In the bag!

Getting organized to go to the gym can be stressful.  Here are six things to make sure we have in our bags:

 

1.     Mask.  Going to the gym is a lot less healthy when we share germs.  I know it’s uncomfortable, but so is dying.

2.     Water bottle.  Dehydrated people are crabby people.  They also perform worse.

3.     Toiletries.  What exactly we bring depends on how elaborate our routines are, but shampoo, comb, and deodorant seem like the minimum.

4.     Extra clothes.  Sure, we need regular clean clothes for after the workout, but sometimes stuff happens even before that and we need something to wear that doesn’t have food/blood/sweat/whatever on it.

5.     Plastic bag.  For dirty and messy stuff.  If we’re not getting dirty and messy, why are we going to the gym at all?

6.     Headphones.  Not only can we listen to what we want to listen to while we work, we can avoid annoying conversations (whether ours or other people’s!).

 

Now go!

Whine away...

One of the things I used to say to my kids a lot was that they didn’t have to like doing whatever it is I needed them to do, but they did have to do it.  It may have annoyed them (I have it on good authority that I am the Meanest Mom in the Entire Universe, so I’m sure I annoyed them often!).  I thought it was important, though, and I still think so.

 

There is a lot of pressure around us not only to do hard things but to do them with a positive attitude.  This may be because it helps other people avoid feeling bad for not giving us a hand or for not overthrowing oppressive systems or something.  Point is:  there is plenty of pressure out there and life is hard enough without pretending that we feel great about doing difficult stuff.  We may feel proud of ourselves afterward.  We may like what we got out of the experience as a whole.  But we don’t have to like the process.

 

It turns out that sometimes allowing ourselves to dislike things (like, say, lunges) takes away some of their power.  I can do more lunges when I don’t have to smile and pretend they’re fun and I can even have enough energy left to remember why I’m doing them anyway:  they work my lower body and core and balance and burn a bunch of calories.  Whining can be entirely good for us.

 

As long as we do the work.

Enthusiasm, cookies, minimums, and the dark side

Every gift we have has a darker side, as we all know.  Cookies:  delicious, but so many calories!  Speed, but then we feel impatient.  Cars, but then we don’t walk as much and we get mad at traffic.  All fine examples, but the one that is plaguing me today is enthusiasm.  Maybe I am not alone.

 

I get excited about stuff.  Spin is great!  Weight lifting is great!  I love yoga!  Oooh!  Shiny Pilates!  Oh, yeah, and I want to ride my bike and ski and rent a kayak and and and.  I run around trying to Do All The Things and suddenly I am very very tired.

 

I could just become enthusiastic about naps, which is not a terrible idea; I, like nearly all of us, could use more sleep on a regular basis.  However, there is another way to cope:  the minimum.

 

I’ve talked about this a lot from various perspectives, but today the minimum protects us from the excesses of our enthusiasm.  We have those times when we’re convinced that we should do that AND that AND that AND that other thing over there, too, until we are exhausted, overwhelmed, and inclined to feel inadequate for not finishing everything.  The minimum is the basic amount we need to do to be healthy and sane.  It is a widely applicable system, but I’ll confine my examples to fitness since that’s the scope of my practice.

 

We all need to find our own minimums.  The general guidelines for health suggest that we need about 30 minutes of moderate cardio exercise about five days a week.  If we have not been moving at all, that might be way too high for a first minimum and we might want to choose something like walking to the mailbox or around the block.  Those of us who have been working out regularly may find that we need that cardio every day and that there are some stretches that really make life a lot better when we do them daily.  Others of us may not need to set a cardio minimum, but we know we need to lift weights on Mondays and Fridays to feel like ourselves.  The key is to make it something we can achieve even when we’re having a terrible day.  Maybe everything possible went wrong, but darn it, we did five whole minutes of yoga; if we can manage that, we can cope with whatever else comes up.

 

Go do just a little.  It’s enough.  And we are enough, too.

Monday Workout: Kettle Bell

I love kettle bells because they work the whole body.  Exercises that work the whole body burn extra calories and build our metabolisms.  Also:  fun!  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
1 leg squat	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
jacks	30
renegade rows	20
femur arcs	10

 

Number Five Might Be the Very Best

 

Following on yesterday’s how-to-stretch post, here are my five favorite stretches:

 

1.     IT band stretch.  All of us who sit a lot need to stretch our IT bands.  To do it, we lie on our backs (yay!) and then extend one leg up toward the ceiling, possibly with a strap around our foot (less yay!).  This is only the first part.  Our hamstrings are now stretching, which is good, but not what we came for.  Now we take that leg across the midline of our bodies, allowing the pelvis to follow.  The outside edge of our leg from the hip to the knee will probably scream, so we need to go slowly and gently.

