The goal is...

It has been a while since I’ve reviewed one way to divide up kinds of goals, so here I am to remind everybody.  And, because I’m opinionated, I’ll even say which kind I like better.

 

One kind of goal is a results goal.  It focuses on the end state.  This is a very common kind of goal in fitness:  I want to wear a size K, or weigh B pounds, or run Z miles in J minutes.  Fancy versions of this kind of goal add deadlines:  I want to lose C pounds by my wedding date, or my reunion date, or my birthday.  There is nothing wrong with results goals, as long as they take reality into account—nobody is going to lose 100 pounds by next week, at least not in a survivable way.  This kind of goal helps us think big and see the end of the rainbow.  What these goals lack is a how.

 

Which is where process goals come in.  I love process goals because they focus on what we can do right now to get where we want to go.  Process goals are things like:  I am going to ride my spin bike for 30 minutes on weekdays before work, or I am going to do two weight lifting sessions every week, or I am going to limit my desserts to one a week.  They are all about actions we can take to move ourselves in the right direction.  They also work really well when we don’t actually know what is realistic for us.  I may not know how long it is going to take me to lose L pounds, but I do know that if I choose smaller portions every day, I’m taking steps to lose them.

 

The other thing I want to say about goals is that we are allowed to change them, no matter what kind we set.  Maybe we initially thought we wanted to lose some number of pounds and we discovered that actually we felt and looked great before we hit that number, or we hit it and found that we wanted to go a little farther.  Maybe we thought we wanted to do a marathon, but realized that our bodies were best suited to a half.  No one is checking.  We can change our minds as we get new information or even just because we want to.

 

Go play.

Work from love

Welcome to summer, or at least to June.  A lot of us confront our body anxieties as summer sets in.  I will lay a lot of the blame for this on the capitalist imperialist cis-hetero-normative white supremacist patriarchy and its advertising machine—anxious people buy stuff.  But I have good news.

 

First of all, smashing the aforementioned many-adjectived patriarchy is good exercise.  We burn a lot of calories that way and build our muscles.  (Please do not smash any actual humans.  This is not good.  Use the energy to lift the weights and power the cardio.)

 

Once we’ve calmed down a little due to the exercise, we may be able to remember that we are more than just pretty faces/bodies.  We are valuable no matter what we look like.  When we are in tune with our actual worth, we find much better ways to motivate ourselves to do things that are good for our bodies and may incidentally make our outsides as lovely as our insides.  Working from love is always better than working from fear—the workout becomes a gift we give ourselves rather than some obscure form of punishment for our imagined sins.

 

All of us are allowed to take the bodies we have right now to the beach to enjoy sun and water and fresh air; anybody who says different is not our friend.

Monday Workout: What holiday?

This week we are continuing to work our compound exercises and our balance.  Choose weights that are heavy enough that it’s hard but not impossible to complete the number of reps.  Three rounds.

 

1 arm clean and press	30
rows	20
1 leg squat	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
mountain climbers	30
squats	20
pretty princesses	10

 

Ten

This week I’ve been writing about reasons to get in a workout.  Here are ten of mine, but we all need to make our own.

 

1.     It improves my mood.  I’m a depressive, so I am all about finding ways to cope with that.  Cardio is the very best antidepressant I have found.  (Please note:  this does not mean that any of us should stop taking medication without talking with our doctors.  Medications can save lives.)

2.     It helps me sleep.  Not just me.  Research says so.  Exercise improves the quantity and quality of our sleep.

3.     It makes my brain work better.  Exercise helps keep our brains functioning well.  Also, it clears out all that hamster-wheel stuff in there.

4.     It reduces stress.  That thing about clearing the hamster-wheel stuff?  That’s stress reduction.  And the weights don’t mind if we take our anger and stress out on them the way our family and friends do.

5.     It gives me more energy for the other things I want to do.  I don’t poop out when I’m exploring a park or a museum or a new neighborhood because I’ve built my endurance during my workouts.

6.     It means I can eat fries.  Not all the time, but once in a while.  No one can out-exercise a truly terrible diet, but working out means that there is a little space for treats.

7.     I look better.  I like what I look like when my muscles are toned and my posture is better and I’m a healthier weight.

8.     I can open jars.  My dad was convinced that I would starve to death back before I started lifting weights because I needed him to open stuff for me.

9.     It improves my health markers.  Exercise is good for reducing cholesterol, improving glucose tolerance, preventing heart disease, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

10.  I have come to like it.  That was a long road, I admit, but nowadays I look forward to my time with my spin bike or in the pool or around the weights.

 

Your turn.

The hard stuff

Sometimes, no matter how many good reasons we have to work out, we don’t.  What we need to do then is figure out how to get the obstacles out of the way.

 

Practical obstacles are relatively easy to overcome.  We can go walk or run for free if the gym is too expensive.  There are plenty of body weight exercises we can do if we don’t have a lot of equipment around.  Almost all of us can find enough time in the day to work out without stealing from our sleep.

 

The inner obstacle course can be more difficult.  Some of us have been scarred by our previous attempts to exercise—that mean coach in middle school or those girls who laughed at us the first time we circled the track and we felt like we were going to die or that time we broke a leg skiing and we had to hobble around on crutches forever.  Some of us hate the whole idea of sweat.  Some of us are convinced that hell is one big elliptical trainer or an endless aerobics class.  Dealing with negative emotions is hard.  In fact, it is harder than any workout.  No matter what particular issues we have, we want to go gently.  When we treat ourselves with kindness and respect and we set teeny tiny goals that we can nail, we encourage ourselves to keep going.  We love ourselves through the tough parts because we know that working out is good for us and will make us feel better in the long run, if not in the actual moment.

 

Navigating all that stuff can feel overwhelming.  This is where a friend or trainer can help—someone to be present for us while we work it through.

 

I’m here to help.

Not just for fun...

Even though I mostly enjoy working out, I don’t do it just for fun.  This surprises people, who assume that I have no problem motivating myself to work out because I am a Trained Professional.  Turns out I am human, too.  All of us, me included, work out for our own reasons.  There are some people out there who run or lift or whatever because they really love the thing itself, but the rest of us have to find other encouragement to hit the gym. 

 

Some reasons are more effective than others.  Research strongly suggests, and my experience confirms, that the best motivations are positive ones.  Put another way, if shame, meanness, cultural pressure, fear, and screaming worked, we’d all be thin and fit already.  What we need is the connection between our workouts and the things we deeply want in our lives.

 

Those deep wants don’t have to be actually deep—if we really want to be hot/gorgeous/thin out of personal vanity, that can be super motivating because we can see the link between showing up at the gym and how we look in that bikini.  Of course, they can also plumb the very depths of our souls:  we can work out to find peace, to live longer and better, to keep up with our kids or grandkids, or to reach the literal mountaintop.

 

So let’s ask the questions:  what do we want and how does that link up to getting today’s workout done?

Monday Workout: Mix

This week we’re doing some basics and some compound exercises.  The idea is to mix things up so our bodies stay a little confused, which helps them adapt.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
flies	20
Arnold press	10
mountain climbers	30
lunge twist	20
curls	10
squat to leg lift	30
deadlifts	20
Russian twist	10