You can also get stronger lifting Russian novels...

My English teacher my junior year in high school, Mr. Johsens, was determined to make us think.  (He may have felt some frustration in this task, taken out on us in his choices of reading, which were uniformly depressing; if I were looking for a book list to encourage suicidal tendencies, I might choose the books we read that year.  He, however, remained consistently cheerful and engaged.  End of digression.)  In the course of this thankless (until now:  thank you, Mr. Johsens, wherever you are!) task, he spent a fair amount of time emphasizing the importance of premises.  All of our arguments begin with the premises we choose.  Among those premises, we find the meanings we assign to particular words.  Yes, I am getting to the point now.

We have to decide what we mean by fitness.  I can help my clients become fitter, but that might mean something totally different to different clients.  One may want to lose weight.  Another may want to increase mobility in the face of chronic disease.  Yet another might want to keep up with a perpetual-motion kid.

Let’s have that conversation.  Let’s figure out a fitness goal that makes sense.  Then we can get there from here.

I meant to do that...

Over the weekend, I got to see some amazing dance performances and a few that were less amazing.  In trying to sort out what made the difference between amazing and not, I realized that the magic ingredient, as far as I could tell from the outside, was intention.

All of the dancers spent hours training and rehearsing.  They all had developed muscles and methods of controlling those muscles.  Body type was not an indicator—some of the most transcendent dancers were older or heavier than what we, societally, think of as dancers.

The ones who moved me, as I sat there in my moderately uncomfortable chair, were the ones who knew why they were there and what they were doing at every second.  There were no body parts unaccounted for, no movements sketched when they could be deeply drawn.  It was an integrated, flowing whole, that kind of dance.

Not all of us are cut out to be dancers.  But all of us can strive, from time to time, for the clarity of mind as we move our bodies that creates beauty out of strength and purpose.  Maybe we’re just doing curls, maybe it’s the third set and we’re tired and we’d rather be on a beach somewhere.  Maybe it’s time to check our hearts and invest in being where we are, doing what we are doing with full intention.  They could be the most beautiful curls ever.

Monday Workout: Ropes again!

This week, we are doing ropes again because they are friendly to the knees and hard on everything else.  Three rounds.

rope double slams	30
bench press	20
pushups	10
rope alternating slams	30
flies	20
reverse flies	10
rope circles	30
rows	20
pretty princesses	10