Bend Your Brain

Flexibility is a subtle thing.  It develops and erodes slowly.  We don’t tend to notice it the way we notice cardio endurance (Hey!  I am not out of breath at the top of the stairs!) or strength (Take that, you evil jar lid!).  And yet, if we ignore it, suddenly everything gets more difficult (Were my shoelaces always that far away?).

Because of the subtlety, flexibility can be hard to remember to fit in to our routines.  Also, it feels good to stretch and far too many of us think that we should skip the good parts of our workouts, that we’re not doing it right if we are having fun.  We are wrong.  Workouts should be as much fun as possible.

Personally, I think most of us do best with a specific flexibility practice like Pilates or yoga.  We follow along and don’t have to figure out what to do or how to do it and we have someone (or someone’s list) there guiding us.  However, sneaky flexibility is good, too—that stretch we take at the end of the thirty-hundredth Zoom meeting of the day, the twist to reach the box of crackers on the table behind us.

However we fit it in, it does make life better.  We hurt less, we feel less tense, and we discover we have larger range of motion than we thought.  It’s also good practice for our brains.

Off road

I grew up in a family that did not believe in dirt.  Or nature, really.  My mom would go outside if there was a pool or a tennis court and my dad loved pretty much all sports, but golf courses and baseball fields are not exactly wild.  It took me a while to figure out this hiking thing and I’m not an extreme hiker by any stretch of the imagination (one of the ground rules is that I am allowed to whine as much as I want.).

However, right now hiking is the blessing we all really need.  We need to get off the pavement and into the trees.  We need hills and dirt and expansive views and fresh air.

Of course, we need to go responsibly.  At the moment, a lot of the trails at regional parks are open, even if the parking lots, bathrooms, picnic tables, and water fountains are not.  We need to keep a safe distance from other humans, bring and use our face coverings, pack out our trash since cans are not available (and really, littering is never a Good Thing.).

The brilliant part is that it takes so little stuff.  We need comfy shoes, water, sunscreen, possibly bug spray and/or a hat.  I love to take photos, so sometimes I bring my big camera, but other times I stick with the phone camera.

What do we get out of it?  Cardio, naturally.  But also a little bit of magic.  Some people call it forest bathing, but I’m not sure that goes far enough.  I know that the quality of my thinking changes when I go visit trees, that my conversations are better and my imagination fired.  Fitness is not just about getting tired.  It’s also about getting rested.

Monday Workout: Another Circuit

This week’s circuit has a few more balance moves in it, but still uses just body weight.  Single leg deadlifts are basically a balance move in which we extend one leg out behind us as we hinge forward from the hips and touch toward the ground (distance from the floor may vary based on how tight the hamstrings are).  Four rounds.

mountain climbers	30
lunges	30
plank jacks	10
windmills	30
1 leg deadlifts	10
side lunges	20
quadruped	10
V sit	hold 30 sec

Equipment?

Since it looks like we might be stuck at home a while, I have a couple of thoughts about what folks might want to have in a home gym.  I’m specifically choosing things that can be used in multiple ways and that don’t take up a humongous amount of space.

1.     TRX.  If there is a place to anchor the straps (the over door mount is not really very good/safe), this is a good, relatively cheap way to get a lot of workout in a small amount of space.

2.     BOSU.  It takes up a bit of space, but it adds core work to pretty much any exercise by adding an element of instability.  Can also sub for a step in a lot of circumstances.

3.     Medicine ball.  They are more “functional fitness” than a whole bunch of dumbbells and offer everything from cardio to stability challenge.

4.     Stability ball.  Again, this one takes up a bit more space, but it is also a good option as a switch from a normal desk chair.  It adds challenge to pushups and crunches, support to squats, and a sense of fun to everything because, hey, it’s a giant bouncy ball!

5.     Kettle bell.  Flexible, functional fitness without taking up tons of space.

And that doesn't even include the spin-offs...

Today I’m going to be Captain Obvious.  When it comes to fitness, it helps to know why we are doing it.  Among other things, it saves time.

Let’s imagine that we’ve been lolling around on the couch for a month, doing not a whole lot because, after all, there are eleventy-teen seasons of CSI we can watch again.  Maybe we realize we’re tired all the time, or the biggest pair of sweat pants is feeling a little tight, or that twinge in the lower back isn’t going away.  And maybe then we realize that we probably should do some working out.  But what should we do?

It depends.

I am going to assume that we’re all in basically good health with no obvious contraindications for exercise—we just haven’t been doing it.  We might have a variety of different goals that would suggest different kinds of fitness routines.

Take, for example, that feeling tired all the time thing.  At first glance, it might seem that exercising to fix that is counterintuitive.  However, cardio exercise improves sleep quantity and quality, so we will end up less tired.  Additionally, fatigue can be a symptom of depression and cardio can lift our mood significantly.

The sweat pants?  That’s a combo plate:  we want cardio to burn calories and weight training to increase lean body mass.

The lower back pain?  We might want to think about some core work and some flexibility, like in Pilates.  Pilates improves posture, too.

I’m not able to see my clients in person right now, so anybody who wants some specific ideas for what to do should shoot me a comment/email/text/call and I’ll hook you up with some thoughts.

Captain Obvious out.

There are no muscles in the brain...

So every once in a while my English degree takes over my other faculties.  What that means is that I get metaphorical.  Don’t worry; it passes eventually.  In this case, I was thinking that right now we need all the strength of character we can find to deal with the various stresses of this changed world.  Which, of course, led me to lift heavy weights.

Technically, lifting heavy weights will only strengthen the muscles we use to do it.  That said, on some level, we lift weights with our minds.  The weight, sitting there, heavy and immobile on the rack, is a problem to be solved.  We bring our minds to bear on the problem, prepare a strategy, and get the job done.

Sometimes, it’s not that straightforward.  We get tired.  Lifting weights is, after all, hard.  There are times when we look at the bar on the squat rack and think:  that is scary.  If we are being safe and smart (please do not lift heavy alone or without proper safety precautions like drop bars!), facing this particular fear can help us build resilience in a context where bad outcomes are unlikely.  That’s a skill that can apply across contexts.

It turns out that the metaphor works.  Get strong to get strong minded.

Monday Workout: Circuit!

This week, we’re getting back to some resistance work using body weight.  (No, resistance in this context is NOT the part where we don’t want to do it; it’s the part where we fight gravity.)  Because we also need to get our heart rates up to keep our hearts and lungs happy and to improve our moods, we’re going to do it in a circuit. 

I haven’t explained this in a while, so here’s how circuits work.  We do all the exercises in the circuit transitioning from one to the next as quickly as possible.  When we get to the end of the circuit, we rest and let our heart rate recover a bit.  Then we do it again (and again, and again, until we run out of time or energy).  Obviously, we need to use our common sense and rest in the middle if we need to, but we want to try to make it through the whole circuit if we can.

This workout includes step ups.  If you don’t have a place to work out with stairs or a sturdy bench or step stool or chair, substitute any other cardio exercise (e.g., mountain climbers, burpees, high knees, etc.).  I chose step ups because they add just a little balance challenge, but the primary goal is to get the heart rate up, up, up!

Do about four rounds of the first six exercises and then do the two ab exercises at the end.

step ups	30
squats	30
pushups	10
jacks	30
1 leg squats	10
lunge punches	20
pretty princesses	10
brains	10