Monday Workout: More Pilates

Yep, Pilates again!  Breathe and relax into it!

pelvic clock

bridging

side to side

dead bug/femur arcs

chest lift

hundred

side kick

dart

quadruped

leg pull

leg pull front

saw

mermaid

standing roll down

Friday Reading Report: Hey, I'm not mad this time!

It turns out that the AMA has a nice, concise list of things that we can do to get or remain healthy.  It’s called Life’s Simple 7.  Here is the list, with a few comments:

1.     Don’t smoke.  (We all know this one, right?  I’m not going to get all judgy at you, but I do want you to live a long time, so if you do smoke, I’m here to cheer you on if you decide it’s time to quit.)

2.     Maintain a healthy weight.  (This one is helped by some of the other items.)

3.     Engage in regular physical activity.  (See?)

4.     Eat a healthy diet.  (I would have liked a little more description here, but I guess that would make it less simple.)  (Eat your veggies and drink your water.  Most of the rest of it is up for debate by someone.)

5.     Manage blood pressure.  (A little bit of how might have been nice, but exercise is already on the list and the healthy diet and healthy weight both help.  Reduce stress if possible!)

6.     Take charge of cholesterol.  (I like the vigorous language, but it also makes me envision wild cholesterols wreaking havoc throughout the land until we manage to round them up and tame them.  Consider a plant-based diet and that exercise thing, again.)

7.     Keep blood sugar or glucose at healthy levels.  (Yep, exercise and healthy diet again, this time focusing on cutting the added sugar in foods.)

I think I know why they didn’t ask me to write the list now…

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.