No Ab Is an Island

I love ab exercises, of course.  However, I like exercises that use our abdominals while we do other stuff even better.  Here’s why.

 

Exercises like crunches or femur arcs or even my beloved pretty princesses work our abdominals in isolation.  They are fabulous for learning how to engage our abdominals and how to work them properly (without pooching them out!  We love you, transversus abdominis!).  What they don’t do is teach us how to use our core for support in our regular lives, unless we somehow have a life in which we lie around on our backs all day.

 

Real life involves things like standing up, lifting things, twisting, balancing, and bending.  When we do an exercise like woodchoppers, we are doing all of those things with the support of our core muscles.  It’s like we’ve done our core isolation exercises to learn the vocabulary and then we do our woodchoppers to have a conversation.  We apply what we have learned to more complex movements.

 

I do include core isolation exercises in the workouts I plan for my clients, but I am not doing my job if those clients are not using core musculature during the whole workout! 

Checking In: Part 2

Yesterday we talked about taking a bunch of measurements.  Now that we have all this information, how are we going to use it?  As always, this depends on our goals, but here are a few possible scenarios:

 

We like the direction things are going.  Our weight has gone down or our circumference measurements have gone down, or both!  Woot!  That’s great news!  If we have reached our goals, we can just carry on as we have been.  If we still have a ways to go to reach our goals, we want to make sure that we keep challenging our bodies by adding weight or speed or intervals or all of the above to keep things interesting.

 

We don’t like the direction things are going.  Bummer.  We need to dig a little deeper into the data to see what the problem is, but most of the time I find that we are eating more than we think we are.  Sometimes we’ve been skipping a few too many workouts or we have been doing the exact same workout for too long and our bodies have stopped adapting.

 

We are confused.  Our weight is not budging, but our measurements have gone down.  What’s up with that?  Congratulations!  We’ve reduced our body fat percentage!  Because muscle is more dense than fat, we can build muscle, lose fat, and stay the same weight, but with a better body composition.  Our metabolisms rev up because those new muscles burn more calories than the fat they replaced, so if we maintain our healthy eating, we may begin to lose pounds, too.

 

We are bored.  Good news!  It’s time to switch things up to keep our bodies adapting.  If we’ve been doing lots of reps with low weights, now is a good time to do fewer reps with heavier weights (or vice versa).  If we’ve been stuck in the gym on the treadmill for months, now might be a good time to take it outside and maybe even add some hills to the workout.  Throwing in one longer workout a week can increase our post-exercise calorie use.

 

Still not sure what to do?  Hey, that’s what I am for!  Ask me!

Checking In: Part 1

Here we are in March!  That was fast!  So:  how about we take a moment to check in with our bodies and see how the year is going?  Today I’ll discuss what we might want to evaluate at this point and tomorrow I’ll talk about what we might want to do to tweak our fitness plans (or, you know, make a fitness plan in the first place).

 

First let’s talk about the quantitative measures we can use.  Two useful sorts of measurements are weight and circumferences.  For the first one, we just step on the scale and see how we’re doing.  As with all of the measurements I’m going to discuss, we want to do our best to take them under the same circumstances as much as possible; that is, in the same or similar clothes, at a similar time of day, using the same devices, and so on (hydration level can be important!).  Personally, I forget stuff when I don’t do it first thing in the morning, so that’s my preferred time, but other people have different sorts of rhythms.

 

Circumference measures require either a sewing-type tape measure or a long enough piece of string and a regular tape measure.  The most common and useful measurements to track are the chest (at the nipple line), the waist (at the belly button), the hips (at the widest point), the upper arm (halfway between the shoulder and elbow), the thigh (halfway between hip and knee OR at widest point—remember which one!), and the calf (at the widest point).  The reason for all those parentheses is that we need to make sure that we are measuring the same spot each time.  The narrowest part of our waist might not be at the belly button, but the belly button is a useful landmark for where to measure so we can track the changes.

 

People with fancy fitness trackers/Apple Watches/wristy overlords may want to track some other pieces of data.  Depending on your gizmo, you can track all kinds of things, but one metric I would like to point out is HRV (heart rate variability).  Research suggests that this measurement is one of the best indicators of cardio fitness.  NOTE:  it is a highly individual measurement and we should NOT compare ours to anyone else’s because that’s just not useful data.  In general, we want our HRV to trend higher.  (Folks who want to get REALLY fancy can track the measurement for a couple of weeks, figure out an average HRV, and then plan workouts for each day based on whether a particular day’s measurement is above or below average—a harder workout on a higher HRV day and a more recovery-based workout on a lower one; this has been shown to produce better results than plain old planning alone.)

