Five things and a picture of a flower

Stressful times call for coping techniques.  Here are five that are better for us than an entire bottle of Scotch or buying out the ice cream section at the grocery store or massive doses of retail therapy.

1.     Connect.  This one works best in person because then there can be hugging involved, but phone, text, email, whatever can also help.  When we feel alone, we suffer more.  Bonus points if we do something that helps someone else out while we are connecting, whether that means going along on a dog walk or bringing dinner or just listening.

2.     Move.  Stress hormones leave the body faster if we chase them out with movement.  This doesn’t have to be complicated or formal.  Just get off the couch.  It will feel better.

3.    Cook.  Taking the time to make nourishing food restores our senses.  We also establish a tiny bit of control over the universe.  We rebuild our chemistry through healthy eating.  Also, home cooking can be a subversive act in these food-industrial-complex times.

4.     Sing.  Off key is fine.  Really this is just an excuse to get us all to breathe.  Singing requires us to take bigger breaths, which is all good news for the body.  One caveat:  karaoke may not be the best choice if it involves lots of alcohol.  Just sayin’.

5.     Spirit.  I know.  That’s not a verb.  But let’s pretend it is the verb for pray/meditate/tune in.  All of those mindful spiritual practices train us to deal with whatever comes along.

Mix and match and see what comes out!

Rocks in a tree?

Last week, one of the exercises I did and my clients did also was a back lunge with a foot on a bench.  It doesn’t look hard.  There are no weights beyond our body weight.  It was surprisingly difficult for many of us, so I learned that we need to work on our proprioception, balance, and core control.

Proprioception is a lovely, fancy word that makes me look smarter when I use it.  It is our sense of where our bodies are in space.  It’s what we use to avoid bumping into furniture.  And, of course, what we use to step back on a bench without looking behind ourselves.  We use it all the time.   The better our proprioception, the more gracefully we can move through the world and the more likely we are to be able to hit a tennis ball, hike a rough trail, and avoid ugly shin bruises.

Balance, not surprisingly, arises in part from our proprioception.  Maybe we don’t want to walk tightropes, but I know we all want to avoid nursing homes.  As we get older, we need to work on our balance to avoid falling. 

Core control contributes mightily to our ability to balance, but that is only one of its important functions.  It helps us avoid back pain.  It keeps us looking trimmer and thinner.  It provides the strong center from which we can base our other strength activities.

We’ll be continuing to work on all these things in the coming weeks!

Monday Workout: Fun with TRX

It’s TRX workout week!  TRX is always fun and challenging because of the inherent instability.  It’s all about the core!  Do three or four rounds, depending on your energy level.

TRX
squat row (mid)	20
mountain climber (mid calf)	20
clock press (long)	20
overhead squat (long)	20
crossing balance lunge (mid)	20
plank (mid calf)	30 sec
crunch	10
hamstring curl	10
low row (mid)	20
burpee (mid calf)	10

Friday Book Report: Lowly Origin

Jonathan Kingdon’s book Lowly Origin traces the evolution of humans.  He contends that what used to be perceived as a linear process is actually more of a family bush with many branches, some leading to extinction rather than to our present existence.  It is an interesting story, framed within an ecological and social context around the question of what brought us to stand up.

Two concepts that are teased out in the text seem particularly relevant to our current fitness situation (note:  I am using the word in the usual context for this blog, not in the evolutionary sense).  One is that our major heritage, as animals, is as opportunists and niche-swipers.  We are not specialized, particularly, in our bodies, but in our minds, where we recognize and exploit resources first discovered by other animals.  This makes us almost endlessly adaptable, which is great; we can learn to cope with many different challenges.  It also means that we have to be mindful of the consequences of our choices and their impact on other creatures, both human and otherwise.  Fitness is about living into our potential.

The second concept arises from the first.  Our experience of the world, given our relatively unspecialized forms, is mediated through technology.  For early humans, this meant that we used tools to make food accessible to us (stones, sticks, knives, fire).  This habit of being has percolated well beyond the survival level.  Perhaps it is not surprising that we have become smart phone addicts given that we evolved in concert with technology.  Again, this evolutionary habit provides us tremendous opportunity for growth and encloses within it a dangerous potential for abuse via disconnect from the rest of the world.

In our current climate, I can wholeheartedly say that it is a pleasure to read about real research and thoughtful theorizing.  If nothing else, this book is good for our scientific fitness as we work to survive the very concept of alternative facts.

More writing it down...

There is a theme to the week.  This notebook is my current journal.  Writing has useful fitness applications, believe it or not, and so wins points with me for efficient use of time.

There have been studies that indicate that journaling reduces stress.  Gratitude journals in particular seem to have beneficial effects.  It may be that journaling is meditative, or that the reflective process of writing increases the brain version of proprioception, or that creativity taps into different circuits than we use regularly.

Whatever the reason or mechanism, journaling provides one more tool for our wellness kit.

Write down more!

This clipboard is a tool familiar to my clients.  This is where I keep track of workouts.  For clients, it gives me a place to write down record-breaking lifts or thoughts for the next workout or exercises that would be good to add to the repertoire.

When I use the clipboard on myself, I use it a little differently because I make myself work out with myself more than once or twice a week.  This is where I write down my goals for the week and where I track what actually happened.  The point is, I keep a record.  I know that Thursdays are the hardest days to work out.  I know I tend to shirk the mat exercises when I do Pilates (so you notice that all the exercises on my Pilates list for the week are mat exercises this time out; I am sneaky like that.).

Set some goals.  Track what happens.  Learn stuff.  Do it again.

Write it down...

Like everyone else, I would like to eat better, exercise more, weigh less, and look cuter.  Most of all, I want to feel good.  Because I am lazy, I love finding ways to accomplish lots of things at once, so this post makes me happy.

The picture is a notebook and pens.  They may be my best weapon for accomplishing my goals around eating.  Numerous studies suggest that writing down what we eat significantly impacts what we put in our mouths.  For one thing, we don’t really want to write down that we ate an entire carton of ice cream, so we might stop at a bite or two, or skip it entirely.  For another, it makes us conscious of the fact that we ate more bread or fewer vegetables than we thought.  It forces mindfulness.

Beyond that, keeping track of what we eat, how much, when, and how we feel supplies us with useful data.  If it turns out that we feel terrible every time we eat eggs and we had not yet made the connection, we can then adjust our intake.  Or we might learn that the days we skip our afternoon snack are the days we Must Have Chocolate in the middle of the night.  We can see the patterns.

As much as I like notebooks and pens and writing, I really really hate writing down what I eat.  It is a challenge not to write down “annoyed” for how I feel every time.  That is why I have added this post.  I have now told anyone reading this that I am going to do it, so it’s out there, in the world.  Ask me to show you!  Hold me accountable!  It is another way to make the practice more effective.  (And, of course, I am happy to hold you accountable, too.)

Let’s do this.