There is no comparison

There will always be someone better than we are:  someone who is stronger, faster, cooler, leaner, sleeker, and more flexible.  There will always also be someone who is worse than we are due to genetics, illness, injury, and lack of practice.  Here is the thing.  We are not those people.  We are who we are and, ultimately, even in the middle of a huge class, we are working out alone because no one has our exact body.

This means we have incredible freedom.  We just get to play and exercise and sweat and chill out.  It doesn’t matter that the person next to us is squatting with a piano on her back (although it would be nifty to see, I’m sure) or struggling to bend her knees at all.  It is not relevant.  We are doing our work, chosen for our bodies on one particular day to the best of our ability.

We can tell our catty inner voices to stuff it when they remark that the guy over there has abs like an Abercrombie and Fitch model (you know, they don’t actually sell those naked men in the stores.  False advertising!) and we feel like someone’s Before picture.  We can also remind it to be nice when we remark to ourselves that at least we don’t look like that woman over there with the uncomfortably tight workout pants.  Those people don’t matter to what we are doing.  They are doing the best they can right now and deserve our respect for doing it.  And we deserve to give ourselves the respect we deserve by not wasting our time in needless comparisons.

It’s about you and the work.  That is all.

Inclined to press some more?

Last week, Stickie demonstrated the bench press.  This week, she has decided to work slightly different muscles, so she chose to model incline presses.  It may not be apparent in the picture, but she, like many people, finds that she needs to use slightly lighter weights when doing incline presses.

Before sitting down, Stickie adjusts the back of the bench to an appropriate angle.  Some benches have lots of choices and some have one or two.  Either way, it is very difficult to adjust the bench once one is sitting on it.

As always, Stickie uses her best posture.  Her lower back retains its natural curve, neither smashing itself into the bench nor creating a tunnel for the transcontinental railroad.  Her shoulders are relaxed away from her ears and her head is centered between her shoulders, not tilted to one side or the other.  She begins the movement with her arms at her shoulders.  As she exhales, she presses the weights straight up in the air by straightening her elbows.  On the inhale, she lowers them slowly back to her chest.

As with the bench press, she does not let the dumbbells touch at the top of the movement because she is all about getting the most out of her workout.  She often does three sets of ten repetitions at a weight that is heavy enough that the last rep of each set is challenging to complete.  (Sometimes she is not sure what that weight is, so she may adjust the weight between sets to keep to the rubric.)

Between sets, she drinks water, gives herself a hug stretch, or extends her arms out to the sides of the bench to stretch her chest.

Thursday Book Report: Nourish

Nourish, by Amber Rose, Sadie Frost, and Holly Davidson, is lovely.  And that is just about the pictures and design of the book.  The content is also pretty amazing.

The book has three sections, one about food with recipes, one about mindfulness, and one about exercise.  I’ve cooked several things from the food section and they have all been delicious.  I expect to cook many more of them.  All of them involve fresh, healthy food prepared with love and attention.  The resulting dishes are also beautiful to look at, an aspect of food that I tend to forget is important but which does add something important to the experience.

The mindfulness section provides lots of information about breathing, yoga, mediation, and the like.  We all can use more mindfulness and this is a good jumping off point.

I felt right at home in the exercise section because the focus is on doing what is fun.  There are clear directions for various exercises (I learned a new kind of jack!  Beware!) and some interesting workouts.  Most exercises require nothing more than the body.

While the book is focused and directed toward women, men should not be afraid to use it (except maybe for the beauty aids, but those scare me, too).  After all, we all need to eat and breathe and move.

Ultimately, I did find the book to be nourishing, in many senses of the word.

Truly, you are wonderful

Fitness, like any other discipline, compels us to tell the truth if we really want to follow its ways.  We learn at a very deep level that we do, in fact, love brownies more than bikinis, or that we love swimming more than television marathons, or that if fitness has to involve burpees, we would rather just buy bigger clothes.  It cuts both ways:  sometimes we find out things that help us and sometimes we want to stick our fingers in our ears and scream Green Day lyrics.

If we want to be healthy, we have to be honest about it.  We have to be willing to look at the scale.  We have to face the fear that we will no longer have an excuse to be weak or small or puny; then there is the deeper fear that we may not have all that much potential to live up to after all.

Decluttering, tidying, getting rid of things have become cultural themes.  Let’s throw out the lies we tell ourselves, whether it is as small as “It didn’t do much damage to eat those seven cookies” or as big as “I will never be strong.”  It is amazing how spacious our heads and our jeans become when we tell the truth about things.

In and Out (No Burger)

When we do Pilates or yoga or tai chi, we find mindfulness built into the process as we breathe and pay careful attention to the placement of our bodies.  Sometimes we feel like we have way too many body parts with minds of their own in the process!  Remembering to breathe helps us along.

Cardio has its own kind of mindfulness.  Most cardio exercises take on a rhythm that can help to focus our thoughts.  (Focusing on the mantra “Is it over yet?” might not have the appropriate effect, but we can try it out to see.)  The repetitive nature of most cardio can help still the crazy whirl of our thoughts.

In strength training, a focus on the breath can improve performance as it increases mindfulness.  When we do the “hardest” part of the exercise (getting up from the squat, pressing the barbell away from the chest on a bench press, etc.), we can exhale to help the movement along.  Inhaling during the other portion of the exercise allows us to reset and gather our forces for the next repetition.

No matter what, we have to keep breathing.

Stylin'

I worked on a television cooking show once (not as a cook).  I learned a lot about food styling, which is all the stuff that makes the food beautiful in pictures.  It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was all that important.  I care about what food tastes like.

The thing is, taking the time to make the food look pretty does add something.  The combination of colors on a plate or in a bowl can feed the eyes (which are not ever bigger than the stomach, no matter what my grandmother used to say to confuse me when I was small).  The effort involved in arranging food on the plate rather than just plopping it there gives a sense of love to the experience.

Sure, we can all just eat pizza straight out of the delivery box, or dump our eggs on a paper plate to save clean up, but maybe we will be a little more fed if we don’t.

Friday Exercise: Bench Press

Bench press is one of the most popular exercises to brag about.  Somehow, how much someone can bench has become a measure of her general strength.  While I don’t think it is the best benchmark (ha!), bench press does have a lot to offer for all of us.

Stickie is demonstrating a dumbbell bench press.  She has her feet up on the bench to make the exercise easier on her lower back, but people with no lower back issues can feel free to keep their feet on the floor.  Stickie prefers the dumbbell version of the exercise to the barbell version because it is more challenging; the barbell allows the stronger side to help out the weaker side, while the dumbbells make both sides work equally.

To begin, Stickie holds the weights at chest level.  This means, ladies and gentlemen, that the weights line up with one’s nipples, which, generally, are not located just below one’s neck.  On an exhale, Stickie presses the weights straight up into the air so that they are still aligned with her chest, not floating over her face or belly.  The weights do not touch each other at the top of the motion:  that would be cheating.  As she inhales, Stickie slowly lowers the weights until they are nearly but not quite touching her chest.

She chooses a weight heavy enough that completing 8 to 10 reps is the most she can do in a set.  She likes to do three sets, unless she is working up to her maximum weight.  In that case, she increases weight each set until she can only complete a single, good-looking rep.