  They might look too old to get another job.  We all have anxieties.

 

Unfortunately, anxiety is also exhausting.  At a certain point, we can’t lift weights and anxiety, too.  We wear ourselves out and we surrender.

 

When we start by loving ourselves, we feel lighter.  In the same way that we want the best for our partner or child or parent, we want that for ourselves.  We are motivated to do the things that are good for us, even hard things that are good for us.  Sure, sometimes we want a chocolate treat, but we know we should just have a piece.  We find our satisfaction in healthy behavior.

 

Let’s go give our hearts some love in the gym today.

Ouch

One of the things that tends to derail our best workout plans and schedules is soreness.  This is where I put the disclaimers:  I am not a doctor, physical therapist, or other medical professional and so I do not diagnose or treat illness or actual injury.  If you are sore for more than a couple of days after a workout, consider consulting your health care provider.

That said, I do know a thing or two about soreness and things we can do to mitigate it, assuming we are not actually injured.  (I trust that we all know the difference between normal soreness and pain that means we’ve damaged something.)

 

First, let me say that ibuprofen is our friend, unless we have some reason why taking it is not good for us.  Its job is to reduce inflammation and that is exactly what our soreness is.  It is the best of the OTC pain medications for our purposes, but the other ones will do if we need to avoid ibuprofen specifically.

 

If our soreness involves swelling, ice can help bring that down.  Some people also find ice soothing.  I am not one of them, but I’m also not here to criticize.  When the soreness does not involve swelling, heat can be soothing.

 

A combination of rest and gentle movement can also be helpful.  Many of us, when we are sore, vow that we will never move again until it stops hurting, but it turns out that it will probably stop hurting sooner if we move a little.  Certainly we don’t want to go lift a bunch more heavy weights with our poor sore biceps, but taking a little walk and swinging the arms a little will do wonders.

 

If the budget permits, I also love massage.

 

What have I forgotten?  Best tips?

In the middle

We spent last month learning about how to set goals.  Now it’s time to get real on doing what we’ve set out to do.  Two handy tools for staying motivated are the minimum and the maximum.

The minimum is the tool we use on days when we just don’t want to do anything.  We set the minimum on a day when we are neither unreasonably low-energy nor unreasonably optimistic so that it is more likely to be both doable and enough.  If, say, we have cardio goals, our minimum might be a 30-minute walk, or a trip around the block twice during the day.  We want the minimum to be easy.  Depending on where we are in our fitness journey, that minimum might be a five minute commitment.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, we prevent burnout by setting maximums.  Some of us who want to do All the Things just keep piling more stuff into the workouts.  We do cardio and then weights and then some yoga and then there’s this really good class and our friends want to play pickleball and maybe it would be nice to go for a swim and we just totally overdo ourselves.  Unless we are specifically training for an endurance event, we do not need to be spending two hours working out.  Those of us coming from the couch might want to set the maximum at one kind of workout, plus a little stretching.

 

We can do this in the happy middle.

Goal Setting Part 2: What to Do

All right:  we know what we want.  Here’s what we need to do.

If we have cardio goals:  Our first target is 150 minutes of cardio per week.  Those of us who haven’t been outside since 2001 will need to work up to this, starting with something stupidly easy, like five minutes of cardio per day.  We want to increase our time gradually, about 10 percent per week.  (It is also all right to choose a distance and work up to longer distances instead.  Do what works.)  When we are building a cardio habit, I’m not actually in favor of total rest days unless we really need them.  It is better to have a very light day than a total rest, just to keep our rhythm going.  One rest day can magically turn into a rest month.  Once we have hit our target 150 minutes, we can add intervals, work on speed, or increase the intensity some other way if we want.

 

If we want to get stronger:  we need to have strength training goals.  We start with one weight workout that works all our muscle groups per week.  Once we’ve got that habit well established, we can add a second and even a third.  In all our weight workouts, we need to adjust the weights so that we are challenged but not overwhelmed.  This takes some practice and there will be some times when we overdo ourselves and need plenty of recovery time.

 

If we want to refine our movement, we probably want a Pilates goal.  A session every week with a professional plus daily brief home practice should do the trick.

 

All of us need a stretching goal.  It’s simple:  stretch every day.  Five minutes is a good start.  Fifteen minutes should take care of everything amply.

 

Folks who want to lose weight and get more shapely need goals in all four categories.

 

Still need help?  Talk to me!

