Do it anyway

We all have exercises we feel good doing (yes, all of us, even if we have to search deep…) and ones that we dread.  Usually, the ones we dread are the hard ones.  Here are some reasons to do them anyway.

1.     You don’t want to look like Popeye.  If you only do the exercises you like, you only develop certain muscles (“muskles?”).  We don’t want to have enormous forearms and no chest to speak of.  We suck up the exercises we don’t like to bring balance to our bodies.

2.     You want to age well.  Many of the exercises we avoid target the back of the body.  We need those hamstrings for walking and running and squatting.  We need those glutes and spinal muscles to keep us from hunching forward.  We need those rhomboids to keep our shoulders back so we can have lovely posture no matter what our age.

3.    You want bragging rights.  Almost all of us hate burpees.  But I notice that when someone wants to emphasize that it was a killer workout, that’s what they mention.

4.     You offer yourself a reward for doing them.  I believe in self-bribery, although I think it is best if the bribes have no calories.  If you do those over-yets, you definitely deserve that bubble bath.

Who are you? It helps to know!

How do you learn?  This is an important question for anyone seeking positive changes, especially in fitness.  A similar, but related question, is what are your particular kinds of intelligence?

One way to answer the first question comes from David Kolb’s learning styles.  (A quick web search can find you an assessment to test yourself!)  He found four:  diverging, assimilating, converging, and accommodating.  I don’t think the names describe the states all that well.  Essentially, he places people along one axis from thinking to feeling and another from doing to watching.  Divergers learn by feeling and watching; assimilators learn by thinking and watching; convergers learn by thinking and doing; and accommodators learn by feeling and doing.  When you know how you work best, you can maximize those kinds of experiences in your learning process.  In fitness, this might mean an assimilator would want to watch a demonstration of a new exercise and think through exactly what the body is doing, what muscles are working, and how to progress through each step.

Howard Gardner provides a way to answer the second question.  He proposes seven types of intelligence:  linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.  (Again, a quick web search can help you test yourself!)  When you attack a new task, if you do it from a position of strength, you are likely to have more success.  A person with strong musical intelligence, say, might use the music of an exercise class to imprint the motions into her or his brain and body, while a linguistic person might need to talk him- or  herself through the steps.

There are so many great tools out there!  Let’s use them!

I met my goal; can I help you with yours?

I did it!  I finished my NASM Behavior Change Specialization!  I have new tools that I can use to help clients meet their goals.  Heck, I have new skills to help them set those goals in the first place!

If you’re already working with me, let’s take the opportunity to check in on where you are and where you want to go.  If you are just considering what you might like to do, let’s talk and see if I can help you along your journey!

Monday Workout: Holiday? What holiday?

We’ve been doing a lot of short circuits, so it was time to get back to the 30/20/10 model.  I made the squats a 10, so if you want to continue working heavy after last week, it will work.  We can all benefit from some shoulder stability, so we get to do YTA, too.  It’s a surprisingly difficult exercise with great benefits!  Three rounds.

plyojacks	30
bench press	20
squats (can go heavy)	10
jump lunges	30
flies	20
YTA	10
ball woodchoppers	30
ball slams	20
ball rescues	10

Friday Book Report: A Leg to Stand On

Oliver Sacks’s book A Leg To Stand On tells a great story.  It’s a story of personal triumph over adversity, including a near-death adventure, a giant bull, and swelling classical music.  And it is a great exploration of proprioception at the same time.  Sacks, as a neuropsychologist and doctor, brought unique skills to bear on an exploration of his own major injury and the resulting loss of recognition of his leg.  The surgical repair went well, but somehow he could not feel his leg at all.  It vanished from his sense of his body.  He does, eventually recover both full use of his leg and his leg does rejoin his body-concept, but it is a fascinating and frustrating process.

What he learns, among other things, is that our bodies define themselves in action.  Our movements make ourselves.

Even if I hadn’t been interested in the subject itself, I think I would have enjoyed the book because he is a smart, literate person with a flair for language and a poetic sense of the world.  I recommend the book!

In which we investigate clues from literature...

This is a picture of lavender.  Every time I see it, I think, “Rabbit tobacco,” because I spent many, many hours reading Beatrix Potter with my kids when they were small.  In The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, the aforementioned bunnies eat some lettuces, which have “a very soporific effect.”  Who says children’s literature can’t use interesting words?  The resulting nap almost results in bunny pie, but the bunnies do get rescued in the end.

I am not writing this to encourage the reading of Beatrix Potter, although that is a perfectly good idea.  Rather, I would like to point out that what we eat affects how we feel.  If we are lucky in our lives, we will never be in danger of becoming a pie.  Nevertheless, it might be a good idea to notice how we feel based on what we eat.  Maybe we will discover that we can feel more energetic or calmer or happier if we include or avoid different kinds of food.

Experiment!

Remind me...

I absolutely believe that mindfulness is a Good Thing.  But sometimes mindlessness can be our friend, too.  When we build a habit, a real one, we don’t have to spend a lot of energy making ourselves do whatever it is.

This is the theory behind exercising first thing in the morning, right after using the bathroom and brushing our teeth.  All of a sudden, there we are, finished with our cardio and we’re just about awake.  We didn’t think about it.  We didn’t have to talk ourselves into it.  We just put on our shoes and went, on autopilot.

Not everyone is a morning person, so maybe the autopilot needs to kick in on the way home from work, making the car travel to the gym on the way home, so that when we come out of our freeway daze, there we are, ready to work out.

Do whatever works!