Friday Exercise: Burpees

Pretty much everyone dislikes burpees.  Stickie, to tell the truth, does not enjoy the process of doing them, but she likes the results in her body.  There are many variations of the exercise, but Stickie is sticking to the basic version for now.

She begins standing with good posture.  She raises her hands over her head and jumps into the air.  Upon landing, she jumps her feet out behind her into a plank position and does a pushup.  Then she jumps back to a standing position.

Someone doing burpees for the first time may find that sets of five are perfectly sufficient.  Stickie usually does sets of ten.  People who want to use an interval training or tabata style can go for as many as possible in a minute.

Thursday Reading: Time's Special Edition on The Science of Happiness

Time has a special edition out right now on the science of happiness.  It’s not a book, but I did read it and find it useful.

Much of the content of the magazine will not surprise anyone.  I think we all pretty much know that health and happiness enable each other.  We have learned that exercise, mindfulness, human connection, spiritual growth, and meaningful work make us happy.

That said, it is always nice to have data to back up what we know.  Also, I personally appreciate it when lists include new-to-me tips for how to apply the principles.  Finally, as a reader, I love learning about new books I can search out to deepen my understanding, and there are several mentioned in the text that I will be diving into soon.

Mind, now...

I am, so far, bad at meditation.  I’m working on it.  In the meantime, it is a good thing that there are other paths to mindfulness.  Here are a few:

• Cardio:  walk, run, swim, dance.  Anything rhythmic and breathless will encourage the monkey mind to chill out.

• Yoga and Pilates:  They build in the breathing!  It’s right there!  Also the focus that gets us out of our repetitive thoughts!

• Journaling:  This includes not only writing, but drawing and coloring as well.  Another variation is to create a commonplace book in which we copy down meaningful poems, passages, sayings, or verses.

• Going outside:  Sun and air can cure an awful lot of brain-fuzz.  Add water and we are golden!

Yes, yes I do love this song.

I don’t pretend to have good taste in music.  I can’t.  As soon as I play stuff without earphones, I am outed as a novelty-song, power-ballad, goofy-dancing, shower-singing nut.  But boy, do I have a good time.

It is entirely worth the time to make a playlist (or mix tape, for those of us old people who remember) for working out.  We need to find the songs that make us want to dance, that rev up our energy, that lead us to do embarrassing things in the supermarket when they come on the radio.  Sure, if we are working really hard we won’t have the breath to sing along, but the desire to do so can create miracles of motivation.

Let’s dance!

Have you heard the song?

What scares us?  I don’t mean in the monster-under-the-bed way, or in the obvious serial-killers-are-terrifying way.  I mean the everyday fears that actually hold us back from things.

Take, for example, bathing suits.  Many of us find them to be at least somewhat anxiety-provoking.  We fear the exposure.  We fear the social pressure.  We fear the mirror.  We fear some kind of referendum on our characters based on the evidence of our bodies.  We cannot let this fear keep us from splashing in the waves and playing with our kids and enjoying waterskiing, boating, tubing, sliding, surfing, or paddleboarding.  Heck, we can’t let it keep us from building sand castles.

Or maybe the issue is competition.  We hesitate to join the team because no one has ever let us out of right field before.  What if we strike out?  What if we lose?  We are grown ups:  we can go out to pizza afterwards anyway if we want.  Are we really playing for the trophy?  I doubt it.  It’s about friends and running around and dirt and sweat and, be honest, Otter Pops.  Winning is fun, sure, but so is learning to play better, to learn the strategies, to cheer and encourage even when things go wrong.

Let’s do just a little bit of what scares us—go a little farther, a little faster, a little more out there than we have before.  That’s where the growth happens, the excitement, the good story.

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.