Goal Setting, Part 1: What We Want

Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about the basic components of working out.  One of my pet peeves about folks who write about goals is that they always tell people to set manageable and achievable goals before we know anything about what is manageable or achievable, particularly when there is a time element involved.  This is why I talked through the basics of cardio, strength training, Pilates, and stretching before turning my attention to goals.

The first question we need to answer when setting goals is what do we want?  For some of us, this is obvious.  We know we want to run a marathon or wear smaller clothes or show that gym teacher from high school that we actually can do stuff.  Others of us are not so sure.  We know we feel a little breathless sometimes.  We struggle lugging groceries more than we used to.  We wake up stiff and that nagging ache in our back lingers and lingers.  It might take a little digging to come up with what we actually want.

 

This is important:  our goals need to be things we want, not things that other people say we should want.  When we get to the part where we have to do the work, we are not going to be motivated by someone else’s desires and values.  Our goals need to be meaningful to us even if they make zero sense to anyone else.

 

What we want dictates the goals we make.  Breathless folks need cardio goals.  People who want to be smaller need both cardio and strength training goals.  Nearly everyone will feel better with some Pilates and stretching goals.

 

Tomorrow:  what those goals might be.

Basics: Stretching (2 of 2)

I hope that yesterday I convinced the skeptical among us that stretching is worthwhile.  Now let’s talk about how.

The first thing I need to emphasize is (and I’m about to yell it, so be prepared):  STRETCHING SHOULD NOT HURT.  Not even a little.  It is all right to feel, well, a stretch, but not pain.  In my recent experiments on myself and my family members, best results were obtained without even discomfort.  (I feel like I have been lied to in the past by the Stretching Industrial Complex and I’m a little bitter, but I’m sure I will get over it now that I can stretch in comfort!!!)  When we stretch a muscle group, we want to find the first place where we feel even slight resistance to the stretch.  We want to go a little bit past that, but not so far that we feel a lot of resistance.  Between these two points is where the magic happens.

 

However, we have options about how we work in that stretch zone.  Perhaps the most familiar and traditional method is the static stretch.  We get into stretch position and we hang out there.  It’s simple and pretty much foolproof, but we need to make sure we hold the stretch for at least 30 seconds for best results.

 

A newer and potentially more interesting method uses perpetual motion.  We take the muscle into the stretch zone and then explore around with motion, being careful to avoid pain and stay between the minimal resistance and the much resistance points.  We may discover, as we keep moving, that the range of painless motion gets larger!

 

Finally, I need to talk about reciprocal inhibition because it’s cool.  To paraphrase Newton, for every muscle group, there is an equal and opposite muscle group.  The hamstrings bend the knees and the quads straighten them, for example.  If we are stretching our hammies, we can help them relax by tightening up our quads (do this by trying to move the kneecap up toward the hip).  The act of tensing the quads (the antagonist muscles to the hammies) tells the hamstrings to relax, opening up a whole bunch more flexibility and range of motion.  It is the optional add-on to the stretching process or a fun party trick, if you go to those sorts of parties.

 

Go play.  AND IT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HURT (in case I wasn’t clear about that).

Basics: Stretching (1 of 2)

Stretching is possibly the most neglected part of our workouts (assuming we manage to DO workouts in the first place).  I think there are a few different reasons for this.  One is that we have this idea that working out has to be hard and painful and stretching, done right, is not.  In fact, it feels good.  How dare we have a good time at the gym???  Another is that by the time we get to the stretching part, we’re tired, we want to go home, and we don’t really see the point.  I get it.

So:  we are allowed to do things that feel good and there are plenty of benefits of stretching.

 

That feeling good thing, from a certain point of view (does everyone hear Obi Wan when they use these words, or just me?), is why we work out at all.  There are people who love sweat for its own sake and enjoy the process of lifting weights, but most of us work out because we want to feel good at some later time.  That time might be when we go out on that hot date in our very cute outfit that we bought to show off our toned body or it might be those extra years of independence we get by putting in an investment in our health now or something in between.  In the same way that we try to pick activities we like to do in order to get the appropriate amount of exercise, we can put stretching right in there as a good part of the process.  Far be it from me to get between people and their desire to feel guilty for feeling good, but on the scale of self-indulgence, stretching is not up there with getting another puppy or eating an entire cake.  Live a little, people!

