Thursday Book Report: How Learning Works

My kid recommended How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman.  Being a trainer is not the same as being a teacher or professor, but some aspects transfer.  Also, I think of learning as part of life; we are all students and can maximize our learning.

The seven principles are:

1.     Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.

2.     How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.

3.    Students’ motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.

4.     To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.

5.     Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning.

6.    Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.

7.     To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

When I think about how I plan and implement workout plans, I see how these principles apply to fitness.  For example, we all come to our workouts with some level of knowledge about our bodies and what they can do.  Sometimes we “know” how to do things incorrectly and that means we have to re-learn now to perform a particular task or exercise.  Welcome to the first principle!

Similarly, all of us who have progressed from one level of an exercise to another have experienced the third principle.  We begin our pushups on the wall, move to the bench, maybe use our knees on the floor, and so on, each progression marking a stage of mastery over our bodies.

Let’s take a look and see what we might want to focus on to increase our learning during our workouts.

Focus

I wear glasses.  My prescription has only the slightest correction for distance vision; I don’t have to wear my glasses to drive safely.  The real reason I need to wear my glasses is so that I can see what is right in front of my face.  (Glasses are easier to come by than longer arms.)

That said, I need both kinds of vision.  So do we all.  When we figure out what we want in fitness goals, we need to look both at the distance to figure out where we want to end up and at the immediate to figure out where to start.  We need to know where we are going and what steps to take to get there.

Let’s invest five minutes in naming the big fitness goal and then deciding what to do today or this week to bring it closer.

I'm so lazy I need to work out

In some ways, the best reason to focus on fitness is laziness.  Laziness loves efficiency, because it leaves more room for sleeping in and reading and cuddling.

Fitness saves time.  Time spent exercising is an investment.  It makes us healthier, which gives us more years to live in and a better quality of life during those years.  We get to spend fewer hours in doctors’ offices.  We don’t waste hours staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.

Fitness saves money.  Many fitness pursuits are cheap in themselves.  Almost all of them are cheaper than therapy and doctors.  When we maintain our weight, we don’t have to spend money on bigger clothes.  When we maintain our moods through fitness, we don’t have to do retail therapy.

Fitness can save our lives.  Sometimes this is literal.  Fitness correlates with reduced risk of all kinds of nasty diseases.  In a more figurative sense, it can save our lives from stress, boredom, and depression.

Work out so you can be lazy!

Bonus points for carrying up and down stairs

While lifting more weight in the gym is, in itself, a goal for some of us, it isn’t really supposed to be an end in itself.  The point of the exercise lies in what happens the rest of the time.

Over the weekend, I ended up doing some recreational furniture moving with some friends.  It is good to be able to lift and carry what seemed like endless boxes of books.  It is interesting (and sometimes frustrating!) to apply the mechanics of lifting to something like a filing cabinet instead of a barbell.  Yes, I like having a nice, tidy number next to the amount I can lift.  I like it better when the amount I can lift becomes a practical asset in daily life.

By all means we should take joy in our gym time and in all our times.  But let’s remember that life happens in other places, too.

Friday Exercise: Mountain Climbers

The Amazing Stickie works hard to ensure that she has strong abdominals and excellent cardiovascular condition.  One way she does this is by doing mountain climbers.

The starting position is more or less a pushup position, but with a slight pike to the body.  In other words, Stickie sticks her bootie in the air.  Then she brings one foot forward into a modified lunge position.  She jumps her legs up and switches which foot is forward, repeating rapidly until she is good and breathless, keeping her abdominals lifted the whole time.  A minute is a good amount of time to spend on this exercise.

It is also possible to do this exercise with the hands on a bench or on a BOSU.  Standing mountain climbers are also good; in that case, Stickie pretends she is Spiderman climbing a building, side bending as she lifts her knee toward her elbow on the same side of her body.

Thursday Book Report: The End of Overeating

David A. Kessler’s book The End of Overeating trots out many of the usual bad guys.  Hi added sugar, fat, and salt!  I’m looking at you!  He goes over the cultural shifts that have encouraged us to become larger.  He points to food industry practices that don’t help us.  He also discusses underlying brain chemistry in nice small words.  It’s a good introduction to all the reasons why we find it so challenging to eat enough of the right foods and not too much.  That takes up about two thirds of the book.

The final third discusses what to do about it.  He suggests regaining control over our behavior through awareness, competing behavior, competing thoughts, support, and emotional learning.  Most of those things should look familiar to us.

Overall, it is an engaging, personal, and personable book.  Depending on what you already know, it might be extremely informative.  I found it useful as a reminder about taking personal responsibility in the face of much societal pressure.

Work it out

Exercise works.

I see people come to workouts tired, worn down, anxious, stressed, even maybe a little grumpy.  They leave better.  It ain’t my personality that makes the difference, I’m sure.

It’s the movement.  It’s the pumping heart, the breathing, the push of muscles against resistance, the coordination of multiple body parts in multiple planes.

We are happy to take an aspirin and wait half an hour for the headache to go away.  Let’s give ourselves half an hour of exercise and rejoice in what that can do.