Leave feeling better...

In my own Pilates practice, my workouts have two parts.  One part is made up of exercises I need to do all the time to keep my body functioning as it should.  It is familiar and warms me up for the other part.  Sometimes it gets a little boring because it rarely shifts.

The second part is where I push myself a little, revisit exercises I don’t do as often, work on movements that really challenge me.  I might whine a little (or a lot…  I’m there by myself and there is no one to be annoyed by it!).  I might have to go slower than I’d like.  It gets hard.

What I find is that I need both halves.  If I spend too much time on the foundation stuff, I don’t make progress.  If I only do the hard stuff, I get frustrated and sore.  What works best is to approach both halves with patience and curiosity and openness—what is happening in my body today? 

This is the same approach I use with my clients.  The early parts of their workouts are routine and we both get to check in with where their bodies are in the moment.  From there, we can choose exercises to address whatever is going on.

At the end, we want to leave feeling better.

Kind of exciting...

We are all special unique unicorns, just like everyone else.  What this means is that all of us need to evaluate the information we get and decide what parts are good for us.  I know this is more work than just accepting a ready-made program or solution, but it is much, much better.

While this is true across all of life, it is especially true about fitness.  When we show up to a fitness class, we need to make sure to tell the instructor about any injuries we might happen to be dealing with or moves that are not helpful in our bodies.  Good instructors welcome this kind of information because it helps them know what kind of feedback is useful and what sort of modifications to offer.  So if someone says they have a shoulder injury, the instructor might suggest not taking a movement to the overhead extreme, but to stop at a pain-free level.  Or someone with bad knees might need an option without jumping for some exercises.

There will always be exercises that we don’t like.  For many of them, we can find substitutions.  Every once in a while, there is a good reason to do an exercise we don’t like but isn’t actually bad for us.  When we know that it is just a little bit of the workout, we tend to be able to tolerate it more.

One of the things we develop when we work out is strength of character.  We learn to advocate for ourselves because we learn what helps us and what doesn’t.  As we pay attention to how our bodies work on a daily basis, we notice what patterns persist and which change as we grow.  It’s kind of exciting!

Monday Workout: Inclined to do it...

We do a lot of bench presses.  This is a good thing, but from time to time we need to change it up a bit, so this week we are doing incline presses.  What that means is that instead of lying flat on our backs and doing the press, we adjust the bench so that the back is about halfway to upright.  This recruits slightly different muscles and is a bit more challenging, so choose a lighter weight than usual.  In the kettle bell set, the single leg pass and the over yets are the more difficult exercises; choose accordingly!  As always, we need to make sure that we don’t do things that are not appropriate for our bodies—please adjust as needed!  Three rounds.

kb swings	30
kb twists or 1 leg pass	20
kb 8s or over yets	10
mountain climbers	30
incline press	20
curls	10
overhead curtsy	30
rows	20
quadruped	10