Monday Workout: Hidden Abs

This week, Thanksgiving being over and all, we are going to use our abs.  Compound exercises, like the lunge twists, and exercises with instability or asymmetry like the ball bench presses and single leg squats, make us use our core more.  Four rounds.

1 min cardio
lunge twists	20
ball bench press	20
step/jump ups	20
1 leg squat	20
overhead press	10
pushups	10

Friday Mind-Body (no book yet)

For some of us, the connection between mind and body comes intuitively.  The rest of us need to work a little harder to find it.  Except that one of the best ways to find the connection, I think, is through play.

We live in a competitive culture, which has good points and less good points.  One of the less good points is that many of us learn that if we can’t excel at something, we might as well skip it.  This limits our willingness to experiment.  One way of describing the stages of learning moves from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence.  Those two middle phases contain the key to connecting mind and body.

We’ve all had the experience of trying a new sport and suddenly realizing we have way more body parts than we know what to do with.  We focus on hand position and suddenly our left feet are out in right field, so to speak.  What we are doing as we learn is training our bodies by focusing our minds.  We are building the pathways between brain and muscle.

All of this is much easier when we take ourselves lightly.  Let’s give ourselves permission to be the worst dancer or snowboarder or weight lifter in the history of the universe so we can see where we are and then move toward something better.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!  Gratitude is good for us!  Here are eleven things I am grateful for:

1.     My crazy family.  All of them.  Even at their worst, or my worst.

2.     Friends who fill my heart and who make me laugh and who kick my butt when needed.

3.     Dogs, especially Cricket.

4.     Pens and papers, books and pictures.

5.     Loud music.

6.     Movement:  swimming, yoga, walking, biking, dancing, pillow-fighting, hopping up and down.

7.     Sweaters and sweater weather.

8.     Yarn, to play with and to wear.

9.     Work I love.

10.  Mashed potatoes.

11.  The world outside.