Monday Workout: Exercise Pair Circuit

This week’s workout is a longer circuit.  Do two or three rounds.

cardio	1 min
around the world	10 each way
overhead press	10
chest press	10
fly	10
bicep curl	10
hammer curl	10
tricep kickbacks	10
skullcrushers	10
lateral raise	10
reverse fly	10
squat	10
lunge	10

Friday Book Report: The New Better Off

(Warning:  there is a swear word in this post.  Skip the first sentence of the second paragraph if swear words offend you.)

Books tend to lead to more books.  (I am tempted to quote Bilbo Baggins’s song about the dangers of stepping outside one’s front door because roads do the same thing…)  One of the books I read recently led me to Courtney E. Martin’s new book The New Better Off:  Reinventing the American Dream.  No, there are no exercises in it, no recipes or tips for lowering our cholesterol and increasing our cardiovascular fitness, and yet it is a book deeply speaking to the larger questions of fitness.  What are we fit for?  How do we fit?  How do we make our world a fit place to live?

Martin examines the traditional ideas we hold about being “better off” and concludes that those ideas, “left uninterrogated, can be fucking dangerous.”  She posits that there is something, or many somethings, better than making more money, having more stuff, working more hours.  She examines many possible threads that can be woven into a more humane, truly better life.

Short version:  invest in community.  We are fit because we fit together.  Alone, we are toast.

This one is about sex... You are warned.

Better sex.  That’s a good reason to get fit, right?  Are we willing to work out for that?

(And I don’t mean we have to get fit so we can become some random societal ideal of hot to get dates in the first place.  That is the patriarchy speaking, and smashing the patriarchy is an excellent fitness activity as long as we manage to maintain proper posture and core control while we do it.)

Fitness means better sex for real reasons.  Like, for example, that aforementioned core control.  Core control has a direct relationship with the ability to move our pelvises like Elvis.  It keeps our lower backs from giving out on us.  More body positions become available the more core control we have.

Which brings me to flexibility and strength.  Flexibility of body allows for whatever our flexible minds suggest might be fun without that buzz-killing cramping.  The stronger we are, the more possibilities we can realize.

Cardiovascular fitness?  The more you have, the longer you can play.  Also, that playing can raise our heart rates and count toward our daily activity totals.

Always practice safe sex with consent.  That’s just appropriate behavior.

FAQ about SAQ?

This week’s workout, posted Monday, includes work with the speed ladder.  Speed/agility/quickness (SAQ) work often gets neglected, but has plenty of benefits for both athletes and non-athletes.

Bursts of speed raise our heart rates and make excellent high intensity intervals, proven to improve our cardiovascular fitness and pump up our metabolisms.  Shockingly, training for speed also makes us… faster!  Life is not a race, but really, who doesn’t want to be fast?

Agility, in this context, means that we can start, stop, and change direction quickly without compromising our excellent posture.  We need agility to escape from linebackers and to dodge wayward shopping carts.  It helps our brains, because agility, by nature, breaks us out of our always-forward mindset and reminds us that we sometimes have to go backward, sideways, or around.

Quickness is all about response time.  If we want to stop suddenly because the car in front of us has inexplicably burst into flames, we need quickness.  Mentally, we need to be alert and ready for action.  Quickness allows us to elude cheetahs and muggers, adapt to suddenly encroaching curbs, and avoid stepping on the cat.

Also:  fun.

Even if you dream of Hamlet

I spend plenty of time getting people to move.  Today, for different, I suggest sleep.  We don’t, in general, get enough of it and it is just as bad as not getting enough exercise.

We have some of the same excuses, too.  “There’s so much else to do!”  “It’s boring!”  “I don’t want to waste time.”  “It takes too long.”

Without sleep, we aren’t fit.  Sleep enables us to lose weight.  It helps us consolidate our memories.  It keeps us from being insane.  And, obviously, it makes us less tired.

I’m not suggesting we sleep through important things—but do we really need to watch that much television?  Facebook can live without us for eight hours at a time.  So can all those tempting video games.  It is worth losing a little sleep to have that great conversation with your spouse or kid or best buddy or to catch that amazing show or to squeeze in a workout before work, but let’s choose wisely what we are willing to trade our snoozing in on.

And no, napping in meetings doesn’t count.

Monday Workout: Speed Ladder

This week’s workout uses a speed ladder.  If you don’t have access to one, you can substitute any cardio exercise of your choice for the minute exercises at the beginning of each set.  Try to choose one that moves forward, one that moves sideways, and one that moves transversely (e.g., forward step-ups, side step-ups, and crossing step-ups).  Yes, there are burpees in this workout; we can all whine about them together, but we have to do them.

ladder out out in in	1 min
lunges	20
burpees	10
ladder lateral in in	1 min
deadlifts	20
reverse fly	10
carioca	1 min
ball bench press	20
pushups	10

Friday Book Report: How Not to Die

How Not to Die by Michael Greger, M.D. is a big book, both in terms of pages and ideas.  In it, Dr. Greger lays out piles and piles of evidence about what we should eat to prevent diseases including heart disease, diabetes, and clinical depression.  And yes, there are piles of evidence.  The good news is that he is also an entertaining writer, so it does not feel like a slog.

Also he does not mince words.  He points out the inherent difficulty of government recommendations for diet:  the government must attempt to promote healthy eating and support the food industry.  In general, the food industry wins.  He goes on to skewer both government and other recommendations for essentially dumbing things down rather than presenting the best possible recommendations based on the evidence.  In other words, he says that many sources recommend diets based on what they think people might actually follow rather than on what would be best.

Here is the very short version of the book:  go vegetarian and probably vegan.  I’m in because I kind of like living.