Thursday Book Report: The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein is Andrew Luck’s book club pick for adults right now.  (The kid pick, Hatchet, by Gary Paulson, is a great book and highly recommended.  I read it with my younger kid when he was in sixth grade or so…)  Everyone should join this book club. 

The book.  Right.  It is a great, funny, sad story about a guy who drives race cars and his family told from the perspective of the dog.  The story includes plenty of adversity and, better, the overcoming of adversity through hard work and character.  Also, a possessed stuffed zebra.  Enzo, the dog, is hilarious and wise.

At one point, Enzo tells us, “I know this much about racing in the rain.  I know it is about balance.  It is about anticipation and patience.  I know all of the driving skills that are necessary for one to be successful in the rain.  But racing in the rain is also about the mind!  It is about owning one’s own body.  About believing that one’s car is merely an extension of one’s body.  About believing that the track is an extension of the car, and the rain is an extension of the track, and the sky is an extension of the rain.  It is about believing that you are not you; you are everything.  And everything is you.”

Read it and laugh and cry and triumph along with Enzo.

Salty air is better than salty food, right?

I don’t write that much about the intake end of fitness.  I am not a nutritionist, but rather a certified personal trainer.  That means that it is beyond the scope of my practice to design an eating plan for clients, for example.

However, it is part of my practice to encourage everyone to choose foods that are high in nutritional quality and to consume them in appropriate amounts.  No matter how perfect the exercise program I design for myself or anyone else, it will not have the desired result if we eat too many calories.  We will not feel good if we choose primarily highly processed sugary, fatty, salty foods.

Let’s choose wisely for best results.

Tense, but not too tense

Tension, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.  Without it, we couldn’t move.  Our muscles grow, in part, because of the time they spend “under tension,” which is trainer-speak for “working.”

When we work out, we are obviously using literal tension.  Some metaphorical tension can come in handy, as well.  I am thinking, specifically, about the tension between observing and doing.

On one hand, when we work out, we want to do it like no one is watching.  Who cares what we are wearing?  So what if my weights are smaller than yours?  Does it really matter that I have sweat dripping down my back?  Doing the work is way more important than what it looks like.  We always need to remember that we are only doing our own workout and that it has to be appropriate for what we are capable of in the exact moment we are working.

On the other, we need to work out like there is someone hovering nearby with a clipboard taking notes.  We want to show that imaginary observer our best form, with our lovely posture and our aligned knees and our lifted abdominals.  We want to catch that observer lifting an eyebrow at us when we consider bailing out early on a set, even if we bail out anyway.

The creative tension between the two extremes of observed and unobserved makes growth happen.

Sitting in the sun is a good one...

Somewhere out there, there is probably a band named Emergency Third Rail Power Trip.  If there isn’t, there should be.  (Why, yes, I do have a problem with reading signs and giving them different interpretations than they were intended to have…)  Furthermore, we should all also find our own emergency third rail power trips.

We all have emergencies.  Some are real (sudden illness, natural disaster) and some less so (A zit! Right there!  On my face!), but all of them cause stress.  The point of an emergency third rail power trip is to remove the power supply from that stress so it fizzles and dissolves instead of sending its little cortisol messengers out to encourage us to flip out.

Let’s have a little disaster preparedness seminar with ourselves and figure out what we can do to unplug the stress.  Maybe it is breathing practice.  Maybe it is hard cardio work.  Maybe it is hugs.  Whatever it is, let’s figure it out before the emergency comes so we can stop the madness.  It will keep us healthier.

Friday Exercise: Renegade Rows

Stickie, naturally, is a Styx fan.  How could she not be?  On days she wants to crank up Renegade, she does renegade rows and works her abdominals and her upper body strength.

She starts in pushup position with her hands holding dumbbells on the ground.  Keeping her hips and shoulders level, she raises one dumbbell toward her armpit and lowers is back to the ground.  Then she repeats with the other arm.

Sets of ten are good.

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.