It's as if I wrote this post well in advance or something...

What’s the plan?  This is one of the key questions for fitness.  Sure, it’s fine to show up at the gym and do whatever strikes our fancy.  Showing up, is, indeed, a crucial step.  However, it’s also a good way to get into a rut.

Planning can take care of that.  We can think about what exercises we need for a complete workout.  We can consider what we did last week.  We can balance our cardio, strength, and flexibility needs.

Planning also means that we get to the gym with all the right stuff.  I’m not a big advocate of the perfect everything, but we need shoes and water, at least.  Getting the bag together with the water bottle the night before can be transformative.  Also, having the gym clothes out as the outfit of least resistance can make getting going in the morning more automatic.  (Sleeping in gym clothes also works.)

Even knowing that we’re not morning people at the gym is a form of planning.  We can make sure that the stuff is in the car for after work so there are no excuses.

Let’s do it!

Monday Workout: Plyo-huh?

There are a couple of ways to make an exercise more intense.  One way is to make them plyometric, which is a fancy word for adding jumping.  This week our plain-old squats and lunges go plyometric to increase power and ramp up the cardio.  Three rounds.

lunge jumps	30
incline press	20
YTA	10
squat jumps	30
1 leg deadlifts	20
dips	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10

Not a Book Report and Not the Last Flower Picture I Will Use

(I did not finish a book this week, so this is a post about mind-body stuff.  “Stuff” is a technical term, of course.)

Because I am having surgery on Monday, I filled out an advanced health care directive and got it notarized this week.  Which means I’ve been thinking about life and death.  Cheerful, eh?

I am going to die, but probably not on Monday.  We all are.  That means that at some point, we will do things for the last time.  Sometimes we know when the last time is and sometimes we don’t.  When I visited my parents recently, my dad gave me his baseball mitt.  He has played catch with it for the last time.  I doubt he knew that when he was doing it, but he knows now.

We create rituals for this.  That’s what graduations and weddings are for.  Even birthday parties serve to mark the last time we were a certain age and the first time we were the next age.  They help us notice.

Mindfulness helps us notice more often.  Being fully in the moment, whether we are biking or swimming, can give us a deeper sense of what we are doing.  Then, when we have biked or backstroked for the last time, we can remember how our muscles felt, how our emotions soared, how glad we were to get to the top of the hill or the edge of the pool.

That might make the last-ness a little less final.