Try Pilates?

Every kind of exercise is not for everyone.  However, here are a few reasons to consider Pilates.

•      It helps with posture, which makes us feel better and look better.

•      It improves flexibility.  We lose range of motion as we get older, but Pilates can help stop that trend.

•      It improves form.  The kind of attention we pay to movement in Pilates translates to better movement in our other activities.

•      It helps our breath.  When we have a chance to tune into our breath, we calm down and become more efficient.

At my studio, a Pilates evaluation and first session are always free.  Check it out!

I see the weights; now what?

Weight lifting seems confusing at first.  What are we supposed to do?  How do we choose the right weight?  How long are we supposed to keep on going?  Let me help.

When we do a weight workout, we want to work out all the muscle groups.  (If our goal is body-building, it gets more complicated and we might work out different muscle groups on different days, but for most of us, we want the whole body on one day.)  That means we want to work lower body, upper body, and abdominals, ensuring that we work both the front and back of the body.  That means that we want to push and pull with all our extremities and bend both forward and back.  There are many ways to do all those things, which is good: we won’t get bored.  I’m not going to go into detail here, just give the principle and we can all go home and apply it.

At first, we choose the right weight by pure guesswork.  If we choose something too light, we will know because we will feel like we could lift all day.  A choice of something too heavy will be even more obvious by the second or third repetition.

How heavy a weight we choose also relates to what we want to accomplish and how many times we intend to lift it.  If the goal is increasing strength, we want to pick heavier weights and lift them fewer times (no more than 10 reps, and sometimes as few as 1!).  If our goal is to improve our endurance or to look more “toned,” we will choose lighter weights and lift them lots of times (12 to 20 reps).

If we belong to a gym, odds are that there is at least some kind of orientation program that can walk us through the basics of the weight room and give us a basic routine.  If we’re working out at home, there are lots of resources available.  And there is always the option of hiring a trainer to tailor workouts to our needs and goals.

Taking photos of flowers: activity; Walking around to do it: might be exercise

I’m a bit of a word nerd.  I majored in English, so it comes with the territory.  (For reference, my lovely friends and acquaintances who speak linguistics qualify as the real word nerds, in the best possible sense of that term.)  My nerdiness makes me think about the distinctions between words like exercise and activity.

One difference between the two is the point of what is going on.  Exercise, by nature, implies that we are doing whatever it is we are doing to get sweatier, stronger, faster, or healthier in some sense.  Activity can include exercise, but generally the goal is something different.  Take, for example, gardening.  Hefting bags of soil and digging up weeds can certainly make us stronger and get our heart rate up and cause sweat to pour from our working brows, but the point is vegetables or flowers or placating the neighbors who are tired of looking at our wasteland of a yard.

I am all in favor of both activity and exercise, but I need to warn about the danger of confusing the two.  Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking we have exercised when we have just been doing an activity.  We say, “I gardened, so I don’t have to lift weights” on days when the gardening amounted to deadheading a few rosebushes while knocking back a cooling beverage.

If we have a fitness tracker, it can help keep us honest about what is really exercise.  They count the minutes that we reach our target heart rates and log the number of steps we really took while raking up the debris and hauling it to the green bin.  Sweat is another good indicator for those of us who don’t go in for trackers, unless it is particularly hot out and we would be sweating anyway.  It’s also useful to notice whether we need to stop and rest; if we do, we are probably getting some exercise.

As always, the goal is to maximize our enjoyment of life.  Having a body that does enough exercise to make activity easy and enjoyable helps.