This guy didn't stretch and his face froze that way...

We all tend to skimp on the stretching.  Here are three reasons to get around to doing it:

1.     Less risk of injury.  Flexible muscles adapt better to changing conditions, so if we keep our muscles supple, we avoid pesky ankle sprains and the like.

2.     Improved balance.  This goes with the injury risk bit.  When our muscles have the appropriate level of tension, we have the ability to adjust quickly and we are less likely to fall.

3.     It feels good.  Yes, this is a perfectly valid reason.  Not everything has to be just Good For Us.

Perceptive?

I spend a fair amount of time with numbers.  It’s a hazard of my profession.  We are trained to track heart rates, reps, weight, sets, inches, miles, minutes.  This is not entirely bad, but it can be limiting.

My twenty pounds might not be the same as yours.  My mile might be different, too.  It depends on all kinds of things like previous experience, injury status, age, general health, and even hydration status and weather.  What is easy or hard for me may be negligible or impossible for someone else.  This means that saying someone lifted twenty pounds or ran a mile is not all that meaningful without context.

One way to get context without a lot of words is to use something called the Borg scale.  It does have numbers, but the numbers are somewhat arbitrary (especially since they’ve been revised from one arbitrary range to another!).  The Borg scale “measures” perceived exertion.  The beauty of it is that the perceiver is the person doing the work.

What that means is I evaluate my workout based on how hard I think I’m working.  I aim for it to be somewhat hard to hard.  We all have days when our usual workout feels easy and those other days when it seems impossible—the Borg scale lets us adjust to what is appropriate on this very day.

This is also useful for people who take medications that alter their heart rate response or people who don’t want to wear a heart rate monitor or tracker or stop to count pulses.

Those of us who are just starting to exercise want to work at a level we think of as light to moderate.  Moderate to somewhat hard would be the next level.  And so on.  Interval training would move us from a lower level of perceived exertion to a higher one and back.

Try it out!

Two ways

We made it to June.  Some things are reopening and some things remain closed.  Many of us are a little stir crazy (or a lot stir crazy…  or just crazy…).  For myself, I’m finding that things have settled into something of a routine, but there is also an undulation of emotion going on.  Some days I feel like I can do it all and some days I can hardly get out of bed because there is no work to go to and I’m not all that excited about continuing to do the same old things.  I may not be the only one feeling like that, so here’s how I cope (and yes, this is relevant to fitness).  There are two ways.

One way is to let myself rest.  This is a stressful time.  Every time a “new normal” emerges from the chaos, something changes and I have to adapt.  Adaptation is not without challenge.  And I know that the challenges I face could be so much worse, so my heart goes out to those dealing with harder problems.  The point is that it is all right to rest when it becomes too much, to sleep more, to play.  We do not have to be productive every single minute of every single day.  We are not what we do.  However, there are limitations to this approach.  Eventually, doing nothing leads to boredom and apathy and depression.  The good news is I have a second plan.

Plan B is to do some exercise.  It doesn’t matter what kind or how much.  Even taking Cricket out around a single block is enough to shift my perspective, but it is better if I get good and sweaty on the spin bike or on a hike or with the weights.  If that seems like too much work, I can go breathe through some Pilates or yoga.  The small investment of energy creates a whole new outlook, partly from the heart rate elevation and the muscle movement and the flexibility and partly from the simple joy of accomplishing one thing.  Doing one thing means that accomplishment is possible and that opens up the world.

We can rest if we need to and then we can move.  We can do this.

Monday Workout: Pilates mat work

This workout is a repeat of the Pilates mat work I posted a while back.  It’s still a good idea.  Do not do anything that hurts.  Do not do spinal flexion exercises if you have bone density issues.  Remember to breathe!

pelvic clock

bridging

dead bug/femur arcs

chest lift

hundred

dart/press up/swan

scarecrow

quadruped

leg pull

leg pull front

side kick

mermaid

saw

standing roll down

Friday Reading Report: Yes, I am doing my homework

“These expenditures [for chronic health condition care for seniors] totaled $362 billion and averaged $12,566 for every older adult [in 2006}… It is naïve to expect that Medicare can handle these costs, particularly considering the working population who contribute to Medicare is decreasing.” NASM Senior Fitness Specialist, p. 2

When my kids were in middle school and maybe even high school, they occasionally had to do an assignment for English called something like “Talking to the Text.”  I remember it because they hated doing it, which meant it was torture for me, too.  That said, I talk to texts all the time myself.  In the case of the above passage from my current text, “talking” is a euphemism for “screaming in furious anger.”

