Check!

Time for a mid-year check-in!  Remember those goals from back in January?  Here are five things to consider as we go into the second half of the year:

 

1.     Sleep.  Are we getting 8 hours?  7? 4 ½?  Enough sleep is essential to our health and fitness goals. 

2.     Food.  Are we choosing nutrient-dense foods that satisfy our bodies and feed our souls?  Are we getting enough veggies?  Enough water?

3.     Cardio.  When was the last time we got breathless?  Are we doing it consistently?

4.     Strength.  We want strong bones, enthusiastic metabolisms, and lean bodies, so we need to do our lifting.

5.     Fun.  If we’ve been doing the same things every week since January, we’re probably really bored.  It might be time to mix things up a bit.

 

Go play.

Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to work out.

Yesterday I talked about different reasons we might want to work out.  Here are five to consider:

 

1.     To look cute.  Yep, it’s a real reason and totally all right.

2.     To feel better.  We like that after-exercise high.

3.     To feel better, another way.  We want to lower our blood pressure, or manage diabetes, or strengthen our hearts, or just get out doctors and loved ones off our backs.

4.     To get to do more fun things.  Maybe we want to be able to play on the playground longer with our kids or grandkids, or do a walking tour in the Himalayas.  Working out helps us build up our strength and endurance to do those things.

5.     To get revenge.  In the sense of living a long and healthy life, anyway.

 

Why do you want to work out?

Five Ways to ZZZZZs

We may have come to terms with the idea that we need to get some sleep, but how?  Here are five suggestions:

 

1.     Ditch the caffeine.  Before y’all get out your pitchforks, let me suggest that at least reducing the intake can help.  Please note that for some of us the process of weaning ourselves off of caffeine can be long and challenging and even painful, but it can definitely be worth it.

2.     About that alcohol… If the pitchforks are out, might as well use them.  Alcohol affects different people differently, but in general it tends to make it easy to go to sleep and hard to stay there.  At least observe the effects and see.

3.     Get some exercise.  Cardio during the day seems to help folks sleep at night.  Some people like evening exercise because there is a natural energy dip a few hours after a workout and that can coincide with bedtime.

4.     Keep it cool.  Most of us sleep better in a cool room.

5.     Keep it dark.  Our inner beasts are programmed to wake in the light, so we need to give them plenty of dark time.

 

What are your favorite sleep aids?

Five

We get bored with our same old workouts.  Here are five ways to modify what we’re doing to make it less boring.

 

1.     Go faster.  In fact, if we go as fast as we safely can, we add some significant challenge.  This can take the form of intervals of max effort, or just a general increase in speed, whether in cardio or weight training.

2.     Go slower.  This one is for weight training specifically.  If we deliberately raise and lower the weights at a very slow pace, we increase the time our muscles are under tension.  It can be super challenging and useful for building up our strength and endurance.

3.     Go a different direction.  We tend to do everything going forward, but life isn’t always that way.  We can try walking backward (safely!) on the treadmill, or we can trade our regular lunges for side lunges, or we can throw in some twists.

4.     Change the order.  If we always do our cardio first and then our lifting, we can switch it up.  One note:  no matter what order we are doing our workouts in, we need to ensure we get in a warm-up.

5.     Change the time.  We can try working out in the morning if we are usually after-work workout people, or vice versa.  We can try a short, intense workout instead of a longer one, or we can see what happens if we do something more endurance-based and long for different.

 

These are my ideas.  What are yours?

What to bring

Folks planning on playing outside need to plan ahead a little.  Here are things to bring:

 

1.     Water.  Always.  Hydration is our friend.

2.     Snacks.  These might be optional if we are not going to be out long, but anything over an hour it is good to be prepared.  I prefer non-squishable snacks like nuts or dried fruit or granola bars (or gel packets for endurance events), but careful people may manage to snack on bananas.

3.     Hat.  The sun is only sort of our friend.  Too much is too much.

4.     Sunscreen.  See above.

5.     Bug spray.  This may not be necessary if you are staying in town, but really, life is better without mosquito bites.

6.     ID.  Just in case.  I take my driver’s license, a credit card, and $20 when I hike, bike, or paddle.

 

Depending on what we’re doing, we might want a notebook or camera, extra clothes, a first aid kit, a towel, etc.

Snickersnack!

If we want to cut down on the sugar in our lives, what are we supposed to snack on?  Here are some ideas.  (Sugar hides in an awful lot of things, so this list comes with a caveat:  read the labels on any prepared foods and skip those with added sugars.)

 

1.     Nuts.  They’re a good source of protein and healthy fats.  They DO have a lot of calories, so we need to pay attention to quantity.

