The Amazing Stickie and Sun Salutation

The Amazing Stickie loves incorporating exercises from different disciplines into her workouts because it keeps her brain stimulated along with her body.  Today she is adding some sun salutations from yoga into the mix.  She also knows that sun salutations are a lot like burpees, but without the jumping.  They still give her many of the same whole-body benefits of burpees without the impact.

 

She begins standing in good posture with her arms overhead.  From there, she bends forward with her hands on the ground and her body making an inverted V (downward dog, for you yogis and yoginis out there).  Then she flattens her body into plank position and lowers herself slowly toward the floor, like the lowering phase of a very slow pushup.  After that, she extends her arms and arches her back (keeping her shoulders down!) into an upside down backbend position (cobra or upward dog, depending on how high she lifts).  Pushing her behind up in the air, she returns to the inverted V position and from there curls up to standing again.

 

With practice, Stickie has made one position flow into the next in a relatively seamless sequence.

 

Do five to ten reps. 

Neuroplasticity

Today’s five-dollar word is neuroplasticity.  It means that we have the ability to learn new things.

 

For a long time, as we know from the proverb about old dogs, people believed that there was an end to our ability to learn.  Since then, we’ve learned better (ha!).  People can learn throughout their lives, given the right circumstances.

 

What does this have to do with fitness?  If we are doing fitness right, we should be learning new things often.  We want to create the right environment for our bodies and our minds to adapt and learn.

 

The very short version of what we want is novel experiences plus successful and fun movement.  We need our workouts to be hard enough that we have to pay attention to what we are doing but not so hard that it’s all suffering and failure.

 

Go play, and play hard! 

Greater Than

This is one of those posts that comes with my usual disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, physical therapist, or other medical professional.  I do not diagnose or treat illness or injury.  I am just a personal trainer and a Pilates instructor.  Medical treatment is crucial to our wellbeing and we should not hesitate to seek medical advice as needed.

Now that I have said that, I need to say something else.  We are not a diagnosis.

 

What do I mean?  I mean that even if we have a diagnosis from our doctor that says we have osteoporosis, or a rotator cuff tear, or plantar fasciitis, we are still strong and powerful humans with tons of ability and potential.  When we show up to work out, we obviously want to move safely, but we also want to work to the best of our ability.

 

Every diagnosis is a generalization.  How plantar fasciitis plays out in my body is not the same as it plays in anybody else’s body.  We unique unicorns need to acknowledge our diagnoses and then explore what that really means, gently and carefully, in our own bodies.  We may discover that we can do a lot more than we thought.

 

We want to respect the expertise of our doctors and also our own expertise as the only ones who have ever lived in our own bodies.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Variation

Small variations can be interesting!  We’re trying out prisoner squats this week.  Three rounds.

 

push press	30
flies	20
burpees	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
prisoner squats	30
bench press	20
quadruped	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and YTW

The Amazing Stickie has amazing arms, natch.  One way she keeps them amazing is by doing YTW.  (The exercise is named for the shapes the arms make.  Neither Stickie nor I can say why that W is not an M.)  (You can feel free to call it whatever you like!)

Stickie begins in a slight squat.  She raises her arms, with or without small weights, into a Y shape with her upper arms in line with her ears.  Then she opens her arms out into a T shape.  Finally, she bends her elbows so that her upper arms stay parallel to the floor and her forearms point down toward it.

 

Ten or so reps should do it.

Strong and Powerful

Recently I watched yet another Pilates video.  The discussion ranged over a wide variety of topics, but the one that stood out to me was the tyranny of correctness.

Of course when we do Pilates (or any other kind of workout, for that matter), we want to achieve correct form.  However, that achievement takes time and practice.  I often say to my clients (and myself!) that we are approximating our way to greatness.

 

What’s more important than form?  Self-efficacy.  Not one of us is perfect.  Most of us are not going to look like the picture in the book.  What we can do is to do the best we can right now, today.  We, as movers, need to feel that we are capable.  We need to make the attempt to do hard things.

 

Our teachers help us best when they celebrate what we can do and encourage us to keep trying.  The goal is always going to be out there, somewhere beyond where we are now.

 

Good thing we’re strong and powerful!

Joy

One of the things I do in my copious spare time (ha!) is to watch Pilates videos.  Some are fabulous and full of useful insights and some not so much.  Recently, however, the discussion I watched included the idea that many of us are “chasing health.”

What the speaker meant by that was that we work out, we eat our vegetables, drink our water in pursuit of some abstract idea of health.  Our doctors threaten us or we read some magazine article about the hidden dangers of [insert random aspect of modern life here].  Off we trudge to the gym in order to avoid something Much Worse.

 

This is not sustainable.

 

Maybe we aren’t at a place where we love going to the gym, but we want to try to go because of how it makes us feel good in our bodies.  We want to enjoy ease of movement.  We want joy in our lives.

 

Fear doesn’t give us that.

 

Find the joy.