How to...

Falling asleep is not always easy.  Here are a couple of things to help with it:

 

1.     Practice.  Having a bedtime that we stick to trains us to get sleepy.

2.     Keep it dark.  We tend to respond to darkness by getting sleepy.

3.     Keep it cool.  We sleep better in cool rooms.

4.     Eat lightly.  I think we’ve all had the experience of a big dinner that made us sleepy at first and then awake later.

5.     Make it comfy.  A good pillow, a blanket that works, a tranquil room, good smells.

6.     Reduce or eliminate the caffeine and alcohol.  This one might be tough on us, but both caffeine and alcohol change the quality of our sleep.

 

Snooze happy!

Take your teddy...

Most of us don’t get enough sleep and a lot of us don’t get enough rest, either.  It is not easy to do, in part because our culture glorifies busy-ness and stress.  We look askance at anybody too relaxed—don’t they know how difficult it all is?

 

I’m not downplaying the difficulties we are all facing in these uncertain and plague-ridden times.  And I hesitate to suggest yet one more thing to add to our endless to-do lists.  Except that this one helps with all the other ones:  go to bed on time.

 

I’m not saying that we all need to be tucked up virtuously by 8 p.m. or anything.  That would be silly.  We all have different rhythms to our lives and some of us are just hitting our stride then.  What I am saying is that we do better when we have a bedtime and stick to it.  Ideally, that time should be seven or eight hours before we have to get up again.

 

We might have to do some negotiating with ourselves and other people to make this work.  Maybe we’ll have to stop after two episodes of that great show.  Maybe we’ll have to explain that it is all right to do a few dishes in the morning instead.  At first it might be hard to go to sleep at our new bedtime.  We might lie there resentfully feeling like a fractious toddler who is definitely not tired, not one bit, no way.  We’ll have to practice.

 

But once we start getting the sleep and rest we need, we might find that we’re not so crabby, we make fewer mistakes, and we feel better.  We find focus that we’ve been missing.

 

I could be wrong.  Try it out and see.

Not nice

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just figure it all out, even if it took a while?  Then we’d be done with the figuring and we could get on with the doing.  Sadly, it does not work this way.

 

For one thing, change happens.  The workout that transformed us over the first few months is too easy now.  The stuff we used to do when we were younger and indestructible is Not a Good Idea nowadays.

 

For another, boredom is the enemy.  We need to strike a balance between having good habits and falling into autopilot ruts.  When we manage to bring both our bodies and our brains to work, we do better.  There are days when we simply have to run or bike or walk a different route or we will explode.

 

Finally, we want to use feedback.  We learn new things from reading.  We discover new stuff about our bodies as we work.  We want to incorporate new knowledge into what we are doing, experiment, evaluate.

 

So, as usual, I’m suggesting a more difficult path than just showing up and doing the same thing over and over and over, but my way is way more fun.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Jump!

This week we’re taking our squats up a notch by adding the jump.  If your knees don’t like jumping, just use weights and do regular squats, or do squats to side leg lifts.  Three rounds.

 

jump squats	30
bench press	20
round lunges	10
overhead high knees	30
flies	20
pushups	10
jacks	30
deadlifts	20
Russian twist	10

 

What's for dinner?

Most of us could use a little help choosing wisely when it comes to food.  Here are four questions to ask ourselves about food.

 

1.     Have I had enough water today?  (Hint:  the answer is probably no.  Most of us don’t drink nearly enough water.)  If we aren’t going to the bathroom every hour or so, we need to drink more.  And yes, water is the best choice, but I’m not going to get between anybody and their morning coffee or tea.

2.     When was the last time I had a vegetable or fruit?  Most of us would do well to focus a bit more on the produce and a bit less on the meats and starches.  We all get plenty of protein and fat; what we need are vitamins, minerals, and fiber, which come, in many cases, from colorful fruits and veggies.

3.     Am I actually hungry?  We eat for lots of reasons besides hunger.  We eat for comfort.  We eat when we are bored.  We eat because other people are eating.  We eat because Mom made dinner.

4.     How much food do I want?  Sometimes we decide based on the size of the plate, or the portion someone dished out to us rather than the amount that we need or want.

 

Choose wisely! 

I took this picture in New York, actually...

Let’s talk about maps.  When we’re looking at maps on the neighborhood level, we realize that there are lots of ways to get where we are going.  Zoomed out, though, if we want to get from, say, California to New York, we want those ways to tend in an easterly direction.  Both of these views are useful as metaphors for how we approach fitness.

 

The local angle means that we have a lot of options for what we do today.  We can get to the store on the freeway or on the back streets.  Some ways will be more fun than others, some will be quicker, but we will still end up at the store.  Which is to say:  we want some cardio fitness?  We can work out at a low intensity for a long time, or a high intensity for a short time.  We can dance, ski, bike, swim, run, kayak, or whatever makes our hearts go pitter-pat (literally!).  All the things will work.

 

The wider angle means that we want our workouts to tend to improve what we’d like more of in our lives.  Dancers dance.  Marathon runners run.  The strength and flexibility work those two kinds of athletes do are all in service of their larger goals.  They still have lots of options, but they all veer toward the distant goal.

 

(If you have a destination in mind, you can ask me and we can make a map together!)

 

Go play!

Attitudes on Attitude

I am not one of those people who is going to say that attitude is everything.  That workout that we complained the whole way through?  It still worked.  And maybe all that whining and groaning made the difference between doing it and not doing it.

 

That said, we will be happier if we bring some kinds of attitude to our thinking about our workouts.  If, before and after the work, we devalue what we do or did, we discourage ourselves from doing it at all.  If we evaluate our selves rather than our work, we are not likely to feel all that good, because not one of us is perfect—there is always someone out there stronger or younger or thinner or more whatever than we are.

 

The attitude I like best (even if I don’t always achieve it) is one of loving curiosity.  I look at my week’s worth of workouts and I try to see why it went well or why it didn’t without passing judgment on myself.  Maybe I missed a workout.  Maybe that was because I stayed up too late the night before watching tv.  I might decide that was not worth it, but if I was up too late laughing and playing games with my family, I might decide that my health needs that, too.  And I might also figure out that just because I usually work out in the morning, it doesn’t mean that I have to do it then if I need a little more sleep first.

 

Or let’s say I tried something new, some different yoga routine.  At the end of the week, I can see what my body feels like and decide if I like what this particular batch of exercises does.  If I do, great!  I know what I want to do in the new week.  If not, I can think about what I want to try instead.  It all goes better if I don’t say, “You know, I really suck at this and I’m never going to get better at it and I don’t know why I even try.  And by the way, I’m ugly and stupid and useless and worthless and who picked out those clothes?  I did?  UGH!”  (Other people’s inner monologues might be nicer and more creative than mine, but I do know how to make myself feel small…)

 

The point here is:  we can bitch all we want while we work, but we need to save some kindness for the evaluation and planning bits.

 

Go play.