Diddly Squat

If I had to choose just one exercise, I would pick the squat.  Here’s why:

• It’s a multi-joint exercise.  Ankles, knees, and hips all work when we squat.  If we add overhead arms, we get shoulders involved, too.  That means we’re doing lots of work.  Our metabolisms benefit.

• It uses big muscles.  Big muscle movements mean lots of calorie burn.

• It takes coordination.  That means that we use our abdominals for balance and we have to engage our brains.

• It has practical applications.  We all want to live independently as long as possible.  That means we have to be able to sit down and stand up all by ourselves.  Squatting is practice for this very thing.

Let’s do them!

Same Flower, But This Time-- A Bee!

One of the best reasons to have a trainer is that good trainers pay attention to form.  When we work out, we are hot and sweaty.  We get tired and our brains get fuzzy.  Having someone else there to notice that it’s time to shift to a lighter weight so we don’t make weird body compensations or to suggest that our knees will be happier in the long term if we can manage to keep them in line with our toes can make the difference between progress and injury.

Yes, we can tune into those things ourselves.  Yes, we can use a mirror or an observant friend for help.  Yes, we want to build our own proprioception.

But it’s easier with a trained eye on us.  We may not know or notice that we habitually hold our heads slightly tilted to the right, or that our left hip tends to hike up more often than our right one.

Try it out.  It could be fun and useful!

Yellow dinner is still popular...

When my kids were small, I was a stay-at-home parent.  It was both difficult and luxurious.  I learned a lot.  Some of it is even relevant in a fitness context (unlike, say, my ability to read certain picture books in the dark).

One relevant skill was meal planning.  No one wants to go to the grocery store any more than necessary with a toddler who might scream at any moment.  Making sure there was only one trip in a week required some tactics.  Surprisingly enough, it also resulted in all of us eating better, more varied meals and only the occasional resort to calling Blondie’s for pizza or the infamous and popular yellow dinner (mac and cheese and frozen corn).  If we want healthy, tasty meals, it makes sense to plan them (and maybe even cook them!) ahead of time, when we are not hungry, tired, and easily influenced by the idea of ice cream as dinner.

A useful principle that emerged in multiple contexts was that some times worked better for getting things done than other times.  Afternoons with cranky children were not the prime moments for tasks that required detailed attention, but first thing in the morning we could do just about anything successfully.  That was our rhythm; other people have different ones.  In a fitness context, the application is that we need to work out at the times that work for us.  Some people can roll out of bed and pump iron.  Others do better after work in the evening or at lunch time.

Even after I returned to paid work, meal planning and appropriate timing of tasks served us well as a family and continue to work now.  Let’s do what works!