Just a pretty straightforward workout this week. We’ve got some core and balance challenges, some oblique work, and our deltoids won’t like us when we’re done (they’ll be fine, really.). Three rounds.
squat raises | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
kickbacks | 10 |
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leg kicks | 30 |
rows | 20 |
round lunges | 10 |
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woodchoppers | 30 |
flies | 20 |
windscreen wiper | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie is changing up her crunch game today. Instead of putting her feet flat on the floor, she is putting the soles of her feet together while lying on the floor, making a diamond shape with her legs (or butterfly position!). Because Stickie loves Pilates, she uses the chest lift technique to do her crunches: she slides her breast bone toward her heels, allowing her head to float up off the floor. Then she returns to the start position.
She likes to do a set of ten.
Those of us who have been hanging around in fitness circles for a long time are used to saying or hearing stuff about muscles. We talk about pulling in our abs or engaging our glutes. Those cues are fine, as far as they go, but sometimes we do better to focus on what it is we are trying to do. Then we let our bodies figure it out.
Take, for example, our friend the crunch (or, for you Pilates folks out there, the chest lift). Of course it works our abdominal muscles. It also helps us to move our spines one vertebra at a time. When we think only about the abs, we tend to yank our heads and upper bodies up with a ton of tension in the neck. If, instead, we make our goal to move our sternum toward our heels, our abdominals end up working both more intensely and more efficiently. Our necks stay relaxed. Our spines have the space they need to move segmentally. We do better.
Similarly, when we’re presented with balance challenges, we want to focus on staying over our center of gravity. With that as a goal, our bodies know to use our core muscles (all of them, not just the abs!) and all our glute and leg muscles to stabilize us. We don’t micromanage the how; we give the task and get out of the way.
Go play.
In Pilates, we learn that we can only do so many things at once. This applies in lots of ways, but the way I’m thinking about right now is about how our spines move.
Our spines move, roughly, along three axes. We can flex and extend our spines (bending forward and back). We can side bend left and right. We can twist.
The interesting thing is that we have the greatest range of motion along any of those axes when we are only moving one way. That is, we can bend forward and back more when we’re not also trying to side bend or twist, or we can twist more when we’re not also bending to the side, etc.
So if we are trying to increase our ability to move in a particular direction, we will do best if we work on just that one thing at a time. We can add the other fancy stuff later, when we’ve achieved our range of motion goals.
It’s time for Christmas in June! We do this workout twice a year, once in the summer and once in December. Here’s how it works. On the first “day” we do one push press. Then we move on to the second “day” and do two goblet squats and one push press. We continue on through the days until on the last round we do 12 plyojacks, 11 kettlebell swings, etc. all the way to that last push press. I realize that this means we end up doing 42 burpees before we are done. I am not sorry. Try to keep the rests between the “days,” but, obviously, rest when needed.
1 push press |
2 goblet squats |
3 Overhead press |
4 1 leg squats each leg |
5 deadlifts |
6 burpees |
7 pushups |
8 renegade rows |
9 mountain climbers |
10 jump lunges |
11 kb swings |
12 plyojacks |
The Amazing Stickie loves working on control. Winshield wipers definitely help her.
She begins lying on her back with her legs straight up in the air. Keeping her shoulders on the ground, she swings her legs left and then right. Ten reps should do it.
As we go along in our fitness journeys, we will have times when it seems like our progress has stalled completely. We work and work and nothing changes. We can get stuck for lots of reasons. Here are a couple of things to think about to get unstuck.
It’s possible that we’re not doing as much as we think we are. Sometimes our attention lags and we are just going through the motions of our workouts rather than digging in. We might be lifting weights, but we’re actually thinking about the errands we have to do on the way home and what’s for dinner and what those people at work were talking about in the break room. Tuning in to what we’re actually doing can clue us in.
Another way to check what we’re doing is to look at our records, if we’re people who keep them. A glance at the food log might reveal that we’ve let our calories creep up or that we’ve been visiting the ice cream shop too often. We might notice that what we’ve been doing for cardio has been exactly the same for the last five months and we might do well to pick up the pace or the difficulty or both.
Taking a look at things like our stress levels and our sleep also can indicate where the issue is. Overstressing and undersleeping do not help us get fit. (It might not be possible to change those things right now. That’s all right. Recognizing that they’re an issue is a really good start and can help us keep from putting more pressure on ourselves.)
Maybe we just need to be patient. Sometimes reaching the next level is about failing over and over again until suddenly we don’t.
Finally, sometimes we just need a change. Maybe we’ve been focusing on strength training and we’d do well to step up our cardio for a few weeks. Maybe we’re in a yoga rut and need to pump iron. Maybe we just need to take the workout outside for a while.
The one thing we don’t want to do is give up. We can do this.
