Showing posts with label What to do. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What to do. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Mental & Emotional Wellbeing, Part 2






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

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

 

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

 

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

 

What works best for you?

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Mental & Emotional Wellness, Part 1






The final wellness piece is mental and emotional health.  (This is where I put in the disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist.  I can give general advice about mental and emotional well-being, but please seek professional help from those other folks as needed.  I’m here for support, not for diagnosis or treatment.)

Today I’m going to talk a bit about supporting cognitive function.  Tomorrow I’ll touch on some of the emotional stuff.

 

We tend to assume that cognitive decline is inevitable as we age.  Not so fast, y’all.  We have a bunch of tools we can use to keep our brains working.

 

A couple of the tools are kind of un-tools:  quitting smoking and preventing head injury.  If you smoke, I’m sure you already know it is not the best choice for health.  Maybe this one more reason will make the difference?  (Quitting smoking is hard.  No judgment if you haven’t got there yet.)  The head injury part may not be something we can control, but we can reduce our risk by doing smart stuff like wearing helmets when biking or skiing or the like and by working on our balance to avoid falls.

 

The positive tools all kind of work together.  We want to get regular exercise (Hey!  That works well with the balance work we want to do anyway to keep from falling!).  We want to get enough good sleep (a virtuous cycle with our exercise, which promotes good sleep, and good sleep helping us exercise again!).  We want to keep our brains active.  This can mean anything from doing puzzles to reading to learning a new sport (look!  There’s that exercise thing again!).  We also want to support our mental health.  There are, again, lots of ways to do that.  We can journal or hang with friends or take a walk with those same friends (dead horse beating:  exercise with friends!).

 

Essentially, when we live an engaged, healthy life, our brains thrive along with our bodies.

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Thursday List: 5






Need a few more tips for sleeping?  I got you:

 

1.     Move every day.

2.     Don’t over-nap.

3.     Meditate or reduce worry some other way.

4.     Stick to a schedule.

5.     Avoid late night meals and snacks.

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Sleep, part 2






I’ll start with a confession.  I have really struggled to put together an evening routine.  Morning routine:  no problem.  Evening rolls around and I’m like, “Routine?  Is that even a thing?”  But, knowing the benefits, I keep working on it and I’m making a bit of progress.

(The benefits are:  I feel more prepared for the next day, I fall asleep faster, and I sleep better.  Also, my teeth are brushed.)

 

What kind of stuff goes into a bedtime routine?  Surprisingly, best results come from starting up to 8 hours before bed.  (OK, so it’s not like we just stop doing stuff at 2; we just tick off a couple things then.)  Around eight hours before bed, we might want to stop with the caffeine.  While it is probably better for us not to have nicotine ever, if we are users, we want to try to stop using around the same time.

 

Around an hour before bed, we want to turn off the tv, shut down the screens, and stop working.  This supports our melatonin production by limiting our exposure to blue light and also helps us turn down the stress.

 

If possible, a half hour before bed we can dim the lights further.  When we are in an environment that is about candlelight-bright, we stimulate dim-light melatonin onset, which in turn helps us to have an uninterrupted night of sleep.  Then we can take a hot shower to relax our bodies further.

 

When we turn in, we will sleep best in a cool, dark, quiet room.  This may require interventions like a sleep mask, ear plugs, a noise machine, or the like.  Preparation helps.

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Sleep, Part 1






We can’t be well without sleep.  There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a torture.  Some of us might want to have words with the current culture about this, because there is a lot of pressure out there to do All The Things even at the expense of sleep.

While there are certainly times when we’re not going to get enough (like, say, when we have a new baby), we can strive to get our seven to nine hours.  I realize this may mean terrible sacrifices, like waiting a whole day to watch the next episode of that awesome show or putting away the phone at bed time, but when we wake up with actual energy, we might find it worth it.

 

When we get enough sleep, our bodies and our brains work better.  Sleep time is when our tissues repair themselves from our workouts so we wake up stronger.  It’s also the time when we consolidate the things we learn during the day.  Our brains do housework while we’re unconscious (isn’t that nice of them?) and we don’t really want to get in the way of them taking out the garbage.

 

Tomorrow:  bed time routines!

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Nutrition, part 2






Food is one of the joys of life, in my opinion.  It’s also necessary!  Choosing foods that are both good for us and fun to eat helps us live a happy life.

