Thursday Book Report: Resilience

Bad things happen.  How we choose to cope with those bad things is the subject of Steven Southwick’s and Dennis Charney’s book Resilience:  The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.  The authors reviewed existing studies on the topic, conducted their own research, and interviewed highly resilient people, including former Vietnam POWs, Special Forces instructors, and regular people who overcame many different kinds of horrible circumstances.

Ten resilience factors emerged from their research:  optimism, facing fear, having a moral compass, religion and/or spirituality, social support, role models, physical training, brain fitness, cognitive and emotional flexibility, and a sense of meaning.  They explore each factor in a separate chapter while recognizing that all the factors are interrelated and often build on each other.

Resilience, they argue, is a skill that can be learned.  They outline specific actions that we can take to increase our resilience.  Even better, we can start anywhere; an increase in skill in any of the ten areas will help us with resilience in general and will give us leverage in learning the other skills.

The fitness takeaway message here is that not only do we get more fit when we engage in physical training, we improve our ability to deal with whatever life chooses to deal out to us.  Fitness is a survival skill.

Being Core-teous

Core strength underlies everything we do.  Without it, our cardio work and our other strength work comes to very little.  We need it to stand, to balance, to control our movements, and to protect us.

We all know about crunches (I hope).  Here are a few other exercises to try when you are bored with them:

Pushups and Pullups

Planks, Straight and Side

Woodchoppers

Medicine ball overhead slams and oblique slams

Quadruped/Bird Dog

Kettle Bell Twists

Straight Leg Lowers

Femur Arcs

Anything with the TRX

Strong is beautiful

Some people gravitate more naturally toward weight training than others.  Those who instinctively enjoy moving heavy objects need no convincing that it is a good idea.  For everyone else, here are some good reasons to do it:

1.     Bone health.  Weight training builds bones as well as muscles, reducing the risk of fracture as we age.

2.     Increased metabolism.  Our muscles are more demanding than our fatty tissues, burning more calories and making weight loss or weight maintenance easier.

3.    Strength.  This one is obvious, but maybe not as obvious as it first seems.  Yes, lifting heavy objects makes it easier to lift more heavy objects.  It also makes it easier to shift furniture, play with kids, and use crutches if necessary.

4.     Vanity.  Muscles that are used look prettier than muscles that watch TV all day. 

5.     Challenge.  There is nothing like meeting a challenge to build self-esteem.  When we crank out a new personal record, we earn a new sense of our own awesomeness.

The boas turned out to be nonfunctional, but I get tiger arm pads tomorrow!

I’ve written about injury before, but the time has come to do it again because—hey!—I am injured.  We all try not to get injured.  This is why we pay attention to form and take reasonable precautions when doing semi-dangerous things.  Even so, sometimes we end up hurt.

Our doctors and other practitioners do an excellent job of telling us how to take care of whatever body part is non-functional.  We all know about ice and ibuprofen and rest and the other useful advice.  What is harder, I think, is coping with our brains.

When we find ourselves more helpless than usual, there are two contradictory things we have to do to cope:  fight it and embrace it.

Fight it is the one I prefer.  That is the part where we ask the doctor what parts of our current fitness practices we can still do.  Maybe feeding the dog while balancing on one foot is challenging, but it can be done.  Look!  Someone kindly transformed my house into an obstacle course!  I am going to master that sucker.

The embrace it part is more challenging.  It is not antifeminist to allow people to hold the door for us when we have crutches.  It is okay for your family to bring you things and fuss with your pillows.  This is a great excuse for binge-watching crime shows and catching up on all that reading.

The point is:  healing is faster when we remain sane.  Let’s remember our independence and also celebrate our interdependence.  Also:  fancy crutches.

Friday Exercise: Russian Twist

Stickie enjoys having a trim waistline.  She knows that working her oblique abdominals contributes to that trimness, so she often chooses to do Russian twists.  (Stickie is a fan of Lemony Snicket, who would point out that “Russian” in this context means “horrible, challenging, or painful, but effective.”)

She begins seated on the floor with her knees bent, feet flat on the floor.  She holds a medicine ball (a dumbbell will also work just fine).  Her torso is slightly leaned back, her abs drawn in.  Keeping both hips firmly planted on the ground, she twists her upper body to one side, touching the medicine ball to the floor next to her hip.  She quickly twists to the other side and does the same.  A touch on both sides makes a single repetition.  Sets of ten repetitions are good.  Stickie does two or three sets.

Thursday Book Report: Play

Play:  How It Shapes The Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown is a book after my own heart.  After all, I am a person whose company is named Recess and I’ve been told my inner child is not very inner at all.  I believe in play.  It is nice to have someone provide handy evidence that what I believe turns out to be a good thing.

Consider the sea squirt.  In its early life, it has a rudimentary brain and swims around exploring.  However, “The adult sea squirt becomes the couch potato of the sea.  In a surprisingly macabre twist, the sea squirt digests its own brain.  Without a need to explore or find its sustenance, the creature devours its own cerebral ganglia.  It’s like something out of a Stephen King book:  ‘All work and no play make sea squirt a brain-eating zombie’” (p. 48). We need to play and we need to play actively lest we all turn into brain-eating zombies.

The book describes the various kinds of play, the ways play develops our brains and our social structures, and provides some ideas about how to start playing again if we have, unfortunately, stopped.  It is written in an accessible but smart way—a playful book with much to offer.

Doing things we love or doing things we don’t love with a playful heart helps us grow and thrive and connect and give.  It replenishes our souls.

Go play.  It’s good for you.

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.