Growing

Coping with change can be difficult.  Like, say, when our favorite yoga teacher changes schedules and we can’t make it to her class anymore.  Or when our relatives come to visit and we suddenly have different food in the house.  Or when we realize that our old weight routine is not a challenge anymore and we have to adapt.  (Good changes require as much adaptation as bad ones.)

Change happens all the time.  The body we work out with today is not the same as yesterday’s body or tomorrow’s body.  Every workout is different.  We just need to show up and work with what we’ve got, today, this minute.

Practicing with our different selves every day helps us grow.

One Two Three, One Two Three

A question we may not ask ourselves enough when it comes to fitness is:  what is fun?  So many of us do our fitness activities with a clenched-jaw determination to Get It Done.  It doesn’t have to be like that all the time (except for lunges:  lunges are always pretty much evil).

We can get fit doing anything from ballroom dancing to deep sea diving to flipping truck tires.  Given that, it makes sense to choose among all the things the ones we actually enjoy doing.  Hate dancing?  Run around instead.  Love loud music?  Welcome to zumba!

Beyond choosing a way of fitness we like, we can also choose ways to make the parts we like less somewhat less objectionable.  A partner in crime is one good way to make the time go faster.  Working out somewhere beautiful (hi yoga on the beach!) can do wonders.  Fancy new shoes can be surprisingly motivating and may, as we believed when we were kids, make us go faster.  And never underestimate the power of disco, or heavy metal, or punk, or hip hop, or whatever music gets you ready to gasp along.

The point is:  get out and play.  It’s good for you and fun, too.

Monday Workout: TRX

This week’s workout uses the TRX.  If you don’t have access to a TRX, you can use dumbbells and do regular versions of the exercises.  The goal is three rounds, completing 10 to 20 repetitions of each exercise per round.

TRX:  squats

add jump

add 1 leg

sprinter start

add jump

hamstring curls

rows

low

1 arm

chest press

add 1 leg

deltoid fly

add TY

roll out

plank

crunch

oblique

add pushup

Friday Book Report: Sociology of Sport

In the wake of the events around Colin Kaepernick, I finally got motivated to look up the work of Harry Edwards, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley.  Sociology of Sport did not disappoint, and, in spite of being published in 1973, remains insightful and almost prescient.

Sports, he argues, occur within our cultural context.  The American “sports creed” includes the beliefs that sports build character, promote discipline, encourage healthy competition, enhance physical and mental fitness, advance religious/moral precepts, and develop nationalism.  The implications and challenges of this creed as well as an exploration of how it might be affected by social change and in turn effect social change are the subjects he addresses throughout the rest of the book.

Additionally, he views the field through the lens of the issues facing African-American athletes.  He makes some attempt to include women in his analysis, but since he was writing just at the onset of Title IX, there was not much to analyze at that point.  It was fascinating to see both how far we have come and how far we have not come.

Anyone interested in the “machinery” of sports in our society would do well to start with this excellent resource.

Love your body...

While I was away, I missed my Pilates equipment.  My body needs to move with the precision of Pilates.  It needs the stretching and lengthening.  It needs mindful attention brought to what it is doing. 

What else might our bodies be missing?  What can we give them today to make them feel nurtured, strong, loved?

Drive

Because I am a very lucky human being, I don’t drive much.  When I do end up spending a lot of time in the car, either as a driver or passenger, I get to—appreciate?—afresh what driving does to the body.

We are not made for sitting for long periods.  Without constant vigilance, our spines slump, our heads fall forward, our shoulders round.  Our hips feel tight from the constant flexing.  And all of that happens without accounting for the tension of traffic.

Nothing makes me miss my Pilates equipment more than a road trip.  However, even without spiffy, expensive, bulky equipment, it is possible to be kind to our bodies.

One way is to use a couple of cheap tools.  A hook-shaped “point-pressing stick” from the dollar store can help release tension in the shoulders and promote world harmony.  A tennis ball, lacrosse ball, or yoga tune-up ball under one side of the behind at a time can release hip pressure.

Regular attention to stretching/yoga/Pilates in the rest of our lives also helps.  Our strong cores and long muscles not only prevent a lot of the postural chaos of driving, they train us to relax almost automatically by stretching when we arrive if not on the journey.

Also:  breathing.  If deep breathing doesn’t come naturally, we can turn up the radio and start belting it out.  At the very least, it will make us laugh, which is probably the best tension reliever ever.

Sometimes art is a workout...

Workouts come in many shapes.  We are familiar with the kind that involve running or hefting handily-shaped barbells and dumbbells.  Sometimes workouts involve lifting seemingly innumerable boxes of heavy things, like when we move, or running up and down stairs all day, like when we speed-clean the house.  Both the familiar and the unusual workouts count, assuming we meet certain criteria.

It has to involve sweat.  If we aren’t getting sweaty, as I mentioned last week, we aren’t working hard enough.

We have to get breathless.  We want our hearts to work.  That’s where the endurance benefits come from, as well as the mood-enhancers.  We want to use our work to train our bodies to recover quickly from stresses, and that means providing our bodies with controlled and appropriate stress.

We need to be (a little) sore later.  Soreness means we worked hard enough.  Please note:  we are not talking about major pain or injury.  If we feel a bit stiff and sore the next day, we know we have done the right amount of work to challenge our muscles.  We can stretch them and then give them some time to recover and get stronger.

So, hit the gym or clean out the basement, whatever works for today.