Friday exercise on Monday: Curls

(So this was supposed to be Friday’s post, but I was traveling.  It will still work today!)

The lovely Stickie, my exercise model, so named because of her svelte figure and her existence on a series of post-it notes, is demonstrating how to do a curl.  Curls are an excellent exercise for biceps, but I also like to use them to check out postural issues.

To begin, you need to stand up with good posture.  As you know, this means that your ears line up with your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.  Your abs are engaged (of course!).  It is good to check yourself out from the side in a mirror while doing this exercise to ensure that everything stays aligned.

As you exhale, you lift the dumbbells from your sides up to your shoulders.  While this sounds simple enough, your body may not agree.  It tends to cheat by letting the elbows slide back behind your torso or out to the sides.  It likes to recruit other muscles to help the biceps, resulting in a torso that sways backwards and forwards.  Also, if you choose a weight that is heavier than optimal, you will find that your shoulder will creep forward (in trainer-speak, you will find your humeral head is no longer centered in the socket), which strains all the nice little muscles that stabilize your shoulder joint.

As you inhale, you lower the weights back down to your sides, resisting gravity the whole way to maintain control of the weights.  I know it is tempting to let the weights just fall back down, but you build a lot of strength controlling that descent.

Have fun!

Thursday book report: Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery

Eric Franklin’s Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery was like marriage counseling for my body and mind.  Before I read the book, my body and mind lived together pretty amicably, but had some communication issues that made each of them unhappy.  What the book provided was a bridge between the two.

I love words (ya think?) and metaphors and the like.  My body doesn’t always know what to do with words, preferring pictures.  Imagery satisfies both.  Franklin explores the images we have all heard at different times at the gym—imagine you are suspended from the top of your head, for example—but he also gives many, many more.  Imagining one’s pelvis floating on balloons might not work for everyone, but it did keep mine from sinking down into a slouch.

Lots of different kinds of images fill the book, along with a basic introduction to the anatomical structures.  If you want a better understanding of how everything fits together and you are interested in visualizing different ways to make your body work, this book is for you.

I will add one disclaimer.  If you do not like floaty hippie kinds of language, you might want to stick to the anatomically based images, lest you find yourself annoyed with envisioning your breast bone as a flashlight and the like.

The really heavy stuff

I believe in lifting weights, but I draw the line at imaginary ones.  Let’s heft the real dumbbells in front of us, not the ones made of guilt or regret or whatever intangible but psychically heavy stuff.

Step in to the gym with me as a brand new person, created just this very minute.  Your ten-year-old self who could run for hours doesn’t exist.  Neither does your eighteen-year-old bathing beauty or your twenty-year-old running back, unless you are eighteen or twenty right now.  Even your last-year 50-pound-overweight self is gone, replaced by you, here, now.

The best workout you can do is the one that fully exhausts the body you inhabit today.  Some days, that body is stronger than others.  Some days, that body has a cold.  Some days, it’s a good idea to take out aggression on the weights instead of other targets; besides, the dog who sometimes has trouble distinguishing inside from outside doesn’t weigh very much.

Often, it turns out that dropping the psychic weights opens up the ability to lift the real ones.

Learning to learn

Teachers come in lots of different flavors, although most of them will not let you lick them to figure out what flavor they are.  This is a good thing because we learners also come in lots of flavors.  (You can pause here to lick your arm to detect your own flavor if you like.)  Some teachers are peanut butter to our chocolate, lox to our cream cheese, rosemary to our roast potatoes.  What we need to know comes flowing out of those teachers in ways that we can easily absorb.  The challenges become manageable with their help.

Then there are the kind of teachers who are cheddar to our peppermint, pickles to our fruit salad, or ice cream on our steak.  We can still learn from that second kind.  And, no, I don’t mean how to avoid them, although that is definitely a useful skill.  We can learn, by managing our attitudes, how to translate a totally foreign language into something we can understand.

