Out loud is all right

We all talk to ourselves, although some of us are more subtle about it than others.  How we talk to ourselves when we work out matters.  Here are some things to consider:

 

1.     Give yourself positive feedback.  This means noticing what is going right, even if it is very small.  “I showed up today!  Good job!”  “Lifting that weight one time is more than I did yesterday!  Hooray!”

2.     Focus on process.  “I went to the gym three times this week.”  “I spent 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer.”

3.     Process your feelings.  It is all right if you don’t like working out.  One of the things I said about a gazillion times to my kids (and still do, even though they are adults now) is “You don’t have to like it, but you do have to do it.”  Acknowledging that some parts of what you are doing to get what you want are unpleasant is healthy and useful.

4.     No insults and no apologies.  You are not lazy or stupid.  You may not be where you want to be in terms of your fitness or your body shape or whatever, but you are working on it, so give yourself some respect.  You are also doing your best, so do not apologize for not being perfect (I had to learn this one the hard way; my trainer made me do pushups every time I apologized during a workout.  I got a lot better at pushups while I learned…)

5.     Encourage yourself.  This can be a hard one.  Sometimes it helps to imagine that you are encouraging someone else, maybe a small child or a best buddy.

Fantasy and reality

It is the nature of my work that I read a fair amount about workout programs and systems and how to achieve goals.  They’re all very neat and pretty.  I have a recurring batch of fantasies about how someday I will find or make the perfect system, enabled by the perfect planner and suddenly the planets will align, my skin will be flawless, peace will break out throughout the earth, and I’ll never sink into the murk of despair again.  I mentioned that this is a fantasy, right?

 

Here in Reality Land, it’s not quite so neat and pretty.  We don’t all progress through the stages of a workout program at the same rate.  Sometimes we hit a plateau and we have to get creative to climb off it.  Sometimes we backslide.  And, on special occasions, we progress faster than we expect.  The nice clean workout sheets get marked up and corrected and scribbled on as we adjust to what is actually happening.

 

We do have the option of avoiding adjusting, but it’s not a good one.  When we force our progress to adhere to an abstract idea of what it should be, we are asking for boredom if we happen to move faster or injury if we need a little more time.  The key, as always, is to pay attention.

 

This, of course, is why a trainer can be handy.  It’s my job to pay attention to how things are going, make the adjustments, and help my clients get to their goals.  I’m here to customize the workouts for each individual and to shift in the moment if life has made unexpected left turns.  I am not necessary, but I am useful.

Good habit to adapt...

Habits are a good news/bad news kind of thing.  Obviously, we want to have good habits like eating food that is good for us and moving our bodies enough to feel healthy.  It is awfully nice to get into the groove of a habit and get workouts in automatically.  What’s not to like?

 

Well, sometimes when we have a strong habit, we get thrown when life doesn’t go as planned.  We are so used to doing things the way we always do that when family comes to visit or we go on vacation or we don’t get up at the usual time we don’t know how to adapt.  It’s like we only know one way to do things and we’ve broken ourselves by getting off the track.

 

So then we have to figure out how to get stuff done anyway.  In the moment, mostly we need to take a deep breath, remember that we are smart and flexible humans, and get on with it.  In the longer term, we need to practice.  That means that every once in a while we need to shake up the routine on purpose to remind ourselves that there is more than one way to achieve our goals or check off those tasks.  Maybe once a week or so we try an evening workout if we are normally morning people, or vice versa.  Maybe we switch up the order of our workouts.  Change is inevitable, so learning adaptability is a useful tool to pair with our habit tool.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Gravity

This week we are changing our relationship to gravity.  Instead of doing plain old rows, we’re doing renegade rows.  Instead of our usual kickbacks, we’re doing skullcrushers.  Not surprisingly, we challenge ourselves in different ways when we switch up our body orientation.  It’s all good.  Three rounds.

 

squat to leg lift	30
deadlifts	20
renegade rows	10
1 arm clean and press	30
lunge to curl	20
pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
skullcrushers	20
pretty princesses	10

A Useful List of Unuseful Things

Usually, I focus on the positive, but every once in a while it’s good to remember what NOT to do.  Here are five things to skip:

 

1.     Comparisons.  Our workouts are our own.  There are workouts out there that are too hard for us and others that are too easy.  We need to concentrate on the one we are doing.  What that woman over there is doing is not relevant.  That guy doing whatever it is he is doing does not matter to our workout unless he literally crashes into us.

2.     Time travel.  This is sort of a subset of comparisons.  We can only do today’s workout.  Maybe we did much harder workouts when we were twenty, but that does not change what we are doing today.  In six months, we may be doing far more amazing things, but, again, not relevant today.

3.     Self-Trash Talk.  I’m all in favor of trash-talking the weights—they have no feelings to speak of—but we need to make a point of talking nicely to ourselves about how we showed up and are working.  No bitching about how slow/fat/weak/whatever we are because it does not help.

4.     Excuses.  We’re creative.  I get it.  We can come up with really good reasons to skip workouts all day long.  The thing is, we don’t get fit by talking about workouts; we get fit by working out.  This is not to say that we should never skip workouts—life happens—but that we should be very careful to make good choices most of the time.

5.     Burnout.  I know I just said we need to skip the excuses.  Scheduling rest days is not the same as flaking off.  We need to plan rest just the same way we plan workouts.

 

Now go play.

Maximums

One way to divide humans is between minimalists and maximalists, especially when it comes to fitness.  Some of us want to know how to scrape by with the least possible exercise; I’ve written plenty about how to do this, so I’m not going to go over it right now.

 

On the other end, some of us want to work out All The Time.   I get it.  I like working out, too.  But too much is not a good thing.  When we over-train, our bodies start to break down.  We get repetitive stress injuries.  We get other kinds of injuries just from being flat-out tired.  And we stop making progress.

 

Bodies get stronger and leaner and faster by cycling through challenge and rest.  We work our muscles, which makes them sore, and then they rebuild themselves stronger while we rest.  No rest means no rebuilding.

 

Our culture firmly believes that more is better and most is best.  Fight the power and get stronger by resting from time to time.  Really.

Jump!!!

Back when we were kids, jumping came naturally.  Our bodies were young, elastic, and bouncy!  Nowadays, most of us have to be more careful when we jump so we don’t get hurt.

 

Good jumping starts with our feet.  As we lift off the ground, we want to lift our heels first and toes last, articulating through our feet.  On the way down, we want to reverse that process, letting the balls of our feet land first and rolling down to our heels.  This helps our bodies absorb the shock of reconnecting with the ground.

 

Not surprisingly, knees also have a lot to do with good jumping.  We bend them to get the energy to launch ourselves in the first place, but we have to remember to bend them again as we land.  We want to come down more like rag dolls, who land softly in a lump and less like china dolls, who hit stiffly and shatter.

 

The final piece of good jumping is core control.  Core control is what keeps us from crashing inelegantly.

 

Jumping is a great way to add oomph to our workouts (jump squats!  jump lunges!  plyojacks!) and it can be fun as long as we take a moment to make it safe.  However, some of us find jumping inappropriate for our bodies—this can be because we have large breasts that don’t get adequate support or because we have gimpy knees or because our ankles dislike us (this is not an exhaustive list, of course!).  Done safely, it’s great, but it is totally all right to skip it if it doesn’t work for us.

 

Happy bouncing!