2.     Quad stretch.  There are a couple of ways to do this stretch, but I’m going to focus on the one where we get to lie down.  This time we lie on our side.  We bend the top knee as if we were trying to kick ourselves in the butt with our heel and grab that foot with our hand.  The front of the thigh will stretch.  This stretch is improved by keeping both knees next to each other.  Extra flexible people may need to press their hips forward and/or push the foot hard into the hand holding it.

3.     QL stretch.  For this one, we sit up with our legs spread out wide and our spines nice and straight to begin.  We want to lift our ribcage up off our pelvis and then bend to the side, reaching toward our toes.  That’s just the start:  the inner thighs and possibly the intercostals and obliques at the side of the ribcage we are stretching away from may feel the effects, but it’s the next part we’re aiming for.  Now we want to round our upper body toward our foot as if we were trying to put our belly on our thigh.  I grab my foot with my same-side hand and put my other hand on my thigh.  At the same time, we press the hip we are stretching away from into the ground.  This stretches the QL (quadratus lumborum), which is a deep back muscle in the lower back, one that gets tense and sore when we sit a lot.

4.     Chest stretch.  Again, there are several ways to do this one, but the fun one is to stand in a doorway with forearms against the doorframe.  Then we lean forward, opening the chest and feeling a lovely stretch across the whole thing.

5.     Neck stretch.  This is a stretch that can be done seated or standing, but it’s pretty useful when we’re stuck at our desks, so I’ll focus on that one.  We begin sitting up nice and straight.  For many of us, this may mean sitting at the edge of our chair, feet flat on the floor.  We tilt our head to one side, pulling the head toward the shoulder with the arm we’re tilting toward.  The other hand reaches down toward the ground; the energy out that hand makes a difference to the stretch.  After we hold a while, we can turn our head toward our bicep (the Kaepernick variation!), still pulling the head down with our hand.

 

What are yours?

Stretch Goals

I spend a good chunk of time encouraging people to stretch.  Almost no one does enough stretching, so from that perspective, any kind of stretching is good stretching.  However, in the interest of promoting optimal behavior, here’s a basic primer on how to do it:

 

There are at least two kinds of stretching:  static and dynamic.  Static stretching is the kind where we hold a stretched position for a while, like when we bend over and touch our toes.  Dynamic stretching is when we move through stretched positions, like when we twist back and forth at the waist.  Both kinds are good for us.

 

When we do static stretches, it is important to begin with warm muscles or at the very least to go slowly at first.  Taking our muscles to their maximum stretch first thing is a good way to pull something.  So:  we begin gently, stretching our muscles to the point where we feel a little tension.  NOTE:  stretching is not supposed to hurt.  It may be slightly uncomfortable, but if we hit the pain point, we are going too far.  Once we find that little bit of tension place, we need to hang out for a while.  Most of us are really impatient.  We stretch for about a second and say, “Done!”  Ideally, we stay in the stretch for thirty seconds to a minute.  For most of us, a good marker for that amount of time is about five deep breaths.  This gives our muscles some time to adjust to the stretch.  We may find that after those five breaths, we can go a little farther into the stretch without pain and repeat the process.  This allows our bodies to build flexibility in a gradual and sustainable way.

 

Dynamic stretches, in my experience, don’t build flexibility as well, but they do wake up existing flexibility.  I like them as part of a warm-up.  It’s what dancers do at the barre before getting to the actual dancing.  Just like with static stretches, the goal is to take the muscles to a place where they feel a little tension, but not pain.  We go gently to that place and out of it, not with quick bounces like some of us were taught eons ago in P.E.

 

Ultimately, any stretching is better than no stretching, so we should do the kind that appeals most to us.

 

Go play.

You're Getting Warmer

It’s cooling down outside, so, naturally, I’m going to talk about warming up.  On one level, I’m not a big believer in warm-up exercises.  The body will, in fact, warm up as we go along with our workout.  That said, we don’t want to jump right into the most difficult and heaviest and most demanding bits of our workouts.  We need a little preparation for that.

 

Now that I have everyone good and confused, let me unpack what warm-ups are and are not.  Warm-ups are essentially slower and less challenging versions of the exercises we do during our workout and/or some cardio to get our hearts moving.  They are kind of like practice versions of the real stuff.  Because of the way I design workouts, the first exercise is always a cardio one, so the warm-up is essentially built in.

 

A lot of people think of stretching as a warm-up exercise.  This is only sometimes true.  Doing static stretches before doing some movement is not super effective for flexibility, can cause muscle pulls, and, if we are looking for personal bests in our lifts, can, according to some studies, have a negative impact on our one rep max.  Dynamic stretching (think lunges or old-fashioned windmills) are better for warm-ups or static stretches can follow cardio.

 

In general, the older we are, the more warm-up we need.  Yes, this is unfair.  Please file the appropriate complaint form in the round file.  I would fix it if I could.  I will, however, point out that a little extra warm-up time is way better than sideline time due to injury.

 

Bottom line:  do a few minutes of cardio and maybe some dynamic stretching before doing the heavy lifting.