Six on the Ninth!

Some days working out is harder than other days.  Here are six ways to talk ourselves into squeezing in a workout even if we don’t much want to do it:

1.     We’ll feel better afterwards.  I use this one a lot and it is invariably true.  At the very least, I get to feel like I have been a person of character for showing up.

2.     We’ll be smarter.  Exercise is good for our brains.  Who doesn’t want to be smarter?  We have so much to figure out in our daily lives (Where do the socks disappear to?  Why can’t I read and sleep at the same time?  Who are these people who care how fitted sheets get folded?  Why can’t we figure out how to feed and house and clothe everyone?) that any extra mind resources are awesome.

3.     We’ll relax.  Sure, workouts can be stressful in the moment.  That’s kind of the point, to put some good stress on the body to make it stronger.  But there is pretty much nothing that relieves the tension of a bad day like slinging some weights around or running our hearts out on the pavement or treadmill.

4.     We’ll give ourselves a treat afterward.  Hot showers, naps, cuddle time… no calories involved!

5.     We have friends who are counting on us.  We may be able to justify blowing off the gym, but we can’t blow off our besties.  They keep us honest and keep us moving.

6.     We can brag about it.  We did something hard!  We are proud of ourselves!  Go us!

We can do this.

Avoid the Not Good

Out there in the culture, there is this idea floating around that sitting is the new smoking.  I can’t really speak to smoking, not having had that particular habit, but I can say pretty authoritatively that too much sitting is Not Good.  We may not be able to avoid it if we have a long commute and/or a desk job, but Pilates can help.

One of the ways Pilates helps is by gently encouraging flexibility and mobility.  Our bodies seem to have been listening when our moms told us that our faces would freeze that way—they get stuck in the flexed and slouched postures of our chairs.  Pilates unsticks us.

Even better, Pilates teaches us good mechanics so that when we do all that sitting, we can at least do it with better posture, axial elongation (that’s a fancy way of saying sitting up tall), and core control.

Fight the dominant paradigm!  Squeeze in some Pilates!

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.