Simply beautiful...

Because an awful lot of our lives is complicated, I tend to emphasize keeping it simple in workouts.  We don’t need a lot of stuff; we just need to get in there and get sweaty.

That said, sometimes it is useful to check out our environment and see if we can make it better in a simple way.  Maybe that means taking the scenic route on our walk/ride/run instead of the most convenient.  Maybe our whole workout perks up when we have a flattering workout top that doesn’t become instantly soggy when we get moving.  Maybe it’s remembering to bring a water bottle, or a friend.

The point of working out is caring for ourselves.  Let’s treat ourselves nicely in the process.

Heavy Metal

I have favorite kinds of workouts, like everyone else.  The workouts I write for my clients are circuits that incorporate cardio intervals.  We work various muscle groups and we vary the equipment, the weight, the plane, or the balance required.  One of my goals is to keep things interesting.  Another is to pump up metabolism.

Sometimes, however, it is useful to go heavy.  Working through one or two exercises from warm-up to a one-rep maximum makes a great change.  We push our limits.  We raise our heart rates in a totally different context.  We find out just how powerful we are.

A couple of important notes, though.  Don’t lift heavy alone.  It’s dangerous.  Know what to do if the weight is too heavy (e.g., use the drop bars on a power rack while squatting, pull the dumbbells into your body and drop them in flies, tell your spotter you’re in trouble…).  Choose one or two exercises, not ten or fifteen; it can take almost an hour to work heavy squats from warm-up to maximum.  Rest appropriately between sets—at least two minutes and preferably five as the weight gets closer to maximum.

Let’s be strong!

Extremely Moderate...

I have been thinking about football players and gymnasts over the last while.  The men and women who do these extreme sports have a lot to teach us, but not, perhaps, what we might think at first.

I am a fitness professional.  I believe that exercise is good for all of us, as essential to our well-being as food and sleep.  But just as I would not recommend that any of us eat four times the necessary calories in a day or sleep for days on end, I do not recommend the kind of workouts these athletes do.  Some of us may be gifted with football skills or acrobatic grace; the rules become different when we want to be professional or Olympic.

The rest of us need to exercise enough but not too much.

Enough means, at the very least, that we do about 30 minutes of cardio five or six days a week and do some kind of weight training once or twice a week.  We also need to take the time to work on flexibility, whether we just incorporate stretching or catch a yoga or Pilates session.

Too much is a little trickier to define because it depends on a lot of things.  The easiest way to tell if we are doing too much is that we hurt all the time.  Our bodies need time to recover and rest just like we need to work.  If our muscle soreness doesn’t go away, it probably means we are overdoing it.  Other signs include extreme fatigue (after we’ve ruled out work all-nighters or small children or other usual suspects), injury—particularly repetitive stress injuries--, illness, and sometimes weight changes.

We only get one body.  We have to use it carefully, enough to keep it strong and supple and not so much that we break it down.