Keep breathing

Almost every list of mindfulness techniques includes some kind of breathing.  I’m in favor of breathing.  It keeps us alive.  Here are four things to do to make breathing easier.

 

1.     Quit smoking.  If you don’t smoke, you’re already ahead and you can just cross this off the list.  If you do, I encourage you to quit when you’re ready.  It will help.

2.     Stretch.  Breathing uses muscles.  Muscles work better when they have some flexibility.  In the context of breathing, we want to stretch the muscles of our torsos, so do a few side bends, a forward bend or two, and maybe a bit of a backbend every once in a while.

3.     Do my favorite exercise.  Really.  It’s my favorite.  And you get to do it lying down.  Lie on your back on a firm surface (bed is ok, but the floor is better) with your knees bent and your feet flat.  Lift your arms toward the ceiling and put your hands together so that they are directly over your shoulders.  Holding your head still, move your hands from side to side, keeping your arms straight (one shoulder will move off the ground when you go to one side, the other on the other).  Do this ten times.  Now do it again, but this time move your head along with your arms.  After ten repetitions, do a set where you turn your head away from your arms.  That’s it.  It feels good and it loosens up all the tiny little joints in your thoracic spine so that you have more room to expand your ribcage when you breathe.

4.     Practice.  When we get stressed out, we tend to breathe shallowly, using the muscles of our neck to lift our shoulders instead of using our diaphragm and abdominals to breathe lower into our bellies.  When we practice deep breathing, it becomes habitual.

 

If you want, ignore all of these ideas except this one:  keep breathing.  The world needs you.

All Systems Go!

I love systems.  I love them even more if they involve office supplies.  We all have our favorite, most-cherished delusions, and one of mine is that one day I will get the right office supplies and the instant magical result will be that I am Organized, Successful, and Generally Fabulous.  In the meantime, I have a bunch of pens and clipboards and binders and I live in mostly happy chaos.

 

Because I am a Trained Professional, I am actually organized about my clients.  I keep track of their workouts, preferences, dislikes, injuries, and goals.  It helps me help them.

 

What I notice for myself is that doing even a little bit of organization and tracking helps a lot.  The small, incremental changes don’t show up until I look back a ways.  That thing that used to be hard is much easier now.  I understand the point of that Pilates exercise on the 854^th attempt.  I realize that Thursdays are not the best day to try to accomplish anything, if only because it turns out that I never manage to write down what I did for a workout on a Thursday.

 

Some people are doubtless scoffing at my hapless self.  Some of us were born color-coding and filing.  Others of us are rolling their eyes because WHY would anyone waste time on this whole organizational business when there is important stuff to do.  That’s okay.  The world needs the whole spectrum of us with our varying gifts.  The slightly obsessive organizers could probably benefit from getting on with the actual workout and the more free-spirited might learn something from a pause to analyze.

 

My job is to suggest tools.  Then we get to use them together to make amazing stuff.

Done and not done yet

I was thinking (no, that is not what caused the fires).  My head was churning over all the stuff I have on my to-do list and I was getting all caught up in how behind I feel.  I was specifically thinking about my (self-imposed) reading goals, but it could have been any of my various not-yet-completed projects.  Then I looked up at the bookshelf in front of me.  Which is full of books I have actually read.  Right.  Maybe I don’t need to obsess about what isn’t done yet since I know, and have evidence, that I can do things.

 

Working out can be like that.  I know a lot of us want to be thinner/fitter/stronger.  We struggle to fit in a cardio workout, or some weights.  We hear about some new study touting some other kind of exercise and we sigh inwardly because how the heck are we going to manage to incorporate even one more thing.  Might as well just give up now. 

 

Except.  We don’t lose workouts.  We get to keep the ones we did.  Our bodies remember how, even if they might take some reminding and even if we, as always, have to adapt to the body we have in this very moment.

 

We have power.  We get stuff done.  Maybe we’re not done yet, but that’s all right.

Monday Workout: Ropes

I’m in the mood to pretend things are back to normal, so this week’s workout uses battle ropes.  If you don’t have battle ropes, substitute the cardio exercise of your choice (jacks, high knees, woodchoppers, burpees, whatever) for the rope work.  Do three rounds.

 

double rope slams	30
squats	20
pushups	10
alternating rope slams	30
lunges	20
renegade rows	10
rope circles	30
deadlifts	20
pretty princesses	10

Three

We get healthy in lots of ways, not just by exercising.  Here are three things to do that will improve our health without breaking a sweat!

 

1.     Get enough sleep.  I feel a little bad about putting this on the list because I know too many people who are having trouble sleeping right now.  I can see them rolling their eyes saying, “Yeah, and while I’m doing magic, I’ll make my house a purple castle and create world peace…”  Fine.  I know it’s tough.  But we all could try.  And we can at least work to deglamorize the whole I’m-so-busy-and-important-I’ll-have-to-wait-til-I’m-dead-to-sleep thing.