 

Those of us who want even more gizmos can acquire a blood pressure cuff and track that, but it is not necessary unless high blood pressure is a problem.  Those of us who are curious about our body fat percentage can get a bioelectrical impedance monitor.  The consumer versions are not as accurate as the medical ones or as the water displacement tests, but they do allow us to track changes if we use the same device under the same circumstances every time.  The monitor I have also computes BMI, but anybody with a calculator (or a pencil and paper) can do the same (I am not putting the formula here because I think BMI is a bad measurement and less useful than many other indicators of health and fitness—anyone who wants the info can Google it).

 

One other kind of tracking we might consider is food tracking.  There are tons of apps out there to make it easy.  If we have been tracking, now we might want to do a little evaluating of how we are doing.  If we haven’t been tracking, we can start now.

 

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what to do with all this data.

Pelvis, no Elvis

Recently I went to a workshop on Pilates for pelvic floor health.  Nearly all of us will have some pelvic floor issues at some point in our lives, so it was a practical decision.  I learned tons and my clients will be seeing little sneaky things creeping into their workouts to keep everything functioning smoothly (and drily!) as we go forward.  However, there are two things we all can do to improve our function that have nothing to do with kegels.

 

The first thing we can do is, surprisingly, to breathe deeply.  Deep inhales and exhales into the abdomen allow the pelvic floor to contract completely and then relax completely.  Muscles that are held too tightly or too loosely are weak muscles.  Teaching muscles to contract and relax allows us to create the optimal amount of tension for whatever we happen to be doing.  So what do I mean by deep breathing?  We need to inhale so that the breath fills our torsos from the bottom up and then empties the same way.  That’s it.  We may not be able to concentrate on breathing that way all the time, but even a few minutes of attention to the breath a couple of times a day will help.  (Bonus:  we get mindfulness points for this!)

 

The second thing we can do is to strengthen our deep abdominal muscles.  Most of us spend a lot of time focusing on the surface ones (the rectus abdominis) because those are the ones that make the six-pack look.  However, looks aren’t everything.  Below the rectus, we have the transversus abdominis, which runs across the body from side to side.  That’s the one we need to befriend in order to improve our function (not only for pelvic floor, but for all kinds of daily activities!).  When we hear (or use) cues like drawing our belly buttons to our spines, we are recruiting our rectus abdominis.  Instead, to wake up our transversus, we can think about all the stuff in our abdomens and imagine that we are shrink-wrapping it.  That feeling of pulling all those squishy bits together is our transversus working.  We can, of course, do this during our workouts, but we can also take a moment every once in a while during the day to do it all by itself (or maybe we can do it when we do our breathing?  Too organized?  Probably not.).

 

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Squat!

I have made no secret of the fact that squats are my favorite exercise.  However, I may have not been as obvious about WHY they are my favorite.

 

The very first reason they are my favorite is that I want to live an independent life all the way to the end.  As long as I can get up and down off the toilet by myself, I won’t necessarily have to go to assisted living or nursing home care (except, of course, if my tiny mind loses touch with reality, but that’s another problem).  In other words, I do squats to avoid a boring and sad existence in a small room.

 

A more cheerful reason to do squats is that squats work pretty much everything in our bodies.  The more muscles that work during an exercise, the more the exercise impacts our metabolism, burns calories, recruits stabilizers, improves our strength, and prepares us for the challenges of the world outside the gym.

 

Speaking of those challenges outside the gym, squats are particularly important as we get older.  By the time we get to 70, nearly all of us will have some bone loss (a.k.a. osteoporosis).  We can minimize that bone loss by doing weight-bearing activity (like squats!), but it will still happen.  With bone loss, we have to be careful about flexing our spines to avoid fractures.  In practical terms, this means that when we need to pick up things like packages or dogs or small children from the floor, we need to use our knees to get low rather than our backs.  Squatting regularly helps us do that.

