Ideas for balancing...

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about balance, here are five balance exercises to try.  If your balance is poor, make sure that there is something close by that will help you stabilize (chair, wall, sturdy friend).

1.     Brush your teeth standing on one foot.  We have to stand there anyway; we might as well practice balancing.  One side will be much easier than the other.  Do that side first.

2.     Play 1 leg catch.  This is best with a friend, but it is also possible to use a wall to “throw” the ball back to yourself.  Again, do the hard side first.

3.     Do 1 leg weight passes.  I use a kettle bell for this, but any weight you can comfortably hold in one hand will work.  Stand on one leg and hold the weight in one hand.  Pass the weight across your body in the front and transfer it to your other hand.  Pass the weight around behind you and give it back to the first hand.  Repeat five times, then reverse directions.  Then do both directions while standing on the other foot.

4.     Do round lunges.  Changes of direction challenge our balance.

5.     Do any of the exercises you do normally on a BOSU or any other unstable surface.  For safety, use less weight than you do when you do the exercise on the ground.

Have fun!

Practice helps...

After flexibility, I think the most neglected portion of fitness training might be balance work.  We notice when we get out of breath and when we can’t schlepp the groceries as easily as we’d like, but we don’t notice balance until we lose it.

The thing is, balance training helps with that whole strength business.  When we improve our balance, we are doing at least two things:  building our proprioception and strengthening our stabilizing muscles.

Proprioception is a fancy word for knowing where our bodies are in space.  When we don’t have much of it, we bump into things (most of us have enough to avoid bumping into things most of the time).  When we have more of it, we can notice that when we squat, our left leg works harder than the right, or that our right shoulder tends to be lower.  This is the first step toward getting better alignment and alignment is what helps us get strong safely.  We build proprioception when we work on balance because we need to keep track of all those (hey, where did we get so many?) arms and legs that suddenly want to wheel around through space instead of helping us stay over our center of gravity.

Which brings me to that second part:  strengthening the stabilizers.  Balance is about finding stability in a precarious world.  We use the muscles closest to the center of our bodies to stabilize ourselves.  Putting ourselves in (controlled) unstable environments helps us practice stabilizing for those times when we are not in control of how unstable the environment is.  We adapt to what we practice.  Strong stabilizers free up our more peripheral muscles to move us around and lift heavy stuff.

What to do?  Practice standing on one foot.  Use dumbbells instead of barbells.  Work asymmetrically.  Use the BOSU or any of the many kinds of wobbly surfaces available.  Do some yoga or Pilates.

We can’t make the world more stable, so we have to learn to adapt!

A Workout for Every Kind of Stress...

We are all experiencing the current times in different ways, but I think it is pretty safe to say that we’re all finding new and exciting sources of stress.  I say all the time (and it’s a pretty prevalent idea in the culture) that exercise is good for stress, but different kinds of exercise, having slightly different flavors, work in different ways.

If stress is causing depression-like symptoms, what we need to do is cardio.  We need the extra energy and the mood-boosting power of heart pumping to help with that particular kind of stress.  (Note:  exercise is no substitute for actual mental health treatment.  Talk to your therapist/psychologist/psychiatrist and take your meds.  You are important and valuable and I’m always here to listen if you need a friend.)

If we find that stress is spiking our anxiety or that our entire bodies have seized up with tension, what we need is something on the yoga/Pilates order.  We practice our breathing and we move gently in ways that help our muscles lengthen.

And, finally, if our stress springs from feeling like we have lost all power in the world because random or not-random things keep happening to us, we need to lift weights.  The weights do not mind if we express our anger at them.  We can burn our rage and calories at the same time.  And at the end, we will be stronger.

Repeating it one more time:  If you need a friend, call/text/message me.  I’m here for you.

Monday Workout: Kettle Bell If Possible

This week’s workout is technically for kettle bells, but any weight will do.  In fact, some of the exercises, like the overyets, work just fine with no weight at all.  Do three rounds.

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
kb one arm clean/press	30
kb goblet squat	20
kb overyets	10
kb overhead high knees	30
kb overhead triceps	20
kb pushups	10

Four things

Left to myself, I’m a stress eater.  I’m working on it.  In case I am not the only one, here are four things to do instead of diving into the ice cream:

1.     Journal.  We can write out our feelings rather than eating them.  It’s inexpensive and keeps our hands busy.

2.     Meditate.  We can learn to put a bit of space between the stimulus and the response.  In other words, just because we want the ice cream, we don’t have to eat the ice cream.

3.     Get some sleep.  Often we eat more just because we’re that tired.  Catch up on dreamtime and maybe the butter pecan will be less compelling.

4.     Go outside and play.  The more nature and the more heavy breathing involved the better.

Please remember, eating is not a bad thing.  If we sometimes overdo the treats, it does not make us bad people.  Loving ourselves does mean trying to choose foods that make our bodies strong and healthy, but we need to love ourselves even when we aren’t perfect.

Fitness for Revolutionaries

Over the last months, we’ve seen some crazy stuff.  We have dealt with change after change in our living and working (or not-working) conditions.  On top of that, we have seen some particularly ugly manifestations of the racism in our society and way too much violence.

So what the heck am I doing writing about cardio and weights and Pilates?  What relevance does fitness have in this kind of crisis?

Two things.  One is that fitness is self-care.  We all need things that help us cope with the undeniable stress of these times.  Doing the breath work that comes with Pilates can give us a respite from the chest-tightening horror of the news.  Getting breathless biking or running or walking can give us a chance to elevate our mood and exorcise some of the demons.

The other is that change requires strength.  It may not require literal strength, but as I say often enough, I majored in English and I believe in the power of metaphor.  When we build our literal strength, we build our figurative strength and our strength of character as well.  We need to live a long time so we can transform our society and have some time left to enjoy it.  Fitness brings us that.

Fitness can be a tool for creating the world we want to live in.

It's the love...

I give a lot of disclaimers in my line of work.  I am not a doctor, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a nutritionist, or a dietician.  I can’t diagnose illness or injury, prescribe treatment or medication, design specific eating plans.  Let me add that I am not a priest, either, and thus cannot absolve anyone of sin.  If I did happen to be a priest, I would still not be in a position to absolve people of the “sins” they most often confess to me because I do not think that not exercising and overeating are in fact sins.  They may not be the best ideas ever, but we really are not, generally, most successful at motivating ourselves with guilt.

What works, in my experience, is love.  When we treat ourselves with love, we are able to recognize that our bodies feel better with the right amount of movement and the right amount of food.  We are also able to see that some days we really need rest most of all, or a bit of chocolate, or both.

We also do best when we don’t try to do absolutely everything at once.  We should start small, with maybe a ten minute walk or a fruit snack in place of a candy.  Small victories add up to big ones.

What I AM is a trainer.  I CAN coach people to success with lots of encouragement and practical programs and general nutrition information.  Let me help.