2.     Popcorn.  Full of fiber, which makes us feel full. 

3.     Celery and (your favorite nut) butter.  Celery has fiber and nut butters have all the good qualities of nuts.  DO check the nut butter label and choose one that has just nuts and maybe salt in it and not a bunch of added oils and sugars.

4.     Veggies and hummus.  Tasty, fibrous, full o’vitamins, and with a dash of legume protein!

 

Yum. 

Five Ingredients for Success

Working out is great, but there are some things we can do that are NOT working out to make those workouts better.  Here are five:

 

1.     Drink water.  Hydration is essential to our bodies’ processes.  Enough water will help us work out better and longer and recover faster.

2.     Eat.  Those of us who decide to work out to lose weight sometimes don’t eat enough.  We want to choose nutrient dense foods to fuel our workouts.

3.     Wear the right shoes.  No one wants shin splints or a sprained ankle or plantar fasciitis.  Heck, we don’t even want blisters.  (Sometimes, like when we do yoga or Pilates, the right shoes are no shoes at all.)

4.     Use safety equipment.  Those strong legs we are developing while biking won’t do us a bit of good if we crack our skulls open.  Wear the helmet—or the knee pads, or the life jacket, or whatever.

5.     Have fun.  Most workouts do NOT have to be drudgery.  Take a friend, turn up the music, get silly, whatever it takes to make it more like play.

Compounding the Issue

I am big on compound exercises, which are exercises that use multiple joints and muscle groups at the same time.  Here are some reasons why:

 

1.     They’re efficient.  We get more workout in less time when we do compound exercises.

2.     They amp up our metabolism.  Whether that means increased weight loss or an extra cookie is up to the person working out.

3.     They’re practical.  Anybody who has ever moved understands that very few things in the real world are shaped like barbells and dumbbells.  When we need to use our strength in our regular lives, we don’t often use just one muscle group all by itself.

4.     They’re more fun.  This one might be debatable, but I’m going with it.  When we have to coordinate the movement of multiple body parts, we have to use our brains and that’s way more interesting than just waving some dumbbells around.

Three, Plus One More

Some of us are better than others at going outside.  If we need a little inspiration to make it out the door, here are three reasons to do it.

 

1.     Vitamin D.  The sun is our best source of this essential nutrient.  D helps keep our bones strong, reduces inflammation, supports our immune system, and keeps our brains working.

2.     Forest bathing.  Spending time in nature has been shown to reduce heart rate, lower blood pressure, and zap stress.

3.     Variety.  Our brains and bodies like novelty.  That’s where the growth happens.  The world outside changes more than the world inside where we control everything from the temperature to the light.

 

Still not working?  All right.  Mom says we have to go play outside. 

Six Kinds of Feeling

Some days we wake up and don’t know what kind of workout to do.  Here’s a quick list of choices based on how we happen to feel:

 

1.     Grumpy.  Maybe that’s just me first thing in the morning?  Maybe not.  Anyway, if grumpy, choose cardio.  It really shifts mood a lot.

2.     Tired.  Another good time to choose cardio for its energy-boosting effects.

3.     Sore and tired.  This is the time to get gentle with ourselves.  Some yoga or simple Pilates or a less-intense walk would all be good choices.

4.     Bored.  This is the moment to kick things up a notch.  Choose heavy weights or more high intensity intervals.  Nothing beats boredom like lots of sweat!

5.     Fat.  This one requires a two-pronged approach.  First, we work out our minds by reminding ourselves that we are valuable humans no matter what we look like or weigh.  Then we hit the weight room to increase our lean muscle mass, burn calories, and boost our metabolisms.

6.     Stiff.  We need a little cardio to get the joints to wake up and then some yoga or other stretchy exercise.

 

What did I forget?

Seven for the Playground

Per request, this week’s list is exercises that we can do at the playground while our kids/grandkids are doing their thing.  The short version is that any body weight exercise works fine, depending on our willingness to look like we are exercising while we’re hanging out by the swings.  However, here’s the list.  Do ten of each.

 

1.     Squats.  I love squats and they can be done nearly everywhere. 

2.     Single leg squats:  All the fun of squats, plus balance!

3.     Bench dips:  the great thing about playgrounds is that they all have benches.  To do dips, we sit on the bench, put our hands on the edge of the bench by our hips, stretch our legs out long, heels on the ground.  Then we scooch our butts off the edge of the bench, bending our arms to lower our butts toward the ground and then straightening the arms to come back up.  This can be challenging, so start with a small range of motion and build up.

4.     Pushups:  these can be done on the ground, with hands on the aforementioned bench, or with hands on something taller, like a picnic table, depending on how much difficulty we want.

