There is a fair amount of weight-bearing on the arms in this workout. That’s all right: the hamstring curls will distract us. (Or, as always, we can choose to modify. We are adults and can make our own good decisions.) The short circuit means—you guessed it—four rounds.
1 min cardio | |
| |
mountain climbers | 30 |
renegade row | 20 |
hamstring curls | 10 |
burpees | 10 |
flies | 20 |
plank to pike | 10 |
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.
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?
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?
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 |
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.
