The Amazing Stickie and Side Lift

The Amazing Stickie loves all varieties of planks because of their benefits for her core and general strength.  One of her favorites is the Pilates side lift.

To begin, she lies on her side, her body propped up on one elbow placed directly below her shoulder.  Her hand is out in front of her body.  Her other hand is lying along the side of her body that is toward the ceiling.  She inhales to prepare and on an exhale, she presses her elbow into the ground to straighten her body from head to toe by lifting her hips up toward the ceiling.  She balances on the side of her bottom foot and her elbow for as long as she wants and then lowers herself (with control!) back to the starting position.

 

If she wants more challenge, once she is in the side plank position, she can raise her upper arm away from her body and lift the top leg.

 

Stickie also knows that it is possible to do this exercise balancing on an extended arm rather than on an elbow.  She advises trying all the variations until we decide which one we like best.

Basics: Cardio (2 of 2)

Yesterday we talked about the very basics of cardio.  Today we’re going to add a key technique, the cardio interval.

Most of us, when we head to the gym in the dark, cold morning, plop ourselves on the spin bike or the treadmill or the stair machine and go at a steady pace until we’re done.  This is a perfectly valid way to work out and if it is working for us, we can carry on.

 

However, those of us who want to progress more quickly, or have already progressed to the point where we are bored, or just want to get out the gym quicker may want to try intervals.  Here’s how they work.  We warm up for five minutes or so.  Then we bump up the pace or incline or resistance for a minute so that we’re working at the very high end of our appropriate range.  At the end of the minute, we return to a pace/incline/resistance that allows us to recover (but still stay in our target heart rate zone) for a minute or so.  Then we repeat the tough minute and the recovery period as many times as we want, ending with a cool down. We can burn an hour’s worth of steady-state calories in half an hour this way AND we improve our cardio function more than just chugging along.

 

A few notes to keep in mind, though.  Many pieces of equipment with programs already on them have an interval program.  If the hard interval is longer than one minute, it’s not really interval training (but it might be fun and we can certainly try it).  The key to interval training is that we work as hard as we possibly can for that minute.  By the end of a minute, we have used up our ATP supplies (remember ATP from biology way back when?  It’s our quick energy cellular power.  We have about a minute’s supply before it’s depleted and we have to give it a minute or so to regroup.).  If we’re working hard enough, we really can’t go longer than a minute without a recovery.  Our bodies will inevitably slow once our ATP is depleted.

 

The recovery interval can vary.  When we first start out with intervals, we might need three or four minutes to recover between intense intervals.  As we get more fit, that time can shorten until we’re doing minute on and minute off.

 

If we are working out outside and don’t want to focus on our watches, we can do our intervals by distance.  We choose a landmark like the end of the block or a really cool tree and go as fast as possible until we get there.  Then we pick another landmark and go slower until we get to that one.  Alternatively, we can choose a route with built-in intervals in the form of hills, which work for walking and running and biking and the like.  Outside intervals may not exactly align with the one minute max and the ATP cycle as discussed above, but they still work.

 

Go play.

Basics: Cardio (1 of 2)

It’s a new year, so we’re going back to basics.  This week I’ll spend two days going over what we need to know about cardio.  Next week, we’ll talk about weights.  The week after that, we’ll discuss Pilates.  Then stretching the week after that.  Finally, in the last week of January, we’ll put it all together and talk about goals.  Why this way?  Because it’s hard to set goals when we don’t have basic information.  It’s worth waiting until the end of the month to set goals because we’ll be equipped to set better goals than we can right this very minute with the knowledge we have.  Ready?  Here we go.

I’m starting with cardio because cardio is a good foundation for everything else we do.  It’s also easy to get started with cardio because nearly all of us can go for a walk.

 

Let’s define what we’re talking about here.  Cardiovascular exercise is movement that makes our hearts beat faster and our lungs work harder.  The benefits of cardio exercise range from boosts in mood and cognitive function to calorie-burning to improved heart health to the ability to go upstairs without feeling like we’re going to die.  We can get cardio exercise by walking, running, skiing, swimming, biking, dancing, skating, and playing a variety of sports.  This list is (obviously) not comprehensive.  If it gets the heart rate up and keeps it there for a good while, it counts.

 

To be effective, we want to get our heart rates up to 65 to 85% of our maximum heart rate.  Those of us who wear fitness trackers or smart watches can ignore the following math:  our gizmos do it for us.  The rest of us can get out the calculator app on our phones.  The quick-and-dirty math for calculating our maximum heart rate is to subtract our age from 220.  I will use myself as the example.  I am 55, so my max heart rate is 220-55, or 165.  Then I use that number to calculate my training range, which is a heart rate between 107 (65% of 165) and 140 (85% of 165).  I can take my own pulse for a minute during a workout to check that I’m working hard enough.  In my experience, it is rare for people to work too hard; when we get above 85% of our maximum heart rate, we feel terrible and slow down.  However, any special snowflakes out there who like to feel terrible might want to check the heart rate to make sure to stay on the safe side of the max.

