I Sit There With a Clipboard and Look at People

Every once in a while, I see that meme come around that asks people to describe what they do badly.  There are lots of ways to do that for my job, but one I am fond of is that I make people do what they don’t want to do for their own good.  The reason it is a bad description of my job is that I actually don’t make anyone do anything.

 

When things are going right with my work, I design a workout for my clients and they do it, but it’s not that simple.  As they move through the exercises, we collaborate.  If I see a form compensation, we discuss what’s happening.  They may say that a weight feels too heavy or too light, or I might notice that myself.  For any number of reasons, an exercise I have selected is not the right one for the current circumstances—it might be a good day to avoid jumping or the day after lugging boxes or the dog might have got underfoot causing a twisted ankle.  We adjust.

 

Even with everything going right and all the appropriate adjustments, some parts of workouts are not very fun (looking at you, lunges, burpees, and hamstring curls).  Then it is my job to provide the motivation to get through those parts.  For some clients, this is a focus on what the exercise is for.  Sometimes clients just need to know that they don’t have to pretend to like the exercise.  Ultimately, I can’t make anyone do an exercise.  We are adults and consent is an important aspect of life generally.  I suggest, based on my education and experience, but in the end, clients have to choose to do the work.

 

Let’s play.

Growth

When we learn something new, ideally we progress through several stages.  Before we begin, we are unconsciously incompetent.  We don’t even know what we don’t know.  It doesn’t last very long, because we absorb a bunch of information and suddenly we have reached the next stage.

 

It’s called conscious incompetence.  In other words, we know we don’t know what we are doing.  I am fond of conscious incompetence because a lot of growth happens in this phase.  We discover that we have way too many body parts to control at once.  We have to build new mental maps of our bodies and space.  Some people find this very frustrating.  Those people often quit, deciding that they don’t have a talent for whatever it is they are trying out.  It can be hard to look foolish or to accept that we are, for the moment, bad at this new thing.  However, learning to accept this temporary situation allows us to grow through it.

 

If we keep working, we eventually arrive at the next stage, which is conscious competence.  We know what to do and we manage to do it as long as we concentrate.  We develop a lot of mantras for our performance in this stage (“Abs in, back straight, eyes forward.”).  This stage can last a long time because as we progress, we find more things to refine in our form.

 

Our eventual goal is unconscious competence.  This does not mean that we can do whatever we are doing in our sleep, but rather that correct form is embedded in our minds and bodies in such a way that we don’t have to think about every separate bit of our form.

 

The key to moving through the various stages lies in our mindset.  If we believe that we are learning skills and that mistakes are a normal part of learning, we set ourselves up for positive learning experiences, even on days when things are not going particularly well.  This is the growth mindset.  Conversely, if we take every mistake as a sign that we have no gift for what we are doing, we are adopting a fixed mindset and limiting ourselves to what we can already do rather than allowing ourselves to stretch and grow into new abilities.

 

Let the mistakes go and keep playing at the new skills.

Monday Workout: Balance

This week we’re putting our focus back on some balance moves.  If, for some reason, single leg deadlifts and squats are not appropriate for you, you can always do the two-leg version.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
suitcase swings	30
1 leg deadlift	20
1 leg squat	10
squat raise	30
kickbacks	20
pretty princesses	10

 

Four ways to rest

I might have overdone myself last weekend.  It happens.  Here are some ways to rest:

 

1.     Sleep.  This is the big one and the obvious one and it is always all right to get some if we need it.

2.     Nap.  If we don’t have time to catch up for real on our sleep, we can grab a little bit.

3.     Stroll.  This is not the time to tackle that hike with big hills.  This is just a gentle, short little walk that helps our muscles move enough that they don’t freeze in place.

4.     Stretch.  Again, not the time for three hours of hot yoga.  Just a little bit of movement, a chance to let the muscles relax and lengthen.

 

Go play, but gently.

Success in failure

There’s a fitness phrase that I don’t like much, but I haven’t come up with a better one:  work to failure.  It is when we do an exercise until we can’t possibly do another rep with proper form.  (Some people keep going anyway, with improper form, but that’s just a quick way to get injured.)

 

It’s an approach that we use when we want to determine our single rep max (the most weight we can lift only one time) or what we end up doing when we guess wrong about what weight to use for three sets of an exercise.  We get helpful information from it about our current capabilities.  What I don’t like is the name.

 

When we work out, we are automatically doing something that is a success.  We are taking care of our bodies and training our muscles to be strong and our bones to be dense and our brains to work better.  But I think we’re all at least a little susceptible to the word failure.

 

The reframing comes in when we can’t do that last rep.  We can’t do that last rep right now.  Even unstoppable forces like we are encounter times when the immovable object wins, but then we rest and grow and the immovable object has to shift after all.

 

Up from here.

Two Is Biggest

The hardest workout is the second one.  We can gear ourselves up for the first one and we have that shiny new energy going for us and maybe even a sense of virtue.  We don’t necessarily expect to be good at what we’re doing, so we just go along with whatever happens.

 

Then the time for the second workout rolls around.  Our former blissful ignorance has been obliterated by soreness.  We look at the weights and resent them for their heaviness, their deceptively small size, their treachery.  We have become more familiar with the steps we’re supposed to take, but this does not somehow translate into making us more willing to take them.

 

Good news!  Workouts after the second one are better.  We learn more.  We understand how to keep the soreness afterward to a bearable level.  We begin to associate the work we do with the outcomes we want:  more energy, greater strength, looser waistbands.

 

We can do this.

Monday Workout: MORE Choices

This week’s workout, again, has options to make it more and less challenging.  If you need a less intense workout this week, choose to do just rows, regular pushups, and regular jacks.  As always, choose what works for you.  I suggest three rounds, but that, too, is optional.

 

1 arm clean and press	30
lunge twist	20
Arnold press	10
squat to leg lift	30
row to kickback	20
spiderman pushup	10
jacks or plank jacks	30
bench press	20
brains	10