Friday Exercise: The Hundred

The hundred is a classic Pilates exercise.  Stickie enjoys it because it builds core endurance, among other things.

To begin, Stickie lies on her back with her legs in a tabletop position.  She can have her arms either down along her sides or raised toward the ceiling.  She inhales deeply to lengthen her spine.  On an exhale, she lifts her chest, extends her arms toward her feet, and straightens her legs.  Her body will have more or less the shape of a V.  Once in this position, she will pulse her arms up and down along with her breath, five exhales followed by five inhales, until she has completed one hundred pulses.  Then, with control, she will lower her body back to the starting position.

During the entire exercise, Stickie concentrates on keeping her abdominals spread out across her body.  She does not want to train her abdominals to poke out when she contracts them.

Some people find this exercise problematic for their lower backs.  In that case, it is best to choose a different abdominal exercise until the lower back issues are resolved. 

The exercise can be modified by increasing or decreasing the number of pulses (most people do not want to start with a full hundred pulses).  How high the chest lifts and how low the legs lower toward the floor also influence the level of challenge.

Thursday Book Report: Capture

Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering by David A. Kessler is a tough book to read.  Perhaps this is not surprising in a book about mental suffering.  However, the piling up of varieties and instances of suicide, murder, addiction, and the like creates, for me, a crushing sort of bulk.

Aside from the many, many examples, the book offers a little bit of framework.  Kessler writes, “The theory of capture is composed of three basic elements:  Narrowing of attention, perceived lack of control, and change in affect, or emotional state.  Sometimes these elements are accompanied by an urge to act.  When something commands our attention in a way that feels uncontrollable and, in turn, influences our behavior, we experience capture” (p. 7).

He briefly discusses the ways in which we have to filter our experience in order to function; capture is essentially a particularly compelling filter.  Most of the rest of the book, as mentioned above, is examples of various kinds of capture.  Only in the last few pages does Kessler attempt to draw out any sort of coherent theory of how to extricate oneself from the morass of unhealthy capture.

One possibility is to substitute a healthy form of capture for the unhealthy one.  He suggests that programs like AA tend to work on this model.  He also suggests mindfulness work.  Ultimately, he concludes that, given our need for filtering, at best we can understand that we are captured and we can hope to reduce our vulnerability to the worst aspects of it.

I did not come away feeling encouraged.

Know thyself...

Bodies are wise as well as smart.  We notice the smart parts more often, like when we still remember how to ride a bike after all those years or when we manage to catch the toddler’s ice cream cone before it hits the floor without thinking too much about it.

The wise parts require a little more patience.  Our bodies do, in fact, tell us what we need.  This does not mean that when we open the fridge and see leftover pie it is our body’s wisdom that makes us take it out and eat it.  Sure, our body reacts to the idea of pie, wants pie, loves pie.  The body also knows that too much pie means misery later.

The wisdom of the body speaks slowly.  Those first five minutes of exercise can feel like a new terrorist interrogation program.  We can spend all of high school having a Coke and a donut for breakfast and get only minor warnings from the body about that not being the best possible idea.

Listen in.  Listen deep.  Listen long.  We may find that we exercise longer and eat less.  We may realize that, really, our body would rather go to zumba than yoga, or lift weights in the morning rather than the evening.  We may discover that blueberries are the food of the gods and that we can live without eating kale ever again.

What do our bodies know?

Independence, day two

The long weekend is over.  We’ve watched the relatives explode and the fireworks blossom, or the other way around.  We have returned to our roots, cooking things over fire and eating onion dip.  We might be slightly sunburned and we were up too late.

What do we do next?

It’s tempting just to roll over and push the snooze alarm.  We can have leftover brownies for breakfast.  We don’t need to work out; we walked thousands of steps cleaning up after the barbecue, after all.

Nope.

Put on those tennies.  Get in the cardio.  Lift something that isn’t a beer.  Eat the leftover fruit salad instead.  Declare your independence from the post-holiday blues.

Celebrate American heroes

It’s a holiday.  Go celebrate freedom and exercise your civil rights.

(Real blog post tomorrow, as usual…)

Friday Exercise: Bench Rows

Bench rows are a great exercise for the back of the body.  Stickie also likes that she has to use her core for stability since she has to work one arm at a time.

To begin, she puts one knee and one hand on a bench.  She ensures that her spine is long and her head is in line with the rest of her spine as if she were doing a plank or pushup.  Her other foot remains on the ground.  In her working hand, she holds a dumbbell.  Taking care to keep her shoulders level (the working shoulder tends to drop when the dumbbell is at the bottom of the movement and tends to hike up at the top), Stickie exhales to lift the dumbbell up toward her armpit.  She feels like her shoulder blades are sliding toward each other.  Then she lowers the weight back toward the floor.

As usual, two to three sets of ten to fifteen repetitions should do it.

Thursday Book Report: Our Pristine Mind

Wanting to be happy seems to be a universal human trait, at least most of the time.  (We can make exceptions for our 13-year-old selves, who occasionally glory in the misery of it all…)  How to go about being happy, however, appears to have a more… multiplicitous… sort of existence.

One possible answer is provided by Orgyen Chowang’s book Our Pristine Mind:  A Practical Guide to Unconditional Happiness.  Chowang provides an approach rooted in Buddhist practice.

What I found interesting in the book was the contention that meditation can and should go beyond mindfulness.  Admittedly, many of us could do with more mindfulness, however we manage to achieve it.  Going beyond that place to Pristine Mind may seem daunting.

There is much to think about for anyone with an interest in meditation.  I am not sure I would describe the book as “practical” myself; the reader will need to do some work to parse out the actual practical steps to follow.

For me, the book touched on issues that are beyond the scope of a simple book report; I may get around to writing a more in-depth piece on that stuff or I may not.  For the purpose of this post, I will say that the book seems to be worth reading, if somewhat of a slog.