 

Squats can be modified to suit nearly everyone.  People with troublesome knees may prefer to do squats with a stability ball against a wall or with the support of a TRX.  People with bionic/replacement knees will need to ensure that they don’t go too deep into the squat, as do folks with hip replacements.  Obviously, if a doctor or physical therapist tells us not to do them or if we experience the harmful kind of pain when we try to do them, we should skip them.  Otherwise, we should go for it.

 

Go play.

Fighting the Power Is Good Exercise, Too

If the Personal Trainer Police exist, they’re probably going to come get me for saying this, but whatever:  I’m just not that into weight loss.  Sure, I know about it and I know how to help clients if that’s their goal, but I just don’t think it’s that important.  Hear me out about why.

 

A number on a scale doesn’t mean anything except what we attach to it.  Two bodies with the same scale number can look radically different, and, more importantly, feel radically different.  We have bought, as a society, the Kool-Aid that the lower the number the better.  This is not true.

 

Here is what I am excited about instead of weight loss.  I am excited when people get stronger.  I am excited when they change their body composition and shape by lifting weights and building lean body mass.  I am prone to celebrate when I hear that my clients were able to do something they never could before or weren’t able to do for a long time because of the hard work they’ve put in during their workouts.  I love it when my clients fall in love with what their bodies are capable of and how they look and feel as powerful humans.

 

I do care about health, but it turns out that exercise (cardio, weight lifting, and mindbody practices) impacts health even if weight loss doesn’t occur.  Another thing that has massive health impact?  Stress.  So stressing out about weight loss or lack of weight loss is not helpful.  I want my clients to find exercise that they enjoy (or at least don’t hate), to love themselves for being miraculous this very moment, and to live full, rich lives.

 

So, yeah, I can help people lower the number on the scale, but I’d rather amp up the joy in their lives by building strong, confident, and comfortable humans.

Get started

Let’s talk about yoga and Newtonian physics (I leave the quantum physics to experts).  Both yoga and physics apply to all our workouts, surprisingly enough.  They agree:  the hardest part is getting started.

 

In yoga, this is phrased like this:  To begin is the victory.

 

Physics, in the form of Newton’s first law of motion, says it a little differently:  A body at rest tends to remain at rest and a body in motion tends to remain in motion.

 

In our daily lives, then, what we need to focus on is that first step.  Once we get going, once we get to the gym or get on the bike or look at the weights or roll out the mat, we can keep on going more easily.  We win by showing up.

Ow!

Sometimes it seems like colder weather just brings out the aches and pains.  I like to whine about stuff as much as the next person, but eventually I want to deal with the issues, so here are some thoughts about what to do when it all hurts, since a Hawaiian vacation is not on the horizon any time soon.

 

On the prevention side of the equation, we can make sure that we get enough of a warm-up before we work out.  If, like me, other folks are impatient, it might be a good idea to re-brand the idea as “not going at top speed/weight/intensity from the starting buzzer.”  Also, it is best to get a little warm before starting to stretch—cold muscles are cranky about flexibility just like cold rubber bands don’t like stretching much.  Choosing the right workout intensity is also a good idea to help keep things from hurting too much—a little soreness is a good thing, but we need to dial it down if we’re still feeling it after two days.

 

Then there is the palliative side of things.  (Insert usual disclaimer here.  I am not a doctor or a physical therapist.  I do not diagnose or treat illness or injury.  I am a trainer giving generalized advice for non-injury soreness.  Injured people should seek out qualified medical professionals.)  The old trainer’s mantra is RICE:  rest, ice, compression, elevation, or in other words, take it easy, chill it, wrap it, and hold it above the heart until the swelling goes down.  In addition, if there is soreness but no swelling, warmth can be helpful.  I am a big fan of Ibuprofen for those who can take it or other OTC pain relievers—no pain is better than pain!—but not if it means that we’re just going to go out and do more of what made us sore in the first place.  Massage can also make us feel like whole new humans.  If the budget doesn’t allow for massage, foam rollers, tune-up balls, or other SMR tools might do the trick.

 

It is okay to rest and recover.  It is how we come back stronger.

Step Away from the Shake-Weight and the Air Fryer

Welcome to December, month of gift-giving.  Which is to say it is time for my yearly helpful reminder:  do not give passive-aggressive fitness gifts.

