Why weight?

Most people can be convinced to do cardio exercise.  It can be done without a lot of equipment or preparation, lends itself fairly well to hanging out with friends, and sometimes can even be done while watching television.  And, once the initial endurance gets built, it makes us all feel good.

Weights, on the other hand, are often a tougher sell.  Sure, we can listen to loud music, but we’re pretty much hanging out counting.  With heavy objects.  And a bunch of sweat.  And we feel sore afterwards.  That’s the down side.

The up side is considerable.  Weight training builds muscle mass, which improves both metabolism and body shape.  It also maintains strong bones, which is crucial for those of us who do not want to end our lives in a nursing home.  On a fuzzier level, weight training gives us a task at which we can see our progress in actual numbers very easily—not that many things we have to do in our lives are as clear as progressing from lifting five to ten pounds, or 105 to 110 pounds; it is a good feeling!

Go play!

Monday Workout: Ladder!

The speed ladder is familiar to most people, if they know what it is at all, from football or other sports drills.  Even those of us who don’t know an interception from a touchdown can benefit from using it during workouts.  As the name implies, one of the goals of the ladder is speed, but it also builds agility and quickness, which are about the ability to change direction rapidly without crashing.  All of us have to cross the street and our speed, agility, and quickness come in handy in the live Frogger game of life.  Three rounds.

speed ladder in in out out	1 min
bench press	20
Arnold press	10
speed ladder lateral	1 min
flies	20
1 leg squat	10
carioca	1 min
(lunge to) curls	20
pretty princesses	10

Friday Reading Report: Find Your...

This is not going to be the usual kind of book post.  I do, unequivocally, think Alexis Rockley’s book Find Your Fuckyeah is worth reading.  It is funny and wise.  It has useful information in it.  I think Rockley has, like a perceptive massage therapist, found the exact right place to press on the tensed muscle of life in our current climate.

(This is the part where I put the disclaimers, although most of those are for people who stopped reading at the title of the book.)  Rockley is very cute.  She has a high-energy, breezy way of writing (and talking—I got this book at an author event and so heard her when I had only read the first 19 pages while awkwardly waiting around to see if I was going to know anyone in the crowd).  Objectively, she is younger than I am; subjectively, she feels a LOT younger and not just because of her preferred pop culture references.  She swears a lot.  These things may bother some people.  I found them charming, personally.

One of the topics the book touches on is WooWoo.  I’m from Berkeley, so I have a high tolerance for WooWoo (personal line between okay WooWoo and not okay WooWoo happens at people who think healing crystals are more than pretty rocks, but if healing crystals make you happy, you go nuts with them.).  This book came to me in a very WooWoo way.  For some time now, I’ve felt like my life has been getting ready to shift gears, but how was unclear.  I saw a post on Facebook about the author event, but couldn’t go because I would be working then.  And then a client canceled.  And then I didn’t just collapse on the couch, but got my butt in gear and went to hear Rockley speak.

Sometimes a book is the right book for the right person at the right time.  This is exactly the book I needed to read this week.  It has given me a whole bunch of stuff to chew on and chew over.  Not all of it is going to be easily digestible, I predict, because change can really suck, but it is inevitable, so I had better figure out how to suck it up.

This is how many markers I put in the book of things I want to copy out into my commonplace book or use in journaling or both:

So:  this may not be the right book for anyone else right now, but I have a suspicion that it might be.  My copy will be lendable eventually, but impatient people should buy their own.