Five Ways to ZZZZZs

We may have come to terms with the idea that we need to get some sleep, but how?  Here are five suggestions:

 

1.     Ditch the caffeine.  Before y’all get out your pitchforks, let me suggest that at least reducing the intake can help.  Please note that for some of us the process of weaning ourselves off of caffeine can be long and challenging and even painful, but it can definitely be worth it.

2.     About that alcohol… If the pitchforks are out, might as well use them.  Alcohol affects different people differently, but in general it tends to make it easy to go to sleep and hard to stay there.  At least observe the effects and see.

3.     Get some exercise.  Cardio during the day seems to help folks sleep at night.  Some people like evening exercise because there is a natural energy dip a few hours after a workout and that can coincide with bedtime.

4.     Keep it cool.  Most of us sleep better in a cool room.

5.     Keep it dark.  Our inner beasts are programmed to wake in the light, so we need to give them plenty of dark time.

 

What are your favorite sleep aids?

Snoozing IS the Job

Sleep is one of the most overlooked parts of fitness.  Culturally, we frown on sleep.  Sleep is for lazy people, or children, or boring people who don’t have anything better to do.  Sure it is, but the rest of us should be getting more sleep, too.

 

Sleep gives our bodies a chance to repair the wear and tear of our days.  It helps our brains reset.  It solidifies learning.

 

If that’s not enough motivation for those of us who want to maximize our workout time, let me offer this:  people with adequate sleep make more progress than people without it.  We work out better and harder and stronger on a good night of sleep and we are a lot less likely to get injured when we are not sleep-deprived.

 

Work then rest.

Raw or refined?

One of the shared challenges for people new to exercise and people who have been exercising for a long time is that when we try something different we feel it.  It can be hard to tell if that discomfort we are feeling is just our bodies adapting to a novel experience or if we are doing something wrong.

 

The short version is that our muscles are a bunch of whiners who don’t like having their routines changed, even for their own good.  When we first start swimming after a lifetime on land, different muscles have to work and our usual favorite muscles have to work differently.  So they complain.  They feel sore.  They ache.  This is normal.  This is why we have ice and ibuprofen.

 

However, sometimes the muscles have a point.  When we are just learning something, we may not understand how the form works.  We may not be giving our muscles the best chance for a peaceful existence.  If our pain persists for more than a day or two, we probably want to stop and reflect.  We may want to do some reading or talk to an expert about what’s going on to see if we can refine the movements and avoid the suffering.  Most of the time, when we manage to move with good mechanics, our soreness decreases.

 

Bottom line:  a little soreness is okay; a lot requires some work to resolve.

Monday Workout: Core

This week we’re focusing on core exercises.  The Russian twist is obviously a core exercise, but so are the YTAs, the mountain climbers, the renegade rows, and the pushups because we need our core muscles to stabilize us while we do them.  If we do our bench press and flies on a stability ball, we’re doing some good core recruitment there, too.  Not that our cores don’t work while we do our step ups and jacks—they just don’t work quite as noticeably.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
bench press	20
YTA	10
mountain climbers	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
jacks	30
flies	20
Russian twist	10

Five

We get bored with our same old workouts.  Here are five ways to modify what we’re doing to make it less boring.

 

1.     Go faster.  In fact, if we go as fast as we safely can, we add some significant challenge.  This can take the form of intervals of max effort, or just a general increase in speed, whether in cardio or weight training.

2.     Go slower.  This one is for weight training specifically.  If we deliberately raise and lower the weights at a very slow pace, we increase the time our muscles are under tension.  It can be super challenging and useful for building up our strength and endurance.

3.     Go a different direction.  We tend to do everything going forward, but life isn’t always that way.  We can try walking backward (safely!) on the treadmill, or we can trade our regular lunges for side lunges, or we can throw in some twists.

4.     Change the order.  If we always do our cardio first and then our lifting, we can switch it up.  One note:  no matter what order we are doing our workouts in, we need to ensure we get in a warm-up.

5.     Change the time.  We can try working out in the morning if we are usually after-work workout people, or vice versa.  We can try a short, intense workout instead of a longer one, or we can see what happens if we do something more endurance-based and long for different.

 

These are my ideas.  What are yours?

Sweat It

I am a person with depression.  It is under control, most of the time, but there are times when it gets worse.  When that happens, I try to remember to get some exercise.

 

Please note:  I am not a doctor or therapist or counselor or psychiatrist.  I am a personal trainer.  What I am saying here is not a substitute for professional psychological help.  I encourage any and all depressed people to seek out whatever therapies they need, including medications, which can save lives.

 

Now that I’ve got the really important disclaimers out of the way, here’s why I exercise when I feel an upsurge in my depression.

 

Cardio exercise releases endorphins in our bodies.  Endorphins are the neurochemicals that make us feel better.  So it works like this:  we exercise, we get happy brains.

 

Another thing that exercise does for us is make us breathe.  This can be the heavy breathing of cardio or weight training, or the focused breathing of yoga or Pilates.  In either case, we have to pay attention to bringing air in and out of our bodies, which helps to ground and center us.

 

One more thing:  exercise is something we can actually do.  When we feel overwhelmed and useless and hopeless, we may feel like we can’t do anything.  Going for a walk, doing five minutes of yoga, lifting one weight is a completed task.  We are now people with agency in the world.  If we manage a whole workout, we are not only people with agency, but we are also stronger.

 

Go play.

Uncle Joe Loves Us

I love Pilates for a lot of reasons, but today I’m going to talk about how it makes other things we do better.

 

One of the gifts that Pilates gives us, or, more accurately, one of the rewards we earn when we do Pilates, is core strength.  Core strength is not just doing eight million crunches in fifteen seconds.  The best core strength is the kind that does what it is intended to do while we are in motion:  stabilize our bodies.  The core musculature is not limited to the “six-pack.”  In fact, the rectus abdominis is a superficial part of the core.  Pilates gets to the deep stuff.  Also, we have core muscles in our backs as well as on our fronts.  Pilates strengthens them all.

 

Core strength leads directly into balance.  The ability to balance helps us deal with all the uneven, uncertain, wobbly terrain that we encounter in our active pursuits and in the course of our daily lives.  In sports, this skill contributes to our agility and quickness in changing direction.  As we age, balance practice becomes an important tool in preventing falls.

 

Proprioception is one of my favorite five-dollar words.  The five-cent definition is where our bodies are in space.  The Pilates repertoire, with its insistence on precision, helps us learn where we think our bodies are, where our bodies are really, and how to bring the two into agreement.  As we learn to perceive our bodies, we learn to align them, which makes our movements more efficient and helps us avoid injury no matter what we are doing.

 

Finally, Pilates helps us chill out.  Movement, in Pilates, is tied to the breath.  Tuning in to our breathing centers us in our bodies and helps us become mindful, which is something we can bring with us out of the studio and into the world.

 

Spend some time with Uncle Joe.  It’s worth it.