More on goals

Fitness goals come in many guises.  We all know the obvious ones:  lose weight, run fast, go far, lift heavy, collect compliments.  I would like to suggest that there are some other areas that contribute to our fitness goals.  Here are some questions to consider:

What do we want to learn this year?  Our brains are crucial to our fitness goals.  If we are not learning and growing, we are dying.  Let’s think about skills we want to develop, books we want to read, experiences we want to create.

How do we want to connect?  What sort of relationship weight lifting do we need to do this year?  When we strengthen the bonds between people, we create healthy communities and happy humans.

What feeds our souls?  We spend lots of time thinking about what to eat.  What do our hearts crave?  Maybe we need to go outside, or go to church, or hug a dog, or laugh really hard.  Whatever it is, we need to do it to avoid soul anorexia.

Fitness is holistic (I am allowed to use that word; I lived in Berkeley for 20 years.).  Let’s make fitness goals that address our whole selves.

On goals

We can set new goals any time we want, but at the new year, it seems especially appropriate.  My unscientific guess pegs the number of articles about how to set good goals at about ten gazillion million.  I will offer only two suggestions.

First, make a process goal.  Process goals are the kind where we decide to show up.  We make it a goal to do cardio every day, or to lift weights twice a week, or to floss our teeth on Tuesdays (got to start small, right?).  Maybe the thing we want is better endurance, or more shapely muscles, or gingivitis avoidance, but our goal is to do the activity that will produce the result, not the result itself.  Process goals have the advantage of being concrete and incremental.  It is easy to tell whether we have done them or not.  And, if it turns out that the process goal does not move us toward our desired outcome, we have at least built our ability to accomplish things.

Second, make a big goal.  A big goal in conjunction with a process goal can create great things.  If, for example, we set a process goal of riding our bike every week, we can set a big goal of doing a century ride.  (Guess what I want to do this year!)

We will, God willing, all experience this next year together, whether we set goals or not.  Let’s try to make it the best year ever.

Monday Workout: Balance challenge!

It’s a new year!  Guess what?  We still get to work out!  This is a shorter circuit, so we get to do four or five rounds.  If no medicine ball is available, substitute kettle bell swings or dumbbell swings. 

The single leg squat to touchdown works like this:  Do a single leg squat holding a dumbbell in the same arm as your standing leg with your arm held as if you have just completed a curl (elbow bent, weight at your shoulder).  Then bend at the waist and extend your elbow to lower the dumbbell toward the floor.  As you straighten your knee, raise the dumbbell overhead.  This should be an entertaining balance challenge!

1 min cardio
med ball slams	20
goblet squats	20
flies	20
1 leg squat to touchdown	10
bench rows	20
round lunges	10

Friday Book Report: This Is Where You Belong

Earlier this week, I wrote a little bit about the contents of This Is Where You Belong:  The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick.  I did, in fact, finish the book, and the rest of it was just as good.

The main premise of the book is that connection to where we live helps us build happier lives.  It is an upward spiral in which our connection to home makes us happier, which makes us feel more connected to our home, which makes us happier, and so on.  Happy people, in general, are healthy people.

In addition to going outside and building our maps of our neighborhoods by walking as I mentioned in my other post, Warnick suggests buying local, meeting the neighbors, enjoying the things we would show visitors, getting politically involved, and volunteering as ways to enmesh ourselves in the web of our communities.

The book is full of references to other books and studies and the like, but what makes it work for me is that it also chronicles the writer’s actual experiment in loving the place where she happened to end up.  She tried it all out on herself, which is my favorite method of experimentation.  Some parts worked better than others; your results may vary.

In any case, Warnick provides a helpful recipe for plugging in rather than dropping out.

Breathing

My kids have a distant relative who was known for semi-oracular statements.  The story, as handed down through the family, is that Uncle Paul (don’t remember whose uncle he was or in which generation or even if he was an actual relative and not one of those family-friends-who-are-family) asked their grandmother, who was a small child at the time, if she wanted to know the secret to avoid death.  She did.  He leaned toward her and said, “Just keep breathing.”

He was right.

Breathe consciously in yoga or Pilates.

Breathe hard in running or swimming or cycling or skiing or sex or dancing or roller skating.

Breathe out as you lift weights and in as you lower them.

Hang out with people who take your breath away and then let it come rushing back as you rejoice in them.

Keep breathing.

More on outside

Perhaps this is obvious, but in order to write book reports for Fridays, I have to read the books beforehand.  If all goes well, I will be posting a report on Friday about the book I have been reading that will talk about the whole thing and why it is good and why it applies to fitness.

But right now, I’m only halfway through the book.  I am too excited to wait to post two new reasons to get outside and exercise, as articulated in this book (tune in Friday to find out what it is!).

One:  nature makes us happy.  Studies show that being outside in nature improves our mood and our health.  We live longer, have fewer health problems, and generally improve when we visit the trees and rocks and waterfalls of our world.

Two:  walking (and to some extent biking) can increase our sense of connection to our community.  When we are out in our town, we notice things we don’t have time to see in our cars.  We get a sense of the terrain, like where the biggest hill is and where the restaurant aromas are most enticing.  We improve our brains by mapping our immediate world in more detail.  We meet the neighbors and learn, if not their names, the names of their dogs.

Go play!

Light!

Now that we are past the winter solstice, we are turning toward the light!  The world is literally growing brighter each day (at least for us folks in the northern hemisphere).  That means we have metaphorical momentum to burnish other parts of our lives.

Often when we go to yoga, our instructors invite us to choose an intention for the time we spend in class.  I am no yogi (more like Yogi Bear), but let’s choose to reflect on what we want to spiff up while we get our cardio done this week.  All that lovely rhythmic running and biking and striding and such provides an excellent space for clear thinking.

Maybe we want to eat foods that make us feel good in the larger sense.  Maybe we want to tune into what our bodies are telling us.  Maybe we just want a bikini.  Let’s figure out whatever it is that is going to make us feel like we can shine in the coming light of the world.