Ways to Measure

In keeping with the goal theme of the week, here are some ways to measure things to help us meet our goals:

 

1.     Pencil and paper.  Spreadsheet also works.  Measurements only work if we have a way to track them, so write or type it down.

2.     Scale.  Yep, our good friend on the bathroom floor.  It’s best if we weigh ourselves on the same scale in the same clothing (or lack of clothing) at the same time of day to keep things consistent.

3.     Tape measure.  The sewing kind that flexes, not the construction metal kind that crinkles when it bends.  We can use it to measure our upper arm, chest, waist, hips, thigh, and calf.  Measure the same spot every time for best results.

4.     Tracker.  I have a Wristy Overlord (aka Apple Watch), but many fitness trackers exist and work just fine to track things like our exercise minutes, steps, heart rate, and the like.  They’re not necessary, but they’re nice and they keep us honest.

5.     Scale.  The one-to-ten kind.  This is useful when we want to track goals that are a little fuzzier, like having more energy.  We give each day a rating on a scale from one to ten and see how our ratings change over time.

6.     Other tech stuff.  This can be things like a bioelectric impedance gizmo to measure body fat percentage, or a blood pressure cuff.  Again, not necessary, but useful if we have very specific goals.

7.     Calculator.  Unless we love math, a calculator can really help us when we look at our averages.  Weekly averages help us see trends in things like weight, sleep hours, or HRV.

 

Remember that different people thrive under different systems.  What seems ridiculously elaborate to one person will delight someone else.  Some of us need things to be simple and others love to have thirty-seven color coded folders.  Do what works.

Goals, Part Two: DUMB

Today I’m going to write about DUMB goals, a system I just made up myself to articulate some things that I have seen and experienced.  Some of us feel (OK, I feel) pressured by SMART goals and constrained by systems that keep demanding more and more.  I offer DUMB goals for those of us who want something different.

 

DUMB goals are Doable, Understandable, Measurable, and Basic.  Yes, two of those things are the same as SMART goals, but with different letters.  I kept those two because they were the most useful.

 

Let’s get the repeats out of the way first:  Doable and Measurable, which map to Attainable and Measurable in the SMART system.  We want goals that we can meet, so choosing a doable goal is important, even if we need some help figuring out what exactly is doable.

 

I’ll come clean:  I really hate measuring stuff.  I resent it every single morning when I step on the scale.  I dread my monthly dates with the tape measure.  I often swear at my Wristy Overlord (aka Apple Watch) when it reminds me that I have not hit a particular measured milestone on a given day.  Problem is, measuring stuff works.  I like stuff that works even more than I hate measuring things.  The key is finding the measurements that combine effectiveness in gauging our progress with something we can tolerate doing.  Using myself as an example, again, my fitness level does not have a high correlation with my daily step count, at least partly because my favorite exercises are biking and swimming, which do not add steps.  Cardio minutes, however, really do impact my fitness level, so I pay attention to getting my 30 minutes every day.

 

Now on to the letters I added:  Understandable and Basic.  Understandable, in terms of goals, means that we choose something that means something to us.  Waist-to-hip ratio, BMI, body fat percentage may all be useful metrics, but if they don’t mean anything to us, they are not useful as goal-markers.  We may do better with something like a clothing size or a scale weight or a round-the-block time.

 

My favorite letter in the DUMB goal is the B for Basic.  I believe that we learn to meet goals by meeting goals, so starting with very basic goals is the way to success.  I think that our first goals should be stupidly easy—do five minutes of cardio once a day, do one squat, one pushup, drink one glass of water.  We learn efficacy this way.  Then, once we know we CAN do things, we make it just a little harder, say, six minutes of cardio.  One step at a time is how we get to our goals.

 

Try it and tell me what you think!

Goals, Part One: SMART

Now that we’re in 2022, we might be making some goals for the year.  I’m going to be writing about goals all week, beginning with today’s topic:  SMART goals.

 

There are lots of ways to make goals, some more effective than others.  A fair amount of research suggests that SMART goals are useful.  So what the heck are they?

 

SMART goals are Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely, thus the acronym.  Explaining further is best done with an example.

 

Let’s say we, like nearly everyone else after the holidays, want to lose weight.  We could say, “I want to lose weight,” and call our goal-writing done, but how will we know when we’ve met our goal?

 

We begin by making it specific:  I want to lose 10 pounds.  We’ll know, assuming we weigh ourselves, when we’ve reached the goal.

 

For a lot of fitness goals, specific and measurable go together.  We get specific by choosing a measurable thing.  Pounds are a measurement, so by making our goal in terms of pounds, we have automatically made it measurable.  (Reaching a milestone lifting weight or beating a best mile time would be other examples of measurable fitness goals.)

