Monday Workout: Christmas in July

I try to make Christmas come twice a year, once at the normal time and once sometime during the summer.  It’s this week.  Here’s how it works:  your true love wants you to be strong and powerful (or tired…).  He or she gives you one push press on the first day.  On the second day, he or she gives you two goblet squats and a push press.  On the third day, you get three overhead presses, two goblet squats, and a push press.  And so on, until you have done all twelve days’ worth of exercises.  No, I don’t know what we all did to deserve a true love who wants us to do so many burpees.  We can do this.

1 push press

2 goblet squats

3 Overhead press

4 1 leg squats each leg

5 deadlifts

6 burpees

7 pushups

8 renegade rows

9 mountain climbers

10 jump lunges

11 kb swings

12 plyojacks

Friday Book Report: The Bulletproof Diet

Dave Asprey’s book The Bulletproof Diet is, obviously, a diet book.  One does not, in general, read diet books for fun and this book does not encourage one to do so, although I have read many worse diet books.  There is a pattern.  Person feels miserable.  Person tries everything.  After much searching and gnashing of teeth, person finally finds the way and wants to spare the rest of us all that pain and suffering.  Buy this book.

This diet might work.  It includes foods my husband might actually eat, so we might even test it right here at home.  It eliminates the sugars that are the bane of the Standard American Diet.  It does focus on mostly whole foods.

Like all diets, it has idiosyncracies.  Asprey is obsessed with avoiding mold.  He adores grass-fed butter.  He has his personal list of must-have supplements.

The recipes at the end sound reasonably tasty and functional.  If you are looking for a set of directions, you could do worse than this book.

Not perfect

In general, I like to be efficient.  I like to figure out the best way to do something and then do it.  I want to work hard, get results, and get on with it.

Sometimes, though, it is better to do something than to do the perfect thing.  Maybe we overslept a little and there isn’t time for the ideal workout; it is okay to do a short version instead.  Maybe we discover that we forgot our gym shoes; we can improvise and try out a yoga class.  Maybe we are all set to bike and discover that we have a flat and no spare tube; this might be our chance to speed-walk the neighborhood.

Maybe we can’t be perfect, but we certainly can be pretty darn good.

Deep in and out

When we want to change our behavior, one of the things that can get in our way is stress.  Change itself is stressful and when we forget the milk, or get stuck in traffic, or get into a debate on the relative merits of the Marvel and DC Universes, we might fall back into old, unhelpful patterns, whether those involve slamming doors or eating all the M&Ms.

One of the simplest ways to deal with stress is something we have to do anyway:  breathe.

Yes, we do it all the time (unless we are dead, in which case we have a whole different set of problems).  We tend, however, to take shallow breaths.  When we get anxious, we breathe faster, too.

Making a point of taking deep breaths helps remind our bodies that we are not, actually, about to die.  We probably don’t even need to sprint at top speed away from a hungry bear.  It is good to practice taking deep breaths when we are not stressed so we are better at it when the time comes to help ourselves calm down.

So:  inhale and let your belly fill.  Exhale and hollow your belly out.  Sometimes holding the space for a count or two between the inhale and exhale and the space between the exhale and inhale can be helpful.  Even five deep breaths can give us the time we need to reconnect with our more serene selves.

Independence!

Today is Independence Day.  We can celebrate lots of things today, from the system of checks and balances in our government to the invention of fireworks to the opportunity to eat hot dogs.  Here are a couple more things we might want to declare independence from:

1.     Negative vibes.  Be yourself, your whole self.  Don’t let the turkeys get you down.  Being your own honest, beautiful, crazy person is the best gift you can give yourself and the world.  We need you to be you, because no one else can do it!

2.     Bad habits.  Take back your life from the cigarettes or the complaining or the sugar or the binge-watching.  You don’t need those crutches anymore.

3.    The stress machine.  Breathe freely.  Take the extra moment.  Enjoy.

Monday Workout: Pre-Holiday

Sure, tomorrow’s a holiday.  That doesn’t mean we can’t get in a workout today!  This one is less cardio-intensive than last week’s, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get our heart rates up as we lift weights.  Choose on the heavy side (you’ll know it’s right if you can barely complete the set; it is okay if you have to do 29 or 19 or 9 repetitions, too.  The goal is to max out.).  Three rounds.

step ups	30
ball chest press	20
reverse fly	10
squat	30
row	20
calf raise	10
lunge	30
deadlift	20
curl	10

Friday Book Report: The Stress of Life

Hans Selye’s book The Stress of Life remains a classic in the field.  Selye was among the first to articulate a theory of how stress works in the body and backed up his theory with extensive experimentation that demonstrated the role of various hormones in the stress response.  The work has percolated thoroughly into our body of knowledge.  We all now know what it means to be “stressed.”

The bulk of the book is taken up with detailed explanations of the General Adaptation Syndrome and the Local Adaptation Syndrome that make up the stress response.  Most of us probably don’t need this much detail, particularly about some of the grimmer experimental methods that brought us this information.

The last section of the book offered some ideas on how to cope with stress to maximize our positive challenge (eustress) and minimize destructive tension (stress).  I was hoping for something more than was on offer.  Selye suggests that we each need to find our individual balance and our right work, that we need to make mindful choices to avoid wasting our limited supply of adaptation energy, and that we ought to seek a meaningful existence.  None of this is bad advice, but it’s not particularly helpful, either.

As an introduction to the concepts and mechanisms of stress, the book succeeds, but may not be suitable for all readers.