Five Ingredients for Success

Working out is great, but there are some things we can do that are NOT working out to make those workouts better.  Here are five:

 

1.     Drink water.  Hydration is essential to our bodies’ processes.  Enough water will help us work out better and longer and recover faster.

2.     Eat.  Those of us who decide to work out to lose weight sometimes don’t eat enough.  We want to choose nutrient dense foods to fuel our workouts.

3.     Wear the right shoes.  No one wants shin splints or a sprained ankle or plantar fasciitis.  Heck, we don’t even want blisters.  (Sometimes, like when we do yoga or Pilates, the right shoes are no shoes at all.)

4.     Use safety equipment.  Those strong legs we are developing while biking won’t do us a bit of good if we crack our skulls open.  Wear the helmet—or the knee pads, or the life jacket, or whatever.

5.     Have fun.  Most workouts do NOT have to be drudgery.  Take a friend, turn up the music, get silly, whatever it takes to make it more like play.

Warning!

It is entirely possible that workouts should come with a warning label.  Not because workouts will make us sore or tired, although they most likely will if we are doing them right.  Workouts can be addictive.  They can be a gateway drug to a whole new kind of living.

 

We start with maybe a little walk around the block.  That leads to longer walks, or maybe even some running.  We get better shoes.  Our muscles get stiff, so suddenly we start stretching.  We realize that we like our runs better when we have a good breakfast first.  One day we wake up and there we are:  eating our veggies, drinking water, pumping iron, and high on cardio.

 

The good news?  Most of us can get addicted to working out with no real ill effects—I mean, most of us feel worse from taco-and-margarita night than from the average workout.

 

Go play.

Issues...

In the book group I belong to, we are reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.  The premise is that Harold gets a letter from a former coworker, Queenie, who is dying in hospice, roughly 500 miles away in Scotland.  He writes back, but on his way to the mailbox, he decides he needs to deliver the letter in person and he just starts walking, right then.  He’s wearing boating shoes.  He doesn’t have his cell phone.  He doesn’t tell his wife.  I’m not done reading the book yet (although it is really hard not to read ahead!), but so far it is lovely.

 

(I’m not suggesting that any of us start out on a 500-mile trek with no preparation and bad shoes.)

 

In the portion I read for last week, Harold struggles.  He gets blisters and shin splints.  He gets tired and discouraged.  And, as he continues to walk, he finds himself remembering hard times in his life, difficulties with his wife and his son, failures.

 

I mention this because the phenomenon is familiar to personal trainers, Pilates folks, yoga teachers, and body workers.  Harold has “issues in his tissues.”  In other words, sometimes when we work our bodies, it releases emotions and memories and past traumas.  This can make the hard work we do with our bodies harder.

 

Knowing that this is a real phenomenon can help us cope.  Continuing to move our bodies (with kindness!) and to breathe can help, too.  Working out is no substitute for therapy or medical care, but it is a useful adjunct.

 

Keep breathing.

Monday Workout: Sneaky Core

This week we are doing some work with our obliques and our back muscles while we happen to be working other stuff.  Core work goes way beyond crunches!  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
flies	20
YTA	10
1 arm clean and press	30
bench press	20
curls	10
overhead curtsy or march	30
deadlifts	20
pretty princesses	10

Compounding the Issue

I am big on compound exercises, which are exercises that use multiple joints and muscle groups at the same time.  Here are some reasons why:

 

1.     They’re efficient.  We get more workout in less time when we do compound exercises.

2.     They amp up our metabolism.  Whether that means increased weight loss or an extra cookie is up to the person working out.

3.     They’re practical.  Anybody who has ever moved understands that very few things in the real world are shaped like barbells and dumbbells.  When we need to use our strength in our regular lives, we don’t often use just one muscle group all by itself.

4.     They’re more fun.  This one might be debatable, but I’m going with it.  When we have to coordinate the movement of multiple body parts, we have to use our brains and that’s way more interesting than just waving some dumbbells around.

Captain Obvious, At It Again

We get better at what we practice.  Thanks, Captain Obvious!  I had no idea! 

Yeah, I know.  We all know that, but sometimes we forget that it applies to fitness.

 

This means that if we always spend half an hour on the cardio machines, we will get good at doing half an hour of cardio, but we are not getting better at doing anything longer.  And, unless we are actively choosing to vary the speed and incline and resistance levels on the machines, we are not getting better at adapting to varied environments.

 

When we stick to our old favorite weight training routines, we get stronger at those specific exercises.  Depending on what those favorites are, we may be building endurance or strength or muscle size or power, but if we don’t switch things up, we’re not building the other ones.

 

The implications are twofold.  First, we need to know what we want to get out of working out and then choose exercises that help us practice for those outcomes.  Marathoners need different workouts than sprinters and power lifters are going to choose different exercises than folks just figuring out the difference between dumbbells and barbells.

 

Second, variety is good for us.  Even when we choose a workout in line with our goals, we will need to mix things up so we can practice adapting to different circumstances.  Adaptability is a basic skill that underlies all our movement in the world, fitness and regular.

 

I’m here to help anyone who needs to sort out the best kinds of workouts.

Same Muscles, Different Choices

We all have the same muscles, but we don’t all need to work them in the same way.  Fortunately, there are lots of ways to vary exercises to get each of us the right kind of work. 

For example, let’s take pushups.  I think most of us are familiar with regular pushups and the version with the knees on the ground, which are usually called modified pushups.  Those of us who have a hard time getting up and down from the ground can do wall or TRX pushups.  Those of us who want additional challenge have lots of choices:  we can raise our feet, add instability with a BOSU, add asymmetry with a medicine ball under one hand, add a renegade row between reps, and so on.  Additionally, we can choose to work the same main muscle groups in an entirely different way by doing bench presses (or any of the many variations of them) instead.

 

Even if we have a favorite version of an exercise, it can be interesting to try a subtle variation just to see how our muscles work slightly differently.  This would be the case when we keep our elbows next to our bodies when we do whatever pushup version we like and we find our triceps working more.

 

One of the things I offer my clients is tons of options, variations, modifications, and choices.

 

Go play.