Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Skiing like a moose is fun


Sometimes we need to remember what the goal is.

With fitness, it is easy to get distracted into thinking that the goal is something other than what it really is.  The goal is not to be thin.  It’s not to work out for a certain number of minutes a day or week.  It’s not to be lean or toned or strong or even plain healthy, even though those are all good things.

The goal is to be happy.

Yes, I know that being healthy is a major component of being happy.  Lifting that previously-impossible weight, finishing that marathon, buying those smaller clothes—all good things that can contribute to happiness.  They are not the goal.


So please, when you choose your fitness activity for the day, pick one that will give you joy, either in the moment or in the long term.  Lift weights because you want those muscles to turn your kids upside down as long as possible, even when they keep growing.  Ski because you like to go fast.  Dance because the music moves you.  That is a goal worth meeting.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Unfold like a flower...


You did your cardio workout.  You did your strength training.  All done, right?  Nope.  One more thing.  Time to stretch.

But you have places to be!  Stretching is boring!  It hurts!  You don’t want to waste your time sitting around trying to reach your toes.

Do it anyway.

Maybe you are already perfectly long and lean.  You may have the most gorgeous definition in your muscles ever.  If you can’t move, it doesn’t do you a lot of good.  You are a person, not a sculpture!  Flexibility creates lots of possibilities for movement.  Remaining flexible allows for greater range of motion as you get older, which, in practical terms, means more independence for longer.


Bribe yourself, distract yourself, nudge yourself gently—whatever it takes to spend five minutes lengthening the muscles you are working so hard to build.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Friday exercise: chest lift


I love abs.  I may not love ab exercises, at least not in the moment, but abs are wonderful.

The basic ab exercise is the crunch.  In Pilates, it is called the Chest Lift, which is actually a better name because we really shouldn’t be crunching while exercising, unless we are eating popcorn, which is best done in front of a movie rather than while trying to work.  (Persistence is key when you fall into a sentence like that!)

The exercise begins Lying Down.  Everyone loves lying down!  Even lying down, form is important.  You will want to bend your knees and place your feet in line with your sit bones.  Your spine should feel relaxed, not smooshed into the floor.  Leave a little tunnel under your lower back for passing ladybugs.  If the tunnel is big enough for an iguana, you will need to lower the ceiling.  You will want to support your big heavy head with your hands, keeping your elbows where you can see them; those elbows get up to no good when unsupervised.

Breathe.

Now we are ready to work.  As you exhale, use those abdominals to pull your breastbone down toward your toes.  This will, as a side effect, lift your head off the floor.  Thinking about the exercise this way will help keep your chest safe from evil chin incursions, which will keep your neck safe from excessive flexing.  Since you are a wonderful multi-tasker, you can also think about keeping your abdominals flat and spread out across your body to avoid that little bubble that tends to pop up like an alien fetus.

Curl back down.  Breathe more.


There are lots of variations on this theme, but this is the basic place to start.  Sets of 10 are good, but you know your body; do what works for you.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

And the finger flexibility gain from flossing!


Want a good five minute exercise that may contribute to your overall health?  Go brush your teeth.

I am the possessor of a new silver toothbrush, courtesy of my dentist.  That dental visit yesterday may have been as good a contribution to my health as the spin class I took.  It was certainly less sweaty!

Here is a link to the Mayo Clinic’s information on the topic.  It’s not a long article, but for the truly impatient, here is the summary.  Good oral hygiene may prevent a whole bunch of bad stuff from happening to you, ranging from Alzheimer’s to osteoporosis.  Worst case, you get fresher breath, which is not bad for your social relationships, mood, and state of wakefulness.


So:  up, down, side-to-side.  Give me about 100 reps.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Mmmm... bacon!


This week I learned how to use my hamstrings for pedaling a bike.  It was a major epiphany, maybe not as major as figuring out how to create world peace or to eliminate traffic, but major.

Hamstrings are the muscles in the backs of your thighs that complain when you bend over to touch your toes.  They have plenty of reasons to complain.  They get tight from sitting, since they are responsible for flexing your knees, and bored because they help unbend your legs at the hips, which you don’t do much when you are stuck at your desk.  We all love our quadriceps more and tend to focus on working them instead.  Hamstrings feel like Clark Kent to the quadriceps’s Superman.