 

What fitness gifts qualify as passive-aggressive?  Any exercise equipment or clothing, any cooking/diet supplies, any subscriptions or books about fitness or exercise or healthy diets that were not specifically requested by the recipient are passive-aggressive.  We may think we are being helpful by giving Uncle Larry some yoga classes—that dude needs to chill out before he has a heart attack—but no, we are not being helpful and may in fact be adding to Uncle Larry’s stress.  It may be abundantly clear to everyone that Mom could use some larger exercise pants, but it is not up to us to address that unless she asks us to do so.

 

It is, however, entirely fine to buy ourselves fitness gifts.  We could probably use some chill time and some new exercise pants as well.  And, again, if our loved ones ASK for fitness gifts, we can shop to our little hearts’ content.

 

Be kind.

How to Modify

Workouts are not one-size-fits-all.  I mean, I’m not going to try to do a marathoner’s workout because I like continuing to breathe and I’m not going to get what I need from a workout geared toward someone who has been bedridden for the last year.  That part is obvious.  However, even workouts that are designed for people with more or less our level of fitness may need modifications to be right for the individuals we are.  Here are some ways to customize the exercises to make them optimal for us.

 

If we have an injury, current or chronic:  we may need to make some substitutions.  Folks with bad knees will want to avoid jumping.  People who have recently given birth may also prefer non-impact exercises to avoid leakage.  Those of us who are older and may have bone density issues will want to avoid spinal flexion.  These are only a few examples, but the basic principle is that if it hurts, don’t do it.

 

If the workout is too hard:  we have some choices to make, depending on how it is too hard.  If we are too out of breath, we need to tone down the cardio by moving slower, moving smaller, or resting more.  This is another place where lower- or no-impact exercises can help.  If our muscles can’t cope with the load, we can, obviously, use smaller weights, but we can also do fewer repetitions.  Also, there are many ways to work the same muscle groups.  If, for example, a renegade row is too challenging, we can do a bent-over row instead.

 

If the workout is too easy:  we can increase the challenge.  From a cardio standpoint, if we want more challenge, the easiest way to do that is to add jumping.  Plain squats become jump squats.  Step ups become jump ups.  It is also possible to increase the cardio aspect of a workout by making movements bigger.  This is the cardio difference between overhead presses and clean and presses.  Heavier weights can also add more cardio to the mix.  And there are always cardio intervals:  throw in a minute of jump rope or a quick sprint on the treadmill between sets of weights for cardio fun.  The solution if the weight part is too easy is not always just throwing more weight at ourselves, although that does often do the trick.  It depends on what our goals are.  Many of us may find that we get the challenge we want from doing more compound exercises and fewer isolation exercises (lunge to curl versus bicep curl, for example).  In general, when we increase weight, we want to reduce the number of repetitions until we get used to the new weight.  Then when the new weight gets easy, we add reps, alternating our way upward to greatness.

 

If we really really hate a particular exercise, most of the time we don’t have to do that one.  There are a lot of exercises out there and we can usually find a different way to attack the same problem.  There are very few things we just have to suck up; this is a good thing.

 

Ultimately, I encourage everyone to experiment and see what works.  As we work out more, we will need to continue to experiment as our capabilities expand.

 

Go play. 

Is Your Trainer Fit?

I have mentioned before that I am not the right trainer for everyone.  There are people out there who need different things than I can provide.  Here are some ways to tell if a trainer is a good fit.

 

Does the person have the knowledge/education/training to keep us safe?  All of us should ask if the trainer we are talking to has a certification (NASM or ACE or similar) to be a personal trainer at all.  It is also worth asking about a trainer’s specializations and continuing education.  For example, people with an extensive injury history might want to know that their trainer knows about corrective exercise.  Older folks might want to know that their needs are understood and planned for.  That’s just basic.

 

Does the person know how to get us to our goals?  If we are just getting started on our fitness journey, we want someone who knows how to move us along gradually so we don’t burn out or get injured.  If we are training for an event like a marathon or a century ride, we want someone whose workouts facilitate those goals.  If we are trying to lose weight, we might want to seek out someone who not only has the skill to plan our workouts but also the appropriate knowledge to help us make good food choices.

