Squat!

I have made no secret of the fact that squats are my favorite exercise.  However, I may have not been as obvious about WHY they are my favorite.

 

The very first reason they are my favorite is that I want to live an independent life all the way to the end.  As long as I can get up and down off the toilet by myself, I won’t necessarily have to go to assisted living or nursing home care (except, of course, if my tiny mind loses touch with reality, but that’s another problem).  In other words, I do squats to avoid a boring and sad existence in a small room.

 

A more cheerful reason to do squats is that squats work pretty much everything in our bodies.  The more muscles that work during an exercise, the more the exercise impacts our metabolism, burns calories, recruits stabilizers, improves our strength, and prepares us for the challenges of the world outside the gym.

 

Speaking of those challenges outside the gym, squats are particularly important as we get older.  By the time we get to 70, nearly all of us will have some bone loss (a.k.a. osteoporosis).  We can minimize that bone loss by doing weight-bearing activity (like squats!), but it will still happen.  With bone loss, we have to be careful about flexing our spines to avoid fractures.  In practical terms, this means that when we need to pick up things like packages or dogs or small children from the floor, we need to use our knees to get low rather than our backs.  Squatting regularly helps us do that.

 

Squats can be modified to suit nearly everyone.  People with troublesome knees may prefer to do squats with a stability ball against a wall or with the support of a TRX.  People with bionic/replacement knees will need to ensure that they don’t go too deep into the squat, as do folks with hip replacements.  Obviously, if a doctor or physical therapist tells us not to do them or if we experience the harmful kind of pain when we try to do them, we should skip them.  Otherwise, we should go for it.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Back to Compound

This week we are working on compound exercises again.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
squats	20
pushups	10
mountain climbers	30
flies	20
kickbacks	10
clean and press	30
rows	20
brains	10

Five Core Favorites

I’m in the mood for core exercises.  Here are five of my favorites, with links to directions that feature the Amazing Stickie.

 

1.     Pretty princesses.  Here’s how to do them.   What I like about them, besides the fact that they work everything at once, is that they keep the spine supported, making them suitable for folks who should avoid flexion (people with osteoporosis and various other spine conditions).

2.     Brains.  Here’s a how-to.  Brains have the same advantage as pretty princesses, but they focus attention on the obliques.

3.     Femur arcs.  Another how-to.  This is a Pilates exercise that I use with both Pilates and personal training clients because it is so good for learning about our lower abdominals and about how to engage our transversus abdominis (the deep abdominal muscle that helps our tummies look flat instead of poochy).

4.     Plank:  yet one more how-to.  Planks not only strengthen the abdominals, but also help us with our upper body strength.

5.     Side plank:  the last how-to.  Another exercise to target obliques and help us with shoulder stability.

 

(If you would like a booklet of exercises featuring the Amazing Stickie, drop me a note!)

What Comes Out Depends on What Goes In

A lot of people in my profession talk about results as if they are some magic thing.  Nope!  When we do things, other things happen.  It’s basic cause and effect.  Exercise will change our bodies.

 

But.  (There had to be a but, right?)

 

Results come from what happens before.  If we make a habit of skipping workouts or if we phone it in every time we do show up, we’ll see the effects in the results we get.  Similarly, if we consistently over-train, we will see results like exhaustion and injury and repetitive stress.  I didn’t learn a lot in chemistry, but I did learn the concept of titration, or, as I like to call it, approximating our way to greatness.  We look at the results and we see how we like them, adjusting as needed to get what we want.

 

As unique as we all are, we don’t have to start from absolute scratch with our cause and effect experiments.  Those of us who want to build endurance need cardio and lots of reps with relatively light weights.  Weight loss people need plenty of cardio, a good dose of weights, and an eating plan.  A trained professional can help us figure out where to start and help us tailor from there.

 

Let’s play.

Throwing Shade

I am that person who talks back to surveys because multiple choice just does not allow me enough scope for my world view.  I also choose things like 5.65 on a scale of 1 to 10.  Nuance, people!  It’s important!

 

My point here is not just to expose all my various neuroses.  I was thinking about nuance because it is nuance that shades between acceptance and giving up.  I am in favor of one of those things.

 

Acceptance is a beautiful thing.  It is where we keep in touch with reality.  I accept that I am just not ever going to get any taller at this point in my life.  I accept that it is probably best if I do dance not only as if no one is watching but when no one is watching.  Acceptance is protective.  It says that it takes a while to recover from a knee injury, that the first workout back after a couple of months of sluglike existence is not going to be peak performance.  It points out that we are not as young as we used to be.

 

However, even not as young as we used to be, we are still awesome.  We don’t give up.  Maybe we can’t run, but we can walk.  We don’t decide that since a gold medal is basically out of the question that we are never going to get out of bed or move again.

 

Acceptance takes a look at what is possible, nods, and makes the most of reality.  Giving up, after the same glance, rolls over and prepares to die.  Let’s choose the good one, folks.

Monday Workout: V-DAY!

I am not much of a fan of Valentine’s Day (sorry, folks!) and I’m going to spread the love (heh).  This workout works like the (infamous) 12 Days of Christmas workout, but since it’s Valentine’s, there are 14 things.  Here’s how it works:  on the first day of Valentine’s, we do a plank.  On the second day, we do two pushups and one plank.  And so on until we finish all fourteen virtual days.  The good news is that we only go through once.

 

1 plank or star plank

2 pushup

3 renegade rows

4 1 leg squats each leg

5 1 leg deadlifts each leg

6 calf lifts

7 burpees

8 (jump) lunges

9 suitcase swings

10 clean and press

11 standing mountain climbers

12 woodchoppers

13 jacks

14 squats

High Anxiety...

Exercise anxiety is a real thing.  A lot of people in our society have been traumatized by P.E. classes or bullies or jocks or mean girls and, as a result, find it difficult to show up in the gym without a certain amount of panic.  Here are five things to do to help with that anxiety:

 

1.     Breathe.  Taking slow, deep breaths can help.  If we feel too amped up, making our exhales longer than our inhales can chill us out a bit.  Conversely, if we need a bit more energy, a longer inhale might help.  No matter what (if any) pattern of breathing we choose, we want to encourage ourselves to breathe into our bellies, slowly, rather than adding energy to the anxiety with shallow, chest breaths.

2.     Take a buddy.  Not necessarily the one who works out all the time.  We want the one who helps us laugh and/or relax.  We want the human security blanket person who understands that this situation is hard for us and does what they can to make it easier on us, whether that is staring down the mean girls or figuring out how the heck to start the treadmill.

3.     Go when the gym is less crowded.  This might be very first thing in the morning, when only the two super dedicated old people claim their own personal elliptical trainers, or early in the afternoon when the college students aren’t awake yet and the parents have left to gather their preschoolers, or well after the after-work crowd have finished.  That way, there is a chance to figure stuff out without anybody watching.

4.     Alternatively, go when the gym is busy.  When there are tons of people all around, literally no one will notice one more.

5.     Repeat:  I am a worthwhile human and I have every right to be here taking care of myself, no matter how much or how little space I take up, whether I lift every weight in this place or none at all, whether I set a speed record on the treadmill or never get out of a walk.  It may take a while, but with enough reps, we’ll get stronger at it.

 

If none of those work, talk to me.  We can figure out what the right approach might be and we can try a bunch of stuff.  We can do this.