Basic and fancy

While I firmly believe that variety is one of the keys to success in fitness, I also firmly believe that it is key to have some basic plans as go-tos.  This is not unlike meal planning for a family.  We all have staples like flour and salt and sugar and pantry basics like pasta and rice.  Most of us have at least one emergency meal ready to pull out at a moment’s notice—spaghetti night often happens this way at my house.  (Yes, there is also the call-the-pizza-man method, which definitely has a place, but should not be relied on as a major source of nutrition.)

 

Our fitness staples are our basic cardio, weight, and flexibility exercises that we can do pretty much no matter what.  They might be walking, body weight squats, and forward bends, for example.  The pantry basics are what we get from those staples:  a 30-minute interval run, twenty minutes of squats and pushups, a few sun salutations and five minutes of meditation.  Then we can spice things up with our trips to the fitness grocery store or farmer’s market—we do a little Zumba one day, hit the machines at the gym, do a heavy weight workout, or take a different Pilates class.  We have the basics so we don’t starve; we have the other stuff so we can enjoy eating.

 

No surprise:  I vote for both.

Sadly, the cake is metaphorical...

In high school, I was blessed to have a Czechoslovakian French teacher (yes, I went to high school a long time ago, before the Czech Republic and Slovakia were things).  Whenever somebody used a particularly stuffy phrase, he would call it a “five-dollar word” and then ask what we meant.  Unpacking five-dollar words is a very educational experience and I ended up learning a lot about English as well as French.  Today’s five-dollar word is synergy.  It is one of those words that gets used all the time in flavor-of-the-month business concepts where management is trying to disguise the fact that they really just want everyone who doesn’t want to be “downsized” or “outsourced” to work harder for longer for less money—“We need to work synergistically across departments…”  This has given the word a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve.

 

Synergy is when multiple things interact to have a greater effect than we expect.  Kind of like cake:  eggs, flour, sugar, butter and then suddenly a taste celebration!

 

Eventually, I will get to the point.  Which is:  we want to do different kinds of workouts because we get a synergy going.

 

On a basic level, this means that when we do cardio, we make our weight workouts better and vice versa.  Our work on flexibility improves our performance in other areas.  However, that’s not the whole story.  When we combine things like Pilates with our weight workouts, we create results we could not expect—the precision of Pilates and the way it builds connections between our brains and our muscles helps us lift weights with better efficiency and form, while lifting those weights improves our strength to execute the Pilates exercises.  Additionally, by mixing up what we do, we keep our bodies slightly confused, which is a precondition for growth.  But wait!  There’s more!  Working out in a variety of ways helps us prevent overuse injuries since running is not the same as swimming is not the same as yoga is not the same as biking is not the same as lifting weights.

 

I particularly like the results of fun cardio plus weights plus Pilates and/or yoga because that gives us everything we need to burn calories, improve metabolism, boost mood, get flexible, strengthen our muscles, and relax our bodies and minds, but I always encourage experimentation.

 

Go play.  A bunch of ways.

Monday Workout: Unstable Variety

This week we are exploring a bunch of ways to create and therefore cope with instability.  This is practical because life likes to throw us curves (and sometimes off of curbs!).  When we work under unstable circumstances, we improve our ability to adapt and we strengthen our core.  And sometimes it is even fun!  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
bench press	20
round lunges	10
1 arm clean and press	30
1 leg deadlift	20
1 leg squat	10
jacks	30
kickbacks	20
roll out abs	10

Friday Reading Repot: The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score:  Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is only tangentially related to what I do, but it is related enough that I think it is worth discussing in this context rather than in my regular monthly book post on my personal blog.  The central thesis of the book is that traumatic events change our bodies and change our brains.  We live after trauma differently than we did before.

 

Dr. Van Der Kolk cites tons of data and provides pictures of brain scans, EEG readouts, and plenty of other things to support his thesis.  He, as a psychiatrist, doctor, and trauma researcher, then interprets this data to suggest how to treat trauma survivors effectively.  In most cases, our culture simply throws a bunch of labels at people and gives them drugs.  Drugs certainly have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and the like, but they are not the whole story.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is also not an answer all by itself.