 

Is the person likeable?  I know likeable is a very fuzzy term, but I’m using it on purpose.  We have to feel comfortable with the person training us.  Some of us want rah-rah cheerleading trainers.  Some of us want a more matter-of-fact approach.  Some of us (I find this hard to believe, but it seems to be true) want someone to yell at us until we do our work.  How much does the person talk?  Does the person give enough information?  Too much?  Not enough?  Do they give understandable directions and demonstrations?  When we are struggling, do they understand how to motivate us?  Most importantly, does the person listen and hear what we have to say about what we need?

 

Finally, is the person reliable?  We need to know that our trainer is organized enough to show up for our workouts as scheduled and to communicate with us when there is a problem.  This is a surprisingly rare skill.

 

Do not hesitate to ask lots of questions.  When we pay good money for training, we should know that we are getting what we need.

Stretch Goals

I spend a good chunk of time encouraging people to stretch.  Almost no one does enough stretching, so from that perspective, any kind of stretching is good stretching.  However, in the interest of promoting optimal behavior, here’s a basic primer on how to do it:

 

There are at least two kinds of stretching:  static and dynamic.  Static stretching is the kind where we hold a stretched position for a while, like when we bend over and touch our toes.  Dynamic stretching is when we move through stretched positions, like when we twist back and forth at the waist.  Both kinds are good for us.

 

When we do static stretches, it is important to begin with warm muscles or at the very least to go slowly at first.  Taking our muscles to their maximum stretch first thing is a good way to pull something.  So:  we begin gently, stretching our muscles to the point where we feel a little tension.  NOTE:  stretching is not supposed to hurt.  It may be slightly uncomfortable, but if we hit the pain point, we are going too far.  Once we find that little bit of tension place, we need to hang out for a while.  Most of us are really impatient.  We stretch for about a second and say, “Done!”  Ideally, we stay in the stretch for thirty seconds to a minute.  For most of us, a good marker for that amount of time is about five deep breaths.  This gives our muscles some time to adjust to the stretch.  We may find that after those five breaths, we can go a little farther into the stretch without pain and repeat the process.  This allows our bodies to build flexibility in a gradual and sustainable way.

 

Dynamic stretches, in my experience, don’t build flexibility as well, but they do wake up existing flexibility.  I like them as part of a warm-up.  It’s what dancers do at the barre before getting to the actual dancing.  Just like with static stretches, the goal is to take the muscles to a place where they feel a little tension, but not pain.  We go gently to that place and out of it, not with quick bounces like some of us were taught eons ago in P.E.

 

Ultimately, any stretching is better than no stretching, so we should do the kind that appeals most to us.

 

Go play.

You're Getting Warmer

It’s cooling down outside, so, naturally, I’m going to talk about warming up.  On one level, I’m not a big believer in warm-up exercises.  The body will, in fact, warm up as we go along with our workout.  That said, we don’t want to jump right into the most difficult and heaviest and most demanding bits of our workouts.  We need a little preparation for that.

 

Now that I have everyone good and confused, let me unpack what warm-ups are and are not.  Warm-ups are essentially slower and less challenging versions of the exercises we do during our workout and/or some cardio to get our hearts moving.  They are kind of like practice versions of the real stuff.  Because of the way I design workouts, the first exercise is always a cardio one, so the warm-up is essentially built in.

 

A lot of people think of stretching as a warm-up exercise.  This is only sometimes true.  Doing static stretches before doing some movement is not super effective for flexibility, can cause muscle pulls, and, if we are looking for personal bests in our lifts, can, according to some studies, have a negative impact on our one rep max.  Dynamic stretching (think lunges or old-fashioned windmills) are better for warm-ups or static stretches can follow cardio.

 

In general, the older we are, the more warm-up we need.  Yes, this is unfair.  Please file the appropriate complaint form in the round file.  I would fix it if I could.  I will, however, point out that a little extra warm-up time is way better than sideline time due to injury.

 

Bottom line:  do a few minutes of cardio and maybe some dynamic stretching before doing the heavy lifting.

One sick workout??

I’ve had a cold for the last week or so, which means I have been thinking about whether or not to work out.  Here are some general guidelines for anyone in a similar situation.

 

First, we want to avoid “sharing” our illness with others.  This means skipping the gym workouts and the non-virtual classes and training sessions.  Having a home-based or outside workout for this situation is a good idea.  No one will like us if we share our germs, and this is especially true in pandemic times as flu season approaches.  I hope we have all learned a lot in the last while about taking care of other people’s health by staying away from them when we are sick, but it is never bad to be reminded.

