Friday Exercise: Overhead Press

The Amazing Stickie is demonstrating the Overhead Press, an excellent exercise for upper body strength.

Stickie begins by standing with correct posture.  Her ears are aligned with her shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.  Her abdominals are engaged.  She is remembering to breathe.

She has weights in her hands and her hands are held up at her shoulders.  As she exhales, she presses the weights up until her elbows are straight but not locked and the weights are overhead.  It is hard to tell in the picture, but Stickie is maintaining excellent shoulder stability by using her back muscles to keep her shoulder blades down as her arms rise up.  When it is time to inhale, Stickie lowers the weights back to her shoulders.

Three sets of ten repetitions at a weight that is barely tolerable with good form would be a great choice.  Start with lighter weights than you think you can do because you can always add more. Also, it is always allowed to change weights either up or down; you are the boss of your workout.

Thursday book review: The Roll Model

Fitness, in a larger sense, is about taking care of ourselves.  While we may love exercise for its own sake (hi, skiing!), or tolerate it because it is good for us (burpees?  Again?), the point of it all is to increase our ability to enjoy life.  At times, our daily lives and even our play at the gym can leave us sore, tight, and achy.  Reading a book won’t fix that, but following the directions in Jill Miller’s The Roll Model will go a long way.

Miller has created some very spiffy tools for myofascial release, the yoga therapy balls and the coregeous ball.  The book lays out the nitty gritty of using the balls to make happiness in your body.  I love my balls and the exercises she has created around them.

I have a high tolerance for puns.  This comes in useful reading the book because every single thing has some kind of punning clever name.  I have a low tolerance for glowing testimonials, which means I skipped a lot of the stories of successful users who have been transformed.

I took my book to have the regular binding cut off and a spiral binding put on to increase the usefulness of it; now it lies flat while I am rolling and referring to it.  It was cheap and totally worth it.

I highly recommend the content of this book for anyone looking for increased flexibility, mobility, and happiness in the body.

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…