It can also improve our moonwalking

Over the weekend, I tried a virtual reality program.  There were goggles and headphones.  I took a tour of Pluto.  It was a gorgeous seven minutes in space, except I was really in a friend’s living room.  Because I was in virtual reality, what I saw changed with how I moved.  That is to say, when I turned my actual body, what I saw in the goggles turned as if I were really standing in space. 

What was interesting was that I felt like I was turning in place from the virtual reality perspective.  In real life, I ended up moving across the floor and butting up against a chair.  What I was seeing affected my sense of where my body was.  The fancy word for our ability to know where our bodies are and what they are doing is proprioception.

One of the reasons we exercise, whether we know it or not, is to improve our proprioception.  That sense of where we are in space allows us to coordinate complex movements.  Pilates is particularly good for developing proprioception because of its emphasis on form and placement.  We learn how to feel where we are, to inhabit our bodies more fully, and, by extension, avoid encounters with chairs when we do spacewalks.

Step (and keep stepping) away from the fridge

I am a stress eater.  I know I am not the only one who heads straight for the fridge when the day gets tough.  I am, when under pressure, sure there is no problem that won’t be made better by ice cream.  I forget that eating too much ice cream is a problem in itself.

We (because, as I said, I am not alone in this pattern) are going to attack this issue.  I have a plan.

Step One:  Don’t buy ice cream.  Or cookies or chips or vodka or chocolate or whatever it is that we crave under adverse circumstances.  If it isn’t in the fridge or freezer or cabinet, we have at least one more obstacle between us and less than ideal behavior.  We might not eat the ice cream if we have to go through the process of finding the car keys to go to the store to get some first.

Step Two:  Move the body.  This step has both a long-term and an immediate phase.  If we are moving our bodies regularly in the long-term sense, we are attacking the stress problem.  And if we choose to walk around the block instead of open the fridge in the moment, we have substituted a better behavior for snacking.  (If we end up walking to the store to get the ice cream, at least we have walked first…  Nobody’s perfect.)  There are very few excuses about why we can’t move instead of snack.  Snacking takes time and involves mess, too.

Step Three:  Don’t be mean.  Maybe we won’t always avoid the ice cream.  Maybe we really want it.  Maybe we are too darn tired to walk another step.  Maybe we blow it.  Let it go.  Let’s give ourselves a hug instead.  We will do better the next time.

Body weight to reduce body weight

It turns out that I should write about burpees more often, apparently, since we all have opinions about them!

Burpees, in their classic form, are a body weight exercise, a type of exercise that should be dear to all of our hearts because there are no excuses for not doing them.  We all have bodies; all our bodies have weight; we can work with that!  Keeping things simple often helps us to achieve what we want.

Other examples of no-excuses body weight exercises are squats, lunges, pushups, and planks.  Dips and pull-ups or chin-ups are also body weight exercises, but do require a bench or bar.

If we throw our weight around, we may end up with less of it.  All good.

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!