KISS, baby!

 Let’s keep things simple today.  Here are five things to do to feel good and stay healthy:

 

1.     Sleep.  Fight the cultural glorification of overwork and under-sleep.  Nap against The Man.  Seriously, prioritizing enough rest is good for the body, the mind, the metabolism, and people who have to deal with us.  Aim for about eight hours, give or take.

2.     Move.  It doesn’t have to be big or complicated.  A half hour walk on most days is enough to maintain a healthy body.

3.     Eat.  We need food to live.  When we pay attention to the foods that make us feel more energetic and happy and calm, we do better.  Spoiler alert:  it’s not going to turn out to be Jack-in-the-Box all day, every day.  Bonus spoiler alert:  it’s also not going to be a single leaf of kale per day and nothing else.

4.     Drink.  Water.  Plenty of water.  Dehydrated people are grumpy and mistake-prone.  Drinking other things is all right, but water is best.

5.     Play.  Not everything has to be hard.  Taking the time to find the joyful bits is entirely useful.

Pelvis, no Elvis

Recently I went to a workshop on Pilates for pelvic floor health.  Nearly all of us will have some pelvic floor issues at some point in our lives, so it was a practical decision.  I learned tons and my clients will be seeing little sneaky things creeping into their workouts to keep everything functioning smoothly (and drily!) as we go forward.  However, there are two things we all can do to improve our function that have nothing to do with kegels.

 

The first thing we can do is, surprisingly, to breathe deeply.  Deep inhales and exhales into the abdomen allow the pelvic floor to contract completely and then relax completely.  Muscles that are held too tightly or too loosely are weak muscles.  Teaching muscles to contract and relax allows us to create the optimal amount of tension for whatever we happen to be doing.  So what do I mean by deep breathing?  We need to inhale so that the breath fills our torsos from the bottom up and then empties the same way.  That’s it.  We may not be able to concentrate on breathing that way all the time, but even a few minutes of attention to the breath a couple of times a day will help.  (Bonus:  we get mindfulness points for this!)

 

The second thing we can do is to strengthen our deep abdominal muscles.  Most of us spend a lot of time focusing on the surface ones (the rectus abdominis) because those are the ones that make the six-pack look.  However, looks aren’t everything.  Below the rectus, we have the transversus abdominis, which runs across the body from side to side.  That’s the one we need to befriend in order to improve our function (not only for pelvic floor, but for all kinds of daily activities!).  When we hear (or use) cues like drawing our belly buttons to our spines, we are recruiting our rectus abdominis.  Instead, to wake up our transversus, we can think about all the stuff in our abdomens and imagine that we are shrink-wrapping it.  That feeling of pulling all those squishy bits together is our transversus working.  We can, of course, do this during our workouts, but we can also take a moment every once in a while during the day to do it all by itself (or maybe we can do it when we do our breathing?  Too organized?  Probably not.).

 

Try it out and let me know what you think!

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.