 

I know some of us really need to know the reasons.  So here is why it is good for us to stretch, assuming that feeling good is not enough of a reason for the sticklers among us.  The most obvious benefit of stretching is that it improves our flexibility and mobility.  And yes, those things are important.  It doesn’t matter how strong we are if we can’t raise our arms over our heads, for example.  Stretching reduces tension in our bodies and I should not have to explain why that’s a good thing.  Additionally, it can help us sleep well and reduce pain.  Not enough?  How about improving performance and balance?

 

Tomorrow:  how to do it!

Basics: Pilates (2 of 2)

Yesterday we talked about what Pilates is and why we might want to do it.  Today we’ll talk about how.

In general, I believe in DIY, which is why I do my best to provide tools for folks to go out and do their own thing.  However, with Pilates it really is best to start out working with a professional.  Here are the things we want to think about in choosing a Pilates class or trainer.

 

Class or trainer is actually the first question.  Those of us who belong to a gym with Pilates mat classes included may find that to be the easiest way to test it out and see if it is a good fit.  Many studios also offer introductory reformer classes so that clients can try the equipment in a safe environment.  Once we’ve tried a class, we can carry on if it is meeting our needs.

 

Those of us with particular needs, however, may need to cough up for individual sessions.  An instructor facing a classroom full of students will of course offer modifications for various things (bad knee, osteoporosis, etc.), but will not be able to tailor the session for any one person’s health or injury history.

 

Whether we decide on classes or individual sessions, we want to choose an instructor who knows how to be present.  We want someone who tunes in to how the bodies in front of her are moving and who has the knowledge and skill to elicit better movement from them.  What that looks like may vary.  We have different learning styles and so an instructor that is great for one person may not be so great for another.  It also helps if we like the person.

 

Try it out!  (And remember, the first session with me is always free!)

Basics: Pilates (1 of 2)

Next in our workout basics, we are turning our attention to Pilates.   Today we’ll discuss some of the whats and whys of Pilates and tomorrow we’ll talk about how.

Pilates is the creation of Joseph Pilates (I call him “Uncle Joe”) and it is both an exercise system and a philosophy.  In that way, it is similar to yoga, although yoga is more inherently spiritual.  After Uncle Joe died, his students took his work in a variety of directions, which is right and natural.  Different Pilates schools will emphasize different parts of the practice.  However, all kinds of Pilates will share some basic principles.  There are six.

 

First, breathing.  If we don’t breathe, we die.  If we learn to breathe better, we can improve our quality of life.  Breath facilitates motion and movement in turn can facilitate our breath.  This is why, when we go to Pilates, our instructors will tell us about when to breathe.  As we practice Pilates, we find that we do breathe more easily and this has good impacts across our lives.

 

Second, axial elongation and core control.  Think of this as countercultural pressure.  We live in a slouched society.  As we work through our Pilates exercises, we find that we feel taller and more centered, more capable of deep breath and clear thought.  (This is also one of the principles that makes us look good!!!)  This also contributes to good balance.

 

Third, spine articulation.  Our spines are there not only to support us, but also to enable us to move freely.  When our spines get too rigid, the rest of our movements are impaired.

 

Fourth, organization of the head, neck, and shoulders.  As I mentioned in the part about axial elongation, we are slouchy.  We hunch over our desks and phones.  This puts our upper body out of whack and contributes to all kinds of problems, including headaches.

 

Fifthy, alignment and weight bearing of the extremities.  Once we have our spine and our upper body straightened out, we want to propagate that healthy positioning and strength out into our arms and legs.  Here’s where we get practical in the activities of our lives.

 

Finally, movement integration.  Isolated movements in any part of the body can improve local function, but in real life, we rarely use just one body part or muscle group.  The Pilates repertoire helps us learn to coordinate movement using our whole bodies with efficiency and grace.

 

Given the principles, it’s not too hard to see why we might want to do some Pilates.  The practice is both empowering and relaxing.  We tune into that mindbody connection space, which can deeply enrich our lives.  We feel taller.  We move more efficiently, which means we have more energy to do the things we want to do.  Our balance improves, as does our posture.

 

It's good stuff.

Basics: Strength Training (2 of 2)

Yesterday we discussed the why of strength training.  Now we’re going to talk about how.

Pick up weight.  Put down.  Repeat.

 

Just kidding, mostly.

