Old School

I talk a lot about how we need to shake things up in our fitness lives.  That is absolutely true, but I also love how we can go deep when we practice exercises over a long period of time.  I guess I have fully embraced that we live in paradox.

 

I find this depth particularly compelling as I cycle through the Pilates repertoire.  Something that the newest newbie of newness can do, like arm arcs, can still reveal new uses and applications to me, depending on how I use my breath, what bone rhythms I’m thinking about, what muscles are whining, and the like.

 

What exercises do you find fresh even though they are old favorites?

No Ab Is an Island

I love ab exercises, of course.  However, I like exercises that use our abdominals while we do other stuff even better.  Here’s why.

 

Exercises like crunches or femur arcs or even my beloved pretty princesses work our abdominals in isolation.  They are fabulous for learning how to engage our abdominals and how to work them properly (without pooching them out!  We love you, transversus abdominis!).  What they don’t do is teach us how to use our core for support in our regular lives, unless we somehow have a life in which we lie around on our backs all day.

 

Real life involves things like standing up, lifting things, twisting, balancing, and bending.  When we do an exercise like woodchoppers, we are doing all of those things with the support of our core muscles.  It’s like we’ve done our core isolation exercises to learn the vocabulary and then we do our woodchoppers to have a conversation.  We apply what we have learned to more complex movements.

 

I do include core isolation exercises in the workouts I plan for my clients, but I am not doing my job if those clients are not using core musculature during the whole workout! 

Monday Workout: Two More!

A few more new exercises, again!  I am liking experiments.  The first one is a variation on our friend the step-up.  Instead of doing our usual up-up-down-down, we are going to do one leg at a time while holding some dumbbells.  Here’s how it works:  grab some dumbbells and hold them down at your sides (they just hang there, making life more challenging).  Put one foot on top of the step and raise the other foot up to meet it without actually stepping on the step with the second foot.  Lower the second foot back to the floor.  Repeat to finish the set on one side and then switch feet (in this case, 15 on one side and 15 on the other).  It will add some balance and weight challenge to the exercise!  Our second new exercise is the split squat pulldown.  We begin standing with one foot about a step in front of the other, with a dumbbell in the opposite hand held with a bent elbow so that the weight is at the shoulder.  Then we bend both knees as in a lunge while raising the dumbbell up over our heads.  Return to starting position and repeat until you’ve completed the required reps on one side; then do the other side.  Three rounds!

 

1 leg step up or step up	30
split squat pulldown	20
lateral raise	10
suitcase swings	30
flies	20
renegade rows	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
femur arcs	10

 

Hard Enough?

How do we know if we are working hard enough?  Here are three ways to tell:

 

1.     The Talk Test.  This is the easiest one to use.  We want to be working hard enough that we can still talk to a friend in short bursts, but singing is out of the question.

2.     Rate of Perceived Exertion.  This is a fancy way of saying we need to check in with ourselves.  We want to aim for 70 to 85% of our maximum effort, or a 7 to 8.5 on a 10 point scale where 0 is lying on the couch and 10 is about to die.

3.     Heart Rate.  If we have a fitness tracker, it will let us know our heart rate.  Otherwise, we can count it ourselves at wrist or neck.  Then we need to do some math.  The basic equation to find our maximum heart rate is 220 minus our age.  Our working zone is 70 to 85% of that number.  So, if you are 53, like me, the math looks like this:

220-53=167

70% of 167 is 117, the low end of where I want my heart rate to be

85% of 167 142, the high end of where I want my heart rate to be

 

Please note:  everyone is different.  People who are just getting off the couch may not tolerate working out at 70% of their maximum heart rate at first.  The same goes for older people, people coming back from injury, and people whose doctors have advised them to go easy.  People who are super conditioned may want to do intervals that get their heart rate above 85%-- just be careful!  As always, we have to use good judgment.

Checking In: Part 2

Yesterday we talked about taking a bunch of measurements.  Now that we have all this information, how are we going to use it?  As always, this depends on our goals, but here are a few possible scenarios:

 

We like the direction things are going.  Our weight has gone down or our circumference measurements have gone down, or both!  Woot!  That’s great news!  If we have reached our goals, we can just carry on as we have been.  If we still have a ways to go to reach our goals, we want to make sure that we keep challenging our bodies by adding weight or speed or intervals or all of the above to keep things interesting.

 

We don’t like the direction things are going.  Bummer.  We need to dig a little deeper into the data to see what the problem is, but most of the time I find that we are eating more than we think we are.  Sometimes we’ve been skipping a few too many workouts or we have been doing the exact same workout for too long and our bodies have stopped adapting.

