We Can Dance If We Want To...

I am 51 years old.  This explains why I had a fabulous time over the weekend seeing Men Without Hats and Howard Jones.  I am not ashamed of my enthusiasms, or of the fact that I was once a 15-year-old girl.  No matter what age we happen to be, we have music that speaks to us because it spoke to us when we were young (unless we are young right now, in which case we are collecting music that will evoke this time later!).  This is a good and useful thing.

For one thing, we can dance.  Sure, we might look silly.  That’s not bad.  Most of us can use an opportunity to lighten up, especially in these dark days.  If we want to be able to jump around into our old age, we had better keep it up in the present.  Dancing is fun, aerobic, and social.  Sing along and you add another level of challenge.

If those old guys up on stage can still rock their leather pants and crazy pleated suits by keeping up the dancing, we can too.

Hut, hut, hike...

We all get into fitness ruts.  Maybe everybody doesn’t have a spin bike in their living room like I do (it’s decorative, right???), but we all have an exercise of least resistance that is the easiest thing for us to do to hit our fitness goals of the day.  We should have that thing that is really easy to get done because we want good habits to be simple and automatic.  That said, we do need to shake things up a bit from time to time.

Last week, I went hiking for the first time in a long time.  I took my fancy camera and my kid and some water and my ridiculous sun hat.  (Next time I’m also taking snacks and bug spray.)  Five miles later, having climbed, according to my kid’s phone, 42 floors, we were both sweaty and tired and exhilarated.  I was sore in different places than usual.  My brain was refreshed both from the presence of trees and the kind of conversations that occur when walking on dirt under a canopy of leaves.

I am not abandoning my spin bike.  I don’t always have the time to drive somewhere to hike.  But an awful lot of stuff shifted when I did something out of the ordinary.

What needs shaking in your workout this week?

Monday Workout: Yes, It Is Burpee Week

I know I’m not going to be popular this week.  I am okay with that.  The only way to make peace with burpees (I’m not going to go as far as liking them) is to get better at them and we get better by practicing.  They, like the squats, renegade rows, and lunges are great exercises for building metabolism and burning lots of calories.  Also:  we end up stronger!  This workout has some options in it because folks with knee problems probably don’t want to be doing too many jump squats or lunges; regular squats in a comfortable range of motion or with support from a TRX or stability ball on the wall and high-knee marching with a weight overhead will also do the trick of getting heart rate up and joints moving.  As always, if it hurts, don’t do it.  We need to use our good judgment and adapt workouts to the body we are working with today.  Three rounds.

Xiser	30
flies	20
burpees	10
(jump) squats	30
kickbacks	20
renegade rows	10
overhead lunges/high knees	30
bench press	20
pretty princesses	10