Often there is another way

I wrote yesterday about getting the worst thing on the list done first.  There is a caveat:  the worst thing must actually need doing.

My focus, as a fitness professional, is on making fitness as much fun as possible.  Almost everyone can find a kind of exercise they enjoy.  For those who can’t, we strive to find a way to make it less horrible, whether that means making it quick or social or loud or whatever.

We all need to do cardio, weights, and flexibility/balance work, but that offers a wide range of possibilities.  We can swim, bike, run, dance.  We can do weights with a class or a trainer or mano-a-mano with the dumbbells.  Yoga, Pilates, stretching, circus, gymnastics can provide that supple agility we require to navigate all the unstable surfaces of life.

Even burpees can be avoided if we work it right.

Do Your Worst

Several careers ago, I had a longish commute (although not by today’s standards; the same drive now is Much Worse).  My job had a lending library of educational tapes and I listened to a lot of them in the car because driving is not my favorite thing ever.  The tapes all focused on various business skills.  We got some kind of Brownie points for writing up what we learned.  (I wrote a stinging assessment on the one about professional dress for women as being particularly sexist and stupid.  The culture may not have caught up with my thinking, but at least I now have a career where sweats are, in fact, totally appropriate in the workplace.)

Anyway, one of these many tape series discussed various time management techniques.  There was one that I found transformative:  Worst First.  In the context of time management, what it means is that we do the most horrible thing on our lists before all the other things because once that is done, it’s all easier going.  We, in theory, procrastinate less because that awful thing is over.  I find, as bonus, it reduces my stress level to know that particular monster is slain.

This theory applies to fitness.  For some of us, it makes us work out very first thing because workouts are our Worst.  Those of us who hate cardio can check it off before we hit the weights.  Weight-haters can do a brief warm up, pump the iron, and relax (relatively speaking) into the cardio haze.  Even within a weight workout, if there is one exercise that makes us want to invent new swear words, we can put it up front.  It all gets better after that’s over.

We can get the Worst done.

Beyond In, Out, Repeat

Last week, I spent six hours at a workshop on breathing.  You’d think I would have known how to do it before the workshop, since I’m not dead yet.  However, breathing does have finer points.

On one level, it is absolutely simple.  Our autonomic systems take care of it without any input from our conscious mind.  This is by design, so we can do things like worry about whether there is milk in the fridge or consider how wormholes work without keeling over.  We would never get anything done if we had to remember to breathe and make our hearts beat and our glands secrete and our hair grow.

However, as people have noticed throughout time, we can also exert some conscious control over our breathing.  This can do everything from facilitate movement to soothe nerves to energize our thinking.  How we choose to control the breathing affects what we get out of it.

There were a bunch of technical details that I get to apply in my work, but one item was of interest in the wider sense, I think.  Because the purpose of breathing is gas exchange (oxygen in, carbon dioxide out), when we focus on lengthening the inhale, we are energizing our bodies and we are calming ourselves when we lengthen the exhale.  In practical terms, in these stressful times, we need to exhale more if we are anxious and inhale more if we are depressed.  (This goes some way to explain why aerobic exercise is so useful for those of us with depression issues:  we have to inhale a lot more when we do it!)

The best news of all is that no matter how we are breathing, we are simultaneously training our core muscles.  It is the longest set of core exercises ever—a whole lifetime’s worth!