 

We are confused.  Our weight is not budging, but our measurements have gone down.  What’s up with that?  Congratulations!  We’ve reduced our body fat percentage!  Because muscle is more dense than fat, we can build muscle, lose fat, and stay the same weight, but with a better body composition.  Our metabolisms rev up because those new muscles burn more calories than the fat they replaced, so if we maintain our healthy eating, we may begin to lose pounds, too.

 

We are bored.  Good news!  It’s time to switch things up to keep our bodies adapting.  If we’ve been doing lots of reps with low weights, now is a good time to do fewer reps with heavier weights (or vice versa).  If we’ve been stuck in the gym on the treadmill for months, now might be a good time to take it outside and maybe even add some hills to the workout.  Throwing in one longer workout a week can increase our post-exercise calorie use.

 

Still not sure what to do?  Hey, that’s what I am for!  Ask me!

Checking In: Part 1

Here we are in March!  That was fast!  So:  how about we take a moment to check in with our bodies and see how the year is going?  Today I’ll discuss what we might want to evaluate at this point and tomorrow I’ll talk about what we might want to do to tweak our fitness plans (or, you know, make a fitness plan in the first place).

 

First let’s talk about the quantitative measures we can use.  Two useful sorts of measurements are weight and circumferences.  For the first one, we just step on the scale and see how we’re doing.  As with all of the measurements I’m going to discuss, we want to do our best to take them under the same circumstances as much as possible; that is, in the same or similar clothes, at a similar time of day, using the same devices, and so on (hydration level can be important!).  Personally, I forget stuff when I don’t do it first thing in the morning, so that’s my preferred time, but other people have different sorts of rhythms.

 

Circumference measures require either a sewing-type tape measure or a long enough piece of string and a regular tape measure.  The most common and useful measurements to track are the chest (at the nipple line), the waist (at the belly button), the hips (at the widest point), the upper arm (halfway between the shoulder and elbow), the thigh (halfway between hip and knee OR at widest point—remember which one!), and the calf (at the widest point).  The reason for all those parentheses is that we need to make sure that we are measuring the same spot each time.  The narrowest part of our waist might not be at the belly button, but the belly button is a useful landmark for where to measure so we can track the changes.

 

People with fancy fitness trackers/Apple Watches/wristy overlords may want to track some other pieces of data.  Depending on your gizmo, you can track all kinds of things, but one metric I would like to point out is HRV (heart rate variability).  Research suggests that this measurement is one of the best indicators of cardio fitness.  NOTE:  it is a highly individual measurement and we should NOT compare ours to anyone else’s because that’s just not useful data.  In general, we want our HRV to trend higher.  (Folks who want to get REALLY fancy can track the measurement for a couple of weeks, figure out an average HRV, and then plan workouts for each day based on whether a particular day’s measurement is above or below average—a harder workout on a higher HRV day and a more recovery-based workout on a lower one; this has been shown to produce better results than plain old planning alone.)

 

Those of us who want even more gizmos can acquire a blood pressure cuff and track that, but it is not necessary unless high blood pressure is a problem.  Those of us who are curious about our body fat percentage can get a bioelectrical impedance monitor.  The consumer versions are not as accurate as the medical ones or as the water displacement tests, but they do allow us to track changes if we use the same device under the same circumstances every time.  The monitor I have also computes BMI, but anybody with a calculator (or a pencil and paper) can do the same (I am not putting the formula here because I think BMI is a bad measurement and less useful than many other indicators of health and fitness—anyone who wants the info can Google it).

 

One other kind of tracking we might consider is food tracking.  There are tons of apps out there to make it easy.  If we have been tracking, now we might want to do a little evaluating of how we are doing.  If we haven’t been tracking, we can start now.

 

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what to do with all this data.

Monday Workout: More New Stuff!

We have some more new compound exercises this week!  The squat raise begins with feet hip-distance apart, arms out to the sides at shoulder level with light weights in them; as we bend our knees, our arms move to the front of our body out over our knees; then we return to the start position.  The plié bend-extend begins with our arms out to the side at shoulder level holding light weights and our legs wide and turned out; as we bend our knees and lift our heels, we also bend our elbows to bring the weights in toward our shoulders; then we return to start.  The single leg deadlift row works like this:  we stand on one foot with our torso and other leg parallel to the floor (drinking bird position) while holding light weights in our arms; then we row the weights up to our armpits and lower them back down; do half the set on one leg and the other half on the other.  Plank quadruped works like regular quadruped except that it starts from plank position; we lift our right arm and left leg off the floor and then reverse it.

 

Everything else should be familiar!  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
squat raise	20
reverse fly	10
overhead high knees	30
plié bend-extend	20
Arnold press	10
step ups	30
1 leg dead lift row	20
quadruped or plank quadruped	10