Thursday Book Report: Rolfing

Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being by Ida P. Rolf presents an interesting take on the question of body and mind.  She invokes the “sound mind in a sound body, “ essentially insisting that the mind cannot be sound when the body is out of whack.

What I wanted out of the book I found:  close observation of alignment and discussion of underlying structure.  She states the problems of current culture as expressed in our bodies well:  forward heads, rounded shoulders, aching backs, dysfunctional hips and feet.  Whether her plan for correcting the issues is correct, I do not know, but the discussion is interesting.

Also, if it takes an entire chapter to answer the question of whether the process if painful, the answer is yes.

Count to Four...

Four reasons to do Pilates:

It sweats the small stuff.  When we do big movements with heavy weights, we are paying attention to the big muscles.  Pilates doesn’t ignore them, but it brings the attention deeper, to the stabilizers, the balance muscles, the little shifts that create symmetry and grace.  Taking those Pilates lessons back to the weight room can transform a workout when it is time to commune with the barbells.

It creates space.  We spend so much of our lives crammed.  We are stuck in cars.  Our shoes pinch our toes.  Our pants are too tight.  There is not enough time.  Pilates works to lengthen our bodies, to tease out the compression.  We can move with flow and find there is plenty of space after all.

It is harder than it looks.  We can rise to the challenge and find that our bodies like it!

It is about breathing.  We breathe or we die.  Pilates makes the not dying work better.

Shower the people...

Who loves you?  Who is there for you?  Who makes you tell the truth and sticks around to hear it, no matter what it is?

Maybe those seem like strange questions for a fitness post, but they are important.  We can’t do it all alone.  Sometimes this is obvious, like when we try to bench press more than we can and we are stuck there, pinned under a heavy barbell (Public Service Announcement:  Do Not Do Heavy Lifting Alone.).  Sometimes it is less obvious at first, like when we are eating an entire carton of ice cream because no one else is home and it has been one of those days.

Figure out who your people are.  Spend some time taking care of them.  They are crucial to your health.

Run, run away

In a perfect world, I would never be grumpy.  Until the world becomes perfect, I have cardio.

I know a lot of people who tell me that they are too tired to walk or run or bike or otherwise move.  I understand.  I am sometimes one of those people.  The thing is, I do it anyway.

I may bitch and moan about how tired I am, but almost always by the time I’ve been walking or riding or swimming for five minutes, I am smiling again.  Some of it is chemical, no doubt.  I love endorphins.  But there is also the psychological benefit of Doing Something instead of hanging around just letting things fester.  Bonus points for going outside.

Friday Exercise: Medicine ball slams

The Amazing Stickie likes exercises that serve multiple purposes.  Medicine ball slams work the whole back of the body, demand coordination, and raise heart rate, all at the same time.  For bonus points, on days when Stickie feels frustrated, she can imagine that the things that are frustrating her are in front of her on the floor and smash the heck out of them.

She begins holding the medicine ball over her head.  Because medicine balls are not all that bouncy by nature, it requires a pretty good slam to get it to hit the floor and bounce back up to where it can be caught.  Stickie uses her arms and back to slam the ball down and her knees to get low enough to catch it as it rebounds.  She will often do thirty slams at a time, or, for a switch, slam the ball for a minute at a time between other exercises for a cardio burst.

Thursday Book Report: The Boys in the Boat

I didn’t really need another reason to like Andrew Luck.  He’s smart, talented, and a good sport.  Now that he has started a book club, I am a real fan.  I wrote about the book he chose for kids a couple of weeks ago.  His first selection for adults (although, depending on your kids, I can see them getting into it also) is The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.

What a great story.  A bunch of mostly poor kids from Washington overcome all kinds of struggle from dysfunctional families to financial disaster against the background of the Great Depression.  They learn to pull together and win gold in Hitler’s Berlin.

It would have been very easy for this to have been just a sports book.  The athletic achievement of the group has enough heft all by itself, what with guys jackhammering on the construction of Grand Coulee Dam in the summer to raise money for school in the fall and incidentally get even stronger and other similar tales.  What makes it more is that Brown has a sense of history.  He puts all the grit and brawn and inherent struggle to achieve in the context of the Dust Bowl on one hand and the Nazi rise to power on the other. 

Go read it.

Remain

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert in Dune

What are we afraid of, when we head to the gym?  (Heading to the gym is not more scary than heading anywhere else, by nature.  I find that what is true about heading to the gym tends to be true about pretty much every other place.  This may be because I am a metaphor junkie.)

Sometimes we are afraid of failure.  Maybe we go to the gym and we don’t end up suddenly fit and wonderful.  Maybe we keep going and we don’t get the results we want and we become sure that it is because we suck and nothing can ever fix it and we should really just go get ice cream instead.

Sometimes we are afraid of success.  If we go to the gym and get stronger and fitter and cuter and smarter, suddenly we might feel able to transform in other ways and in other areas of life.

I think that really it comes down to fear of change.  We are used to How Things Are.  Except that things are always changing.  The question is whether we want to be agents or victims.  I vote for agents.