While I was away on vacation, my son T.R. and I took a ski lesson together because we both want to improve.  Our instructor was blunt.  T. does better with a more encouraging style of teaching.  He heard that he was less competent than he thought he was and took that to mean that he was less competent than he really is.  It took a couple of days for him to process what the instructor said into something he could use, and even then he did better at applying what the instructor told me to do.  He made the best of a less than ideal situation.  And next time I would choose a different instructor for him.

For me, the bluntness worked.  Sure, my ego hurt a bit, but I came to the lesson knowing that I needed to learn and that I was not able to figure that out by myself.  Bluntness saves time.

My point, and yes, there is one in there somewhere, is that we, as learners have the responsibility to find the lessons.  When I am wearing my instructor/trainer/teacher hat, I try to make those lessons fun and accessible.  I do that by remembering that I am a learner, too.

It's cold!

It’s a bright new year and I am so motivated to… go back to bed.

I have a cold.  I may assure you that I am dying, but I’m not.  I have stuffy everything and a cough and a headache and all the usual symptoms.  I am crabby and achy.  So what to do about exercise?

Go gently.

Today is not the day for me to ride the extra hill miles, or to add a few more intense intervals to my cardio training.  Not the day to nudge the bench press weight up one notch.  Not the day to tackle some of those tough Pilates exercises.  Today the goal is to show up.

Fitness is a process.  The good news about that is that no one day is the be all and end all of success.  The bad news is that it is never done, crossed off forever.  Which means that I—we—have to keep on doing it.

So:  show up.  Take the dog around the block.  Spend five minutes on the bike.  Do one set of pushups.  Then go rest and get well.

Also, there is the recycling carry...

A few holiday exercises:

Laugh:  If you laugh until your abs hurt, you are doing it correctly.  Repeat as many times as possible.  For some of us, this will also be a pelvic floor exercise.  Crossing your legs is an acceptable variation.

Smile:  The studies I have just made up prove that this exercise reduces unpleasant wrinkles by encouraging the release of endorphins and training the wrinkles into happy grandparent patterns.  Under certain circumstances, it can also build your character muscles, but only if you avoid the clenched teeth version.

Water curls:  Place a glass of water in your hand.  Lift to your mouth and drink.  Repeat until glass is empty.  Do the next set with your other hand.  This exercise is not recommended for other liquids.

(After today, I will be on blog recess until the new year, some of the time on skis!  Enjoy as many holidays as possible!)

They were used lint roller sheets, by the way.

I know everyone else has an absolutely perfect family and the holidays are a blissful, peaceful time for all.  I adore my family, but somehow blissful and peaceful are not words I tend to associate with holidays.  This is why I make a plan.

In case your family happens to lose that Hallmark sparkle, you might want one, too, for emergencies.

Here it is:

1.     Go outside.  Walk the dog.  Borrow a dog.  Steal one.  Walk the cat.  Ride a bike.  Develop a burning need to take up running right this very minute because you are dying to see what the corner of your street looks like at high speed, even if the feeling goes away as soon as you reach the other side of the door.  This works because moving reduces stress.  Distance can also help, since it is more difficult to strangle people from far away, whether you are destined to be a strangler or a victim.

2.   Watch out for the cookies.  They are out to get you.  That may be extreme. One cookie is harmless; you have to watch out when they travel in packs.  They will beat you up and give you a sugar hangover that will have you haunting the cookie jar for weeks.  While you eat your one cookie, you can savor the sweetness of the moment, or imagine that you are chewing up and destroying stress with every bite.

3.      Breathe.  So the kids wrapped the dog?  It will make a good story later.  So will your crazy uncle’s diatribe on the mind control aspects of the space program.  Also, the kids will grow up and your uncle will go home.

4.      Smile.  Or better, laugh.  I have an extremely sincere ornament on my tree made out of lint roller tape, glitter, feathers, and string, made by a formerly small child who will remain nameless lest I have to enter a witness protection program.  If all else fails, I can smile remembering that kid’s proud face, having made something all by himself.