Friday Book Report: Keep Your Brain Alive

Lawrence C. Katz, Ph.D. and Manning Rubin wrote Keep Your Brain Alive to help prevent memory loss and increase brain function.  They coin the (horrible) word neurobics for their brain training exercises.  The exercises themselves are fairly interesting and could be useful.  The brain likes novelty and thrives on tasks that involve multiple senses.  Doing things like brushing one’s teeth with the nondominant hand or navigating the shower process with our eyes closed to wake up other senses have good results for our brains.

The take away is:  do something different and focus on more than just the visual and you will stay smarter longer.

Energy!

Many of us are tired.  We would love to have more energy.  Absent a magic wand, we have to create that energy for ourselves.  Here are some ways:

1.     Get enough sleep.  Duh.  Except we don’t.  We stay up too late playing video games or watching cop shows or even doing useful things like laundry and work.  Just go to bed.  Mom says.

2.     Exercise.  Even though we are tired, we need to do it.  Paradoxically, it will give us more energy.  Cardio is especially effective for this, so even if all we do is drag ourselves around the block (or get a dog to help…), we will feel more energetic afterwards.  Bonus points:  it helps us focus afterwards, so we’ll feel smarter, too.

3.     Watch out for the sugar.  Yes, it will get us through that dreadfully boring meeting without falling asleep, but the crash afterwards will be worse.  We need to try to have protein in our emergency snacks for good energy management.  Worst case:  if you do not have an allergy, at least choose a candy bar with nuts in it.

From the top...

Sometimes we need to start over.  We may get injured and have to take time off to recover.  We may have an especially busy or stressful time with work or family and lose track of our workouts.  This is all right.  It happens.

Starting over can be frustrating.  Things we used to do easily require way more time and effort than we think they should.  We want to pick up where we left off, not backtrack.

Here’s the thing:  we have to work with who we are in this moment.  Maybe last year we were stronger, or maybe we were totally awesome in high school.  Maybe not.  When we start a workout, time is new.  The past doesn’t count.  The barbell doesn’t care whether we used to lift more or fewer plates along with it.  We build the future by having an open and accepting attitude about what we can do today.

Let’s get awesome.

Yep: still writing about goals

We all have goals, whether or not we express them.  (Yes, even striving to avoid all conversations about goals is a goal.)  Some of our goals are fuzzy, like wanting to feel “good” or “fit” or “healthy.”  Some are more concrete, like wanting to fit into those jeans at the back of the closet.  If we want to achieve those goals, however, how we articulate them becomes more important.

First, we want to make our goals less fuzzy.  That means we have to spend some time defining good, fit, and healthy in terms of things that can be tracked and measured.  Measuring good might mean something as simple as assigning a grade for how good we feel on each day’s calendar box and seeing if we can get those grades up over time.  Fit might mean something about a target time for a mile run or a target weight for a heavy squat.  Healthy might be a body fat percentage or a cholesterol level.

Then we get to make some choices.  Specific goals fall, loosely, into three categories:  outcome, performance, and process.  Outcome goals work best for the super competitive among us because they are about winning and losing.  This is the kind of goal for someone who wants to take first place in the next 5K.  For those of us who are less motivated by the total win, we can skip this kind.

All of us need the other two kinds.  Performance goals focus on targets.  “I want to achieve my best time ever on my next century ride.”  Essentially, they are about competing with ourselves to reach our peak.

Process goals are about how we get to performance goals.  “I am going to do interval workouts to improve my cardio three times a week.”  “I am going to increase my leg strength by weight training twice a week.”

In practice, this means that we might have several goals that together add up to a single goal.  That is great as long as we are careful not to overwhelm ourselves with too many things to do at once.  We will get there.

Monday Workout: Core!

This week we get a little core-focused.  When using kettle bells, we have to keep our core engaged to protect our backs.  Roll-out abs use our core from the moment we start the roll out; the part where we pull our knees to our chest is almost secondary to the work we do just to keep balanced on the ball!  Three rounds.

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
(jump) squats	30
upright rows	20
curls	10
barbell clean and press	30
lunges	20
roll out abs	10

Friday Book Report: Half a book

So today’s book report is, in theory, about Walker Percy’s book The Message in the Bottle.  It’s a collection of essays with the subtitle “How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other.”  I read a little more than half of it.

It’s not that I’m uninterested in language, cognition, and philosophy.  It’s not that I find semiotics boring.  I can be fascinated by all of those things.  This particular version of the discussion just isn’t capturing my attention.  Some of it has to do with the age of the essays.  The voice is very White and very Male.  I forget that I used to swim in that water without noticing it (hmm… a reflection about language in a book about language…).  The kind of alienation Percy speaks about in his man on the subway is not the Zeitgeist of this era; we have our own brand of alienation and apparently flavors of despair look more dated than the glasses our fathers wore for twenty years.

I should have stopped reading after the first forty pages or so.  Maybe even earlier.  I stuck it out for 176 out of a mistaken sense of duty.  Some books are not my books.  Some teachers are not my teachers.  I can remain engaged in how language works, what makes humans conscious, how brains work, where the path of evolution takes us, and other mind/body issues without reading this particular book.  I choose to spend my time with some other book.

Some of fitness is about making good choices.  Choose a book you love.

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.