 

I’m going to be a little wacky and go out of order here, but that’s because it makes more sense to talk about the time thing next.  A lot of us do better with goals that have an end date and/or a deadline.  So instead of just generally wanting to lose ten pounds sometime between now and when we die, we can say we want to lose ten pounds by March 31.  Now we can do some math and realize that we need to lose a little more than 3 pounds a month, or about a pound a week—we’ve just made ourselves some mini-goals to go with our big goal.

 

The attainable bit comes into play right around the part where we start making time goals.  I’m sure all of us would love it if we could lose ten pounds by tomorrow, but that’s not an attainable goal (at least by any method I would suggest as healthy and sane).  It is totally all right to get help with figuring out what an attainable goal is.  A fitness professional can guide us so that we don’t set ourselves up for disaster.  (Pro tip for weight loss goals:  healthy weight loss is between one and two pounds per week, so 26 to 52 pounds per year.)  This is also the part where we consider how our goals fit with our real life, not the fantasy life we wish we had.  We get realistic and say that our birthday week, for example, is probably not going to be a week in which we lose two pounds and we might want to pencil in staying the same as a goal for that week.

 

Finally, let’s talk about the relevant part.  We need to choose our own goals.  We all get lots of messages from our loved ones, our acquaintances, and our society at large about what we are “supposed” to be.  Making changes is hard, so it really helps to want those changes deep in our hearts.  Maybe somebody else wants us to lose weight, but we are happy the way we are—those somebody elses can go pound sand.  Healthy bodies come in many shapes and sizes.  We need to choose what gives US joy.

 

Tomorrow:  another way to look at goals.

Monday Workout: Happy New Year!

 

Welcome to 2022!  Let’s work out!  Three rounds!

 

squat to leg lift	30
flies	20
pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
kickbacks	10
jacks	30
reverse flies	20
pretty princesses	10

 

Monday Workout: Choose Your Own!

So I’m on vacation this week, but I won’t leave y’all in the lurch.  In fact, my after-Christmas present is that you get to choose your own workout using the 30-20-10 format.  Here’s how it works.  From the chart at the bottom, you will choose three exercises from the 30 column, three from the 20 column, and three from the 10 column, making sure that one of the 10s is from after the space (because we all need an ab exercise!).  Then arrange the choices into a workout and do three rounds.

 

For example, you might choose woodchoppers, jacks, and clean and press from the 30 column; lunges, deadlifts, and curls from the 20 column; and lateral raises, burpees (yeah, I’m sure everyone is going to pick those!), and pretty princesses from the 10 column.  Your workout would then look like this:

 

woodchoppers	30
lunges	20
lateral raises	10
jacks	30
deadlifts	20
burpees	10
clean and press	30
curls	20
pretty princesses	10

 

From there, you can do three rounds and get on with life.

 

If, however, you would rather be shot than do burpees, I have good news!  You don’t have to pick that option.  You could choose pushups or YTA instead!  If you hate lunges (and who doesn’t?), you can choose kickbacks or bench presses or anything else on the list.

 

Now, since I gave an example workout, there is a choice even for the decision-challenged—do the sample!  Otherwise, here is the list of choices.

 

30	20	10
woodchoppers	squats	round lunges
mountain climbers	lunges	lateral raise
jacks	deadlifts	skullcrushers
plank jacks	bench press	YTA
jump squats	fly	pushups
jump lunges	row	burpees
ball slams	kickback
overhead high knees	curls
opposite knees	reverse fly
clean and press
1 arm clean and press		Russian twist
squat to leg lift		pretty princesses
suitcase swings		brains
		femur arcs
		quadruped
		roll out abs

 

Now go play.  And have a Happy New Year!  I will not be posting again until January! 

Magic words?

Some workouts are harder than others.  We all have rough days at the gym.  Here are five things we can say to ourselves to help us get through:

 

1.     I showed up today.  That counts.

2.     I didn’t used to be able to do this at all.

3.     That shower afterwards is going to feel really good.

4.     This is terrible, but it will be over soon.

5.     This may suck, but it will help me get to my goals.

 

If none of those works, we can try bribery—I’ll do an awful lot for a burrito.

Shape of things to come

When I ask new clients about what their goals are, a lot of them say they want to get in shape.  That’s a groovy goal and all, but it’s not very specific.  To get to “in shape,” we have to figure out what “in shape” means.

 

No, I’m not just being a jerk here.  Even though we share language, we each have our own idiosyncratic interpretations of things.  One person may define in shape as a particular number on the scale.  Another might have a pair of jeans from high school lurking in the back of the closet as a visual representation of in-shape-ness.  Yet another person may think of being in shape as readiness to run a marathon.  Some of us want our blood pressure in a better range or maybe to get to the top of the stairs without feeling out of breath.

 

As we figure out what “in shape” is, we can begin to plan how to get there.  Some of us will need to focus on cardio.  Others may need more strength training.  Most of us probably need to take a look at what we’re putting in our mouths.

 

Put another way, the goal determines the path.  Where would you like to go?