This workout has some options built in. Want to make it more challenging? Add a back lunge to the step ups. Need things a little easier? Sub in plain pushups for the shoulder tap ones. Three rounds.
step ups | 30 |
deadlifts | 20 |
skullcrushers | 10 |
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suitcase swings | 30 |
rows | 20 |
shoulder tap pushups | 10 |
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woodchoppers | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
V sit press | 20 |
Need to troubleshoot? Here are some good questions to ask. (Alternatively, I am a wellness coach and you can hire me to help figure stuff out!)
1. How is my sleep? If we’re not sleeping, we can’t really expect anything else to go super well. Both our bodies and our brains need sleep for proper function.
2. What am I eating and drinking? Despite my high school experience, it is not sustainable to run on Coke and donuts. If our most frequent vegetable is French fries and we drink coffee by the pot, we might have an obvious culprit. Even if we do generally eat pretty well, we may find that we’re not getting enough protein or we’re hitting the afternoon cookies a little too hard.
3. What am I doing about my stress? Yep: I am assuming we have stress. But if we have nurturing relationships, good practices like meditation, and time to relax, stress can be mitigated. (Bonus points for activities that will help to dismantle the systemic sources of much of our stress. Smashing the white supremacist cis-hetero imperialist capitalist patriarchy is good exercise, too.)
4. Am I giving my body a break? In addition to sleep, our bodies need recovery time. We need rest days between workouts. We need restorative practices like massage. Yoga helps.
5. When did I last have some fun? Sometimes we just need to do something frivolous to restore our energy.
So if we are still stuck after we’ve checked that we are, in fact, doing what we say we are doing, we have to take a closer look at our routines to see how to adjust them to get back to making progress.
This is where all those wellness categories come into play because we are not just exercise machines, but human beings. And, because we are humans and complicated, it might take a little while and a few experiments to figure out what is going to work. (Yep: we’re exercising our patience again, unfortunately.)
When I notice a client having a hard time with a workout, I start with two questions: how are you sleeping? and did you eat today? Usually the answer to those questions reveals the issue.
It takes a bit of time to go through what’s happening in our sleep and diet and recovery and mental health, but it’s worth it. That’s how we figure out how to make stuff better.
Sometimes we get stuck. We have our healthy routines and we are ticking our boxes and yet we are not making the progress we think we should be making. I’m going to talk about troubleshooting this kind of thing today and tomorrow.
Today we’re going to look at our performance with a slightly critical eye. (Critical, in this instance, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be mean to ourselves—that never helps—but rather that we are going to evaluate what we are actually doing.)
Often when we stop making progress, it turns out that we’re not doing what we think we are doing. We may have cut a few corners on our workouts or skimped on our sleep. We may have declared that we needed a treat more often than we thought we were.
Sometimes all we need to do to reboot our progress is to notice what we are doing and align it more with what we think we are doing. We might be losing because we’re cheating. That’s okay. We can fix it.
This is a great workout for back strength. Both the kettlebell swings and the good mornings work the whole back of the body. The tap backs are not far behind (heh). We need our back strength for the renegade rows and lateral raises as well! Three rounds.
jacks | 30 |
renegade row | 20 |
lateral raise | 10 |
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kb alternate arm swing | 30 |
kb hammer curl | 20 |
kb halo | 10 |
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tap backs | 30 |
good mornings | 20 |
brains | 20 |
Here are more ways to build in intervals in our workouts:
1. Add hills. These can be real hills if we are walking/running/hiking/biking outside or pretend ones on the treadmill.
2. Mix in a minute of cardio when weight training every so often. This can be something as simple as jumping jacks or we can hop on the treadmill and run for a minute.
3. Make it complicated. We can amp up our usual lunges, say, by adding a bicep curl to overhead press. Squats can acquire an extra leg lift to the side each time.
4. Change the tempo. Do most of the workout at an even tempo, but every few exercises make it faster before returning to normal.
Yesterday I wrote about how pretty much all our workouts have, inherently, a relationship with interval training. I gave some examples of what that might look like, but today I want to talk a little more about how we might use the concept when we work out.
When we are doing our strength training, the exercises we do lie on a continuum from simple to compound. The more joints we are using, the more compound the exercise. The more compound the exercise, the more muscle groups we are using, the more calories we are burning, and the more body parts we need to coordinate to move successfully. In our analogy to interval training, then, our most compound exercises are our intense intervals and our simpler exercises are our periods of relative recovery.
In practice, this can take a variety of forms. One way to structure our intervals would be to superset an exercise with a more unstable version of the same exercise, such as regular squats followed by BOSU squats, or deadlifts followed by single-leg deadlifts. Another way to create this kind of interval is to superset a compound exercise with a simpler one, like following squats with bicep curls or Arnold presses with hamstring curls. (Note: when doing strength training, there is also actual rest that has to happen.)
In Pilates, our interval training would likely take on the character of doing related exercises that build toward a more complex version, followed by an easing off. So we might begin with chest lift and explore our way along until we are doing something like the long stretch series on the reformer or hamstring 3 on the chair or any of the tendon stretch versions, ending with something that brings us into extension like the rolldown reach on the spine corrector.
The common element here is that we understand and plan around the natural flow of our energy to get the most out of our workouts.
Go play.
