Monday Workout: Still No Excuses!

Body weight workouts continue!  No excuses!  Do as many rounds as you have energy for of the top exercises and finish off with the ab exercises at the bottom!

plank jacks	30
round lunges	10
pushups	10
squats	30
mountain climbers	30
dips	10
pretty princesses	10
brains	10

I did 7; how many more can you find?

Perhaps I am not the only one feeling a little irritable and stressed.  The unfortunate part about being a grown-up is that it is up to us to figure out what to do about it so that we don’t spread that ill-feeling around too much.  Here are some stress-busters:

1.     Go outside.  Do it safely, of course, with appropriate precautions and keeping a good distance from other humans.  Nature and fresh air can shift our perspectives and blow away our inner cobwebs.

2.     Move fast.  As I say all the time, cardio is mood magic.  We may start our workout grumpy, but we’ll end feeling better.

3.     Stretch and breathe.  Yoga, Pilates, plain old meditation, and prayer all help with this one.  Keep the air moving and don’t let the muscles solidify in one position.

4.     Get some contact.  Ideally, we have somebody around to hug or cuddle or convince to give us a massage.  If not, petting the dog or cat or hamster helps (haven’t tried petting fish, but it doesn’t seem likely to do much good to anyone…).  If we are also pet-less, there is this great invention called the phone and we can, in the words of the old ad, reach out and touch someone.  Texts, emails, Zoom sessions, and the like also work.

5.     Do something good for someone else.  It can be as small as picking up some trash or letting someone go ahead in line.  Spreading kindness ripples back over ourselves.

6.     Take a nap.  We almost all need more sleep.

7.     Drink some water.  Dehydrated people are crabby people.

What else works for you???

Cardio is not the sexiest exercise.  A lot of it is repetitive.  Yep… still swimming (or biking or running or walking).  For some of us, this can be a feature as we sink into the rhythm of it (no, not to the bottom of the pool; that would be bad.).  But most cardio is not inherently interesting.

That said, if I have a limited amount of time or energy or both to devote to exercise, I’m going to choose cardio.

Why?  The biggest reason is that cardio provides an energy boost.  This may sound counterintuitive.  However, as the blood gets pumping through our bodies and we have to do a bunch more breathing, we wake up more.  Our brains start firing better and all of a sudden we have more oomph (that is a very special technical term that fitness professionals like myself use…).

That same energy boost accompanies a lift in mood.  We all can use that.  Ditto the calorie burn we get.  If that’s not enough good reasons, we can add in stress relief.

Go play.

Whatever gets you through...

I spent my weekend in Pilates workshops via Zoom.  I have a whole bunch of fresh ideas kicking around in my brain and it’s going to be fun to put them into practice as soon as my clients return!

However, the learning process is tough on the body.  There is the obvious part where we try out the various exercises in our bodies.  That’s work.  But then there is the whole sitting and listening and taking notes thing.  I’m not good at sitting for long stretches of time any more.  It was more tiring than working.

Bodies don’t like to be too still.  They like variety and movement.  I was not the only person in class moving from one position to another, from chair to floor to cushion to stability ball.  We all welcomed the opportunities to get up or down to try movements out.

Under normal circumstances, I’d get a massage after this kind of weekend.  That’s not an option right now, but I’m making sure to do other self-care stuff to keep my body happy while my mind works through all the new knowledge.

What helps YOU get through???

Monday Workout: Improvise!

This week’s workout has a couple exercises that would be improved by a little bit of stuff, but it should be stuff that is relatively easy to find around the house.  For the woodchoppers and Russian twists, find something that weights a couple of pounds (if you have a dumbbell that is less than 10 pounds, that’s perfect, but even a quart bottle of water would work; hold the ends.)  For the hop or jump ups, a sturdy box, stool, bench, chair, or step works.  Lower things are easier, obviously, and use appropriate care!  If hopping and jumping are not appropriate for your body, step up instead.  Do three or four rounds of the top exercises and finish with a set or two of the ab exercises.

woodchoppers	30
squats	30
good mornings	20
lunges	30
jump or hop ups	30
punches	30
Russian twist	10
femur arcs	10

What is worse????

In general, I like to keep things positive, but just for fun, here are four terrible reasons to exercise:

 

1.     As punishment.  No one should be sentenced to exercise.  Not for eating cake, not for bad behavior, not for nonconformity to the current fashionable body type.

2.     To satisfy someone else.  We do not exist to please other people.  If our partner or parent or other significant person in our life demands that we exercise as a condition for their love and acceptance, we have a big problem, and it isn’t that we need to hit the gym.  (Please note:  I’m not saying that our loved ones can’t suggest in a loving, kind way that they enjoy having us around and they want us to build healthy habits.  It’s the part where love is withheld because we don’t measure up or obey that is the problem.)

3.     To try to achieve the impossible.  Not all of us can be (or should be) supermodels.  Some of us can be sprinters.  Some of us can lift really heavy objects.  Some of us can lift people’s hearts with their dancing.  We can certainly improve at whatever we practice, but we need to recognize that some goals are going to remain unattained.

4.     To be virtuous.  Exercise is good for us, but it does not make us good humans all by itself.  There is nothing inherently more saintly about exercising than about lying on the couch.   Exercising for a positive mark in the great gradebook in the sky is silly.

 

Anybody got any worse ones????

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!