So how do we do that?

 

In general, we want to choose foods that are close to how they occur in nature.  Eating an apple is going to be better for us than eating an apple pie.  And sour apple candy isn’t even food and may not have any actual relationship with apples.  This principle means that whole grains are better for us than processed grains, that fresh veggies are on the whole better than canned, that fresh fruit is better than jam, etc.

 

However, we also want to consider that food is more than just fuel for our bodies.  Food is part of our culture and our social interactions.  When we’re considering apple pie, we may need to remember that our grandpa baked it with love and we get to hear him tell stories while we eat it.  That feeds us, too.  If we get so hung up on eating the “right” things, we may skip going out with friends and that’s not good for us either.

 

Most of the time, we want to choose real food, minimally processed, and cooked in ways that are good for us.  Sometimes, not so much.

 

Or, as my personal guru, Cookie Monster, says:  “Healthy food makes me a healthy dude” and “Cookies are a sometimes food.”  

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Nutrition, Part 1






A third pillar of wellness is nutrition.  We can’t be well without proper fuel.  Today I’m going to go over macronutrients and tomorrow I’m going to talk about actual food.

There are three macronutrients:  protein, carbohydrates, and fats.  When we eat food, we’re ingesting some combination of these three.

 

Protein is crucial for building and rebuilding our bodies.  If we don’t get enough protein in our diets, we have trouble healing from injury.  Those of us who would like to change our body compositions toward more lean tissue also need protein in order to do that.  Vegetarians and vegans need to be careful to ensure that they are getting good sources of protein because most non-animal proteins don’t have all the essential amino acids we need to get from our diets, but it’s not that complicated.

 

Carbohydrates get a bad rap these days and a lot of them don’t deserve it.  Unless we have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, there is no reason to avoid our friends the whole grains.  Carbohydrates are a good source of energy for us.  Also:  veggies!  We love veggies!  Quality matters in carbs, though.  There’s a big difference between getting carbs from vegetables and whole grains and from a box of donuts.  When in doubt, choose the carbs with more fiber.

 

Fat is also essential for our bodies to function.  It is a dense source of calories, which is important when we are doing lots of exercise.  Quality matters here, too.  In general, the best fats for us are the ones that are liquid at room temperature.  Those are the unsaturated fats.  Saturated fats are solid at room temperature.  Focusing on getting our fats from healthy whole food sources like nuts and seeds, oily fish, and the like is a good way to get what we need without overdoing it.

 

We don’t sit down to a nice plate of protein, carbs, and fat, though.  We eat food.  I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Thursday List: 7 More






So:  it’s time to recover.  What are we going to do?  Here are some ideas:

 

1.     Sleep.

2.     Eat.  Preferably something with actual nutrition in it, but something is better than nothing.

3.     Chill.  The fancy term for this is “quiet wakefulness.”  It can mean anything from meditating to reading to staring into space.

4.     Light movement.  This would be something like gentle stretching or a bit of a stroll just to keep the muscles limber and lithe.

5.     Hot or cold.  Or both!  Some folks like alternating sauna and cold plunge.  Some folks swear by ice.  Others are all about the heating pad.  Do you, but consider that ice is generally great for reducing swelling and heat is generally very soothing.

6.     Stuff that pushes on the body.  On the expensive end, we have massage.  Somewhere in the middle we have percussive therapy (the massage guns range in price, but the most expensive ones I saw in a quick visit online were about $150 and most were significantly cheaper).  For the budget minded, we have foam rollers and all their various relatives.  All of them help our bodies release tension and allow us to build flexibility.

7.     Other stuff.  That can be things like acupuncture or going outside or doing puzzles or looking at art.  If it feeds your soul, it’s good for recovery.

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Recovery and Healing, Part 2






When we are “just” sore from whatever kind of movement we’ve been doing, whether it is our first steps around the block or our hardest, heaviest weight workout to date, we need to take some steps to recover.  Heck, even if we are not sore, we need to make sure that we give our bodies space and time and care for recovery.  Bodies like that.

The low-hanging fruit of recovery is pretty much stuff we should be doing anyway:  eating food that is good for us, getting enough sleep, and taking time for mental relaxation.  (This may be time to give ourselves a pat on the back:  we were doing an awesome job without even thinking about it!  Go us!)

 

If we need something a bit more direct, we have even more fun options, ranging from light movement (think yoga and stretching of a very gentle stroll) to massage to foam rolling. 

