No, not the box-shaped puzzle...

I love rubrics because they are an efficient way to know how I’m doing.  They also help to keep my perfectionism in check.  To give a non-fitness example, my rubric for housework is that the end result needs to be better than when I started.  If the house looks better at the end, I’ve done enough and I can declare success.  (If that doesn’t work and I still feel less-than-successful, I employ my second-tier rubric:  if what I did was more than anyone else around here has done recently, I win!)

Rubrics for fitness come in many flavors.  Some are traditional:  aim to increase cardio time by about ten percent a week, add more weight when 12 reps are easy, work out hard enough that we can talk but not sing.  One of my favorites is that we need to be sweaty at the end, although it doesn’t work for swimming.  Another is that we should stop before discomfort becomes pain.

We can make different ones for the various things we do.  Maybe the rubric for cardio is that we need to spend at least half an hour doing it each day.  Maybe the rubric for weights is that on the day we have to do deadlifts, we don’t have to do any other lower body exercises because we’ve exercised our character, too.

There are not too many outlets for our creativity when we’re working out.  We can take this opportunity to experiment and play and find the rubrics that keep us moving along toward our goals.

Monday Workout: Body Weight

I am on vacation this week, so while I am gone, everyone can do a body weight workout that requires no fancy anything—just our miraculous bodies!  Do four or five rounds:

squats	20
1 leg squats	10
lunges	20
pushups	10
punches	20
pretty princesses	10
brains	10

More Fresh!

Maybe we don’t need to start from scratch with a whole new workout program, but we could use a bit of a nudge to make things fresh and challenging.  Here are five things that we can try:

1.     Add some intervals to the cardio routine.  Even if we bump up the intensity for one minute out of the however many we squeeze in, we are doing ourselves a favor.  We can survive at our fastest for a minute and then drop back to our regular pace until our heart rate returns closer to normal.  Bonus points for getting more than five intervals in during the workout.

2.     Add a pound or two or five to that exercise.  How much to add depends on your fitness level, age, and genetics.  Fitter people, younger people, and boys will generally be able to add more weight at once, but there are many exceptions to this.  The caveat:  we can’t use bad form.  When our reps are no longer things of beauty, we need to drop down to the usual weight and/or rest.

3.     Change the tempo.  Our basic body weight squat is a whole different critter when we hold at the bottom for 30 seconds and come up slowly.  It is also a different critter when we go for speed and jump squat.  We each tend to prefer a particular rate and shifting to another pace is good for our brains and bodies.

4.     Go backwards.  If we normally do our cardio first, we can try doing the weights first and the cardio afterward.  Or vice versa.

5.     Go sideways.  We tend to do most of our exercises going forward and back (“in the sagittal plane,” in fancy trainer-speak).  Take those lunges to the side for a change (to work in the oddly named “frontal plane”)  Or, for bonus points, twist them a little (“transverse plane”).

Little tweaks help.