5.     Calf raises.  For these, we can hold on to something stable or practice our balance.  We just rise up on our toes and lower.  For extra challenge, we can do one leg at a time.  For extra extra challenge, plus a calf stretch, we can do the exercise with the balls of our feet on a curb so that when we lower, our heels drop lower than the rest of our feet.

6.     Pullups or modified pullups.  If there is a bar tall enough for hanging, we can do pullups.  If that is too challenging and there is a lower bar, we can get under the bar with our legs on the ground in a kind of upside down pushup position and then pull our bodies up toward the bar.

7.     Running around.  Chasing the kids is great exercise in and of itself.  Tag gives us the opportunity to practice changing direction while simultaneously becoming a Fun Grownup.  Keep in mind that intervals of about a minute are great for our cardio fitness and also let us rest in between.

Five that don't and one that does

Excuses that don’t work (sorry!):

 

1.     But I exercised yesterday!  That was then.  This is now.  Gotta do it again.

2.     It’s too (pick one) hot, cold, rainy, windy, dry.  This is why clothes and heat and air conditioning were invented.

3.     I’m too tired and grumpy.  It will be better afterward.  Really.

4.     Can’t somebody do it for me?  No.

5.     But I paid for my session/gym membership/ equipment!  Yep.  And none of it works without showing up to do it.

 

One that does:  I am sick and/or injured.  Rest.

Affirmations for the Challenged

I confess that I hate affirmations.  The Wellness Police are probably coming for me right now.  However, here are a few for people who hate them.

 

1.     My body is amazing.  Really.  It keeps breathing all by itself.  It moves me around.  It turns food into energy, light into images, and waves into music.

2.     I can do things.  I got up this morning and brushed my teeth. 

3.     The world is beautiful.  There is a sky.  There are leaves.  And flowers!

4.     I can make connections.  There are other humans!  We can talk!  We can laugh at stupid jokes and know that dogs and babies are adorable. 

Inertia-Beaters

As Newton has explained, the hardest part of getting moving is getting started (Look!  I learned at least one thing in physics!).  Here are four ways to beat inertia:

 

1.     Give it five minutes.  If you’re not into it at the end of five minutes, stop!

2.     Go outside.  The fresh air helps us get motivated.

3.     Get childish.  What did you do at recess?  Try that.  Hopscotch?  Tag?  Handball?  Grab a couple friends for kickball or baseball or football.

4.     Use bribery.  Promise yourself a hot bath or a nap or an extra episode of that show.  (Note:  food bribes are not the best choice.)

 

Go play.

Four things

Things to do on a rest day:

 

1.     Go for a walk.  A relaxing one, not a death march.  Take a friend and chat, or take photos, or listen to music.

2.     Take a nap.

3.     Stretch a little.  This is not the day for super double extra hot yoga with weights.  Just some gentle movement to let the muscles lengthen and relax.

4.     Nothing.  It’s a rest day.  Rest!
 

Six stretches

So now that I’ve spent two days convincing folks to stretch, which stretches should we all be doing?  As always, it depends on what else we are doing, but here are some that pretty much all of us need:

 

1.     Chest stretch.  This one is fun.  It can be done one side at a time or both at once.  Stand in a doorway and put one or both arms on the doorframe.  If you are doing one arm at a time, turn away from the arm in the doorframe until you feel a stretch in your chest.  If both arms, just lean through the doorway, supporting yourself with your arms and feeling both sides of your chest stretch.  This is a good one to do after slumping at the computer all day.

2.     Piriformis stretch.  There are a lot of ways to do this stretch, but today I will explain the chair version.  Sit in a chair with one foot flat on the ground.  Place the other ankle on your knee (as if you were starting to sit crisscross applesauce) and press that knee down toward the ground and/or lean forward from the waist until you feel a stretch in your behind on the crossed-leg side.  Repeat other side.

3.     Neck stretch.  Sit or stand up straight.  Keeping your shoulders down, pull your head toward one shoulder with your hand to stretch the opposite side of your neck.  Bonus points for turning your face toward your bicep to target your sternocleidomastoid (you don’t have to spell it; you’ll feel it!)  For both stretches, you may need or want to press the arm you are stretching away from down toward the ground to improve the stretch.

4.     Quad stretch.  Again, there are several ways to do this stretch, but I’m going to explain the one that requires the least balance.  Lie on the floor (hooray!) on one side.  Bend the top leg at the knee and grab your foot (or loop a strap or towel around the foot if you can’t reach it yet).  This may be enough to feel a stretch in the front of the thigh, but if not, you can press your hips forward.  Also, try to keep your knees next to each other for best results.

