The Amazing Stickie and Leg Pull

Today the Amazing Stickie wants a challenge for her shoulder flexibility, upper body strength, and core control, so she’s doing the Pilates Leg Pull.  (No, this does not mean that Uncle Joe is going to play a joke on her!)

As with many Pilates exercises, there are options for Stickie to choose.  The starting position is sitting on the floor, hands slightly behind the hips, legs extended in front of the body.  The position of the hands is where the choices come in:  Stickie can have her fingers pointing away from her body, out to the sides, or towards her body.  Different positions will feel differently for different people, but generally folks find it most challenging to have the fingers pointing toward the body and least challenging to have them pointing to the sides, but the best way to find out which way works best is to try all three!

 

Once Stickie has chosen a hand position, she lifts her pelvis toward the ceiling, pressing her feet into the floor.  Basically, she is doing an upside down plank.  The main part of the exercise starts now.  On an inhale, Stickie lengthens one leg and lifts it toward the ceiling.  She keeps her pelvis stable (i.e., she doesn’t let her butt sag down!) as she lifts.  Then she exhales as she lowers her leg back to the upside down plank position.  She alternates legs and does about ten reps on each side.

Apple?

This post requires all my usual disclaimers:  I am not a doctor, therapist, nutritionist, or dietician.  Please check with any/all of those other kinds of folks for advice from people with more education and training than I have.  That said, the general comments below are within the scope of my practice.

What we eat affects how we feel.  (Thank you, Captain Obvious!)  Even if all that changes is that we don’t feel hungry anymore after we eat, we have changed our state of being.  Since we’re going to make a change anyway, it might as well be a good change.

 

It is both easy and hard to eat healthy food in our culture.  We have an incredible abundance of food and a boggling number of choices.  (Digression:  I used to worry that my kids didn’t eat a particularly varied diet.  Then one day they were discussing whether Ethiopian food or sushi was better.  I relaxed.)  Unfortunately, a lot of the choices we have are not ones that are particular good for us.  Food deserts exist.  Food insecurity is a big problem, exacerbated by all kinds of societal pressures right now.  We are stressed and it is way easier to get ice cream at the drive-through than it is to get a real, healthy meal cooked.

 

It's worth it, though.

 

We need to try to eat a non-potato vegetable fairly often.  We need to drink water.  We need to eat food that still looks more or less like it did when it started, not like a sad and pummeled version of itself pumped up with sugar, salt, and a bunch more chemicals.

 

Try an apple.  They’re in season.

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.