 

We need to make sure we work out our whole bodies.  That means we need lower body exercises, upper body exercises, abdominal exercises, and exercises that work both the back and the front of the body.  A good basic list includes squats, deadlifts, bench press or pushups, rows, pretty princesses, and supermans.

 

When we start out lifting weights, we want to build some endurance and stability first.  That means we lift relatively light weights a lot of times and we incorporate some balance challenges (throw in some single leg exercises or do those squats on a BOSU, for example).  The best way to figure out the right weight is to experiment.  We want a weight we can use with good form for 15 to 20 reps.  As with all strength training, as we get stronger, we will need to increase the weight, dialing the reps back down to the low end of the range and working our way back up.  We can do two or three sets of reps for each exercise.

 

Once we’re more confident about the whole idea of weightlifting, we can choose a variety of goals.  Maybe we want to build big muscles or get as strong as possible.  In the first instance, we want to choose slightly heavier weights and work in the 8 to 10 rep range.  In the second, we want to work in sets of up to 5, continually increasing the weight until we can complete only one good-looking rep.  Another possible goal is power, which means lifting a whole bunch of weight really fast.  We want to do that after we have mastered form and we’ve worked on max strength for a while.  Power strength training is best done with a trainer for safety.

 

For folks just getting started, commit to one strength training workout a week.  When that habit is ingrained, we can add a second weight workout.  That is enough for most people, but those of us who get really into it can add more.  We need to keep in mind, however, that we don’t want to work the same muscle groups two days in a row.  This is why some people do lower body work on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays and upper body work on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, keeping Sunday as a rest day.  (Bad news:  it is ok to do ab work every day.)

 

Still have questions?  That’s what I’m here for!  Ask me!

Basics: Strength Training (1 of 2)

Last week we went over the basics of cardio.  This week, we turn our attention to strength training.

There are a lot of us who, having figured out the cardio thing, don’t really care about strength training.  We go run or dance or swim or whatever and we feel fabulous and why would we want to do anything else?

 

There are a bunch of reasons.  One of them is that time, from our perspective, only flows in one direction, which means that we are all getting older.  As we age, we lose lean body mass even if our weight remains unchanged.  One of the markers of good health is a low body fat percentage and the way we keep that low body fat percentage is by increasing our lean muscle mass.  How do we do that when time is against us?  By strength training.  It helps us keep the sand in the upper half of the hour glass longer.

 

Additionally, we need strength training as we get older to help us keep our bones strong.  Work with weights helps to stave off osteoporosis.

 

Those of us who want to lose weight will do better with strength training because of the aforementioned lean body mass increase.  Muscle burns more calories per pound than fat does, which means that as we add muscle, we fire up our metabolism.

 

Need more reasons?  We’ll look better.  Strength training gives our muscles tone and makes us more shapely.  (Those of us who identify as female don’t need to worry about bulking up; it is actually challenging for women to get bulky.  We’re much more likely to get smaller and tighter-looking.)

 

Even more?  Strength training is practical.  We all need to lug groceries around and shift furniture from time to time and open jars.  Stronger people are more able to be independent.

 

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how we go about this whole strength training thing.

Basics: Cardio (2 of 2)

Yesterday we talked about the very basics of cardio.  Today we’re going to add a key technique, the cardio interval.

Most of us, when we head to the gym in the dark, cold morning, plop ourselves on the spin bike or the treadmill or the stair machine and go at a steady pace until we’re done.  This is a perfectly valid way to work out and if it is working for us, we can carry on.

 

However, those of us who want to progress more quickly, or have already progressed to the point where we are bored, or just want to get out the gym quicker may want to try intervals.  Here’s how they work.  We warm up for five minutes or so.  Then we bump up the pace or incline or resistance for a minute so that we’re working at the very high end of our appropriate range.  At the end of the minute, we return to a pace/incline/resistance that allows us to recover (but still stay in our target heart rate zone) for a minute or so.  Then we repeat the tough minute and the recovery period as many times as we want, ending with a cool down. We can burn an hour’s worth of steady-state calories in half an hour this way AND we improve our cardio function more than just chugging along.

 

A few notes to keep in mind, though.  Many pieces of equipment with programs already on them have an interval program.  If the hard interval is longer than one minute, it’s not really interval training (but it might be fun and we can certainly try it).  The key to interval training is that we work as hard as we possibly can for that minute.  By the end of a minute, we have used up our ATP supplies (remember ATP from biology way back when?  It’s our quick energy cellular power.  We have about a minute’s supply before it’s depleted and we have to give it a minute or so to regroup.).  If we’re working hard enough, we really can’t go longer than a minute without a recovery.  Our bodies will inevitably slow once our ATP is depleted.

