Not so sexy

Most of us don’t have to remember to brush our teeth.  It’s just something that happens automatically.  This is the power of habit.  It took me a long time to admit it, because it’s really not very sexy, but I thrive on habits and routines.  I suspect I’m not the only one.

When we have the habit of fitness, it doesn’t take as much energy to get to the workout.  We just go, like we always do.  We know where our shoes are and we know, more or less, what we’re going to do.  The mental load is low.

 

This means we can use that energy toward the workout itself. 

 

This is a win all the way around.

Perfect

Let’s have a little chat about perfectionism.  Even the rebels among us are susceptible to its messages—we have to rebel perfectly to show how little society’s emphasis on perfection means to us.

Perfectionism is not our friend.  It’s a tool that the cis-hetero-white-supremecist-imperialist-capitalist-patriarchy uses to keep us working and working and working some more.  We can never work enough to make the system happy with us.  We can only work ourselves to death.

 

So.  In a fitness context, this has a couple of implications.  One is:  take the time to work out.  We are worth it, no matter what society tells us.  We can take back that much of our time to do something that makes our bodies feel good.

 

Another is:  we can work out before we have the perfect body or the perfect workout.  It is all right to show up at the gym in whatever clothes we happen to have on.  We don’t have to know all the things to do from the first day.  We are allowed to try stuff out and be bad at it.

 

And:  the fact that we’re never going to be perfect does not mean that we don’t want to work hard.  The fun in working out comes from learning and growing and getting better at stuff, which only happens if we show up and play hard.

 

Go play.  It’s gonna be perfect.

Monday Workout: New Again!

Sometimes I forget about an exercise for a while, but then I remember and it’s exciting and new all over again!  We’re doing roll out abs this week.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
rows	20
pushups	10
overhead high knees	30
deadlifts	20
curls	10
jacks	30
reverse flies	20
roll out abs	10

 

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