 

Now that we’ve got public safety out of the way, we can address the personal issues.  One of the first things to keep in mind is that IT IS OKAY TO REST.  Sorry to shout, but it can be hard to be heard over the noise of the Protestant Work Ethic and all that advertising telling us we’re not doing enough to be fabulous and the general ick of the white-supremecist-imperialist-cis-normative-heteronormative-capitalist patriarchy.  Our bodies need more sleep when we are sick.  Fighting off bacterial or viral invaders takes a lot of energy.  If we don’t feel up to working out, we don’t have to do it.  The workouts will still be there for us when we feel better.

 

If we don’t feel like we need to rest all that much, it is still a good idea not to go for a personal record of any kind while we are sick.  Skip the hill route, substitute a walk for a run, do the body weight workout, or do restorative yoga.  This is one time when a light workout is definitely better than a challenging one.

 

Cardio is normally one of my favorite things because of its mood-boosting properties.  However, when just plain breathing is hard because we’re congested or coughing, it is best to choose something like stretching or yoga or light weight-lifting or Pilates.  Our bodies are working hard enough fighting the snot.

 

Another thing to consider is how well our brains are working.  When we are fuzzy-headed from congestion or from decongestants, we may not have the focus to keep ourselves safe while working out.  When in doubt, skip the workout; it’s much better to miss one workout than to get injured and miss lots of them.

 

Finally:  drink lots of water.  This is always true, but especially when we are sick.

Maybe a different kind of rest?

I spend a surprising amount of time, given my profession, telling people to rest.  However, sometimes when we’re feeling low-energy and tired, we don’t actually need rest; we need to get moving.

 

I know we’ve all had days (or maybe even weeks!) where we’ve had a lot on our minds and we feel stressed out.  We may have “treated” ourselves to less healthy foods as a stress management technique, or leaned on the caffeine to make up for the sleep we can’t seem to get.  It is tempting, at that point, to crawl under the covers or cocoon ourselves on the couch, but if we want to get our minds and bodies back to life, we’d do better to throw on some shoes and go for a walk.

 

I am not saying that we shouldn’t sleep when we need to, or that we should go run a marathon to beat the fatigue.  I AM saying that some moderate exercise and maybe a dose of fresh air is the kind of break we need even more.  Cardio, once we get started, increases our energy level and boosts our mood.  Our brains start to work better.  Going outside literally changes our perspective (bonus points for going outside into a natural setting, where “forest bathing” can occur to soothe our souls).

 

It takes determination to get started when we feel blah or worse.  We can talk ourselves into it by giving ourselves stupidly easy goals, like walking around the block one time.  We may discover that that is enough; we’ve earned our nap at that point.  We may, however, realize that we feel better already and we’d like to do another lap or two.

 

Go play.

Short Circuit (not that kind...)

There are lots of reasons to like circuit training, but the one that seems really compelling to me right now is that it doesn’t require a long attention span.  Done right, there is no time to get bored and in half an hour to 45 minutes, both cardio and weight training are taken care of.  And the next time, the workout can be completely different!

 

So what is this done right I’m talking about?

 

A good circuit includes cardio, upper body, lower body, and abdominal exercises.  Many times, the cardio exercises do double-duty as whole body exercises.  Ideally, after the warm up, we get our heart rate up a couple of times during the circuit and then have a rest period at the end of a round, or we have mini-rests after a few exercises and a longer rest at the end.

 

A short circuit might be six exercises, two cardio or whole body, one or two upper body, one or two lower body, and one ab exercise.  A workout would be three or four cycles through the circuit, depending on time and energy.  Here’s a sample:

 

30 clean and presses (cardio/whole body)

30 squats (lower body)

20 bench press (upper body)

30 mountain climbers (cardio)

20 lunges (lower body)

10 pretty princesses (abs)

 

Notice that the exercises are distributed rather than bunched; cardio does not follow cardio and lower body does not follow lower body.  Also notice that the abs, which involve lying down, happen at the end just before the rest.

 

Try making your own!

Banish the Hobgoblin!

Crazy Uncle Ralph (Waldo Emerson) said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  My mind appears to be hobgoblin-free, because I try not to be too foolish or too consistent.  Why am I thinking about this?  I was thinking about workout plateaus and how to deal with them.

