Top Five!

We all have favorite exercises.  Here are five of mine and the reasons they are my favorite:

1.     Squats.  I love squats best.  They are the one exercise that I want everyone to do.  They have variations that work for pretty much every human because we all have to stand and sit.  Squats are a compound exercise, meaning that they use lots of joints and thus work multiple muscle groups at once.  They are practical and easy to learn.  Watching someone’s squat form tells me more than any other single exercise about what a person needs to work on.

2.     Pushups.  Again, pushups have about a gazillion variations so that almost everyone can do them.  They are also a compound exercise, working upper body and core at once.  While pushups can be done with equipment, none is actually required.

3.     Deadlifts.  Another compound exercise!  (Sensing a theme here…)  What I like about deadlifts is that they use the entire back of the body.  We’re really good at working all the muscles in front, but we neglect the hamstrings, glutes, and back muscles.

4.     Rows.  Yet another compound exercise!  In our society of chair-warriors, we need to do things that help us maintain our posture.  Rows work the back muscles that get weakened when we slouch through the day.

5.     Pretty princesses.  It was hard to pick a favorite abdominal exercise because I like all of them, but pretty princesses work all of the abdominals, so I pick them because they are efficient.  And yes, they, too, are a compound exercise.

What are your top five? 

You are not sorry

Often clients will apologize to me when an exercise is hard for them.  News flash:  the exercises are supposed to be hard.  My job is to provide challenge in appropriate doses.  This, in itself, is hard for most of us because we all secretly, or not so secretly, want to be good at everything we do.

I work on balance with all my clients.  Not one of us is getting younger and the difference between independent old age and nursing home care pretty much comes down to balance—falls are everyone’s kryptonite.  So yes, I am going to ask everyone to try to stand on one foot, or do single leg squats, or stand on the BOSU, or play one-legged catch with me.  Yes, sometimes we have to put that other foot down, or use a body bar, or step off the BOSU in a less-than-controlled manner.  This is called practice.  When the task gets too easy, it’s my job to make it harder.

Failure is part of the process.  It doesn’t mean that we are “bad” at balance (or whatever else we’re working on); it means we haven’t mastered it yet.  That’s what we show up to do—to practice until we get to mastery and then find a new skill to master.

We never need to apologize for not being able to do something yet—only for not trying to grow.

We can do this.

New toy!

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to buy an Apple Watch.  Now that I’ve played with it for a while, I have some things to say about it as a fitness tool.  (I have, accidentally, also answered my wrist while driving and felt like Dick Tracy, but that is not my area of expertise.)  I am not a particularly tech-loving human, so I want my tech to be easy to use and mostly intuitive.

Before choosing the Apple Watch, I also considered Fitbit’s smart watch options.  They are, among other things, less expensive.  Reviews also suggested that the Fitbit options were more suitable to those of us who want the gizmo specifically for fitness tracking.  What made me choose the Apple Watch was, finally, a lack of faith in the durability of Fitbit products—I have killed too many other Fitbits.  What I like about Fitbit, however, is the ability to track food from my computer, so I also went searching for a food tracking application that meshed well with the Apple Watch.  (I will talk about the food tracking part below.)

The Apple Watch tracks three things in its Activity app:  movement, exercise, and standing.  It’s easy to get a visual read on where I am on my goals at any time—each goal is displayed as a concentric circle and the goal is complete when the circle closes. 

One of the most noticeable differences between the Apple Watch and my dearly departed Fitbit is that the watch is much pickier about what counts as exercise—my daily dog walks used to count as exercise and now they are almost entirely movement because Cricket doesn’t want to go at flank speed.  Also, it is entirely possible to get in 15,000 steps and still barely meet the exercise goal—no amount of movement that does not cross the threshold to exercise will add up to exercise minutes.  For me, this is, on the whole, a good thing.

When it comes to the standing goal, I’m a little less enthusiastic.  I don’t have a particularly sedentary vocation and I drink a lot of water, so I do in fact stand up and move around nearly every hour.  However, if I’ve already done over an hour of exercise in a day, I feel like it’s all right if I want to sit on my behind a little longer.  (There is probably a way to turn off the notifications, but I haven’t cared enough to figure out how yet.)  People who work desk jobs may appreciate the reminders more than I do.

Tracking individual workouts is simple enough.  There are plenty of workouts it already knows about.  I’ve used walking, indoor cycling, swimming, yoga, and “other.”  The swimming workout is almost scarily perceptive, knowing how many laps I do in freestyle and how many in backstroke.  I use “other” for weight training and Pilates.  There is a HIIT workout available, too, that I could see applying to some of my weight workouts.

I did not like the band the watch came with, so I bought two others, the metal mesh one for most uses and a perforated rubber one for swimming, although I could swim with the metal one if I wanted to.  When I ride my spin bike, I need to wear elbow and wrist supports; the watch does a good job of perceiving my effort even when it is higher up my forearm above the wrist wrap.  That is probably not something the designers were thinking about, so gold stars to them for making it work anyway.

As previously mentioned, I don’t love tech, so I did not want to try out a bunch of different food tracking applications.  I googled best food tracking for Apple Watch and got the free version of Lifesum.  It interacts seamlessly with the workout data from the watch and tells me how many calories I have consumed, used, and have remaining.  Each meal gets an easy-to-interpret face rating (the smilier the face, the healthier the meal).  Data is entered via phone.  I was skeptical that it would be easy, but I was pleasantly surprised.

So far, I think that the watch has been a good choice.  It does what I need it to do for fitness with little to no frustration on my part.  I expect it to endure more than my last several Fitbits.  Choosing a fitness tracker is a highly individual decision and I can see why someone would choose one of the other options instead, but for me, this one works.