Go have a healthy snack

An awful lot of us walk around feeling tense all the time.  Not in the psychic sense (although that is true, too, but beyond the scope of my practice to address), but in the physical, my-muscles-don’t-move kind of way.  In doing my homework on flexibility and stretching, I learned that there are some not-so-obvious potential causes of that tension.

Of course, we have the usual suspects:  mental and physical stress and physical deconditioning.  Most of us need to address those as actual or potential problems all the time.

 

But sleep deficiency can cause excessive muscle tension.  Maybe we need to rest more!

 

Another pair of interesting factors:  dehydration and poor nutrition.  Drinking enough water and eating healthy snacks can improve how tense our muscles feel!  How cool is that?

 

We all know that feeling of tension we have when we’ve worked out too hard and everything in our bodies declares that we are never moving again, ever.  However, when we don’t move, our bodies also don’t like it and our muscles get tense.  We have to find the sweet spot.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Change? Change!

I love our usual workout template, but sometimes we need to do things differently.  This is a short circuit, so we’re going to do four rounds.  And sorry/not sorry about the burpees.

 

1 min cardio
suitcase swings	20
ball bench press	20
lunge to curl	20
kickbacks	10
burpees	10
pretty princesses	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Mermaid

The Amazing Stickie knows that life does not always move straight ahead.  She prepares for this by doing exercises that work sideways and with twists, like the Pilates Mermaid.

Stickie has no knee problems, so the starting position is not a challenge for her.  Those of us who do have knee problems can modify by sitting crisscross applesauce or with our legs extended out in front of us.  Stickie has one leg bent in front of her so that her shin is parallel to her hips.  The other leg is bent so that her knee is next to her first foot and her other foot is tucked back by her hips.  Stickie, having an ideal body, has no trouble keeping both sit bones on the floor in this position while keeping her spine nice and straight.  Those of us who do struggle can prop up the side that does touch the ground to keep things even.

 

From this starting position, Stickie inhales and raises her arms to shoulder level, keeping her shoulders away from her ears.  As she exhales, she bends to the side away from her feet, one arm coming overhead and the other arm reaching toward the floor.  She does not twist her spine forward or back.  She moves as if she is pressed between two panes of glass.  As she inhales, she returns to the starting position.

 

After doing several reps, Stickie performs the counter stretch, in which she side bends toward her feet.  Then she repeats the whole thing with her legs set up the other way.

Balance

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about how we are whole bodies, I’d like to point out that one of the implications of this is that we need whole body strength and whole body mobility for good function.

Because we move as whole bodies and not as disembodied legs or backs or arms or heads, all of our parts need to coordinate with each other.  If one of our knees doesn’t bend particularly well, the motion has to come from somewhere else (i.e., the ankle or hip, as the joints on either side of the knee).  When one of our muscle groups is significantly weaker than another, the rest of the muscles need to take up the slack for us and we end up trying to do everything with our neck muscles (the codepence champs of the Muscle Olympics!).  In the short term, this is all fine.  We want our body parts to cooperate with each other.

 

In the long term, though, we set ourselves up for imbalances, inefficiencies, and injuries when we let some parts slack off and other parts do more than their share.  This is where corrective exercise, flexibility training, and Pilates come in.  They help us restore the balance so we can move with grace and efficiency our whole lives (in our whole bodies!).

Thank You, Captain Obious!

I have put on my Captain Obvious hat this morning:  we move with our whole bodies.

Maybe it’s my Captain Should-Be-Obvious hat.  We tend to think about our bodies in segments, limbs, sometimes even systems.  We do curls and think:  I am exercising the muscles in my arm.  In truth, we are using our whole bodies, integrating all those different kinds of tissues to lift that weight.

 

What that means, practically, is that stuff that happens in one area of the body affects everything else.  Imagine, for example, that I have a blister on my left heel.  The problem is just right there.  Except now I’m walking differently because my heel hurts.  This changes the way my knees and hips work and the way my spine aligns itself, how my shoulders orient themselves and how my arms swing, even the angle of my head on my neck.  That one blister can give me a headache or aggravate lower back pain.

 

Of course, there are times when it is useful to use our gift for analysis to break down our body into parts, but sometimes we need to remember the whole.  We’re a lot more useful as entire human beings than as just a collection of arms and legs.

Monday Workout: Dip! (Sadly, not the kind that goes with chips)

Both dips and kickbacks work our triceps.  If you choose to do dips, make absolutely sure that the bench/chair/table you choose is heavy enough not to shift when you do the work.  We want our discomfort to come from doing the work, not from getting injured!  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
1 leg deadlift	10
mountain climbers	30
rows	20
round lunges	10
leg kicks	30
dips or kickbacks	20
Pretty princesses	10

The Amazing Stickie and Scarecrow

The Amazing Stickie loves to work on spinal extensions while keeping her shoulders healthy and mobile, so today she is doing Scarecrow.  This exercise has a lot of parts, but Stickie has found it worthwhile to master them.

She begins lying on her belly on the floor with her arms in a cactus position (upper arms out at shoulder level, forearms extended alongside the head).  Stickie’s nose is hovering just off the floor.

 

As Stickie inhales, she extends her spine (spinal extension = backbend) keeping her arms in line with her head.  The curve of her spine comes not from her lower back and not from her neck, but from the segment of spine between the two (thoracic spine).  She keeps her body in this curved position and straightens her arms out so that they reach over her head, still in line with her ears as she exhales.  She inhales and brings her arms back to the cactus position, but maintains the spinal extension.  Finally, she exhales and lowers her torso back to the mat.  Phew.  That was a lot.

 

While it is helpful to breathe in the way Stickie does, it is all right if the breathing doesn’t match up with the movements as described.  It might work better for some of us to learn the movements and then add the breathing once we know what we’re doing.

 

Stickie usually finds that three to five repetitions of this exercise are enough.