5.     Calf stretch.  Stand back up (sigh.) near a table or sturdy chair or wall.  Using the wall for balance, step one foot back behind you as if you were lunging.  Keeping the back heel down and the back knee straight, lean your hips toward the wall until you feel a stretch in your calf.

6.     The Olympic salute.  Stand up nice and straight with your arms in a Y.  Inhale and lift your breast bone to the ceiling, extending your upper spine.

 

Go play.

Don't Look Now!

I know that my industry is super focused on looks.  I mean, hey, it exists in our culture and our culture is, too.  However, research (yes really!) has shown that looks-focused cues and encouragement are less effective at keeping us doing our workouts.  Here are five non-looks-centered things we can say to ourselves for motivation:

 

1.     I am getting stronger.  If we are putting in the time to do our lifting, of course we are, but it is nice to notice it.

2.     Hey!  That thing that used to be hard isn’t any more!  We have learned and adapted and changed.

3.     I like how I feel when I can do this.  Success feels great!

4.     Even if this is hard, I know I am benefitting from it.  On days when the weights are not submitting to our will, we can know that we are at the very least building character.

5.     This is helping me be able to do that thing I want to do.  Sometimes we are working out in order to do something else, like chase our kids or finish a marathon or take a hiking trip through the Rockies.  Keeping that thing in mind while we do our workout helps.

Hard Enough?

How do we know if we are working hard enough?  Here are three ways to tell:

 

1.     The Talk Test.  This is the easiest one to use.  We want to be working hard enough that we can still talk to a friend in short bursts, but singing is out of the question.

2.     Rate of Perceived Exertion.  This is a fancy way of saying we need to check in with ourselves.  We want to aim for 70 to 85% of our maximum effort, or a 7 to 8.5 on a 10 point scale where 0 is lying on the couch and 10 is about to die.

3.     Heart Rate.  If we have a fitness tracker, it will let us know our heart rate.  Otherwise, we can count it ourselves at wrist or neck.  Then we need to do some math.  The basic equation to find our maximum heart rate is 220 minus our age.  Our working zone is 70 to 85% of that number.  So, if you are 53, like me, the math looks like this:

220-53=167

70% of 167 is 117, the low end of where I want my heart rate to be

85% of 167 142, the high end of where I want my heart rate to be

 

Please note:  everyone is different.  People who are just getting off the couch may not tolerate working out at 70% of their maximum heart rate at first.  The same goes for older people, people coming back from injury, and people whose doctors have advised them to go easy.  People who are super conditioned may want to do intervals that get their heart rate above 85%-- just be careful!  As always, we have to use good judgment.

KISS, baby!

 Let’s keep things simple today.  Here are five things to do to feel good and stay healthy:

 

1.     Sleep.  Fight the cultural glorification of overwork and under-sleep.  Nap against The Man.  Seriously, prioritizing enough rest is good for the body, the mind, the metabolism, and people who have to deal with us.  Aim for about eight hours, give or take.

2.     Move.  It doesn’t have to be big or complicated.  A half hour walk on most days is enough to maintain a healthy body.

3.     Eat.  We need food to live.  When we pay attention to the foods that make us feel more energetic and happy and calm, we do better.  Spoiler alert:  it’s not going to turn out to be Jack-in-the-Box all day, every day.  Bonus spoiler alert:  it’s also not going to be a single leaf of kale per day and nothing else.

4.     Drink.  Water.  Plenty of water.  Dehydrated people are grumpy and mistake-prone.  Drinking other things is all right, but water is best.

5.     Play.  Not everything has to be hard.  Taking the time to find the joyful bits is entirely useful.

Five Core Favorites

I’m in the mood for core exercises.  Here are five of my favorites, with links to directions that feature the Amazing Stickie.

 

1.     Pretty princesses.  Here’s how to do them.   What I like about them, besides the fact that they work everything at once, is that they keep the spine supported, making them suitable for folks who should avoid flexion (people with osteoporosis and various other spine conditions).

2.     Brains.  Here’s a how-to.  Brains have the same advantage as pretty princesses, but they focus attention on the obliques.

3.     Femur arcs.  Another how-to.  This is a Pilates exercise that I use with both Pilates and personal training clients because it is so good for learning about our lower abdominals and about how to engage our transversus abdominis (the deep abdominal muscle that helps our tummies look flat instead of poochy).

4.     Plank:  yet one more how-to.  Planks not only strengthen the abdominals, but also help us with our upper body strength.

5.     Side plank:  the last how-to.  Another exercise to target obliques and help us with shoulder stability.

 

(If you would like a booklet of exercises featuring the Amazing Stickie, drop me a note!)