A drinking game?

Now that we’ve made it to spring, it’s time to remind ourselves of all the good reasons to drink more water.

 

1.     It makes us nicer.  Dehydrated people are grumpy people.  Drink up and avoid arguments!

2.     It makes our brains work better.  In fact, almost all of our body processes work better with enough water.

3.     It helps us eat less.  We get confused sometimes between hunger and thirst.  Water has no calories, so it’s always worth it to try drinking some before we dive head first into the spaghetti.

4.     It detoxes us.  I’m not big on the whole idea of detoxes, unless it’s just about knowing we have a liver and kidneys.  But those organs work better when there is water to move the systems along.

5.     It helps us keep cool.  No one likes to be too hot.

 

So find a good glass, ice if you like, some lemon, whatever helps, and drink up.

No need for pointy sticks...

Most of us don’t worry about brushing our teeth.  It’s just something we do on autopilot.  Maybe we aren’t so good about flossing and we need the hygienist to threaten us with her pointy sticks to spur us on to better things, but the brushing we have covered.

 

We want our basic workouts to be like brushing our teeth.  We don’t have to think about them or plan for them; we just do them.  Oh, it’s morning:  I brush my teeth and go for a run.  The work day is done:  I am going to lift weights now.

 

To get to that point, we need practice.  We need to make sure we have the workout equivalent of toothbrush and toothpaste available.  For some of us, this means sleeping in our workout clothes or having them right there when we roll out of bed.  Others of us need to make sure the gym bag is packed along with our lunch and our other work things.

 

Eventually, starting or ending the day without a workout will feel as weird as forgetting to brush our teeth.

How to make it harder...

Yesterday when I posted the workout, I mentioned that as we get more fit, we need to make our workouts harder.  However, we might need some guidance about when and how to do that.

 

When we notice that our cardio workouts aren’t making us as breathless or sweaty as they used to, it’s time to make them harder.  We have a couple of choices about how.  We can go longer (this is probably how people end up doing marathons and definitely how I ended up doing century rides).  We can make the work more intense (increase the tension on the stationary bike, add hills to a walk or run, up the pace on the swim).  We can add intervals if we aren’t already using them or decrease the rest period between intense intervals if we are.  Here’s the thing:  don’t do all those things at once.  I know it is tempting, but that’s asking for a crash.  For most people, time is a limiting factor, so I suggest adding a few minutes every week or so until the workout time is about an hour.  After that, the shifts should come in intensity, unless of course the goal is a marathon or other endurance event.

 

With weights, we want to increase the number of repetitions or the weight we are lifting.  Obviously, we are not going to lift the same weight a hundred times.  Most people who want to be building general strength are going to be doing something between 8 and 15 reps (fewer if the goal is to increase 1 rep max, more if the goal is general toning).  When the larger number of reps at a weight becomes easy, we increase the weight and drop down to the lower end of the rep range, gradually building up to the top end.  Then we increase the weight again and reduce the reps.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Another way to increase the intensity of our weight workouts is to add cardio intervals—a minute of running or spinning or jumping rope between sets makes everything harder.

 

In everything, it is important to pay attention to what the body says.  We want our workouts to be hard but not torturous.  Gradual increases in intensity are best.

 

Go play.  Hard.  But not too hard.

Monday Workout: Harder

As we get more fit, we need to make our workouts harder to keep the process going.  This is why burpees are back.  Also, they get easier the more we practice.  (It is totally all right to call me names or swear or both the whole time.)  Three rounds.

 

overhead curtsey	30
squats	20
burpees	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
jacks	30
rows	20
quadruped	10

Five landmarks

Standing up straight is not as… straightforward… as just throwing back our shoulders and sucking in our bellies.  We need to line up our body landmarks.  Imagine looking at yourself from the side.  We want these body parts to line up:

 

•      Ear

•      Shoulder

•      Hip

•      Knee

•      Ankle

 

For most of us, our ear tends to be a little too forward, as are the hips.  When we bring our heads back over our shoulders, it gets easier to bring our hips to the right tilt to lengthen the lower back a bit.  Beware the tendency to stick out the chest—it is not any better than caving it in; we want the happy medium. 

Uncle Joe wants you to stand up straight.

Good posture is not a particularly sexy idea.  The cool kids slouch.  We curl up in comfy chairs.  We hunch over our desks.  And it isn’t good for us.

 

Uncle Joe (Pilates, that is) encourages us to buck this trend.  This is only partly because he was obsessed with breathing.  When we don’t have good alignment in our bodies, we can’t breathe as well, which affects everything from our cognitive function to our energy levels.

 

Another reason Uncle Joe wants us to get ourselves in line has to do with efficiency.  He was all about efficient movement and that starts with having correct length-tension relationships in our muscles.  What the heck are length-tension relationships?  Our muscles have an optimal default length when they are not contracting.  When they contract, or shorten, they move our bones.  If our muscles are too tense or too slack to begin with, they can’t exert as much force and we don’t move as well, as much, or as efficiently.  We end up doing a lot more work.

 

Good posture helps protect us from overuse injuries.  When we get out of alignment, our parts wear out faster (just like tires on a car!).

 

If all of that is too high-minded to be motivational, here’s one more reason to acquire good posture:  we’ll look thinner.

 

We can do it!

No stressed-out corpses

Lately a lot of people I talk with seem to feel overwhelmed.  Maybe it is cumulative exhaustion from more than a year’s worth of pandemic.  Maybe it is the relief that is starting to come from the better news about vaccines.  Even good change is stressful.

 

So when we get to our workouts, we need to begin slowly and we need to be patient.  I admit, this is not my favorite way of being in the world.  I love to jump right in and try to do all of it Right Now.  Except that doesn’t work for fitness.  Fitness works best when we build it as a habit, so we need to make sustainable habits.

 

Starting slowly might mean choosing a ridiculously easy goal, like maybe walking for five minutes a day.  Once we have that habit, we definitely want to build on it, but we have to be careful not to get into the mindset of more-is-better.

 

Let me digress for a moment:  I have and wear an Apple Watch to track my movement and exercise and standing (I don’t care that much if I stand up in 12 different hours during the day, but it’s part of the package, so I do it.)  I call it my Wristy Overlord because it is always telling me what to do and God forbid that I should end a day without completing my circles!  The Wristy Overlord, when it sees that I have met my movement goal all week, tries to get me to agree to a higher movement goal for the following week.  It wants me to get on the endless upward staircase to failure, because at some point, I won’t be able to meet the increased goal.  Every week, I talk back to the Wristy Overlord and tell him that I have set my goals at my minimum acceptable levels ON PURPOSE because I know when I’m going above and beyond; what I need to know is whether I have done just enough or not.

 

Whether there is a Wristy Overlord involved or not, we all feel a certain amount of pressure to achieve more, faster, and better.  This can cause us to push ourselves beyond what is desirable.  We do not want to be very fit stressed-out corpses.  We want to be happy human beings.  It is true that we sometimes have to do unpleasant things to be healthier, but we want to strike the right balance between what we need to do and what we like to do.

 

Go play.  The right amount.