Thursday weirdness

Sometimes our usual motivational strategies don’t work.  Here are three totally out-there strategies to try when all else fails—I have used (do use) all of them.

1.     Pretend the workout is a montage.  Music selection is crucial here, whether you go all Rocky or Cinderella Man or Flashdance or Chariots of Fire.  Just remember that you win.

2.     Take a picture.  My Instagram is full of weird pictures from my workouts.  Finding, or at least seeking, yet another angle from which to photograph my spin bike keeps my brain whirling as fast as my feet.

3.     Tell a story.  I take the same walk with my dog every morning.  When I take photos of similar things over the course of several days, I make up a story to go along with it.  Currently, the story is the adventures of the traffic cones (Orange Witch Hats, in my telling).  I don’t know what they’re going to do next, so I have to walk to find out.

The point is that we have to do whatever works, even if it’s odd and we’re kind of embarrassed to tell anyone about it.

Acme products probably won't help...

Often when something hurts, our inclination is to avoid doing it.  This is eminently sensible and usually the right thing to do.

Every once in a while, though, we have to look a little more closely at what we mean by “hurts.”  The kind of pain we experience when we have a Wile E. Coyote kind of experience with a piano or cliff or both is definitely something to steer clear of.  Copious amounts of blood or body parts disconnecting are also useful indicators that something is seriously wrong.

But what about that twinge in our knees or lower back?  That feeling in the back of our thighs when we bend over to tie our shoes?  Those can be a little more ambiguous.

When our muscles get too tight, it hurts to stretch them, sometimes a lot.  I don’t believe in pain for the sake of pain; it’s best if it is for a purpose.  If we have pain from tight muscles, we want to warm them up a bit first and then gently stretch them to a place where we feel tension, but not so much pain that we can’t cope.  We know it’s the right amount of stretch if our muscles relax into it after a few seconds and we find we can more a little farther if we want to.

If we happen to be getting older, we may find that we are beginning to get arthritic.  It happens to pretty much all of us.  Our joints don’t want to move the way they used to and they whine about it.  However, synovial joints, like those in our hips, get their nourishment by moving, not from blood flow.  What this means is that if we don’t move them, they get worse.  Ideally, we take all our joints through their full range of motion daily.  The range we don’t use, we don’t get to keep.

Sometimes one part hurts because another part is slacking off.  This happens with low back pain a lot.  When we don’t use our abdominals enough, the muscles in the lower back have to do all the work, which makes them angry and resentful.  Knee pain can happen because we’re not using our glutes enough or because our ankles are not doing their fair share.

Pain is a messenger.  It’s up to us to figure out how to interpret what it has to say so we can send it on its way.

Back Talk

I talk to my Apple Watch.  Also my spin bike, my weight rack, my dog, and a lot of other things and creatures that don’t often answer me.  Recently, I told my watch that I don’t want to set a different, higher goal for my activity.

Why not?  I mean, doing more is better, right?  I want to do All The Things, All The Time, surely.

Nope.

The way I use my device, its job is to help me take care of my minimums.  Sure, I almost always get a lot more than 30 minutes of exercise a day and burn more than the calorie limit on my move target.  It’s not hard for me to stand up and move around in twelve separate hours of the day.

What is hard is keeping perspective.  Even for me, a fitness professional, fitness is not all of my life.  If I hop on the train of escalating expectations (wow, that is a weird picture…), I am asking for a terrible crash when I hit the wall of time/energy/space limitations.  To use a different, possibly less unwieldy metaphor, life is a long journey with no reward for finishing early.  When I put in my 30 minutes of exercise, I know I’ve made enough progress for this day and I can take care of all the other things with a clear conscience.

I do get that other people may have different perspectives.  Some of us thrive on beating yesterday.  I’m not here to say that my way is best for everyone.

Do what works, no matter what your watch tells you.