Between a rock and a rock

Some fitness phrases hurt almost as much as burpees.  My personal least-favorite is “work to failure.”

In concept, I understand the idea that we need to work until we can’t anymore.  One of the ways we get stronger is by maximizing the challenge to our muscles.  We find out the maximum amount we can do by trying one more increase, one more repetition, until there just isn’t another one available.

Failure, though, connotes weakness or lack of character or quitting.  I don’t like that language.  Let’s think, instead, of doing the same thing, but calling it working until we are done.  Or doing the most repetitions with perfect form.  Or pushing our limits.  We have shown up and we are working hard; we are not failures.

Besides, what is impossible this workout becomes possible later.

Me worry?

Monday morning seems like a great time to talk about stress.  The weekend is over and we are back to work, laundry, traffic, and vegetables.  The alarm goes off; we are alarmed.  Sometimes in the midst of that alarm, we find it difficult to remember that we have choices.

Advanced yogis and holy people and dogs (these groups may overlap) may insist that really we can choose whether or not to be stressed.  Speaking for myself, I’m not that cool yet.  The choices I am talking about pertain to what we do about our stress.

We can swear, drink, eat ice cream, jump up and down, run around the block, turn up the music, invent creative insults for our stress people, procrastinate, meditate, take a bath, rearrange the furniture.  Some of those options are better than others.  Let’s pick the best ones, the ones that make us calmer, nicer, stronger, and more resilient.  Our bodies and minds will appreciate us for it.

Cheater cheater bug eater

We all cheat.  Maybe not in the sense that we all prearrange the Candyland cards or cork our bats or something, but we do it.  Blame it on our bodies.

The body, like water, will always go the easiest way.  It will always use momentum and leverage and other handy tricks to avoid expending muscle energy.  Easiest, however, is not always most useful or most efficient or even safest.  And so the handy warning poster was born:  lift with your knees, not your back, for example.

Good form requires that we remember our brains are the boss of our bodies.  We can choose to pull our shoulder blades down our backs when we lift things overhead to reduce stress on our necks.  We can use our abdominals to improve our balance so we never have to use the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” button.

Maybe for a while we won’t be able to lift weights that are quite as heavy as we thought we could when we don’t cheat.  We can’t lift at all when we are injured, however.

Timothy Leary's dead...

A lot of times exercise can be mindless.  We just keep running or pedaling or pushing or rowing, only tuning in when something starts to ache or complain.  After all, the treadmill never goes anywhere, the pool water is always the same color, and gym ceilings are not known for their intricate frescoes.  That kind of mindlessness can be good, working to still the constant wheeling of our brains.

However, paying attention has benefits.  We learn where our bodies are in space (“proprioception” for you word nerds playing along) when we think about the movements we make.  We discover which muscles are working.  We can even figure out how to mitigate some of those aches with better form.

Change can be difficult, but paying attention makes it easier.

The flower is off-topic, but pretty

When my alarm goes off in the morning, I don’t want to exercise.  I want to roll over and sleep.  Besides, it is cold and dark outside the covers.  Somewhere in my brain, I know that I will feel great once I’m moving, but that part hasn’t exactly awakened yet.  Here is how I make myself exercise anyway:  planning.

I get out my exercise clothes the night before and even find my shoes, which can be a challenge since I am good at leaving them all over the place.  I meet up with a friend, or at least have to tell her I’m not coming; texting requires me to be awake enough that I might as well just get up and go.  Since I’ve acquired this smoothie habit, my breakfast gets made ahead; open refrigerator, insert face.

Everyone is different, of course.  What works for me may not be what works for you.  But maybe a little attention ahead of time can make your workout easier to get to.

Continue straight past the lizard...

Test is a loaded word.  Whether it evokes number 2 pencil post traumatic stress or that nightmare about the final in the room we can’t find on the subject we forgot we signed up to take, the very word can set off a stress response.

People, we are not in school anymore.  When we test ourselves, or submit to tests for ourselves, the point is not to gauge our success/worth/general reason for existence or even grade.  We test to get information.

I think about the assessments I do with clients as more like checking the GPS.  Where are we now?  The little blue dot on the map is not a moral judgment.  We can look at the results of the step assessment, for example, as the gas station where we turn to get to the corner of Main and Elm, a place we need to pass through on the way to our destination.  From there, we can see what we need to do next to arrive at the party.

No panicking, okay?

Jar-Jar Binks, however: always scary

Qui-Gon Jinn, noted Jedi master and sage, commented, “There’s always a bigger fish.”  His companions, somehow, were not reassured about their chances of survival as they fled the underwater menaces in The Phantom Menace.  Both Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan have valid points of view on this topic and they are relevant for our fitness pursuits.

Most of the time, we react like Obi-Wan:  scary monster!  Panic!  I will never make it through this overwhelming weight, workout, hill, injury, whatever.  It is okay to be freaked out by some of the things we attempt. 

Qui-Gon’s insight, however, reminds us that if we understand that there will always be bigger challenges (and sometimes pleasant surprises in the shape of things that seem worse and turn out to be the key to success), we can remain calm and deal with the monster.  Eventually, we will look back at the things that terrified us when we first attempted them and realize that they are about as scary as those once-frightening monsters that lived behind the curtains when we were kids.

Keep breathing and keep on working!