 

What Dr. Van Der Kolk suggests is a more holistic approach, one that reconnects sufferers with their bodies, helps to reassure their survival brains that they can find safety, and reignites the ability to play, laugh, and create.  One of the many treatments that he has found to be effective is yoga, with an emphasis on the pranayama and meditative aspects, but he also mentions Pilates as a useful tool to help the mind and body attune to each other.

 

It is not an easy book to read—story after story of people who have had to deal with horrific events can be tough to take—but it does shed some interesting light on how we function and how we might want to approach helping those of us who need it most.

How

Yesterday I wrote about how getting started is the hard part.  Today, I offer some ideas about how to make that hard part easier.

 

1.     Plan ahead.  All right, so some of us might find this even harder than starting the workout, but it really does help.  This might mean putting out the workout clothes the night before so we don’t have to be entirely awake to put them on.  It might mean packing the gym bag before bed.  Sleeping in morning workout clothes is also totally acceptable.

2.     Reduce the thinking.  We are really good at talking ourselves out of doing stuff.  If we build the habit of working out, we don’t have as much time to talk ourselves out of it because the body just starts on autopilot.

3.     Know the routine.  This might be as simple as:  it is morning, so I do spin.  It can get more complicated, too, if we need it:  Tuesdays are for lifting, Wednesdays are for Pilates, Saturdays are for biking with friends.

4.     Keep it fun.  We are always more likely to do stuff that we like to do and there are so many exercise choices out there that we can probably find something we enjoy, or perhaps someone to work out with who makes it better.

 

Go play.

Physics, Economics, and Yoga, oh my!

The very hardest part of working out is getting started.  In economics, I believe this is called opportunity cost.  In physics, it’s about overcoming inertia.  Uncle Patanjali, in the yoga sutras, phrases it slightly differently:  To begin is the victory.

 

Knowing this, we can strategize about how we can begin.  Maybe we need to negotiate with ourselves, as a woman I met in the gym a while back suggested:  just go LOOK at the weights.  Then the hard part is done:  we’re there, in the gym.  Picking them up and working with them is relatively easy after that.  Some days I tell myself I just have to do spin for five minutes; by the time that five minutes is done, I have remembered how much I like spin and I feel the energy surge I get from doing it.  The point is to make beginning stupidly easy, so that we have as few barriers to starting as possible.

 

Again, physics explains this with the same idea of inertia.  While bodies at rest tend to remain at rest, bodies in motion tend to remain in motion.  Just start.  It gets easier from there.

Literal and Figurative, As Usual

Math is not my favorite subject.  (Sing with me, in your best Cookie Monster voice:  “C is for Calculus, that’s good enough for me…”)  That said, it is darn useful, both in the literal and figurative senses, when we approach fitness.

 

In the literal sense, we use math to do things like calculate our target heart rate for cardio.  (Here’s the equation for the quick-and-dirty version:  220-your age=your maximum heart rate.  Multiply your maximum heart rate by .65 to get the bottom limit for your training range and by .85 to get the top limit.  Then check to see if you are in that range during your workout by counting your heartbeats for a minute.)  Math helps us figure out what percentage of our single rep max we are lifting today, allows us to add up our workout minutes to a weekly total to compare to our 150-minute target for basic health, and shows us whether we can spare the calories for that extra scoop of mashed potatoes.

 

Figuratively, we “do the math” to decide what workouts work for us.  If we find that our workouts make us tired in the short term, but give us more energy in the long term, we can say the math says it is a worthwhile investment of our time.  If the scale doesn’t seem to be budging, we might do the math and realize that we need to cut some calories or increase our workout intensity.  Or, we may discover that we have nothing left for our real lives when we’re done with our workouts:  the math says we’re overdoing it, since the point of working out is to make everything else in our lives more enjoyable.

 

The good news is that there are tools out there to help us with some of that math.  There are apps to track workouts and calorie counts.  Our phones and wristy overlords can tell us our heart rates.  Heck, most of us carry around a calculator all the time if we want to be more old school about the math.  (If we want to go REALLY old school, I’m sure we all have pencils and paper.)  The figurative kind of math is less conducive to outsourcing the difficult bits, but that’s all right; difficult bits build muscles in our minds as well as bodies.

 

So the take-away is:  Do the math and then go play.