Strengthening the hamstrings helps with posture.  Strong hamstrings keep your knees safe.  And, when biking for long distances, hamstrings save your quadriceps’ bacon, so to speak; those front-of-the-thigh muscles get awfully worn out and appreciate any other muscle group that might be willing to take over for a while.

Even more important than what I learned was that I learned it.  Fitness is about the brain, too.  Conscious movement strengthens your body’s ability to understand where it is in space.  Your muscles work better when the connections between your nervous system and your muscles are active and quick.  This is why I love to take classes and get personal training sessions—I learn stuff that makes me a better mover.


(And, for those of you who have not already figured out how to use hamstrings in bike pedaling, the key, for me, was thinking about pulling the pedals down from the back of my thighs rather than pushing them down from the front.  Some people find that thinking about leading with their heels or focusing on pulling backwards works the same way.  Go try it out!)

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Ukelele optional


I spend a lot of time thinking about abdominal muscles.  (You are now feeling incredibly grateful that you don’t have to live in my brain!)  I also spend more time than most people talking about abdominal muscles.  This is because they are important and because I don’t know that many people who want to talk about football, comic books, poetry, and food.  Almost everyone is willing to talk about abdominals in the same way that everyone loves to discuss stress.  And the two are related!

I’m not talking about stressing out about what our abs look like.  That’s not useful.  Let’s agree not to do it.  We are where we are, we can do amazing things, and we can always improve.

Stress, in life and in the body, often occurs as a result of lack of balance.  It comes from Too Much:  too much work, too much food, too much debt, too much of everything.  Sometimes it comes from Too Little:  too little sleep, too little whiskey… (ok, maybe that one is all right…).  When we lose our center of gravity, we spin out of balance and can crash.  That’s where the abdominals come in.

The abdominals are some of the most important core muscles of the body.  They are responsible for stability.  Keeping them on the job keeps us centered and powerful, able to meet whatever weird stuff comes flying at us.

How to engage them?  Of course there are the usual suspects:  crunches and their cohorts.  Tired of those?  Try hula, swimming, ballet, boxing, or Pilates.  Jump up on the Bosu for your arm work.  Skateboard!  Rollerblade!  Even just let go of the handles on the elliptical trainer or treadmill and notice that you need to keep those abs working.


Also, don’t forget to breathe!

Monday, December 1, 2014

Remember to take the bulb out first...


Weight lifting can be fun.  Maybe not wearing-a-lampshade-on-your-head fun, although I suppose that keeping the lampshade balanced would improve posture while lifting weights, but fun.  Here’s why:

You get to feel like a superhero. Wonder Woman has to practice with that magic lasso to develop the muscle memory to throw it accurately.  Spiderman needs strength as well as sticky feet to climb up those skyscrapers.  It would be a pretty poor rescue if Superman swooped up to catch Lois and didn’t have the arm strength to hold her.  (And maybe if Lois had worked out a bit more, she would have been able to pull herself back over the parapet of that tall building, preventing the need for rescue entirely!)

So your regular life may not require those superhero skills, but you may need to carry the 35-pound sewing box your son made you or a giant pile of packages or the 15 bags of groceries required to feed the family.  If you happen to be getting older (hey, every day we all do!) and you want to be independent, making sure you can squat and stand will allow you to maintain that superhero independence far longer.  I think we would all prefer to be self-rescuing.

You get to look good in your jeans.  Or out of your jeans!  There are a couple of reasons for this.  Weight training increases your lean body mass.  That lean mass burns more calories and takes up less space.  Even thin people can be flabby; training the muscles gives the body the beautiful toned shape we admire in art, fashion, and posters of scantily clad rock stars/models/etc.

You get to try lots of things.  Because we have so many muscles, we get to do lots of different exercises to target the various groups.  If you have a short attention span—hey!  What’s that?—you don’t have to worry because pretty soon you can stop doing squats and move on to hammer curls (or, as I call them, Drumming Monkeys).  There is always something new to try, which is good for your brain as well as your body.


And if the lampshade helps, by all means use it!