Joe tells it like it is...

A couple of careers ago, I came across this quote from Angeles Arrien about four rules for life:  “Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don't be attached to the results.”  These rules apply in lots of places (that would be the “for life” part), but lately I’ve been thinking about how that third rule relates to Pilates.

 

Pilates is a practice that can expose our weaknesses.  We find out that we’re not even close to symmetrical, that we’ve built a lifetime of questionable movement habits, and that it’s a wonder we can move at all, really.  This is not comfortable.

 

It is, however, useful.  Pilates puts us in a position where we have to tell the truth about what our bodies can do and what is really challenging.  We will find out exactly which portion of our spines like to move and which appear to be cast in cement.  We will discover that we’ve been cheating on our ab exercises for years and so our abs are not as powerful as we thought.  Also, balance is hard, our left side is less flexible than our right, and really, who decided we should have so many body parts that are supposed to move in sync with each other anyway.

 

The good news is that Pilates also shows us how to change.  Today’s truth is just a place to start.  When we tune in (hey, that would be the pay attention part!), we can begin to shift our movement patterns, train our brains to new motor pathways, and grow our skills.  The next batch of truth might find us stronger and longer and more centered.

 

Let’s do it!

No, motivation is not included with the certification...

When I meet people and tell them what I do for a living, they assume, naturally, that I love to exercise and that I don’t struggle to get in my own workouts.  I mean, I’m a trained professional!  They aren’t entirely wrong, but they’re not one hundred percent right either.

I don’t usually have to chivvy myself into going for a bike ride—it makes me feel like I’m about nine, without a care in the world.  As long as it’s not rainy and cold, I’m ready to hike, especially if I can bring my camera.  When it’s easy to jump in a pool, I’m there.

However, there are plenty of kinds of exercise I do because they are good for me, or because they make me feel better when I’m done.  I have been known to refer to my spin bike as the magic mood improvement machine.  Yoga and Pilates are not always fun in the moment, but I always feel more relaxed and centered for having done them.  Weight lifting bores the pants off me, but since I want my pants to fit and I want to be strong and powerful, I do it.

For me, there are a couple of key things that keep me showing up.  One is habit.  I get up in the morning, use the bathroom, brush my teeth, write my morning pages, and go walk the dog.  When I get back from walking the dog, I stick some food in my face and do whatever the workout of the day is.  Then I shower and get down to the rest of my life tasks.  If I somehow get off track before my shower, I’m likely to skip the workout entirely.  It has its place and I have to let the habit carry me along.

The other thing is to make it as much fun as possible.  If my cardio had to be running, I would not do it.  I don’t like running.  But give me something with pedals and some loud music and I’m golden.  I have the prettiest weight plates in existence—they’re brightly colored and fun.  This makes me more inclined to play with my toys.

If all else fails, I have to remind myself that I am a grown up and I need to do the things that keep me happy and healthy.  I don’t like it when I have to do that, because I prefer to pretend that I can be a kid forever.  However, somebody has to be the mama around here and I guess that would be me.

What works for me may not work for anyone else.  However, we all need to spend a little time thinking about what does work for us so we can live long and happy lives.

Monday Workout: Still no excuse...

I’m still focusing on body weight workouts for those of us who don’t happen to have a gym at home.  Do two or three or four rounds of the first six exercises and finish with the ab exercises at the end.  Use a soft ball (tennis ball, Koosh ball, etc.) and a wall with no valuable stuff on it for the one leg ball wall toss.

jump lunges	30
1 leg squats	30
pushup to side plank	10
jump squats	30
transverse punches	30
1 leg ball wall toss	10
plank	hold
superman	hold

Friday Reading Report: Fighting with Texts

I tend to get into philosophical arguments with my textbooks.  I spent a lot of my childhood getting sat on by the dominant paradigm and it only slowly occurred to me that it didn’t have to be like that.  When I end up butting heads with the Fitness Industrial Complex in the course of my continuing education, I get grumpy.

The specialization I just completed was in women’s fitness.  Most of my clients are women and, shockingly enough, I am one, too!  I hope someone gets around to alerting the patriarchy that about half the population are, in fact, female.  They don’t seem to have figured it out yet.

The breathless prose of my text announces that women and men are different!  Who knew?  There is a way to describe the differences between men and women that is respectful and neutral.  The text does not find it.  Women are not only different, but also weird, lesser, and mysterious.  It is entirely true that in general women do not build as much muscle mass as men.  Describing this as some kind of failing is as silly as describing men’s inability to have a baby that way.

Basically, there is no need to belabor the differences between men and women.  Men are not the norm and women some kind of aberration.  The issues of women’s fitness pretty much come down to modifications that are needed for pregnancy, postpartum, and lactation and some specific issues that affect older women.  Healthy people of all sexes, genders, and identifications require respectful, careful, safe, and individualized workouts.  This is what I work to provide to all my clients.  And maybe some smashing of the white imperialist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy—it’s good exercise.

End of rant.

So many body parts!

We all have exercises we love and ones we hate.  That’s normal and totally fine.  The thing is, we need to make sure that our workouts don’t ignore muscle groups.  Here are the kinds of exercises that need to be in every workout:

1.     Multi-joint.  The more joints we involve in an exercise, the more work it is.  This translates to more calories burned.  It also forces us to coordinate all those various body parts.  Example:  overhead squat

2.     Lower body flex and lower body extend.  Getting these together is easy when working with free weights because in general, what bends has to straighten.  Circuit machines often break things up, so if we do an exercise that makes us work to bend our knees or hips, we have to make sure we do one that makes us work to extend them, too.  Example:  lunges

3.     Upper body push and upper body pull.  Hey!  The upper body works like the lower body, but up higher!  Examples:  pushups and pull-ups/rows.

4.     Front and back of the body. By now the principle should be pretty clear.  Examples:  deadlifts and crunches.

5.     Core.  In theory, we work our core with every exercise because we are paying attention to balance and posture, but it’s always good to focus in.  Example:  pretty princesses.

For bonus points, we can also think about working in multiple planes (forward/back, left/right, and twisting), with jumping, and with balance.

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.