I know.  I’m taking a fitness course, not economics or politics or sociology.  The people who wrote it are working in a context in which we are supposed to justify why personal training is beneficial to society and cost-effective.  It is beyond the scope of my course to discuss why the currents of our society actively promote individual solutions to systemic problems, why the pressures of capitalism create unhealthy patterns in the first place, and how to do anything besides accept the system as it is and try to work within it.  Still, I found myself yelling.

Health care doesn’t have to cost as much as it does.  Ask literally any other developed country in the world.  Good health should not be the purview of the privileged few, but the expected birthright of all humans.  It should be easier to eat healthy food than junk food, to get exercise than to be sedentary, to relax than to stress out.

We need a paradigm shift.  This one is killing us.

If you don't like my reasons, you can make up your own!

I find Thursdays to be the hardest day of the week.  I don’t know why.  Why doesn’t matter.  In case this problem pertains to people who are not me as well, here are four goofy and possibly compelling reasons to get it together enough to exercise today:

1.     It’s better than being bored.  We’ve all been stuck at home forever at this point.  We could bake yet another loaf of bread or start learning underwater macramé, but doesn’t a nice bike ride sound better?  How about a walk or run along some slightly different streets?

2.     We baked another loaf of bread.  And ate it.  Let me be clear:  exercise is NEVER a punishment.  However, if we’re taking in a lot more calories, we had better figure out a way to burn off a lot more, too.

3.     If we exercise, we can soak in the tub later.  We earned that good-smelling bath soap with our sweat.  We NEED that muscle relaxing water.  Besides, when we cleaned out all those closets, we discovered that we have a lifetime supply of fancy candles to add ambience to our at-home spa experience.

4.     Better sex.  When we build endurance and strength and flexibility, we can use those skills for anything we want!

Go play.

How to shop...

As a result of the Pilates workshops I took recently, I bought a couple of new toys for the studio.  I don’t do that very often for two reasons:  I already have a lot of toys and most toys I don’t have don’t seem to justify the money I’d spend on them.  However, I am now the proud possessor of two matching swivel discs.

I know that most people don’t have the kind of space or enthusiasm for exercise equipment that I have.  In these times when we’re all stuck home, though, it might be useful to know how I evaluate what deserves space in the studio to help other people’s decision processes.

The first important criterion for something that gets to live in my studio is that whatever it is can be used in multiple ways.  (This also works for kitchen gadgets—I don’t have a quesadilla maker because I have a regular pan that makes other stuff, too!)  Dumbbells, barbells, bench, stability balls, and the like all meet that criterion.

Another important criterion is that whatever it is doesn’t take up an undue amount of space.  I don’t have big cardio equipment in my studio, but I do have an Xiser, a jump rope, and a repertoire of exercises that can get the heart rate up without a bunch of stuff.  There is an exception:  I have a spin bike in the studio at Christmas time because the space in the living room where the spin bike lives the rest of the year gets preempted by the Christmas tree.  And yes, I do have a spin bike in my living room because that is the best and most efficient place for it to live and the spin bike has earned its place in my exercise equipment necessities many times over; other people might not make the same calculation.

How much does the new gizmo cost?  I’m more likely to try out something that doesn’t cost zillions of dollars.  The relatively few dollars I have spent on rollers, yoga tune up balls, Daiso ducks, and other SMR equipment, for example, have all been well spent.  TRX is good value for the money. 

Then there is the use test.  Sometimes I get excited about a piece of equipment and think I’m going to use it All The Time and I’m just wrong.  Clients don’t like it, it doesn’t do what I think it’s going to do, or whatever.  When that happens, I try to notice and get rid of the offending item before the burden of its guilt gets too heavy.

The short version is:  it is important to engage the brain when buying gym stuff or else you end up with a shake weight and other stuff they sell on infomercials gathering dust.