 

Workout plateaus, those times when we don’t seem to be making progress, can be incredibly frustrating.  We look resentfully at the numbers on the weights, which are not going up, or the numbers on the run time, which are not going down, or the numbers on the scale, which seem to be frozen entirely.  So how do we break out?

 

It depends.

 

Sometimes we hit a plateau because we are not working as hard as we think we are.  We’ve actually been coasting a bit on the cardio, or skipping workouts here and there.  It’s also possible that we aren’t eating as well as we think we are.  This is where it is good to renew our commitment to tracking, because that will reveal what is really going on.  Then we can adjust as needed.

 

Other times, we are hitting the plateau because we have been overtraining.  As hard as it is when we are really motivated to DO things, we need to choose to rest a bit at that point.  Easing off gives our systems time to catch up with all the good work we’re doing.

 

We have to check in with ourselves and gently inquire what is going on.  If we are slacking off, we can nudge ourselves back into the work and if we’re overtired, we can treat ourselves with love and take a nap.

Weight!

I think most of us, when we think of exercise, think of cardio or of sports.  It takes a while to get around to remembering weight training and sometimes even longer to get around to doing any.

 

Sometimes all those weights in the gym can look intimidating.  So can some of the people using them.  I have a news flash:  those weights are for everyone and those other people need to share nicely.  Often, people start with the weight machines.  That’s a good place to begin because the machines have some built-in safety and stability things and there are directions, right there, in words and pictures.  Working with the machines offers a way to get comfortable in the gym, look around, see what else is going on.  And then, after a while, we realize that the machines are pretty boring for both our bodies and our minds.

 

Free weights open up lots of possibilities.  When we use them, we are not artificially stabilized by the tracks of machines.  We have to use our own core to do that.  We have to pay attention because free weights don’t have something protecting us from dropping them on our own feet.  It can be a lot more rewarding and challenging.  It is all right, and even encouraged, that we start small and build from there.  It’s worth the trouble.

Mobility vs. Flexibility: YES!

I hear a lot about people feeling stiff (No, not like that.  Get your mind out of the gutter!).  There are at least two things going on there, and we often have some confusion about a couple of common terms.  I’m going to explain.

 

Flexibility is about muscles.  When our muscles feel stiff, we need to stretch them.  This happens when we are stuck in a chair for too long or we do a bunch of exercise and don’t stretch afterwards to help our muscles recover from all that contracting.  Flexibility is a learnable skill, although there will always be folks who are more flexible than others.

 

Mobility, on the other hand, is about bones and joints.  As we get older, mobility can be affected by things like osteoarthritis.  We want to preserve as much mobility as we can and the way we do that is to take our joints through their full range of motion pretty much daily.  Mobility is a lot more structural, but we still can help it along by working on our flexibility and by continuing to move.

 

Bottom line:  moving is still good.  Go play.

Defining Rest

Yesterday I wrote a little about how we need to temper our enthusiasm for working out with periods of rest.  Today I want to dive into what rest looks like, because it doesn’t always look like lying on the couch like a slug (although there are times when that is a perfectly valid way to rest!).

 

When we first start working out, we want to be building the habit of working out as much as we want to be building up our endurance and our strength.  It is better to do short workouts almost every day than one long workout and then nothing until the next Monday rolls around.  For fresh-off-the-couch fitness enthusiasts, I recommend starting with fifteen to thirty minutes of cardio on five days of the week and maybe one weight workout per week.  That leaves one day for the couch.

 

As we get more fit, our workouts can get longer and/or more intense.  We may not have a couch day every week, just days when we take the intensity down a lot (walk versus run, yoga instead of heavy weights, etc.).  We also may realize that things that used to be workouts aren’t really all that strenuous anymore—that walk to the coffee shop that used to take half an hour round trip now takes half the time and we don’t even sweat—so now it counts as activity rather than exercise.  Activity can be a form of rest, too.

 

One kind of rest that should be (but isn’t, here in Reality Land) nonnegotiable is getting enough sleep.  It is hard to fit our 7 to 9 hours of sleep in with all the other things we have to get done, but without it, we are hamstringing our ability to make progress with our workouts, not to mention the even more important parts of life.

 

Work hard and then get some rest!