In the Interval...

I am a fan of intervals.  What is not to like about a technique that gives better results in the same amount of time without a lot more pain and suffering?  We all need and want cardio fitness.  Intervals are a great tool for getting us there.

Let’s start with the basics:  interval training involves intervals (fancy that!) in which we work harder.  Classic interval last no longer than a minute, because that’s how long we can work at our maximum effort before we run out of ATP (sorry about the flashbacks to high school biology).  However, longer intervals still have benefits.

 

Sometimes intervals are built in to our workouts.  When we walk or run or bike outside, we discover that the world is not flat.  Those hills we have to climb?  Intervals!  We have to work harder to get to the top.

 

An easy way to build them in when we’re working out somewhere flat is the fartlek.  (If your inner twelve-year-old just snickered, we can be friends.)  To fartlek (heh), we look ahead on our path as we’re walking or running or biking or whatever and choose a landmark, like a big tree or a stop sign on the corner, or a purple house.  We go as fast as we can until we get to that landmark.  Then we choose another one and go at a recovery pace until we get there.  We continue on like that until the end of the workout.

 

Music also provides a great way to build in intervals.  A classic interval strategy would be to go at top speed during the choruses of songs and recover during the verses.  (Back when I used to watch football and had a spin bike in my living room, I’d use commercials as intervals and game play as recovery time.)  Another way to use music for intervals is to choose a characteristic (genre, type of singer, decade) as the trigger for an interval.  We can also choose songs that are our personal sprint songs; whenever those come up in the shuffle, we really amp everything up.

 

I recently learned about a new-to-me way to do intervals for those of us who keep track of things like lap time.  We note the digit of the hundredth of a second and use that, multiplied by 20, to determine how much rest we get before we go again.  So if we finish in a time that ends in .01, we get 20 seconds of rest.  A time that ends in .02 would give us 40 seconds.  A time that ends in .00, though, means we have to go again right now!

 

As always, we want to build up slowly and experiment.  Adding a single interval to a workout does have benefits.  We add another one when we feel like we can handle it.  Eventually, we can spend our whole workout alternating between hard work and recovery intervals (after our warm-up and before our cool-down, of course!).

 

Go play.

Begin

Some concepts just keep recurring in my mind.  They are the ones I keep turning back to when I get in a rut or get sidetracked.  One of those is Beginner’s Mind.  It’s a concept from Buddhism about working on something as if we’ve never done it before, clearing our mind of preconceptions and habits and distractions.  It’s a fresh start.

All of us have times when our fitness goals get obscured by other stuff.  We have actual lives and everything.  Fitness is supposed to enable us to live the rest of our lives better, but the life part is the important bit; sometimes we need to focus on that instead.

 

When it’s time to come up for air, fitness is still there.  We take some deep breaths and we begin again.

 

When we do that, we have to let go of how our body worked before we got sidetracked and how we used to work out when we were in college and how annoying that person was just now in the locker room.  We start where we are.  We pay attention to how the weights feel today, or the way our feet impact on the treadmill, or the angle we use when our arms enter the water as we swim.

 

Today is a new day.  We are new humans today.  We can make today a good start.

Monday Workout: Stability

This week we’re exploring stability in a variety of ways.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
farmer carry	20
YTA	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
mountain climbers	30
flies	20
plank saw	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Underhand Bent Over Row

The Amazing Stickie knows that small variations can make a familiar exercise seem new.  Today she is changing up her usual bent over row by switching her grip.

 

As usual, she stands with her feet about hip-distance apart with her knees slightly bent.  She hinges forward at the hips being careful to keep her spine straight or even slightly extended (not curved over.  The Amazing Stickie will never have a little old lady hump in her back.).  She holds her dumbbells with an underhand grip and rows them up toward her armpits.  She feels her shoulder blades come together on her back as she does this.  Then she lowers the dumbbells back down.

 

Sets of ten to twenty are good, depending on the weight of the dumbbells. 

Grit, Pro and Con

Yesterday I wrote about flow and how great it is when everything just feels right with our workouts.  Today I’m going to talk about those other days, the ones when everything is just too @#$% hard to do.

 

Grit is an important skill to have in our toolbox.  When we use it, we get stronger and we build character.  It can help us lift that last rep or finish that last mile.  Heck, sometimes it can make us do that very first step of showing up at the gym.

 

It’s also, like many tools, potentially dangerous.  Grit is no substitute for good judgment.  We do not want to use it to keep working when we are injured, for example.

 

We want to keep paying attention.  A workout that starts out terrible can, once we’re going, feel fabulous.  Then there are the ones that show us that what we actually should be doing is taking a rest day.  If we’re just mindlessly going through the motions, we will miss the distinction.

 

So, yes, I believe in persistence, but the smart kind, that knows when it really is a good idea to do a little stretching and call it a day. 

Go With the Flow

In the usual usage of the words, we tend to want to avoid altered states of consciousness while working out.  Alcohol and weights should not mix.  Other drugs, too, seem counterproductive to the enterprise.  However, there is one altered state of consciousness that actually helps our workouts:  the flow state.

 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (no, I have no idea how to say his name, nor spell it without looking very carefully) wrote the book on the flow state, Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  When we are in flow, things seem like they’re just working, like we can do our best without undue effort.  It’s a kind of peak experience in which all the things we’re not doing fall away.  We are doing what we’re doing, and nothing but what we’re doing.

 

In a fitness context, this is related to the runner’s high.  When we’re in flow, we feel like we could work out all day long, or run for hours, or swim for days.  We feel fabulous.  All the things that we struggle with most days are not a problem when we hit flow.  Of course we want flow.  It feels fabulous in the moment and it helps us want to work out again in the future.

 

So how do we get there?  Good question!  And I will give my favorite answer:  we experiment.  Different people find that different things trigger the flow state, so what works for me may not work for you.

 

On a basic level, we want to do all the things we normally do to make working out simple for us.  Rolling out of bed to find our gear right there and ready is a good start.  Plugging in our devices before bed so they are charged when we really need those workout tunes is another one of those things.  Those of us who like to hit the gym after work would want to make sure the bag is stocked with clean clothes, appropriate snacks, and all that good stuff before we leave home.

 

For most of us, flow comes when the workout is not too easy or too difficult.  If it’s too easy, we zone out and start making shopping lists or wondering what possessed that person at work to say that terrible thing or fixating on burritos.  If it’s too hard, the feedback from our bodies overwhelms us with please-stop-now messages.

 

There is some evidence that the mindset we go in with can contribute to flow.  When we bring our curiosity with us, we take an attitude of “I wonder how far I can go?” instead of “when the heck is this going to be over?”  Leaning into the sensations we get during the workout can also help us develop flow—what happens when we try to do the movement this way instead?  What if I concentrate on the alignment of my knees?  That mind/body connection thing is real!

 

Some people find that the right music helps them flow; others find it distracts.  Interruptions from texts and calls are almost always flow-busters.  I recently read something that suggested that rewarding ourselves before the workout can potentially help us hit flow (haven’t tried this one myself, and I suspect it depends on the reward, among other things).

 

One note of caution:  while flow makes us feel like we can keep going forever, we do actually need to use good judgment about when to stop.  We want to quit before we are totally exhausted and ensure that we get plenty of rest.

Go play. 

Monday Workout: Amp!

This week we have some choices to amp things up.  Try something new!  Three rounds.

 

step up or power step up	30
bridge chest press	20
lateral raise	10
curtsy or skater jump	30
rows	20
hip rotations	10
woodchoppers	30
skullcrushers	20
side banana	10