Coping with sitting

I see a lot of information out there about how we’re all too sedentary.  Screens are ruling our lives.  We’re stuck in the car all the time.  We spend so much time at our desks that we might as well be chained there.  It’s entirely likely that all that sitting will in fact kill us.

I confess:  I like a lot of sedentary activities.  I could try to figure out how to knit and walk at the same time, but it sounds a little dangerous.  Reading does not mix well with most exercises—anything strenuous enough to feel like I’m doing something makes the pages jostle too much to read.

I happen to have several luxuries in my life:  an extremely short commute (across the yard) and a job that involves very little desk time.  When I do have to sit for extended periods, I find that I get cranky.

The solution?  How about several.  First, short attention span.  Yes, I know that we want to cultivate focus and deep thought and all that good stuff.  We just need to do it in bursts of an hour or less.  Standing up to stretch and move around refreshes the brain as well as the body.  Also, we can use the bathroom and fill up our water.

Second, put in some dedicated fatigue.  When we get that big workout over with in the morning, we are tired enough that sitting at our desks seems like a pretty good idea.  Evening workouts serve a similar purpose in letting us burn off the accumulated wiggles of the day.

Third, sneak in standing or walking whenever possible.  Weather permitting, take the meeting outside and around the block.  Stand up on that conference call.  Go by your colleague’s desk instead of calling or texting.

We need both sitting and standing to be healthy and happy.

Exercises for Anxiety

I’ve written before about my depression and about how exercise helps me keep the Depression Monster in its place.  In the times when the monster gets out, I tend to get some anxiety symptoms as well.  Fortunately, my anxiety does not surface in the gym or studio, but I do understand when other people find theirs in that space.

Coping with exercise anxiety is a lot like coping with every other kind.  Not every technique works every time, so it’s always useful to have a few extra on hand, just in case.  Here are a few that some folks might find helpful.

• Take a friend.  The right friend to bring along to the gym when dealing with exercise anxiety has some special characteristics.  This is not the time to grab a that critical friend, or the competitive one.  The one with the sense of humor is perfect.  The one who loves us no matter what our hair happens to be doing.  We want to have someone there on the next treadmill or spotting our lift who can natter on about puppies or brownies or shoes, who will tell us as many times as we need to hear it that it is all going to be fine and that we’re doing great.

• Breathe.  Anxiety tightens up our chests.  We start breathing shallowly.  Sometimes we even get the full-on panic attack.  If we’re already a bit breathless from exercising, anxiety just makes it all that much worse.  We can slow down or stop for a few seconds, take a couple of real breaths.  Then a few more.  We can let our bodies remember that they know how to breathe without our interference.  As we get in the cardio habit, we may find that we have trained ourselves out of some of the panicky breathing.  Some of us might find yoga or another mind-body practice useful (others may find the whole idea of breathing quietly to be panic-inducing all by itself; it is okay not to like yoga.).

• Don’t push.  Maybe we do the shortest workout ever.  We show up, we hop on the exercise bike, we freak out, and we hop right off.  Good on us for showing up.  We have to start somewhere.  Another day we might get a little farther.  We were brave enough to begin.

We can do this.

Perfectly done

In theory, the perfect workout might exist.  More accurately, the perfect workout for a particular moment in time might exist, one that carefully calibrates available energy, current strength, wind chill factor, and time since breakfast, among other things.  Under most circumstances, however, I can confidently say that the Very Best Workout is the one we actually do.

We want to spend a little time planning our workouts.  We need to take a minute or two to see whether we have covered our cardio, our flexibility, and our strength exercises for various muscle groups.  And that’s really it.  We do not need to obsess about precise numbers of reps or calories per minute or exact percentage of climb.

Doing something is pretty much always better than doing nothing.

Go play.