Friday Reading Report: Dynamic Aging

Katy Bowman’s book Dynamic Aging is not just for those of us who are senior citizens.  It’s for all of us who happen to be getting older (hey, that’s me, and you, and everybody else!).  Yes, the target market is what she calls “goldeners,” but the very goldeners featured in the book all say that they could have benefitted from the movement practices earlier.

 

This is not a book about really tough workouts.  It is a book about the small adjustments that make a big difference to our alignment, our movement patterns, and our quality of life.  It affirmed me in my commitment to working on balance, beginning with the feet, with every single client and I learned some fresh approaches to some common issues.

 

The prose is clear, the type is large and well-spaced, and the illustrations add useful information.  Highly recommended.

Don't Look Now!

I know that my industry is super focused on looks.  I mean, hey, it exists in our culture and our culture is, too.  However, research (yes really!) has shown that looks-focused cues and encouragement are less effective at keeping us doing our workouts.  Here are five non-looks-centered things we can say to ourselves for motivation:

 

1.     I am getting stronger.  If we are putting in the time to do our lifting, of course we are, but it is nice to notice it.

2.     Hey!  That thing that used to be hard isn’t any more!  We have learned and adapted and changed.

3.     I like how I feel when I can do this.  Success feels great!

4.     Even if this is hard, I know I am benefitting from it.  On days when the weights are not submitting to our will, we can know that we are at the very least building character.

5.     This is helping me be able to do that thing I want to do.  Sometimes we are working out in order to do something else, like chase our kids or finish a marathon or take a hiking trip through the Rockies.  Keeping that thing in mind while we do our workout helps.

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!