Cheers!

I spent a chunk of time studying nutrition over the last year, as anyone who has heard me complain knows.  It was useful and interesting.  I have one categorical piece of advice:  drink water.

Our personal chemistry sets use water in almost all our processes.  We need it to digest, to transport, and to lubricate.  Without it, we die.

I am not foolish enough to try to take away anyone’s coffee.  That’s crazy talk.  But we do need to keep in mind that caffeine is a diuretic, so we may need to drink more water along with that coffee (or tea…).  We also need to be careful about other liquids:  juice, soda, and alcohol.  The first two have a lot of sugar in them, which means they are full of calories, while not being all that full of nutrition (fruits are better than juices, mostly because we get lots of fiber along with the vitamins and phytochemicals and other good stuff; diet soda is full of unpronounceable chemicals and in general, fewer of them in the diet is better.).  Alcohol is also a diuretic, meaning we need to drink more water as we increase our consumption.  It has a lot of calories, no other nutrients, and an ability to interfere with our bodies’ ability to absorb other nutrients.

Maybe it’s not fun to drink water.  There are at least two ways to handle that.  One is:  suck it up.  Not everything we do is fun.  The headaches and performance impairment we get from dehydration aren’t fun, either.  We are adults and sometimes we have to do stuff we’d rather not do because it is good for us.  The other is to try to find a way to make it more fun.  If that means fizzy water or lemon slices or cucumber slices or even a paper umbrella, do it.

We’re nicer, smarter, and healthier when we’re hydrated.  Drink up!

Go Outside and Play

I love gyms.  They take out a lot of the uncertainty about working out.  The handy machines tell me how fast I’m going and how steep the incline is.  The pool is measured for me.  The weights are labeled, so there is no question about how much I’m lifting.  And it never rains inside.

Life, however, does not happen in the gym.   When I scramble down a rocky path to get to the beach, I’m not taking regular steps on a smooth surface at a given rate.  Trying to avoid getting wet in puddles or in waves requires different skills, as does balancing on rocks of varying size and stability.  Then there is the backpack on my back and the heavy camera that swings crazily around my neck.

When I work with clients on balance in the studio, we sometimes recreate unstable surfaces with the BOSU or the turntable or the sea urchin (that piece of equipment may have a real name, but I don’t know what it is…).  We stand on one foot.  We practice moving sideways and diagonally and backwards.  That helps some.

But nothing helps like going out into the real world with its wind and rocks and slippery seaweed.  Sometimes we need to go outside and play.

Sometimes stopping

Over the weekend, I started to do my heavy lifting workout.  Heavy lifting is not something to do alone, which is why I do it on the weekend:  my spotter is home then, although he often finishes breakfast while I get the warm up and the first few lighter sets done.  I didn’t get very many sets in this time.  Something wasn’t right on my second set of squats.  I switched to deadlifts, which took out most of the pain, but not all of it.

So I stopped.  Not because I wanted to stop.  I have as much stubbornness as anyone and no silly barbell is going to tell me what I can and can’t do, thank you very much.   But I realized that I would tell my client to stop.

It was hard.  It was frustrating.  I was mad as I dragged my hurting behind up the stairs to the shower.  And it was the right decision because now I am not in pain.

Next time I do heavy lifting, I will do some extra warming up.  Between now and then, I’ll be seeing how my body works in cardio and Pilates and yoga contexts.  This is the only body I get, so I need to take care of it.  Most of the time, that means making it a little uncomfortable, pushing it to go a little faster, a little longer, a little harder.  Sometimes it means stopping.