 

I want to be clear about something.  Often in our hustle culture, we absorb the attitude that we don’t have time to recover.  Our societal anxiety about being and doing enough can make us feel like rest is a waste of time and frivolous.  This is not true.  All of us deserve to rest and recover because we are valuable humans even if we do exactly nothing more with the rest of our existence.  And, if that turns out not to be convincing, I’ll give y’all’s Protestant work ethic a reason to recover:  it will make us more productive in the long run.  (I like the first reason better.  We are all beloved children of God or essential parts of the universe or however you prefer to phrase it to yourself.)  Bottom line:  work and then rest.

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Recovery and Healing, Part 1






Another aspect of wellness is how we deal with recovery and healing.  That’s the focus for this week.

When we start getting more movement into our lives, we sometimes get sore.  And most of us, at some point in our lives, will have to deal with some kind of injury that requires us to pay attention to healing.  Recovery and healing often have similar aspects, but they are not entirely the same.

 

Today I’m going to be Captain Obvious and say:  if you are injured, seek medical attention.  DIY is all well and good, but most of us aren’t actually doctors.  Get a professional to check you out and then follow their advice.

 

Tomorrow:  dealing with non-injury recovery.

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Movement, Part 2






Yesterday I talked a little about the difference between movement and exercise.  We may want to start with movement and dip into exercise later, but we might have some beliefs that hold us back from doing either one.  Let’s talk about some of those and see if we really need to keep those beliefs.

We might think that movement has to be hard or painful to be effective.  I personally would like to have words with the person who came up with “no pain, no gain.”  Pain is an important message from our bodies that we are doing something potentially dangerous.  We do not want pain while we are moving.  In fact, doing some moving can help us reduce the amount of pain we have in our bodies. 

 

(I’m not going to lie and say that all exercise is always super duper fun and never ever uncomfortable because that’s just not true.  Discomfort is not the same as pain.  Our hamstrings will pretty much always complain when we do hamstring curls.  I will always hate lunges.  But, in general, most of the time movement and exercise should be somewhere between tolerable and great.)

 

We might think that we have to join a gym and figure out all those weird machines and fling dumbbells and make grunting noises to get in our movement or exercise.  Nope.  Things like dancing count.  Half an hour of tag is a great way to move.  Team sports count.  So do swimming and skiing and hiking.  Gardening definitely counts as movement, and, depending on what we’re doing, may be exercise, too.

 

We might think that we have to be good at whatever movement we do.  I can say for a fact that I am a terrible swimmer.  And I don’t care.  I love swimming.  My swimming counts as movement. 

 

A related belief might be that people will make fun of us for being bad at whatever we are doing or for how we look while we do it.  I can’t promise that people will always be kind, but I can say that most people are too busy worrying about their own stuff to pay much attention to anybody else.  Also, blowing off jerks probably counts as movement.  And do we really want the Mean Girls and Boys out there to keep us from feeling good?  Don’t let them win!  (Please note:  gym anxiety is real and serious.  It is totally all right for us to prefer to move by ourselves in private either forever or until we build up the confidence that we need to move with other people.)

 

Perhaps there is a theme here and that is:  there are lots and lots of ways to move.  It’s a fair bet that most of us will be able to find some kind of movement that we don’t hate.  I’m also willing to bet that all of us will feel better when we do make the effort to move, even just a little bit.  Experiment!

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Movement, part 1






Over the summer, I worked on a certification as a Wellness Coach.  It is not surprising that movement is an important aspect of wellness and one that plays well with what I already know and do.  However, movement for wellness is a little different than what I usually do with my personal training and Pilates clients.  I’m going to explore what wellness-directed movement looks like in my posts this week.

 

The basic distinction I want to make is between movement and exercise.  Movement is the larger category and includes exercise, but you don’t have to do exercise to get moving.  One way to think about the two is that often exercise has a particular goal—to improve strength or cardio, to get more flexible.  Movement is a little more free-floating.  A stroll around the block at a leisurely pace is movement, but it may or may not be exercise, depending on the level of fitness of the walker in question.

 

Movement is really good for us.  Our bodies work better when we move them and our brains do, too.  I know there are a lot of us who don’t like exercise, whether it’s because we had a terrible experience in gym class or because we think it has to involve giant weights and big sweaty guys or any of a million other reasons.  But movement can be as simple as dancing around the kitchen with the kids when our song comes on, or taking the dog around the block, or challenging your partner to see which one of you can slide farther down the hall in socks.

