In the habit

I am, in many ways, an extremely lazy person.  Left to myself, I might not ever get off the couch.  So how is it that I manage to exercise every day?  I make it easier to exercise than not to exercise.

 

Spoiler alert:  there is some work involved, but it’s mostly at the beginning.

 

What I do, and what I encourage my clients to do, is to make a habit of exercising.  Habits take some work to establish, but once they are there, we can rely on them to keep us on track.  I don’t have to think about exercising; I wake up and do it as part of my morning routine, just the same way I brush my teeth and eat breakfast.

 

The work of building a habit is mostly research on what works for us.  I am one of those annoying morning people.  If I want to make sure something gets done, I schedule it for the morning.  I’m also a person who loves to check things off of lists, so I have a workout sheet that allows me to do that.  I keep the list in a specific place, so I don’t have to run around looking for it when it’s time to work out.  I am particularly lucky in that I wear workout clothes all the time, but for those of us who don’t have that luxury, prepping our gym bags ahead of time as part of our routine is helpful.

 

Another tool to use when we are in the process of building a habit is accountability.  This can be as simple as the aforementioned list.  However, some of us benefit from having an accountability buddy, whether that person is just someone to tell we’ve done our workout or someone who shows up and does it with us.  Sometimes our commitment to showing up for other people is easier to honor than showing up for our own good.

 

We can tell a habit is a real one if we skip doing it and feel weird.  How weird does it feel to forget to brush our teeth?  When skipping a workout feels like that, we know we’ve been successful.

 

We can do it.

Yes, and

I am all about enthusiasm.  If I like something, it’s not going to be a secret and I might blur the lines between enthusiasm and obsession.  I hope I am not alone in this, because if there’s no excitement in life, what is the point?

 

However, we (going out on a limb here) can’t let our enthusiasm overwhelm our good sense.  When we discover a new kind of workout that is super fun, we can overdo that one thing and neglect our other important fitness tasks.  What do I mean?  For example, we may discover that rollerblading (or swimming, or skiing, or basketball…) is the Best Thing Ever.  We wake up ready to go practice.  We tell all our friends about how great it is.  We do it every day, maybe even twice a day.  Then suddenly we discover that we are stiff and sore and tired.  Or we realize that the Best Thing Ever would work better if we were a bit stronger or more flexible.

 

I am not here to rain on anyone’s parade.  I’m just reminding us all (yeah, me, too!) that just because the Best Thing Ever is fabulous, we still need to put in our time with our stretching (yoga, Pilates) and our friends the weights.  This will help us avoid repetitive stress injuries, stay strong, and keep mobile.

 

Go play, in lots of ways!

Monday Workout: Christmas in August!

I almost forgot to have Christmas this summer, but I remembered at last!  (Sorry about that, folks who really wanted me to forget entirely and forever!)  It is time for the 12 days of Christmas workout, the one we do twice a year, once in the summer and once in December.

 

For those of us who don’t know how it works, or who have forgotten, or tried to forget, here’s how it works:  on the first “day,” we do one push press.  Ta-da!  We have reached day two.  Then we do two goblet squats and one push press.  Day three involves three overhead presses, two goblet squats, and one push press.  We continue, trying to take our rest breaks between the days, until on the last round we do everything from the plyojacks to the push press.

 

(Feel free to call me names while you do this one.)

 

1 push press

2 goblet squats

3 Overhead press

4 1 leg squats each leg

5 deadlifts

6 burpees

7 pushups

8 renegade rows

9 mountain climbers

10 jump lunges

11 kb swings

12 plyojacks

 

It makes us happy plants?

Sometimes I joke with my clients that we are playing Workout: The Drinking Game.  This is because I am always reminding everyone to drink water.  Here are four good reasons to do that:

 

1.     It makes us nicer.  Dehydrated people are crabby people.

2.     It helps us avoid headaches and nausea.  Do I need to say more about that?

3.     It helps us eat only the calories we need.  We often think we are hungry when really we are thirsty.  Drinking first ensures that we are not solving the wrong problem when we eat.

4.     It makes our bodies work better.  Pretty much all of our body processes function best with optimal hydration.

 

Go drink.

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