 

Now that I made everyone do math (sorry!), I will suggest that we don’t need to pay too much attention to the numbers.  As we get moving, we get a feel for how hard we’re working on a given day.  When we quantify that, we get a scale of perceived exertion, which ranges from 0 (equivalent to lying on the couch) to 10 (please shoot me now).  (No, those are not the actual descriptions for the scale numbers, but they get the point across.)  We want to aim for a 7 or 8 (working hard, but we can still cope).  More simply still, we can assess how hard we are working by talking.  If we can still mostly carry on a conversation, we’re all right.  If we can sing, we’re not working hard enough.  If we have to pause our clever response to breathe, we’re working too hard.

 

How long we walk (or run, or rollerskate, or swim, or bike, or Zumba) is another factor we have to consider.  If we haven’t hoisted ourselves out of the comfy chair for the last couple of years, we’re going to start with less time than those of us who just chilled out for a few days over the holiday.  It is better to start slow and easy.  In fact, I’m in favor of the stupidly easy beginning.  So, couch potato friends:  walk five minutes to start.  Ultimately, we want to work up to about 150 minutes per week, which is 30 minutes per day, five days a week.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Happy New Year!

Welcome to the new year!  We have a pretty comprehensive whole body workout to get us back in gear.  Three rounds.

 

mountain climbers	30
flies	20
pushup renegade rows	10
push press	30
deadlifts	20
YTA	10
leg kicks	30
bench press	20
pretty princesses	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Saw

The Amazing Stickie knows that being able to rotate her spine and to bend sideways help keep her mobile.  This is another exercise that involves some spinal flexion, so it is best avoided by people who have osteopenia and osteoporosis.

She begins seated on the floor with her legs extended out in front of her about as far apart as a yoga mat is wide.  She holds her arms out in a wide V at shoulder height.  Stickie inhales to lengthen her spine.  As she exhales, she rotates her torso toward one side, simultaneously bending so that her arm comes across and down toward her opposite ankle, as if it were a saw chopping off her foot (no, I did not make that particular gory image up myself.).  Then she returns to the start position and repeats on the other side.

 

Four or five repetitions to each side are good.

No magic wand

So yesterday we started thinking about goals by figuring out what we want.  We have tuned into what makes us feel joyful.

That joy is the motivation to do the hard bits.  Which is what we’re going to talk about now.  Sadly, I do not have a magic wand.  This means that when we set goals they have to be more or less realistic while still bringing us toward what our little hearts desire.

 

What our hearts desire is our compass point, our big picture.  That’s the direction we’re going to go.  But we’re not orienteering to our goals:  we’re making a map. 

 

If, for example, what gives us joy is being able to travel, lugging our luggage, climbing up church towers or cliffs, eating all the local cuisine, and logging miles and miles of walking as we see the sights, our map to get there is going to need to include some strength training (to enable all that schlepping, to keep our bones strong, and to help our metabolisms process all those delicacies) and some cardio (so we don’t pass out when we end up in a hotel with no elevator and we have to take the stairs, or we want to scale the Mayan pyramids, or we want to do a Julie Andrews in an alpine meadow).

 

We want to figure out where we’re starting from (The couch?  Semi-weekly attendance at yoga class?  Trying Zumba once?).  Many gyms and personal trainers offer free fitness evaluations (yes, I do, too!) and that is a useful way to get some data, but it’s not necessary.  Once we have the starting point, we can begin to have an idea about the time it might take to get where we want to go.  We want to meet our goals safely, so we want to be consistent rather than overdo ourselves. A guideline for workouts is not to increase workout time by more than 10%, for example.  That means that this week’s 30 minutes is going to be next week’s 33 minutes and so on.  With weights, we increase our reps until we hit 10 to 12 with good form and then we increase the weight, dropping the reps down and continue alternating like that.

 

Personally, I like the kind of goals that go like this:  I’m going to do cardio five days a week for 30 minutes and I’m going to do one weight work out.  Then I’m going to see how I feel.  I will adjust each week until I am satisfied with my cardio endurance (it’s ok to attach a number to this, or some other measure, like not being out of breath at the top of the stairs) and I can tolerate two or three weight workouts per week.

 

Try it and see how it goes!

Joy

We’re getting toward the end of December, y’all, which means it is time to start thinking about goals for next year.  (We all have tons of spare time with the holidays, right?  Oceans of hours in which to reflect…)  This is the first of two posts on setting goals.

The only rule for right now is that we have to tell the truth.  This is not about the goals we should have.  I don’t care what our moms think we should do, or our spouses or our kids or our favorite magazines.  It’s about the ones we actually want.  I don’t care if it is silly or vain or unrealistic.  It just has to be real.

 

This might be harder than we think.  We have so many messages around us telling us how to be.  I’m pretty sure all of us have a knee-jerk answer about how much weight we’re supposed to lose.  I have a news flash:  happiness is not to be found in the number of lost pounds.

 

So.  Let’s spend a minute or two picturing or describing or feeling into the life we want to have in the new year.  Maybe we do want to look better than we do right this minute, but I bet we care more about feeling good and happy and full of energy.  Those of us who feel tired all the time might want to feel rested.  Those of us who get out of breath getting off the couch might want to change that.  Maybe we want to meet new friends playing a new sport or doing a new activity and we need to build a bit of strength to do that.

 

What we want to be able to do and to feel helps us to shape our goals.  We’ll discover that we want to be faster or stronger, that we want more stamina or energy, that we need more connection and more joy.

 

Find the feelings that lead to joy.  Then hold that thought for tomorrow.