This workout should feel a little challenging because it has a bunch of compound exercises in it and that first set has two fairly aerobic exercises in a row. If it feels TOO challenging, slow down a bit; if you want more challenge, increase the weight and/or speed (but not to the point of compromising form!). Three rounds.
mountain climbers | 30 |
squat to leg lift | 20 |
rows | 10 |
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kb swings | 30 |
kb twists | 20 |
kb 8s | 10 |
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clean and press | 30 |
1 leg deadlift | 20 |
Russian twist | 10 |
I know my job is to encourage fitness, but sometimes that doesn’t mean running marathons or lifting all the weights in the gym at the same time. Sometimes it means giving our bodies the rest they need. Here are some semi-active kinds of rest to consider:
1. Exploring. On most days, we want to get breathless and sweaty, but sometimes we can take it all down a few notches. Instead of running through the neighborhood at top speed, we can slow down and notice the details. Maybe that means poking our noses into the shops or admiring all the flowers in our neighbors’ gardens.
2. Playing in water. Maybe we usually swim laps (and that is totally awesome!), but sometimes it’s good to float around with a pool noodle or play Marco Polo with the kids (no peeking!).
3. Being a tourist. I rarely exercise when I travel because I like to see the places I go on foot. I get ten bazillion steps in while going through the average art museum without even thinking about it until I realize that my feet are falling off and I really need to sit in the café with some fizzy water.
4. Napping. Yes, napping. It is all right to rest. We are allowed to do it and our bodies are better for it.
Play then rest.
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.
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!
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 |
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jacks | 30 |
deadlifts | 20 |
Arnold press | 10 |
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overhead curtsy | 30 |
skullcrushers | 20 |
Russian twist | 10 |
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.
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.
