The Amazing Stickie and Bridge

The Amazing Stickie loves Pilates.  Today she is working on bridging, which is an excellent exercise for strengthening glutes and hamstrings, working on spinal mobility, and synchronizing breathing with movement.

She begins lying on her back with her arms at her sides and her knees bent so that her feet are flat on the floor.  She ensures that her feet are hip-distance apart.  Stickie inhales deeply.  As she begins to exhale, she tilts her pelvis toward her belly button.  She continues this curling motion until her behind lifts up into the air and she is a straight line from her shoulders to her knees.  Some of us find that our hamstrings don’t enjoy this process.  Stickie used to have this problem, too, until she learned to imagine pulling her knees out away from her pelvis.

 

Stickie inhales at the top of the motion.  Then, as she exhales, she pulls her hips away from her shoulders and rolls herself down, one vertebra at a time, back to the starting position.

 

Safety note:  Because Stickie doesn’t actually have bones, she is not ever going to get osteopenia or osteoporosis.  Anyone who does have either of those conditions should not roll the spine up or down.  Instead of tilting the pelvis and rolling up, those folks should keep the spine a straight line, lifting the hips straight up toward the ceiling and lowering the same way.

 

Stickie likes to do four or five bridges during her Pilates workout.

Back to Basics

I don’t know about anybody else, but sometimes my life feels kind of overwhelming.  I have so many tasks and responsibilities.  I get so busy and caught up in completing errands and crossing things off.  And suddenly I am not working out.

When that happens, it takes me a little while to notice and then a little while to gather my forces to take action.  And then what I need is to get back to basics.

 

Here are the basics:  do cardio for at least 30 minutes a day and do one weight workout sometime during the week.  I get bonus points for remembering to stretch.  When I have managed that for a couple of weeks, I’m ready to think about making my workouts more ideal for my body.  What that means varies by how I’m feeling, but it might include more weight workouts, different or harder cardio, more Pilates, more yoga.

 

I am a trained professional and sometimes I need to remind myself about the simplest level of working out.  That might mean that everyone else does, too.

 

So:  get in that cardio and lift weights at least once this week.

Go Do Stuff

I love making lists.  I make lots of lists.  I have lists with sub-lists, because what is not to like about that?  My lists help me get things done.

Except when they don’t.

 

Sometimes, making a list makes me feel like I have done things, when really I’ve only made a list of things to do.  It is great to make a list of things to do, but it is even better to go out and do the things on the list.

 

And, on days when I’ve got far into my own head, it is often a good idea to ignore the list entirely and go work out.  I know what a workout is.  We all do.  We don’t always need to have a list and a clipboard and a complicated system.

 

Go do stuff.

Monday Workout: Simple

Sometimes simple is good.  Nothing fancy this time, but still plenty of work!  Three rounds.

 

 

step ups	30
flies	20
lateral raise	10
jacks	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
pretty princesses	10

The Amazing Stickie and Pelvic Clock

Today the Amazing Stickie is working on her Pilates exercises.  One of her favorites is one of the simplest because it increases her proprioception, helps her maintain a neutral spine in her daily life, and releases any tension she has from prolonged sitting.  She’s demonstrating the pelvic clock.

She begins by lying down on her back, arms at her sides, knees bent so that her feet are flat on the floor.  It is hard to see in the picture, but her spine is maintaining its natural curve in the starting position.  That means that there is a little bit of space between her lower back and the floor, enough for a ladybug to crawl through like a tunnel, but not enough for a badger.  (No, I don’t know why ladybugs or badgers would want to crawl under Stickie’s back.)

 

Stickie is going to do three variations of this exercise, but there are certainly more out there and she encourages everyone to experiment.

 

First, she is going to rock her pelvis up and down her body.  As Stickie exhales, she uses her abdominals to tilt her pelvis back toward her belly button.  (This presses her lower back into the floor and would squish our ladybug friend.)  Then she inhales and tilts her pelvis forward toward her pubic bone.  Working with the breath on this exercise is very useful.  She keeps the movement small to minimize the engagement of her powerful thigh muscles.

 

After several reps, Stickie shifts her attention to moving her pelvis from side to side.  When she does this, she tries to maintain the distance between her ribcage and her pelvis.  She knows that many of us, when we shift our weight from one side of our pelvis to the other, tend to hike our hip up toward our ribcage.  This might look slightly sexier, but does not help.  We want to be using our obliques to practice keeping our pelvis level even as we press one hip bone and then the other into the ground.

 

Then Stickie combines both movements.  She makes pelvic circles by pressing first her belly button, then one hip, then her pubic bone, then the other hip toward the floor.  Some people do this by envisioning a clock lying on their pelvises and pressing down the various numbers (thus the name of the exercise).  Alternatively, Stickie can imagine that she has a shallow bowl of water on her belly and she is swirling the water around.  Of course, she makes circles in both directions.

 

After she is done, her lower back often feels much nicer.

Why, yes, I AM the funglepress champion of the world

Yesterday I talked a little about montages.  They’re awesome, right?  But in real life, how do we see our progress?

In small steps.  Most of them go forward, but not all of them.

 

With our cardio workouts, we don’t want to increase our time by more than about 10 percent per week.  If that’s too mathy, we can just add a minute a week until we get to our target time.  When we want to increase our intensity, our best choice is to add in a minute of high intensity here and there, either by going faster or adding incline or resistance. 

 

With weights, we want to choose a weight that barely allows us to complete a set of reps.  When completing the set isn’t hard anymore, we increase the weight and see how many reps we can do with good form, even if that is fewer than we were doing before.  For example, let’s say we start doing funglepresses (yes, I made that up so no one has any judgy opinions about the exercise) with 5 pound weights.  After a couple workouts, it's easy to complete ten reps.  We trade our 5s in for 8s, but now we can only do six good-looking reps.  Over the next weeks, we work up to ten reps with the 8s.  When we switch to 10s, we have to drop back to four reps.  And so on until we are eventually, 25 years later, doing our funglepresses with 3 tons.

 

In either scenario, cardio or weights, we will have days when we need to back off.  Maybe the baby kept us up all night and all we can manage is five minutes of random stumbling on the treadmill.  Or we foolishly offered to help our friend move and all her furniture is solid oak, so we’re lucky to complete a single funglepress with 3 pound weights.  This is all part of the process.  Stuff happens.  We listen to our bodies and we do the right amount of work for this day.

 

Go play.

Not just the eye of the tiger...

We all love a good fitness montage.  Think about, say, any Rocky movie.  There’s always a series of clips of Rocky working out in various weird ways with an inspiring sound track and five minutes later he’s ready to have that big match.  (Also applies to the Creed movies I’ve seen, but I haven’t seen the last one.  I’m going to guess it still works.)

Sadly, here in real life, we don’t get fit by montage.  (Neither do we get to travel by map, as they do in The Muppets, but I digress.)  We get fit by showing up over and over again and getting sweaty.  The good news is that we can have any kind of inspiring soundtrack we want!

 

Go put on some Survivor and lift, kids.