No, it isn't a torture device...

Pilates can seem very odd at first.  The equipment looks weird and maybe a little scary, what with all the springs and straps.  The exercises seem so simple, except they turn out to be a lot more challenging than expected.

We come to Pilates for a variety of reasons.  Maybe we find we need balance.  Maybe we want to achieve good posture.  Maybe we would like to connect with our breathing.  Or, you know, look tall and thin and hot.

The beauty of Pilates is that it meets us where we are.  We get to focus on the small stuff that makes big differences, whether we are coming back from injury or looking for a new kind of challenge to add to our exercise repertoire.

If nothing else, Pilates provides a space to move on purpose and with art.  We can shape our minds along with our bodies.

I just like flamingos

Sometimes it seems like exercise takes too long.  There are so many body parts that could use some work.  We get in our cardio, but then there isn’t time for weights.  Almost everyone seems to skip the stretching and rolling because it doesn’t seem worth the time it takes.

It doesn’t have to take that long.

The secret weapon is interval training.  Half an hour of cardio is plenty if we make sure to mix in some maximal intensity intervals.  We can even add cardio intervals to our weight workouts to squeeze more benefit into less time.  We have bought into the idea that more is better.  Unless we have professional athlete aspirations, it isn’t necessary to move in at the gym, marry the treadmill, and know the deep personal details of every single dumbbell.

We can even save enough time to stretch and roll.  Our muscles deserve it after working so hard.

Dashing, darting, diving...

Monday morning is such a nice time to think about exercise.  It is also a pretty good time to get some!  I like to begin my Mondays with cardio.

Cardio exercise prepares the brain for the day ahead.  It wakes us up, clears out the clouds, and helps us concentrate later in the day.  When we push through some intervals as well, we get bonus points for our metabolisms.  Intervals also train our hearts and lungs to recover more quickly and help us burn more calories in less time.

Let’s find our music and pick an activity:  walking, running, skipping, jumping, skating, ellipting (okay, that’s probably not a word…), skiing, biking, unicycling, hiking, zumba-ing, dancing, competitive hopscotch, chasing dogs/boys/girls, or anything else that gets our hearts pumping and our lungs panting.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  We made it through another holiday season full of adventure, food, family, friends, and wrapping paper!  It was great!

Right about now, it would be traditional for us to jump on some new, super-difficult, self-punishing, sugar-free, kale-infested, burpee-intensive program for “detoxing” or “getting serious” or something.  Let’s not.  We will just jump right back off, slightly stiffer and grumpier.

Bulletin: we do not need something awful to turn us awesome; we are already awesome.  What we do need, to increase our awesomeness, is a plan.

Let’s take five minutes off from watching parades/football/reruns to think about what we actually want for our health this year.  It might be a bikini.  Or it might be a surfboard.  We may want to stop carrying around an invisible 20 pound backpack.  We may want to jump out of bed in the morning instead of holding our own personal towing party.  We may just want to release the tension.  Whatever it is that we want, we need to choose activities that enhance our chances of getting it.

As always, don’t forget to breathe.

ZZZZ...

Unfortunately, we can’t work out all the time.  Our bodies require rest as well as work.  Short rests during a workout allow the body’s energy systems to reset.  Longer rests between workouts promote body growth as the muscles recover stronger than before.

Rest is a challenging concept.  We feel guilty about it.  Surely we should be Doing Something.  Rest is that thing.

However, there are some sneaky ways to make rest feel less like wasting time.  We can rest one muscle group while working another, perhaps following squats with bench presses or pushups with lunges.  We can stretch, something that should in fact make us feel extra virtuous since we all need to do it and yet somehow most of us don’t.  We can rest from intense cardio with weights and vice versa.

Best of all, we can sleep.  I know there is a mystique about the I’ll-sleep-when-I’m-dead people.  Some very few people in the world can thrive with not very much sleep.  The rest of us just get cranky, achy, sick, and stupid.

Happy dreams…

Again!

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could exercise once and be done with it?  Who wouldn’t want to escape (your least favorite exercise here) forever by doing a single set?  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

As the Under Armour commercial I saw last night says, we are the sum of what we do every day.  (It features Tom Brady, who is not exactly my personal poster-boy for doing things the Right Way, but that’s just picking on their example rather than their point.)  This is good news in several ways.  No one workout is going to make or break us.  We have tired days, days when our bodies rebel at the very idea of working out.  And those days when we can run twenty laps around the globe without breaking a sweat?  They feel great, but we don’t get to be awesome for life on the strength of them. 

Show up.  Every time.  That’s winning.

I can see this bike from the spin bike, too

My name is Janet and I am a football addict.  I started watching casually when I was a kid because my dad watched.  And then I was in high school in the 80s and there were the great Niner teams.  Later on, I found that watching large men hit each other on Monday nights after work had a soothing (or maybe cathartic?) effect.  Later still, my boys started to watch with me.

There are many reasons why being a football addict might not be a good thing (glorification of violence, excessive valuation of athletic ability over character, wanton sacrifice of young men’s health for entertainment, rampant consumerism, brain cell loss from too many beer/truck commercials), but the one I want to focus on today is that games are long.  If we sit on our behinds on the couch for a three-hour broadcast, we are not doing ourselves any favors.  Getting up to get more snacks is not enough to keep us from being slugs.

I happen to have a spin bike in my living room near the TV.  I realize that not everyone thinks that all décor must include bikes of one kind or another.  I use the spin bike to keep myself from slugging out.  Yesterday, that meant that I did in fact watch the entire terrible spectacle of the Raider game, pedaling seated during the game and doing standing intervals during commercials.

Even without a spin bike, we can multitask our TV time.  Commercials make great intervals for pushups, squats, crunches, jacks, mountain climbers, and other body weight exercises, no equipment required.  Keep a couple of dumbbells around (they make great doorstops) and we can add lateral raises, curls, overhead presses, and the like.  Stepping also works if we can locate something sturdy enough to step up on (which is to say, not the glass coffee table, which is probably higher than we want to start with anyway).

When we use our imaginations, we can find all kinds of ways to sneak exercise into our lives and even make our guilty pleasures somewhat less guilty.