Sneak it in...

I’ve been putting a lot of balance exercises in workouts for my clients lately.  Practice is key to balance, so here are four ways to squeeze in balance practice in daily life.

 

1.     Brush your teeth on one foot.  We brush our teeth every day.  We might as well practice balance at the same time since we’re standing there anyway.  Having the sink right there to grab makes it a pretty safe place to practice, too.

2.     Balance during that time in line at the store.  Focus on your favorite tabloid headline and see if you can read it all before you lose your balance.  Then do the other foot.

3.     Use commercials as time to balance (if you still have commercials in your TV programs.  If not, practice while the streaming stuff loads or during the endless scrolling to find something new to watch.).  May I suggest single leg deadlifts?

4.     Do some core exercises before you get up.  A few femur arcs or chest lifts before getting out of bed is a good way to start the day.  Maybe not as good as rolling over and going back to sleep, but good.  Ambitious people can do pretty princesses, too.

Outside!

The weather is getting warmer and, in some places, actually hot.  What that means is that we have to pay attention to a couple more things when we work out outside.

 

First, we need to drink more water.  This is almost always good advice, but it is truly crucial if we are getting sweaty in hot weather.  We need to bring more than we think we need and if we’re going to be out for more than a couple hours, we might want to bring a drink with electrolytes in it.

 

Second, we need to remember that we don’t need THAT much sun.  Personally, I think I am secretly a plant and I need to photosynthesize, but even this walking plant needs to remember the sunscreen and the floppy hat.  Sunburn is Not Fun and it’s not good for us.

 

We can have tons of fun if we do a tiny bit of planning.  Let’s be good scouts and Be Prepared.

Wanna work out?

Now that more of us are getting vaccinated and we’re allowed to see our friends safely, it’s time to talk about workout buddies again.  I am totally in favor of them, but it is important to choose the right ones.

 

Sometimes the people we love best are not the best workout buddies for us.  We are not looking for a soul mate in a workout buddy.  Here is what we ARE looking for:

 

Great workout buddies keep us accountable.  That dear friend who is always late or bails out at the last minute may be a wonderful human, but they will not help us achieve our workout goals.

 

We want workout buddies who are more or less at the same level of fitness we are.  If we work out with someone who is a lot less fit than we are, we won’t get much of a workout (however, this can be a Good Deed with a side of active rest for us and an opportunity to connect).  If we work out with someone a lot fitter than we are, we run the risk of working too hard or of getting discouraged.

 

We also want workout buddies who can focus enough.  That friend who has fascinating stories to tell might be perfect if both of us can still keep enough of our minds on pedaling/running/walking, but if the stories distract us from lifting form or traffic maybe not so much.

 

All of that said, active fun with our friends is good for us, even if those folks are not our perfect workout buddies.  Go play!

Monday Workout: Challenging

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
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
clean and press	30
1 leg deadlift	20
Russian twist	10

 

I mean it...

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.

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!