This week we’re keeping on with our compound exercises to build strength and rev up our metabolisms. Three rounds.
tap backs | 30 |
renegade row | 20 |
lateral raise | 10 |
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squat to leg lift | 30 |
(lunge to) curl | 20 |
YTA | 10 |
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jacks | 30 |
good morning/deadlift | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie knows that sometimes simple is best. There are not many exercises out there simpler than the farmer’s carry. The level of challenge will vary depending on the weights she chooses.
Holding a dumbbell (or weight plate!) in each hand, Stickie ensures that her posture is good (ears over shoulders over hips over knees over ankles). Then she walks forward holding the dumbbells without swinging her arms. That’s it. When she feels like she has taken the weights for a long enough walk, she stops. She usually takes about ten steps in one direction and ten to return to the weight rack, because she is efficient.
It is really tempting to let other people set our goals for us. I get it. I’m the “expert,” so I should know what it is my clients should do.
Yes, I do have expertise and education and experience. Those things are useful. But no matter how smart I am, I can’t know what is crucial to my clients without them telling me.
My ideas about what my clients should want don’t really matter. What they want does. My job is to apply what I know to what they want. I show up with curiosity. I watch. I ask. Given what I see and what I hear and what I am told, I adapt what we do to optimize for what my clients have their hearts set on.
A lot of us are so used to people telling us what to want (and what to do) that it can be a challenge to tease out what is important to my clients themselves. It is worth the effort, however, because ultimately the only goals worth working for are the ones we choose for ourselves.
(On a related subject, positive goals along the lines of “I want to be able to dance all night” beat the heck out of “I don’t want to die immobile.” We do best when motivated by love, excitement, joy.)
All goals present challenges. We’re not going to sail, trouble-free, straight to what we want. This is why it is so crucial to ensure that the goal is worth it to us. That worthy goal keeps us working when things get hard.
Whatever my clients want, I am there to help them get it.
Today we’re going to talk about happiness versus joy. (My brain just imagined the two as Luchadores, but, aside from making me laugh, that’s not relevant right now.) Happiness is a circumstantial thing. We feel happy when things are going right, when we have cute shoes, when there is no traffic on our commute, when we get tasty snacks.
Joy, however, is not. Joy is a way of being in the world, more of a mindset than something dependent on how things are going. We achieve joy in a variety of ways, including integrity and gratitude. Joy is a practice.
So what’s the connection with fitness?
The most obvious connection is… connection! That mind-body connection is a real thing. When we tune in to what makes our body feel good, when we experience ourselves as moving beings designed to move, we open ourselves to the joy of existence.
Then there is that whole practice bit. When we move with intention, we learn. We grow. We learn to appreciate our capabilities. We practice being grateful for bodies that can do so many things in so many interesting ways.
Finally, as we move our bodies, we treat ourselves with love. That love spills over into things like better sleep, good-for-us food, reduced pain. All those things contribute to our sense of joy in the world.
Bottom line: happiness is good and joy is even better! Get both!
So I’m pretty sure that some folks aren’t going to like me much this week because I have made renegade rows harder by adding that pushup in there. Sorry/not sorry. Three rounds.
woodchoppers | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
pushup renegade row | 10 |
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1 arm clean and press | 30 |
flies | 20 |
front raise | 10 |
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split squat pulldown | 30 |
kickbacks | 20 |
butterfly crunch | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie has amazing posture. One way she maintains this level of amazingness is by working the back of her body. Gorilla rows are a great way to do that.
She begins by squatting down with her legs fairly wide apart. She hinges at her hips so that her back is nice and straight and parallel to the floor, her hands holding dumbbells between her feet. From there, she lifts one dumbbell up toward her armpit (stopping before she runs into her own body!) and then lowers it back toward the floor. She repeats on the other side. Letting the dumbbell rest on the floor is easier than keeping it hanging, but both ways of doing the exercise are good. Sets of ten to twenty are good, depending on how heavy the weights are.
I am nothing if not a repository for random factoids. Today’s tidbit comes from a webinar I watched recently. It was not central to the topic of the webinar at all, but I had one of those “Wait, what?” moments when a presenter said that overuse of antibiotics is driving a rise in ruptures of the Achilles tendon.
That sounded fishy to me. While I certainly do not think we should be taking antibiotics unless they’re really necessary because we don’t want superbugs out there, I did not see any inherent connection between those drugs and our tendons. I could have just gone on with my life, but instead, I checked it out. Internet search for the win!
It turns out (link here!) that certain common antibiotics do have adverse effects on our connective tissue.
The lesson here, besides taking antibiotics when necessary and not willy-nilly, is that we need to be open to examining things we find surprising or counterintuitive. Science is our friend. When we hear something unexpected or surprising, we need to evaluate what, if any, evidence there is.
Play smart!