 

The recovery interval can vary.  When we first start out with intervals, we might need three or four minutes to recover between intense intervals.  As we get more fit, that time can shorten until we’re doing minute on and minute off.

 

If we are working out outside and don’t want to focus on our watches, we can do our intervals by distance.  We choose a landmark like the end of the block or a really cool tree and go as fast as possible until we get there.  Then we pick another landmark and go slower until we get to that one.  Alternatively, we can choose a route with built-in intervals in the form of hills, which work for walking and running and biking and the like.  Outside intervals may not exactly align with the one minute max and the ATP cycle as discussed above, but they still work.

 

Go play.

Basics: Cardio (1 of 2)

It’s a new year, so we’re going back to basics.  This week I’ll spend two days going over what we need to know about cardio.  Next week, we’ll talk about weights.  The week after that, we’ll discuss Pilates.  Then stretching the week after that.  Finally, in the last week of January, we’ll put it all together and talk about goals.  Why this way?  Because it’s hard to set goals when we don’t have basic information.  It’s worth waiting until the end of the month to set goals because we’ll be equipped to set better goals than we can right this very minute with the knowledge we have.  Ready?  Here we go.

I’m starting with cardio because cardio is a good foundation for everything else we do.  It’s also easy to get started with cardio because nearly all of us can go for a walk.

 

Let’s define what we’re talking about here.  Cardiovascular exercise is movement that makes our hearts beat faster and our lungs work harder.  The benefits of cardio exercise range from boosts in mood and cognitive function to calorie-burning to improved heart health to the ability to go upstairs without feeling like we’re going to die.  We can get cardio exercise by walking, running, skiing, swimming, biking, dancing, skating, and playing a variety of sports.  This list is (obviously) not comprehensive.  If it gets the heart rate up and keeps it there for a good while, it counts.

 

To be effective, we want to get our heart rates up to 65 to 85% of our maximum heart rate.  Those of us who wear fitness trackers or smart watches can ignore the following math:  our gizmos do it for us.  The rest of us can get out the calculator app on our phones.  The quick-and-dirty math for calculating our maximum heart rate is to subtract our age from 220.  I will use myself as the example.  I am 55, so my max heart rate is 220-55, or 165.  Then I use that number to calculate my training range, which is a heart rate between 107 (65% of 165) and 140 (85% of 165).  I can take my own pulse for a minute during a workout to check that I’m working hard enough.  In my experience, it is rare for people to work too hard; when we get above 85% of our maximum heart rate, we feel terrible and slow down.  However, any special snowflakes out there who like to feel terrible might want to check the heart rate to make sure to stay on the safe side of the max.

 

Now that I made everyone do math (sorry!), I will suggest that we don’t need to pay too much attention to the numbers.  As we get moving, we get a feel for how hard we’re working on a given day.  When we quantify that, we get a scale of perceived exertion, which ranges from 0 (equivalent to lying on the couch) to 10 (please shoot me now).  (No, those are not the actual descriptions for the scale numbers, but they get the point across.)  We want to aim for a 7 or 8 (working hard, but we can still cope).  More simply still, we can assess how hard we are working by talking.  If we can still mostly carry on a conversation, we’re all right.  If we can sing, we’re not working hard enough.  If we have to pause our clever response to breathe, we’re working too hard.

 

How long we walk (or run, or rollerskate, or swim, or bike, or Zumba) is another factor we have to consider.  If we haven’t hoisted ourselves out of the comfy chair for the last couple of years, we’re going to start with less time than those of us who just chilled out for a few days over the holiday.  It is better to start slow and easy.  In fact, I’m in favor of the stupidly easy beginning.  So, couch potato friends:  walk five minutes to start.  Ultimately, we want to work up to about 150 minutes per week, which is 30 minutes per day, five days a week.

 

Go play.

No magic wand

So yesterday we started thinking about goals by figuring out what we want.  We have tuned into what makes us feel joyful.

That joy is the motivation to do the hard bits.  Which is what we’re going to talk about now.  Sadly, I do not have a magic wand.  This means that when we set goals they have to be more or less realistic while still bringing us toward what our little hearts desire.

