The Amazing Stickie and Swan 2

This week, the Amazing Stickie is building on what she did last week.  Swan 2 in the Pilates repertoire is an extension (pun intended!) of Swan 1.  (You can find the directions for Swan 1 in last week’s post!).

Stickie gets into the starting position by lying on her belly with her hands under her shoulders.  She extends her elbows and brings her gaze forward and up as if she is watching a little bug crawl away from her, ending up with arms straight and her back curved evenly between her cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spine (a.k.a. her neck, torso, and lower back).

 

Now the fun starts.  Stickie bends her elbows slightly and then lifts her hands, allowing her body to rock forward and her legs to leave the floor.  In other words, she keeps the curved shape of her body and tilts the whole thing forward as if she were the rocker of a rocking horse.  Then she tilts back to the starting position, stabilizing with her hands.  She does this until she stops having fun or until she has completed five reps, whichever happens first.

Stretch Out Sleep

I know I bang on a lot about getting enough sleep.  What can I say?  It’s my countercultural side coming out.

 

Not having enough sleep and not having enough good sleep puts us at a higher risk for chronic disease, impairs our cognition, and makes us more likely to get hurt.

 

I realize that we can’t all sleep as much or as well as we’d like.  We have important stuff to do.  We’re stressed out.  We are always behind.  We say we’ll sleep when we’re dead, not really grokking that we’re more likely to get dead if we don’t get enough sleep.

 

One thing that can help:  stretching.  Whether it is the relaxation that comes from stretching or just the fact that we’ve moved our bodies, stretching improves our ability to sleep well.

 

Plus it feels good. 

Ten Bucks for Words

Proprioception has long been one of my favorite five-dollar fitness words (Does everybody have a teacher in their past who would call any fancy-pants vocabulary five-dollar words?  Or is it just me?).  In small-change words, proprioception is our sense of where we are in space.  It keeps us from bashing into things, mostly, and it is what makes us know where our feet are, even if they are under the desk where we can’t see them.

Now I have learned another word that gets to be proprioception’s friend:  interoception.  This is our sense of how things are inside.  Interoceptors in our body keep us posted on whether we are cold, tired, hungry, sore, and the like.

 

So far, we just have some fun facts.  Here’s the cool part:  when we do mindful exercise, like stretching and yoga and Pilates, we not only boost our proprioception, but we also tune in more to our interoception, which in turn gives us a more generalized sense of wellbeing.

 

Short version:  work out and feel better!

Monday Workout: Fresh!

By now, our usual format should feel fresh again!  Our friends the compound exercises are keeping us moving and building up our metabolisms.  Three rounds!

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
leg kicks	30
rows	20
pushups	10
push press	30
kickbacks	20
femur arcs	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Swan 1

Today the Amazing Stickie is working on spinal extension, so she’s doing Swan 1.  Yoga practitioners will know it as Cobra, but the Pilates process is a little different.

Stickie begins lying on her belly with her hands by her shoulders.  As she inhales, she begins to curl her spine up, beginning with her head. She imagines she is watching a ladybug crawling away from her and she follows its path with her head.  Her elbows gradually straighten and Stickie feels that her breastbone is pulling forward.  This keeps her from using her neck too much by helping her thoracic spine to do its fair share.

 

She exhales to reverse the process to come back down.  Three or four reps is about right.

Spicy!

I am a big believer in variety.  It’s not just that I get bored, either.  It turns out that variety is good for us.

I write a lot about what happens when I try new things, even if I don’t like them.  I do like the sensation of being a beginner again, of having too many body parts and too much to think about in order to accomplish the task at hand, whether that’s tai chi or pickleball or whatever I decide to learn next.  That is a useful kind of variety, but it’s not the only kind.

 

We also need variety in the things we do regularly.  Cardio junkies need some weight training and gym rats need some stretching and couch surfing champions need to go outside and play from time to time.  At an even more granular level, we need to mix up the kind of cardio and the kind of weight training and the stretches we do so that it isn’t all swimming all the time or all power lifting.

 

The reason behind this is pretty simple:  bodies respond to the challenges we give them.  The more different kinds of challenge we present ourselves with, the more adaptable we become.  Adaptability is our very best insurance against injury.

 

Go play some other way today.

Flock to Class

I went to Zumba exactly once.  I could cope perfectly well with making a fool of myself by not knowing what the heck I was doing, but I kept running into other people and that was not OK.

Recently, I learned about why that happened.  Or, more accurately, I learned about how to apply the rules of flocking or schooling behavior (in birds and fish, respectively) to large groups of humans attempting to take a fitness class.  (Spoiler alert:  it does not require the exclusion of inexperienced or relatively uncoordinated participants!)

 

A flock or school is a structure in motion that is defined by three basic parameters.  They are separation, alignment, and cohesion.

 

Within the flock, each bird uses its kinesthetic senses to maintain separation from other birds.  This is not a perfect system, but it’s pretty good.  Some birds need a little more space than others.  In a fitness class, setting things up so that participants have a reasonable amount of space around them is a good start.  In a Pilates class, for example, the instructor can influence this by setting up mats in advance.

 

The second parameter, alignment, means that each individual bird in the flock is approximating toward the direction the flock as a whole is flying.  As the leaders of the flock change their direction, the rest of the flock follows along.  Again, in a group fitness situation, an instructor can create success by clearly defining the front (or redefining it, if the instructor wants to shake things up and make what was the back of the class the front, or even spiral the focus of the class around the room over time).

 

Finally, the flock uses cohesion.  All the birds are doing the same thing, more or less.  Fitness instructors can promote this behavior by ensuring that every participant can see either the instructor or another experienced student at all times.

 

None of this will work, of course, if the space allotted for the class is too small for everyone to move reasonably freely.  It might be time to take it outside or to schedule more classes to alleviate the crunch.

 

Above and beyond all this, it is a good idea to explain that this is a game with simple rules, that we are playing.  We all do our best to follow along. 

 

Go play.