Lessons from Uncle Joe

One of the things I do in my personal Pilates practice is to cycle through the whole repertoire of exercises from my initial teacher training.  It helps keep the exercises present in my mind and it ensures that I don’t just do my favorite things over and over.  I’ve just finished my latest cycle through.  Here’s what I learned this time.

 

It doesn’t work to skip steps.  The things that are hard for my body in the easier exercises don’t magically transform when I get to the harder ones.  That segment of my spine that doesn’t like articulating at the beginning still doesn’t like articulating at the end, even if it does appreciate the practice.

 

Simple doesn’t mean easy or stupid.  When I return to the earliest exercises after doing the last ones, I realize that there is a lot packed in to even the most basic Pilates moves.

 

Everything works better when I breathe.  I mean, yeah.  Breathe or die, baby.  But taking the time to move with the breath, to let the rhythm of motion work with the rhythm of breath, makes both breath and motion go better.

 

Want to try Pilates?  Poke me!

Make It Count

I spend a lot of time working with numbers.  It comes with the job.  I count reps.  I choose weights.  I think about heart rate and HRV.  I track minutes and calories.  All that data is nice and crisp and manageable, but it is not the only kind of data we have available to us.  It might not even be the most important kind.

 

Of course I get excited when clients reach new milestones.  It feels great to set a new personal best.  We all like to point to that time we ran a gazillion miles in twelve seconds (I am being purposely ridiculous so no one attaches too much import to the actual distance and time).  We feel like we have an accomplishment that counts.

 

Counts for what, though?  Some of us may, at the end of our lives, want to remember that one time we lifted the equivalent of six elephants and a pony, but I doubt it.  In the large view, we probably care more about the times we played tag with the kids or grandkids or the awe-inspiring walking tour we took with our significant other.  We do all that number tracking for a reason, and the reason is not to do more number tracking, but to live a full and joyful life.

 

Please do spend good time in the gym, but please also spend good time out of it using all the strength and endurance and flexibility and balance learned.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Let's Do It!

Why yes, yes I do love compound exercises.  Of course I do!  Lots of calorie burn in a little bit of time!  Lots of built in core work!  Let’s do it!  Three rounds.

 

clean and press	30
squats	20
pushups	10
suitcase swings	30
(lunge to) curl	20
renegade rows	10
jacks	30
flies	20
brains	10

 

Seven for the Playground

Per request, this week’s list is exercises that we can do at the playground while our kids/grandkids are doing their thing.  The short version is that any body weight exercise works fine, depending on our willingness to look like we are exercising while we’re hanging out by the swings.  However, here’s the list.  Do ten of each.

 

1.     Squats.  I love squats and they can be done nearly everywhere. 

2.     Single leg squats:  All the fun of squats, plus balance!

3.     Bench dips:  the great thing about playgrounds is that they all have benches.  To do dips, we sit on the bench, put our hands on the edge of the bench by our hips, stretch our legs out long, heels on the ground.  Then we scooch our butts off the edge of the bench, bending our arms to lower our butts toward the ground and then straightening the arms to come back up.  This can be challenging, so start with a small range of motion and build up.

4.     Pushups:  these can be done on the ground, with hands on the aforementioned bench, or with hands on something taller, like a picnic table, depending on how much difficulty we want.

5.     Calf raises.  For these, we can hold on to something stable or practice our balance.  We just rise up on our toes and lower.  For extra challenge, we can do one leg at a time.  For extra extra challenge, plus a calf stretch, we can do the exercise with the balls of our feet on a curb so that when we lower, our heels drop lower than the rest of our feet.

6.     Pullups or modified pullups.  If there is a bar tall enough for hanging, we can do pullups.  If that is too challenging and there is a lower bar, we can get under the bar with our legs on the ground in a kind of upside down pushup position and then pull our bodies up toward the bar.

7.     Running around.  Chasing the kids is great exercise in and of itself.  Tag gives us the opportunity to practice changing direction while simultaneously becoming a Fun Grownup.  Keep in mind that intervals of about a minute are great for our cardio fitness and also let us rest in between.

Weight, what?

It took a while for me to learn to like lifting weights.  I think this might be true for a lot of people, so it might be worth looking into why.

 

For one thing, I had a lot of cultural bias to unpack.  Girls aren’t supposed to be sweaty and strong!  (Spoiler alert:  yes, yes they are, too!)  The cultural bias meant that I learned about weightlifting in a practical way later than people my age who identified as male.

 

This led to the second reason it was hard to learn to like weightlifting:  I was really bad at it.  I wasn’t bad at it because I lacked talent.  I lacked experience and practice.  I, like nearly everyone, like to do things I am good at more than things that I’m not good at.  Now that I have been lifting for a long time, it’s a lot more fun.

 

The experience/practice thing also played out as anxiety when I was first starting to lift weight.  The machines are big and scary and complicated.  There are people in the gym lifting monstrously large things.  What if I do it wrong?  What if people laugh at me?  Weightlifting, I am happy to say, is not rocket science.  A little common sense can keep any mistakes we make from being damaging.  And really, nobody in the gym is looking at us—they’re busy.

 

There are lots of ways to lift weights.  It took me some time to find the ways I preferred (for me, if I want to go light-ish, I like interval workouts, or I like to go heavy on two or three exercises and get out of there!).  I needed to figure out what to wear, how to deal with my hair, and what music was motivational.  Not every experiment is fun, but I learned.

 

The last piece, for me, was learning how weightlifting made me feel.  I like how my body works when I lift weight.  I like being able to schlepp my own stuff and open my own jars.  I’m never going to be a fast biker, but lifting has helped me be faster than I was.  (I’m glad that lifting is good for my bones and changes my body fat percentage and increases my metabolism, but none of those things makes it more fun for me—they’re just bonus points.)

 

So:  what makes weightlifting fun for YOU?

Woowoo is the technical term...

I lived in Berkeley for twenty years, so I have a high tolerance for woowoo ideas and maybe even have a few of my own.  The ones I keep are the ones that can live happily next to my belief in science, which is tempered by my understanding that not everything that can be known can be quantified.  Meditation practice hardly even qualifies as woowoo anymore, given all the research into the good things it does for us. 

 

My inner contrarian would like to point out that one thing about meditation, taken too far, can be detrimental to our fitness.  Please note the disclaimers in that sentence; I am NOT saying that meditation is bad for us.  So here’s the thing I want to highlight:  being in the present moment.

 

Staying in the present moment is a great practice and it reminds us about what we can control and what we can’t.  It helps quiet our monkey minds and encourages us to let go of difficult emotions.  However, if we focus too much on the present moment, we lose sight of our marshmallow goals.

 

(What are marshmallow goals?  I am glad you asked!  Some researchers ran an experiment with kids.  The kids could have one marshmallow right away, or they could wait for a period of time and get two.  The kids who could delay gratification by keeping their eyes on that second marshmallow had a bunch of better outcomes later in life.  An update to this study done more recently suggests that in some cases this is not true.  Kids who live in environments where the adults are not to be trusted, for example, have learned to take their marshmallow right away or else they might get no marshmallows at all.  Anyway:  now that we are technically adults, marshmallow goals are things we do to get a benefit later.)

 

Being present in this moment might allow us to skip our workout because, right now, we don’t feel like doing it.  We need a little bit of future thinking to do what is good for us.  We can go back to the present moment when we’re done.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Burpees are back

I know everybody hates doing burpees, but they don’t get any easier if we never do them.  So yeah, they’re in this week’s workout.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
flies	20
burpees	10
(jump) squats	30
rows	20
kickbacks	10
overhead curtsy	30
bench press	20
Russian twist	10