Thursday List: 3

Experiments to try:

 

1.     Eat a new food.  This can be as simple as trying a veggie you’ve never had or as complicated as taking a trip to the library to check out a cookbook for some kind of cuisine that is new to you.

2.     Have a movement snack.  You know that time in the afternoon when you think about having a cookie or another cup of coffee just to get through whatever the afternoon holds?  Try taking a five minute walk, or doing a minute of squats, or a few stretches instead.

3.     Turn off the extras.  This one can be hard.  Instead of jumping on the treadmill or bike or elliptical or whatever and plugging in to the music or TV, just go.  Even better, take the workout outside and do it without the distractions.  You might learn stuff about the content of your head or about how your body works or other things I haven’t thought of yet.

Experiments 2

As I mentioned yesterday, I like experiments.  Probably because I like learning things.  There is one important prerequisite to experiments, though.  I have to remain unattached to the outcome.  Or, in other words, I have to be willing to fail.

This is not easy.  We live in a world of picture-perfect everything.  Social media could give us the impression that everyone in the entire universe is well-groomed, acne-free, and stylish.  Spoiler alert:  I live in the blooper reel as well as the highlight tape.

 

I suspect that everybody does, but some of us hide it better than others.

 

Experiments, like practice, require that we do things we’re not familiar with and maybe not good at.  We can’t control the outcome.  We might get sweaty or messy.  We might even cry a little.

 

But we might also discover something beautiful or useful or amazing.  There was a time before I tried sushi, for example.  My first experience was not entirely successful, but I was willing to try again and now I will eat it any chance I get.

 

Similarly, the first time I went skiing, it was mostly about crashing, but there was something there that kept me coming back.

 

What would you like to try?  What’s worth failing at for a while?

Experiments 1

Recently, I did a little experiment on myself.  (OK, that’s almost always true.  I like to experiment.)  For a long time now, I have routinely worked out as one of the first things I do in the morning.  However, what with the dark mornings and various other stuff going on, getting up early enough to get the workout in before work and the rest of my responsibilities was proving challenging.  So I tried sleeping in a bit and doing the workout in the afternoon.

The thing about experiments is that no matter how they turn out, we learn stuff.  What I learned is that working out in the afternoon doesn’t work for me.  It just doesn’t.  I have ideas about why, but that really doesn’t make much difference.  The point is that I learned that I have the habits I do for the very good reason that they work, most of the time.

 

Changing the workout time was not the solution I was looking for.  But I would not have known that had I not tried.

 

What might you want to experiment with this week?

Monday Workout: More or Less

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
suitcase swings	30
rows	20
shoulder tap pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
V sit press	20

 

Thursday List: 5

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.

Troubleshooting 2

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.

Troubleshooting 1

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.