No pain, no... Yeah, I don't buy it

I am, perhaps, a little countercultural for a personal trainer.  I really hate the slogan, “No pain, no gain.”  A lot.  Pain is there for a reason, and the reason is not to make us stronger, but to make us stop when we need to.

 

This is not to say that working out is always as comfortable as lying in bed or as fun as a birthday party.  Sometimes we do have to do some things we’d rather not.  Very few exercises actually hurt (looking at you, hamstring curls with the TRX) if we are doing them correctly.  I will always be honest about exercises that may not be the most pleasant, I will explain why I want us to do them, and, if they are not appropriate for the person in front of me, I’ll substitute something else.

 

We need to understand the difference between discomfort and pain.  Discomfort is the feeling we have when we’re out of breath because we’re doing some challenging cardio or when our muscles are fatigued on the last rep of a set.  Pain is the feeling that accompanies injury—the sprained ankle, the broken arm, the torqued back.  When we feel pain, the appropriate response is to stop what we are doing, period.  It is not something to push through or buck up under or whatever macho suck-it-up phrase we want to use.  If we do keep going when there is pain, we are asking to make our injury worse, our recovery longer, and our lives more miserable.

 

Discomfort, on the other hand, means that we are doing what we need to do to grow.  We need to put up with it during our workouts, but once the workouts are done, I am a big believer in making it go away.  That might mean rest, or Ibuprofen if that is something we can take, or extra hydration, or a hot bath or shower, or ice.

 

It doesn’t have to be horrible, dear ones.

Monday Workout: Balance

We had a bit of a break from balance exercises, but now I’m back to them because they are so beneficial to our daily life.  Three rounds.

 

squat to leg lift	30
curls	20
pushups	10
mountain climbers	30
1 leg deadlift	20
skullcrushers	10
lunge punches	30
1 leg squat	20
Russian twist	10

 

Six Ways to Sleep Tight

 

Getting enough sleep is hard.  Here are six ways to make it a little easier.

 

1.     Cut down or eliminate the caffeine.  This may sound like crazy talk to those of us who worship at the local Starbucks.  Kicking the habit can be awful in the short term, but in the long term it can help us build a better relationship with sleep and a more realistic idea of what we should be doing.

2.     Get in some cardio.  There is a pretty strong correlation between getting enough exercise and improved sleep.

3.     Find a mindfulness practice.  One of the big barriers to falling asleep is what I call Hamster Head—that little rodent won’t stop running through all the things on the to-do list or the litany of embarrassing things I’ve done since I was three or random song lyrics.  Learning to meditate can help chill that little beast out.

4.     Turn off the tech.  I’ve been working on this one myself.  Instead of binge-watching more cop shows in the evening, I’ve been doing some old-fashioned reading with an actual book.  I’m falling asleep faster.  (Note:  this is anecdotal evidence and not scientifically valid, but real scientists have done studies that indicate that turning off the screens an hour or so before bed improve sleep latency, which is the time between going to bed and falling asleep.)

5.     Schedule it.  This one can be hard, especially for those of us who enjoy sleeping in when we can.  However, bodies like routine, so if we practice going to bed at a regular time and getting up at a regular time, our bodies adapt and learn to sleep during those hours.

6.     Get comfy.  Some of us want all the pillows.  Some want cool sheets.  Some need total darkness.  We can take the time to find our own best practices for sleeping and create that environment.  When I was sick as a kid, my mom would come in and smooth out the sheets and untangle the blankets, which made the bed comfortable again; now we get to be our own moms.

 

As we say in our house, don’t bite the bedbugs; they hate that.

Defining Rest

Yesterday I wrote a little about how we need to temper our enthusiasm for working out with periods of rest.  Today I want to dive into what rest looks like, because it doesn’t always look like lying on the couch like a slug (although there are times when that is a perfectly valid way to rest!).

 

When we first start working out, we want to be building the habit of working out as much as we want to be building up our endurance and our strength.  It is better to do short workouts almost every day than one long workout and then nothing until the next Monday rolls around.  For fresh-off-the-couch fitness enthusiasts, I recommend starting with fifteen to thirty minutes of cardio on five days of the week and maybe one weight workout per week.  That leaves one day for the couch.

 

As we get more fit, our workouts can get longer and/or more intense.  We may not have a couch day every week, just days when we take the intensity down a lot (walk versus run, yoga instead of heavy weights, etc.).  We also may realize that things that used to be workouts aren’t really all that strenuous anymore—that walk to the coffee shop that used to take half an hour round trip now takes half the time and we don’t even sweat—so now it counts as activity rather than exercise.  Activity can be a form of rest, too.

 

One kind of rest that should be (but isn’t, here in Reality Land) nonnegotiable is getting enough sleep.  It is hard to fit our 7 to 9 hours of sleep in with all the other things we have to get done, but without it, we are hamstringing our ability to make progress with our workouts, not to mention the even more important parts of life.

 

Work hard and then get some rest!

Beware Enthusiasm!

I am enthusiastic about… enthusiasm!  I love it when clients want to work and learn and grow because then we can focus on getting stuff done and I don’t have to reach into my bag of motivational tricks (they are invisible and came with my personal training certification, just like all the invisible Pilates tools that came with that certification!).  However, even enthusiasm has a Dark Side (loud breathing optional).

 

The darker side of enthusiasm is obsession.  None of us can work out all the time, and we shouldn’t.  Growth requires both work AND rest.  Our bodies use pain to send us this message; that soreness after a hard workout is notice that we need to rest before doing it again.  When we ignore those bulletins from our muscles, we are risking injury.

 

It is hard to be patient when we are excited about all the new shiny workouts we get to do.  It is worth it.  Slow, steady tortoise progress is not as thrilling as hare-brained all out sprints, but we know who won that race.

 

We can use our enthusiasm as power for the long haul.

 

Go play and then rest.

Monday Workout: Oblique

This week we are working some obliques with the single arm clean and press, the woodchoppers, the renegade rows, and the quadruped.  This is good for making our waists look trim and for our balance.  Three rounds.

 

suitcase swings	30
flies	20
Arnold press	10
1 arm clean and press	30
deadlifts	20
renegade rows or rows	10
woodchoppers	30
lateral raise	20
quadruped	10

 

Five Things to Track to Maximize Success

What we want to track about our diet and fitness depends on our goals, our patience, and our tools.  Olympians need to pay more detailed attention than the rest of us.  However, most of us could benefit from tracking at least these five things:

 

1.     Sleep.  Enough sleep is crucial to workout performance, recovery, and even weight loss.

2.     Food.  People who track their food tend to lose more weight than people who don’t.  There is also the I-don’t-want-to-write-that-down-so-I-better-not-eat-it effect.  A lot of us eat far more calories than we think we do and we need to keep a log as a reality check.  This can be a pencil-and-paper thing or there are lots of apps out there to make it easy.

3.     Water.  Dehydrated people are unhappy people.  They also can’t work out as well as those of us who keep hydrated.

4.     Workouts.  This can be as simple as a checkoff or a detailed list of what kind of workout it was, how long it was, what weights and reps were involved, etc.  In general, it is best to start small to get in the habit.  However, if we have a goal of reducing our mile time, for example, we need to track that to see our progress.

5.     Measurements.  This can be as simple as tracking weight, or we can add circumference measurements (most common are chest, waist, hips, upper arm, thigh, and calf), body fat percentage (if we have a scale or other device to calculate it for us), BMI (which is a math problem based on height and weight), or any other measurements we think we might want to know about.  This allows us to see our progress.

 

Try it and see how it works!