 

Especially when we’ve been best friends with the couch for a long time, it’s important to realize that any movement, even a quick stand-up stretch between meetings, will help us.  We may find that we want to move on to exercise eventually or we may not, but we’ll be better for the effort.

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Best Advice







Today I’m going to share some of my very best advice on exercise and diet.  Here we go:  lie on the couch all day and eat cake.

 

April Fools!

 

(Seriously:  move a little and eat a vegetable.) 

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

I Have Answers






Because I do both personal training and Pilates, folks sometimes ask me which they should do.  I have two answers:  it depends and both.  (Yeah, I know.  I’m annoying like that.)

The “it depends” answer springs from the fact that we are all coming to fitness from our own special spots in the universe.  We have individual needs and goals.  For most of us, it will be pretty clear whether the usual outcomes of weight training or Pilates will align better with what we need and want.

 

The “both” part comes from the synergistic nature of weight training and Pilates.  When we do both, we improve our outcomes even more than just by getting the individual benefits of each of those training modes.  The strength we gain in weight training opens up opportunities for us in the Pilates repertoire.  The finesse and balance and alignment we learn in Pilates translate into better form and performance in our weight training.  Our powerful brains benefit from the mindset of both disciplines and from the challenge of switching between them.

 

The good news is that we can start anywhere.  It’s all good.

Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Outside!






As the season changes, so do our workouts.  Here’s what we need as we start to work out more outside.

Sunscreen.  I confess I am bad at remembering it, but I’m working on it.  The higher the SPF the better.  Reapply often because we sweat it off.

 

The right clothes.  We need breathable fabrics when it gets hot.  Exercise clothes have come a long way since those Rocky movies with the gray sweats.  The new fabrics really do make a difference; we don’t have to feel soggy anymore!  If we’re doing water sports, a supportive bathing suit is a wonderful thing.  Rash guards and other sun protective clothing are also good.  A hat can be useful, too.

 

The right shoes.  It might be warm, but we still need support.

 

Water.  Yes, I will go on about this forever.  Dehydration is bad.  Drink lots.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

When it hurts...






We all overdo ourselves from time to time.  Maybe we were on vacation and we were hiking and it turned out to be more strenuous than we expected.  Maybe we were trying to impress that cute person in the gym and we lifted more than was good for us.  Maybe it was just one of those days.  Now everything hurts.  What do we do?

First, we need to decide if we’re sore or actually injured.  If we think we might have an injury, we want to seek qualified medical advice.  (I am not a doctor, a physical therapist, or anything like it, so I do not diagnose or prescribe treatment; get real help when needed!)

 

If we’re just really darn sore, I can make some suggestions that might help.  Pain, while useful in keeping us from doing too many dumb things, is not a fun thing to experience.

 

Take ibuprofen or your favorite OTC pain reliever as appropriate.  This is not being wimpy.  Pain relief is a good thing.  We are nicer when we don’t hurt.

 

Use ice or heat.  Ice is particularly good for anything that feels inflamed or swollen.  Heat soothes when things feel tense.  Bonus points for heat in the form of a soak in Epsom salts, which will add to the soothing.

 

Move a little.  This one may sound counterintuitive.  We got this way from moving too much!  But a little gentle movement really will help the body heal by keeping everything from stiffening up.

 

Rest.  Duh.  We need to stop doing what made us sore until we feel better.  A good night of sleep or two will also help.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

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!

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

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).

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

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!

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Both!






Unsurprisingly, I read and watch a fair amount of stuff about fitness.  I do this so that my clients don’t have to unless they want to and because I like to learn new stuff.  Sometimes the new stuff I learn is that I already know stuff.

I recently spent an hour watching a webinar about combining Pilates and weight training.  I thought:  hey, I’ll get some new insights!  Nope.  It was a lot of what I’ve been doing all this time where I use Pilates (sometimes in stealth mode) with my personal training clients to build more control or proprioception and I use my knowledge of weight training to make sure that my Pilates clients get appropriately challenged.  Doing both Pilates and weight training, and sometimes both together, is better than doing either one alone because bodies need both strength and precision, both relaxation and challenge.

 

We grow where we work.  How can I help?