2.     Cook.  When we cook, we take control of our nutrition.  We can eat more whole foods.  It’s cheaper than eating out and better for us.  It can even be fun.

3.     Laugh.  Humor helps us cope with stress and pain.  It connects us with other humans.  It feels good.

Weighty Issues

While I firmly believe that pretty much everybody can benefit from weight training, I also think that there are different kinds of training for different people.  Some people scoff at small weights; some fear bulking up.  Other people feel intimidated by the Olympic bar and free weights.  Still other people put their faith in weight lifting machines.

 

Here’s the deal on the machine/free weight thing:  for most exercises, using free weights is more challenging because we don’t have a machine restricting our movements.  We have to recruit more stabilizers.  Under some circumstances, though, machines are the way to go, such as when we are recovering from an injury and we need to be extra careful about our range of motion.  I personally wish I had a lat pulldown machine and I like a lot of the things that can be done with the cables, but I find that my dumbbells and barbells and kettlebells meet all my weight needs.

 

Now, on to the kinds of weight lifting for different people.  Weight lifting comes in three rough categories:  endurance, hypertrophy, and maximum strength.

 

Endurance is the place where everybody starts and it is a perfectly fine place to stay for our whole weight lifting career if it fits our goals.  People who are concerned about getting “too muscular” or who want to “look more toned” like the results of this kind of lifting.  For endurance lifting, we use smaller weights and we do sets of 15 to 20 reps.  As with all kinds of weight lifting, we want to choose weights that just barely let us finish the set.  When 20 reps at a particular weight get too easy, it’s time to increase the weight and do 15, building up gradually to the next level.

 

Hypertrophy is what my French teacher used to call a “five dollar word” with deep scorn.  The ten-cent version:  body building.  Once we’ve got used to lifting at an endurance level, we can do this.  In this kind of weight lifting, the goal is to go all Charles Atlas.  To do that, we lift heavier weights for fewer repetitions per set, aiming for 8 to 10 reps.

 

Maximum strength is exactly what it sounds like.  We try to lift the heaviest amount of weight possible.  That means that we warm up with a set of ten at a reasonable weight and increase the weight each set until we can complete only one beautiful rep.  It is actually important that the rep be beautiful so we don’t get hurt.  This is why this kind of lifting has to follow some learning in the endurance phase, where we can work out all our form issues.

 

The good news is that all the kinds of weight lifting, machine or free, make us stronger, help maintain our bone density, and increase our metabolisms.  Go play.

Try

Because I am blessed to have a lovely friend (well, a lot of them, actually, but one in particular matters in this context), I got to try something new last week:  kayaking.

 

Trying New Things is both fun and scary.  I’ll deal with the scary bits first.  When we try something we haven’t done before, we might find ourselves worrying that we’ll get hurt.  Or worse, embarrassed.  Or worst of all:  both!  So, for example, I imagined trying to get into the kayak, tipping it and myself over, thwacking my head on the dock, and bleeding profusely.  It didn’t happen.  For one thing, I was with people who had done it before and they showed me how to get in the kayak safely.  My friend made sure that the kayak was steady and secure.  What we learn from this is that learning from experts is useful.  It is especially useful when the experts are kind, clear, and encouraging.

 

We might also worry that we won’t be good at the New Thing.  Guess what?  That’s okay.  We can approach the New Thing with curiosity and ourselves with compassion.  I mean, heck, there’s a whole concept in Buddhism about cultivating Beginner’s Mind—it’s good for us to be inexpert and fresh from time to time.  Personally, I find that it helps to take myself lightly; laughter makes a lot of things easier.

 

A related difficulty might be that the New Thing will be too hard.  Common sense, that rare commodity, comes in handy here.  If we start at the beginning, we’ll probably be all right.  No one starts skiing on the double black diamond runs.  The bunny hill is there for a reason.  Begin with the easy bits, try it out, explore, and don’t panic.  Sure, we might end up sore in new places from doing a different sort of movement, but that’s part of the adventure.

 

Now on to the fun part.  Well, probably.  Sometimes we try a New Thing and we don’t like it.  This is entirely all right.  We do not have to like everything.  We tried lacrosse or ultimate frisbee or synchronized swimming and it was not the right activity for us.  We can cross it off the list and try something else or return to our favorites.

 

The New Thing offers us a different way to see the world.  We use muscles we haven’t used before.  We think about physics (maybe not consciously and maybe not mathematically, but still) in a new context.  Maybe it turns out that our previous experience in baseball applies, or that summer we played all that soccer comes in handy.  Maybe we learn that we’ve been doing a whole lot with our lower body and not so much with the upper body.  Whatever it is, it keeps our brains and our bodies fresher, awake, interested.  Kayaking turned out to be incredibly refreshing, challenging parts of me that hadn’t been working in a while.

 

The world is a big and amazing place.  Go explore!!!