Wiggling is good exercise...

I love making plans.  Plans are like slightly more practical fantasies.  They hold out the promise of achievement and progress and all those seductive words that speak to my Protestant-work-ethic soul.  Do this and be better!

 

What I am learning is that the best plans are not as tidy as my fantasies would prefer them to be.  I—and I will venture to say we—need some wiggle room.  If I say I will get up at 5 every morning and I’ll do my cardio straight after breakfast and then weights and then stretch, I’m not exactly lying, but I’m not going to do exactly that every day.  There will be a day when I forget to set my alarm and don’t wake up anyway.  There will be a day when I have a cold.  There will be the day after a hike that turned into an accidental death march.  It’s a good idea to leave some slack.

 

Maybe my plan is something more like this:  I will do 30 to 60 minutes of cardio in the morning 5 to 7 days a week; I’ll lift weights 2 or 3 times a week; I’ll do yoga as often as possible and for sure on days when I skip the cardio.

 

For this to work, I have to be happy with the minimums and not totally wiped out by the maximums.  Thirty minutes of cardio on five days a week meets the minimum requirements for general health.  Two weight workouts is enough for folks who are not professional athletes.  A guaranteed two days of yoga (assuming I miss two cardio workouts) is a reasonable minimum.  If I hit the maximums and I’m totally trashed, I can adjust the maximums down until I get stronger or fitter or whatever.

 

And (bad news alert!) even the best plan doesn’t work if we don’t actually do the workouts.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Back!

This week we’re thinking about core in a different way.  Most of us think of core exercises as ab exercises, and that is true, but not the whole story.  There are stabilizers in the back of the body, too, as we notice when we have to balance or do asymmetrical exercises.  We’ve got deadlifts to target those back of the body muscles and single arm clean and press and round lunges to practice using all our stabilizers.  And, of course, we have pretty princesses to cover the traditional ab exercises.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
deadlifts	20
Arnold press	10
1 arm clean and press	30
flies	20
round lunges	10
squat to leg lift	30
curls	20
pretty princesses	10

 

Do more with fewer

Another efficiency technique for workouts is using compound exercises because they work more muscles in less time.  Here are five of my favorites:

 

1.     Overhead squats

2.     Deadlifts

3.     Lunge to curl

4.     Clean and press

5.     Woodchoppers

 

All of them use multiple joints and will get heart rate up as well!

Fitting it all in...

Yesterday I mentioned that we need to do cardio, weights, flexibility, and core and balance work.  How are we supposed to fit all that in?

 

Circuit training.  And specifically, high intensity interval circuits.

 

High intensity intervals are the key to getting a lot of cardio in a short amount of time.  We do minute-long bursts of exercises that get our heart rates elevated and then recover with less-intense exercise for a minute or two.  If we use that recovery period to lift weights and work on our core and balance, we just need to finish up with stretching at the end and voila!  It’s a little more complicated than that, but not that much.

 

Here’s how we plan.

 

First we plan a warm-up.  This is about five minutes (more if we are older, stiffer, recovering from injury, or beginners) of gentle movement, something like brisk walking or light jogging, and maybe a stretch or two toward the end.

 

Then we pick a few cardio exercises.  Think of things like jacks, mountain climbers, step-ups, jump squats, woodchoppers, anything that gets the heart rate really moving.  (Don’t do them yet!  We’re still planning!)

 

We need some weight training exercises now.  We want to pick more or less the same number of upper body and lower body exercises, so we might choose squats, bench press, deadlift, and flies.

 

Next, we need a couple of core and balance exercises.  This is where we might do multi-directional lunges and crunches.

 

(We’ll save most of our flexibility exercises for the end.)

 

Now that we have all our parts, we put them together like this:  cardio interval, lower body exercise, upper body exercise, core and balance.  Then we repeat with the other cardio, weight, and core/balance exercises we picked.  I usually create a circuit of about nine exercises and repeat it three times with rests spaced before the cardio intervals, but experimentation is good.  Finish with some SMR and stretching and call it a day!  Most people can finish what I’ve just described in under an hour.

 

Go play.

All the parts...

Every part of our fitness work helps every other part.  That’s good news, mostly, because it means that whatever we do is good for us.

 

However, it also means that when we make sure to get in cardio and weights and flexibility work and core and balance work, it’s even better for us.  How does that work?

 

I’m glad you asked.  (Even if I just pretended you did, because I really want to tell you!)  Cardio work is our foundation work.  We need basic cardio fitness to do pretty much everything else.  Weight training is what makes us stronger, obviously, and faster, not so obviously.  It’s where we start to see the real changes in our bodies.  Flexibility work ensures that we get and maintain a healthy range of motion in all of our joints—we want our fabulous muscles to be able to move us more than a few inches.  Core and balance work takes all the gym stuff we do and helps it apply in the real world where things are a lot less predictable.

 

Maybe that sounds a little overwhelming.  A lot of us already feel like we don’t have time to fit fitness in and now I’m saying there are a lot of kinds to do, too.  Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to make it work without spending forever working out.

Monday Workout: Aggression!

This week we’re getting some aggression out on the weights.  Lunge punches are excellent for mood management, metabolism increases, and coordination.  Three rounds.

 

lunge punches	30
bench press	20
1 leg squat	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
jacks	30
overhead press	20
Russian twist	10

Possibly inspired by my mosquito bite...

The weather (mostly) is getting nicer.  Here are a couple of things to consider before taking the workout outside.

 

1.     Sunscreen.  The kind that doesn’t drip into our eyes when we sweat is good.

2.     Hat.  Even more effective than sunscreen!  And it hides our workout hair!

3.     Bug spray.  Hiking and mountain biking and trail running are all great, but less great when we become a roving buffet for the local insects.

4.     Layers.  Our days may start out or end up chilly.  We may need a jacket and then… not.

5.     Snacks.  The middle of nowhere may not have any on offer, so bring your own noshes and gulps.

6.     Safety plan.  Some of the more remote places we get off to don’t have cell reception.  Make sure someone knows you are going and when to expect you back!  Bring identification, a little cash, and a credit card.

 

Go play outside!