Today, the Amazing Stickie is demonstrating the sumo squat to high pull. She begins standing with her feet fairly wide apart and externally rotated from the hip. She holds two medium dumbbells as if she has just done a front row. From there, she bends her knees into a sumo squat and lowers the dumbbells toward the floor (not quite touching!). Then she returns to the starting position. Sets of 20 or 30 are good.
Unsurprisingly, I read and watch a fair amount of stuff about fitness. I do this so that my clients don’t have to unless they want to and because I like to learn new stuff. Sometimes the new stuff I learn is that I already know stuff.
I recently spent an hour watching a webinar about combining Pilates and weight training. I thought: hey, I’ll get some new insights! Nope. It was a lot of what I’ve been doing all this time where I use Pilates (sometimes in stealth mode) with my personal training clients to build more control or proprioception and I use my knowledge of weight training to make sure that my Pilates clients get appropriately challenged. Doing both Pilates and weight training, and sometimes both together, is better than doing either one alone because bodies need both strength and precision, both relaxation and challenge.
We grow where we work. How can I help?
I am making a nuisance of myself to my friends by asking them what they would like to know about fitness. One friend, and presumably more than one, would like to know how long it takes to get results when we start working on our fitness.
It depends.
Which is a crappy answer, but be patient with me for a moment.
Some kinds of fitness activities make us feel better basically immediately. We get a mood burst on the very first day we begin walking. Most of us will notice a pretty good improvement in our cardio within a week or two assuming we aim for five or six days per week of about half an hour of work.
Weight training can take a little longer. We get faster results if we work two or three times per week than we do if we have one workout per week. If we’re doing two weight workouts per week, we should notice that we can increase the weights in about a month. Changes in body size can also occur in that time period, but results will vary depending on what we’re eating.
So the slightly nuanced answer is that, with reasonable effort, we will begin to feel better somewhere between right away and in a month.
Go play.
This week we’re doing some exercises that challenge our coordination. Three rounds.
step ups | 30 |
renegade rows | 20 |
reverse lunge twist | 10 |
| |
squat raise | 30 |
reverse flies | 20 |
front raise | 10 |
| |
clean and press | 30 |
flies | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
When the Amazing Stickie wants to work on movement integration without going to Pilates, she chooses exercises like the split squat pulldown because lots of body parts have to move in a coordinated fashion.
She begins holding light dumbbells overhead, one foot forward and one foot back. Then she bends both knees and lowers the weights to her shoulder level by bending her elbows. She returns to the starting position.
Stickie likes to do sets of fifteen on each side.
I talk a lot about reasons to work out. Today I’m going to talk about reasons not to work out. (Yes, I believe we are all better when we work out, but why we do it matters.)
It’s a bad idea to work out because someone else thinks you should. Even me. When we work out for someone else, we resent the process. Working out is hard enough as it is. We don’t need to carry somebody else’s goals for us, too.
It’s a bad idea to work out because we think we are inadequate the way we are. We’re not. We are worthy human beings whether we do a single rep or not. People who go to the gym are not better than people who don’t. When we do go to the gym, we do better if we go because we know we are worthy of care.
It’s a bad idea to work out when we are sick or hurt. Rest is as much a part of health as working out. Working through pain is just… painful. There is no virtue badge for doing the work anyway.
We can do this.
Don’t get me wrong: I like working out. Cardio is my favorite mind-altering drug. I love the feeling of efficacy I get from lifting weights. My Pilates practice keeps my body actually capable of moving. I would be an even more stressed human being without my yoga practice.
But.
When people tell me about their hours and hours of workouts, I’m not impressed. I think: but don’t you have other stuff to get to? Don’t you have a life? (I’m not trying to harsh anyone’s happy place. If the gym is yours, you go!)
What impresses me is people who get their workouts done efficiently and effectively. They don’t screw around with half-baked systems. They work hard and they go home.
Go play.
