Not Just a Buzz Word

I hate it when business fads wreck perfectly good words.  Synergy is a great word and a useful fitness concept, but I hesitate to write about it because I don’t want anybody spilling their coffee while they jump up and yell, “Bingo!”  (Although jumping up and down is a good way to raise heart rate…)  In business, the concept has come to mean “squeezing more out of less.”  This is not at all what I mean.

 

Every different kind of fitness activity helps every other kind, so we end up getting more out of doing two things than out of doing one for the same amount of time (two or more things working together to produce more than expected is definitional to synergy).  Let me explain how.

 

When we lift weights, we primarily use big muscles for big movements.  Pilates, on the other hand, tends to focus in on doing small movements correctly and recruits a lot more core muscles and little muscles that make fine adjustments to our motion.  The weight training makes us strong and Pilates makes us precise.  Combined, we get a lot better form in our weight training from the precision we gain in Pilates, and we find a lot more of the Pilates repertoire available to us as we get stronger.  Cardio and weight training combined have their own synergy:  the endurance of cardio makes weight training go better and the strength from weight training makes us faster in our cardio workouts.

 

Go play, in several ways!

Monday Workout: Compound

I love compound exercises.  A lot.  So this week we’re making our simple squats a bit more difficult just by raising our arms, which adds another joint to the mix and challenges our form.  Three rounds.

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s or over yets	10
mountain climbers	30
overhead squat	20
lateral raise	10
step ups	30
rows	20
brains	10

 

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.