 

What our hearts desire is our compass point, our big picture.  That’s the direction we’re going to go.  But we’re not orienteering to our goals:  we’re making a map. 

 

If, for example, what gives us joy is being able to travel, lugging our luggage, climbing up church towers or cliffs, eating all the local cuisine, and logging miles and miles of walking as we see the sights, our map to get there is going to need to include some strength training (to enable all that schlepping, to keep our bones strong, and to help our metabolisms process all those delicacies) and some cardio (so we don’t pass out when we end up in a hotel with no elevator and we have to take the stairs, or we want to scale the Mayan pyramids, or we want to do a Julie Andrews in an alpine meadow).

 

We want to figure out where we’re starting from (The couch?  Semi-weekly attendance at yoga class?  Trying Zumba once?).  Many gyms and personal trainers offer free fitness evaluations (yes, I do, too!) and that is a useful way to get some data, but it’s not necessary.  Once we have the starting point, we can begin to have an idea about the time it might take to get where we want to go.  We want to meet our goals safely, so we want to be consistent rather than overdo ourselves. A guideline for workouts is not to increase workout time by more than 10%, for example.  That means that this week’s 30 minutes is going to be next week’s 33 minutes and so on.  With weights, we increase our reps until we hit 10 to 12 with good form and then we increase the weight, dropping the reps down and continue alternating like that.

 

Personally, I like the kind of goals that go like this:  I’m going to do cardio five days a week for 30 minutes and I’m going to do one weight work out.  Then I’m going to see how I feel.  I will adjust each week until I am satisfied with my cardio endurance (it’s ok to attach a number to this, or some other measure, like not being out of breath at the top of the stairs) and I can tolerate two or three weight workouts per week.

 

Try it and see how it goes!

Joy

We’re getting toward the end of December, y’all, which means it is time to start thinking about goals for next year.  (We all have tons of spare time with the holidays, right?  Oceans of hours in which to reflect…)  This is the first of two posts on setting goals.

The only rule for right now is that we have to tell the truth.  This is not about the goals we should have.  I don’t care what our moms think we should do, or our spouses or our kids or our favorite magazines.  It’s about the ones we actually want.  I don’t care if it is silly or vain or unrealistic.  It just has to be real.

 

This might be harder than we think.  We have so many messages around us telling us how to be.  I’m pretty sure all of us have a knee-jerk answer about how much weight we’re supposed to lose.  I have a news flash:  happiness is not to be found in the number of lost pounds.

 

So.  Let’s spend a minute or two picturing or describing or feeling into the life we want to have in the new year.  Maybe we do want to look better than we do right this minute, but I bet we care more about feeling good and happy and full of energy.  Those of us who feel tired all the time might want to feel rested.  Those of us who get out of breath getting off the couch might want to change that.  Maybe we want to meet new friends playing a new sport or doing a new activity and we need to build a bit of strength to do that.

 

What we want to be able to do and to feel helps us to shape our goals.  We’ll discover that we want to be faster or stronger, that we want more stamina or energy, that we need more connection and more joy.

 

Find the feelings that lead to joy.  Then hold that thought for tomorrow.

Gotta do it.

As we get into the darker months and the months with more variable weather, it can be a challenge to go outside.  Personally, I think that I was intended to be a bear who slept through the winter.  Since I have yet to find a job opening in the hibernation industry, I’ll just keep on doing what I do.

Outside can be cold or dark or rainy or windy or even all of those things at once.  Unfortunately, going outside is still good for us.  We need daylight, however feeble it might be, and fresh air and trees.

 

Maybe we have to bundle up or grab an umbrella or bribe ourselves with tea afterwards, but let’s do it.  We’ll feel better and we’ll sleep better.

Them Bones

The prophet Ezekiel did not know anything about Pilates when he saw the vision of the valley of dried bones.  But, he did grasp one of the essential underlying themes of Pilates as he watched the bones knit together again:  it’s all connected.  (Sorry about the earworm about the foot bone connecting to the leg bone and all…)

This connection is good news.  It means that when we work on any part of our body, the whole body feels the effects.  Sometimes it means that it’s better to work on a part that is not the part that hurts because what’s causing the pain is not what is happening right there.  We are a holistic system.

 

That said, we often get best results when we begin with the spine.  As we get good alignment along this central part of our body, the extremities can fall into place.  If they don’t, we can work on them more afterward.

 

Go play.