Ortho what?

I think we’re all familiar with two eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia, but there is a third one out there that we might want to be familiar with both literally and figuratively.  It’s called orthorexia, and it is an obsession with healthy eating.  People who suffer from this disease don’t focus on the amount of food they eat, but they fixate on the quality of that food, trying to ensure that they are eating the very healthiest of everything.  How can that be a bad thing?

 

Well.  It’s in the obsessive part.  Most of us manage, one way or another, to get our nutritional needs met.  On the whole, Americans have zero trouble getting enough calories or enough protein.  We get more than enough fat in our diets and more simple carbohydrates than our bodies know what to do with.  As I have said more than once, my two pieces of nutritional advice for almost everyone are to eat vegetables and drink water.  A reasonably varied diet that incorporates a balance of complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and unsaturated fats is likely to have all the vitamins and minerals we need as well.  (If we’re worried or wouldn’t eat a fruit or vegetable except on pain of death, we might pop a multivitamin, but that’s just insurance.)  This does not mean that we can never eat cake or bacon or Grandma’s heart attack on a plate fettucine alfredo.  We just need to splurge occasionally and moderately.  No one died from eating one French fry (if they did, it must have been a poisoned one or an allergy or something.).

 

Anyway, my point is that we want to think enough about healthy eating but not too much.  We all know when we’ve eaten too much and we feel gross.  We all also know that those all kale all the time diets make us equally miserable.

 

That’s all the literal bit.  The figurative bit is this:  not everything we do all the time has to be useful.  Sometimes we can relax.  Sometimes we can play, and not just because play makes us more efficient later.  Real health comes from being fully human, engaging in the ebb and flow of life, enjoying the salad and the cake by turns, running around like crazy and then resting.  Let’s do what we need to do and let it go.

Form and Force

I was talking with a client about the purposes of an exercise and it brought up a couple of terms that I want to share more widely.  We get stability from our bodies in at least two ways:  form closure and force closure.

 

Form closure is how our bones fit together.  For example, at the back of our pelvis, the sacrum (base of the spine) fits like a wedge in the slot between the two halves of the pelvis.  This is stability by design and unless something goes seriously wrong with our bones, we don’t have to do anything about it—we can’t really do anything about it.

 

Force closure is something we have a bit more influence over.  Our bones are connected by ligaments (directly), and tendons and muscles (less directly).  When we work with muscles around a joint using good form, we are improving our force closure.  In other words, hip exercises improve the stability of our hips, shoulder exercises keep our shoulders stable, and so on.  The extra good part about force closure is that it is about stability in motion—we want to be able to move those joints, not live our lives as stable statues.

 

Let’s be strong, stable, and mobile!

Monday Workout: Twist!

This week’s workout has a few twists, on purpose.  Life does not just go in a straight line, so we need to practice side movements and twists.  Three rounds.

 

1 arm clean and press	30
squats	20
pushups	10
jacks	30
deadlifts	20
Arnold press	10
overhead curtsy	30
skullcrushers	20
Russian twist	10

 

What to do: some principles

When we show up at the gym, it can be hard to decide what to do with all the cool stuff.  Here are a couple of things to think about when we pick up the weights:

 

1.     If you push it, also pull it.  Some people get all into bench press, for example, and get super strong chests, but don’t ever do any rows, so their backs are out of balance.

2.     Work both ends.  Some of us love upper body exercises and some of us love lower body exercises.  We need both, so sometimes we just have to suck it up and get through the ones we don’t love.

3.     Pay attention to the core.  On all sides.  Again, we know a lot about stuff like crunches, but the core goes all the way around the body, so we need to work those lower back muscles and those oblique abs as well.

4.     Put it all together.  As I said earlier this week, it is rare that we use just one muscle, all by itself, in real life.  We need to teach our muscles to cooperate and coordinate, so doing compound exercises like deadlifts, squats, woodchoppers, burpees, and the like help keep us functional.

 

Go play.

Options and an opinion

Assuming that folks don’t want to try anything actually dangerous, I’m completely in favor of experimenting with workouts.  There’s a lot of wiggle room for how to get our workouts done once basic safety is dealt with.  However, I do have preferences and reasons for them.

 

I do workouts in this order:  cardio, weights, flexibility/mindfulness.

 

Here’s the reasoning.  When we begin a workout, we need to warm up.  Cardio is the perfect way to do that.  So we start with some slow jogging before a run, a couple of easy laps before a more intense swim, and the like.  We finish our cardio workout all warmed up for our weight workout!  Hooray!  We lift, lift, lift with those nice warm muscles.  Then, when we’re good and tired, we approach the flexibility and mindfulness stuff.  Now a whole bunch of people want to stretch first, before cardio, before everything.  This is not how I do it for two reasons.  One is that our muscles stretch better after they are warmed up.  Doing flexibility at the end ensures that we don’t pull a hammie stretching that hammie.  The other is a little more academic:  science suggests that stretching before lifting weights has a slight negative effect on how much weight we can lift.  For most of us who are not competing in weight lifting events, this is probably not all that important, but I know that we all feel better when we lift better, so we might as well save the flexibility for the end.

 

All that said, it is always worth trying things another way.  If we really need to prioritize our weights, we can do a brief warm-up and get the weights done first.  If we don’t need to do cardio on a particular day, we can head straight to yoga (any competent teacher will ensure that there is a warm-up built into the class).  Maybe we need to center our minds before we can even consider facing the elliptical machine.  We can try all the options.

Or maybe I'm just weird...

When we lift weights, our muscles do three kinds of contractions:  concentric, isometric, and eccentric (that last one is pronounced EE-centric, not Ek-centric, which pains my English major self, but there it is.).

 

The concentric contraction is the one we usually think about:  the lift itself where we are working against gravity.  The isometric one is the part where we’re holding still at the beginning or end of the lift.  We are using just enough force to keep the weight from falling, but not enough to lift it farther.

 

The one I am interested in today is the eccentric one (and not just because I aspire to eccentricity as a character trait).  The eccentric contraction is the lowering phase where we return the weight to its starting position.  Now it is perfectly possible, though rarely desirable, to get to the top of the lift and let go, allowing gravity to do the work of lowering for us.  This often creates a very loud noise and sometimes dents the floor or any toes that happen to get in the way.  It also does nothing to build our strength.  However, if we focus on lowering the weight slooooooowwwwwwly back to the starting position, we do a lot more for our peak strength and we get bonus points for working our stabilizing muscles extra.  This contributes to good form as well.

 

How does it work in practice?  Let’s say we’re doing bench press.  There we are, on the bench, our dumbbells at our chest.  Keeping them from falling to the floor is an isometric contraction.  We take a breath in, exhale, and push the dumbbells up toward the ceiling for a count of one:  the concentric contraction.  Whatever time we spend with the weights up there is another isometric contraction, usually about another count of one.  Then, if we are emphasizing the eccentric contraction, we lower the weights slowly and with control for a count of four.  Yes, it takes mindfulness and a lot more work; I’m not sorry.  The same 1-1-4 count can be applied to any exercise we want.

 

Try it!

Monday Workout: Compound

I am a little obsessed with compound exercises, which are pretty much the opposite of what all those weight machines at the gym do.  Compound exercises use lots of muscles and move lots of joints, so they are more challenging, more metabolism-boosting, and more like real life, where we rarely just use our biceps or our hamstrings all by themselves.  However, please adapt to YOUR body—if your knees can’t do lunges, do the curls alone, for example.  Three rounds.

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb overyets	10
woodchoppers	30
lunge to curl	20
renegade row	10
squat to leg lift	30
1 leg deadlift	20
pretty princesses	10