Three breaths

Got three minutes?  Let’s do three things to help our posture and breathing!

 

1.     Find a doorway.  Stand in it with arms stretched out to the sides against the door frame.  Lean forward, supporting yourself with your arms.  You should feel a stretch across your chest and maybe even your shoulder blades pulling together.

2.     Lie down on your back.  (Hey!  The good part!)  Bend both knees so that your feet are flat on the floor.  Bring your arms up toward the ceiling and put the palms of your hands together.  Keeping your hips on the ground and your hands together, move your arms to the left (right shoulder can come up and elbows will stay straight) and then to the right.  Keep your head still.  Repeat about ten times.  Then do the same thing letting your head follow your hands for about ten repetitions.  Finally, let your head go the opposite way that your arms go about ten times.

3.     Sit on the floor or a chair with your spine upright.  Lift your shoulders toward your ears, roll them back and down, and then circle them forward, returning to your ears.  Do about five circles and then go the other way.  At the end, sit for a couple of breaths with your ears lined up over your shoulders.

 

These are good things to do any time you feel tense or like your breathing is too shallow.  It’s a good series to reset between meetings or before bed.

Posturing...

Posture is not one of those warm and fuzzy words.  Maybe it makes us think of walking around with books on our heads, or of screeching drill sergeants, or of grumpy older teachers muttering about respect.  Maybe it conjures a sense of bravado, of irritating pretense.  It’s still something useful, so maybe we can replace those other images with, say, dancers.  The relaxed-yet-straight poses of sitting Buddhas are also a good image to keep in mind for posture.

 

Or, if some of us prefer a things-to-avoid sort of image:  let’s not be that person hunched over the computer screen, shoulders in ears, lower back screaming, chest compressed.

 

Why?  A couple of reasons, actually.

 

Here’s one to appeal to our collective vanity:  we’ll look thinner if we use good posture.  Who doesn’t like that?

 

How about one for comfort?  Good posture helps reduce tension in the neck and shoulders, improves and/or prevents low back pain, and helps us avoid injury while exercising.

 

Health?  When we hang out in a slumped posture, we inhibit our breathing.  News flash:  people who can’t breathe die.  Sure, we can get by for a long time with substandard breathing, but really, wouldn’t it be nice if we made it easy for ourselves to take a deep breath?

 

Which brings me to what good posture is.  When we are standing up, we want our ears to be over our shoulders, which should be over our hips, which should be over our knees, which should be over our ankles.  This is best seen from the side, so find a friend to check it out.  A lot of us tend to have our heads forward and our shoulders rounded, but we don’t want to overcorrect and stick our chests out like pigeons.  Many of us also tend to arch our lower backs more than is ideal, so we can think about tucking our behinds under us a bit to lengthen the lower back.  It should feel kind of good.

 

At first, good posture will feel kind of tiring.  Our muscles are used to a different position and the short ones will need to get used to lengthening and the long ones will have to adjust as well.  Keep breathing.  It gets better.

Strong

Many of us are concerned about weight gain these days.  We may feel helplessly under the sway of the refrigerator and the take-out menus.  We may be using eating as a coping technique.  We may not have our usual options for working out.

 

I get it.  It is not a simple problem or else we’d all have it solved by now.  But we can start dealing with it with some simple steps.  I’ve been pushing cardio over the last while because of its mood-boosting benefits and because so many cardio exercises don’t require that we have a bunch of stuff—if we have shoes, we can walk or run.  However, if we really want to get on top of the weight issue, we need to consider strength training.

 

Strength training not only burns calories while we do it, but over time it also changes our body composition so that we burn more calories all the time.  This is because muscle tissue requires more energy to maintain.  In other words, when we have more muscles, we have a higher metabolism automatically.

 

The manufacturers of fitness equipment and the Fitness Industrial Complex will have us believe that we need acres of equipment and fancy machines and the Magic Bullet Exercise Doodad of the Week.  Nope.  We can get a good strength training workout in with just our bodies.  (Hey!  I posted one on Monday!)  If we have weights or other equipment, we have even more options.  Or the resourceful among us can lift water bottles or jugs, canned goods, or cooperative pets and children (uncooperative ones tend to lead to extra cardio…).

 

Some notes:  do not do strength training of the same muscles two days in a row.  Our tissues need time to recover.  Always use good judgment and stop if there is pain (the real kind, not the growing kind).  If there is soreness over the next two days, use ice or ibuprofen as desired and tolerated.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Body Weight

Back to body weight this week.  Do two to four rounds as time and energy allow.

 

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

Time to Stretch

Pretty much all of us need to stretch more often.  I can hear the complaint from here:  “But I don’t have time!!!!”  So here are five times we can stretch we don’t even think about.

 

1.     While waiting for the microwave.  That’s a whole minute of stretching, or an adequate amount of time to hold a quad stretch on both sides.

2.     While brushing our teeth.  Clean teeth and looser calves are a great combination.  Hold one side while brushing the top teeth, the other while doing the bottom ones.

3.     On the way back to our desks from the bathroom.  We have to go through a doorway to do this, so we can take a few seconds to stretch our chests by putting our arms across the doorway and leaning forward.  (If this is too much of a stretch, do one side at a time.)

4.     While cleaning up.  Putting shoes away?  Hang out in that forward bend for a bit.  Dishes to go on the top shelf?  Sneak in a triceps stretch.

5.     Before getting out of bed.  This is the perfect time for a whole body stretch and really, we don’t want to get up that much anyway—we’ve just found a good reason to stay for another minute!

Joe Knows...

One of the fun things about my work is that I get to try stuff out on myself.  I get to experiment for fun and it turns out useful!  This month’s experiment is a commitment to doing yoga daily.  As of this post, I’m about halfway through.  It has been instructive.

 

Not surprisingly, I’m feeling (slightly) more flexible (I’m never going to be all that flexible—it’s not my gift) and like I have some new mobility in my joints.  Which has made me work really hard on my stability.  Suddenly my arms and legs are going in directions I don’t expect!  Chaos!  Wobbling!

 

Oh, right.  I have deep muscles on purpose.  They’re for controlling all that chaos and creating balance.  Tuning in to what is happening on the inside helps bring order to the outside.  What a concept!

 

I’m also appreciating the way that Pilates and yoga can work together.  There are plenty of poses that are not available to my body at the moment, and may never be truly possible for me, but Pilates tools can scaffold the skills for me so I can continue to approximate my way to greatness.

 

Pilates certainly can scaffold way more than yoga.  The refinements it encourages to overall movement patterns can benefit pretty much every other kind of movement.  That Joe was a smart guy.

Play (out of) that funk...

Sometimes we have days that just don’t go right.  Maybe we ate something that disagreed with us, or the dog barked at every cat and squirrel all night, or we were out of coffee and we don’t seem to be able to get out of the funk.  It might not seem like it, but exercise will probably help.

 

Caveats:  I do not recommend working out when we are actually sick.  I do not suggest doing anything super challenging when we are having issues with focus.  We ALWAYS need to use our good judgment about what is appropriate for us to do and sometimes that includes hiding under the covers.

 

Now that that is out of the way, here is why exercise might help.  There are the mood-elevating benefits of cardio that I’m always banging on about (because they are REAL!).  There is the character-building thing that comes with doing the responsible and good-for-us task even when we don’t feel a lot like it.  But one possibly overlooked good reason to work out is that it is a finite thing.  We show up, we do the thing, and then we are done, feeling tired, but also virtuous and maybe even slightly more in control of at least some small part of the universe.  This is not something to be sneezed at in our current unpredictable world.

 

Go play.  It will help.