The Amazing Stickie and Reverse Lunge Twist

Today the Amazing Stickie wants to work a lot of body parts at once so she can get on with her busy life.  Therefore, she is doing the reverse lunge twist.

She begins standing with good posture, holding light dumbbells.  Then she steps back into a lunge (most of us prefer to step forward into a lunge, but we’re going for challenge here!) while turning her torso to the side and raising her arms to shoulder height.  She returns to the starting position and then repeats the exercise by stepping back with her other leg.

 

She likes to do sets of 30.

Lift Weights

It is my job, as a trainer, to encourage everyone to do all kinds of exercise.  But there is a very good reason that my work focuses on strength training:  it works.

Most of us work out for some combination of the following reasons:  to look good and to feel good.  Looking good, for many of us, implies losing some weight and/or shaping up the weight we have.  Feeling good may spring from looking good, or from doing something we couldn’t do before, or from taking pride in our new skills, among other things.

 

Strength training is the way to maximize looking good and feeling good.

 

When we do strength training, we increase our lean muscle mass.  That lean muscle mass burns more calories.  We increase our metabolism.  That, in turn, can lead to weight loss (no, we can’t out-exercise a terrible diet).  Even if we don’t lose weight, the weight we have will look better as we build muscle and we are likely to get smaller if not lighter.  In other words:  we can check off looking good.

 

As for the feeling good part, lifting heavy stuff releases the good brain chemicals.  When we lift weights, we get stronger both in body and in mind.  We take the sense of accomplishment we have in the gym out into our regular life.  Plus we can open our own jars and move our own couch.

 

Don’t know how to start?  Talk to me!

Rolling Rocks: A good workout

Angeles Arien wrote some words that have been helpful to me throughout my life, but especially in fitness.  She offered four rules for life:  “Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don’t be attached to the results.”  Here’s why.

Show up.  No matter how perfectly we plan our workouts, they do nothing if we don’t do them.  We need to get out of our heads sometimes and into our bodies.  We get stronger by lifting weights, faster by running, more attuned to our bodies in space by doing some Pilates.  If we don’t take action, nothing happens.

 

Pay attention.  Once we do show up, we get best results when we take some care about what we’re doing.  (A half-hearted workout is better than no workout, but the point is still valid.)  When we focus on our form, we do better work.  Our bodies function better.  We learn and improve.

 

Tell the truth.  There are lots of ways to apply this one to our fitness journey.  I’ll talk about two.  When we’re trying to motivate ourselves to do our workouts, we have to tell the truth about what we want out of it.  If making our ex-partner drool when we run into them in the grocery store is what we really want, we need to own it; picturing them suffering as we sashay by will help us finish a tough set way more than pretending we’re there for our health.  (Of course, the reverse can be true too:  if what we want is to get to the top of the stairs with enough breath to take another step, we’re not going to be motivated by skinny jeans.)  The second place that the truth is important to our workouts is in our performance.  We need to notice when our form slips, even if we really want to lift one more, or one heavier.  We need to look clearly at what our bodies are doing today, even if it’s not what we want them to be doing.

 

Don’t be attached to the results.  At first this might sound like a contradiction to those other steps.  Of course we want good results of our work.  The thing is, we want to let the results take care of themselves.  We do the process and trust that results will come.  If we keep showing up, keep paying attention, keep telling the truth, we will get results.  We just need to keep our egos out of the way.  Another way to look at this might be to consider Sisyphus.  Who’s he?  He’s the guy from Greek mythology who was so bad in his lifetime that he was condemned to roll a giant rock up a hill over and over again for eternity.  Pretty nasty punishment, right?  Except for one thing.  If Sisyphus came to enjoy the process of rolling the rock and released attachment to getting it to stay at the top of the hill, his punishment becomes something else entirely.  Love the process and there is no punishment involved.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Overhead

A lot of overhead work today!  Three rounds.

 

suitcase swings	30
bench press	20
lateral raise	10
clean and press	30
flies	20
Arnold press	10
squat to leg lift	30
kickbacks	20
pretty princesses	10

The Amazing Stickie and the Single Leg Squat Touchdown

The Amazing Stickie is challenging herself today.  The single leg squat touchdown works coordination and balance.  She begins standing on one leg holding a light dumbbell with the same arm as her standing leg as if she has just completed a curl.  She does a single leg squat.  Then she bends at the waist and extends her elbow so that the dumbbell lowers toward the floor.  She straightens up to standing (still on one leg!) and lifts the dumbbell overhead.

She likes to do a set of five on each side.

Not Separate

Some people like to keep separate things separate.  They don’t want their broccoli to touch their mashed potatoes.  They’re good at sorting laundry.  Their work is work and their play is play.  This is a perfectly useful and valid way to be in the world, but it’s not mine.

What this means for my clients is that my personal training clients get a little Pilates and my Pilates clients learn from my personal training practice.  I know what I know, and I apply the knowledge that best meets the current situation.

 

Recently I listened to a talk about the legacy of Joseph Pilates.  Since he left this plane of existence, his students and their students in turn have interpreted his work in different ways, sometimes peacefully and sometimes less so.  The people giving the talk spoke with lots of Pilates elders and with folks from multiple Pilates schools and practices.  What they found was that we have more in common than not.

 

What we all do, as teachers, is respond to the needs of the body in front of us, whether it is our own body or a client’s body.  We come in with a plan, but we stay present with the human working, adapting as needed to give that person a positive experience of movement.

 

I hope that as my clients see me change what we are doing to meet the needs of the day, they learn to adapt themselves to their own circumstances.  We live in flux.  We need to stay aware and flow along.  Even if sometimes the broccoli and potatoes touch.

Speed

Taking tai chi class has, as expected, given me new things to think about.  One of those things is tempo.

I have, basically, two speeds:  full on and total stop.  Naturally, this makes tai chi with its deliberate pace something of a challenge for me.  That’s a polite way to say it’s flipping hard.  My brain feels like it has to hurry through the moves lest I get left behind.  It doesn’t understand that no one is actually going to be leaving the park until class is over.

 

I know I am not the only one who hurries when I’m doing something hard.  My clients do it, too.  For some things, getting through quickly is good.  But maybe, just maybe, if we all slow down a little, we can learn something different.

 

Maybe slowing down will let us be more precise in our movements.  Maybe we can realize that we’re feeling an exercise more in one part than another.  Maybe, as we breathe, we can come to a new understanding of what we’re doing and it might make us have more compassion toward our bodies.

 

Maybe not.  But it’s worth a try.