What do you call a bodybuilding hairy legendary creature? Sasquat! Groan!

We all do squats.  Sit down.  Stand up.  Voila!  A squat!  Now we just need to work on form a little.

Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart, or a little wider.  Take a moment to think about posture.  Is your head right over your shoulders?  Are your shoulders right over your hips?  What are your abs doing?  Is your weight balanced evenly on both feet?

Now sit back as if you were going to land on the edge of an imaginary chair.  Unfortunately, it is a chilly imaginary chair, so you don’t want to stay sitting on it.  Engage those behind muscles and stand back up, making sure that your hips end up in line with your shoulders again at the top.

On the way down, you should feel work happening in the front of your thighs.  On the way up, your behind has to kick in, especially to get the pelvis back in line.  Your upper body will tilt forward as you sit back, but don’t let it go too far; think about keeping your back parallel to your shins (you can see this in my extremely lovely drawing, right?).

Squats are pretty much the ultimate in practical exercise.  We need to use our squat skills every day, more often if we are drinking enough water, ladies, and if we are getting enough fiber, gents.  As we get older, the ability to squat is a major factor in how long we get to live independently.  Before that, squatting is also good for improving how we look in our jeans.  It challenges our balance, strengthens our lower body, and improves our connection with our abdominals.  Again, no equipment required!

Eat!

I’m from Berkeley.  That’s both a credential and a disclaimer.  I don’t have a tinfoil hat.  T. and I laughed like maniacs about the person we met on the ski lift who wouldn’t drink milk because of the lactic acid in it.  Fluoridation doesn’t scare me.  However, I don’t believe that The Powers have my best interests in mind, particularly when it comes to the way food works in this country.

We all have to eat.  Choosing what to eat, how much, when, where, and with whom consumes plenty of our time.  It should be simple, but industry has spent a lot of effort working to deceive us with things that look like food but aren’t.  I’m not talking about cheese puffs, which don’t actually really look like food at all, but about the sugar-laden breads, the salt-infused snacks, and the rest.

Michael Pollan is a voice of sanity in the chaos.  His latest book, Cooked, describes his journey toward preparing more of his own food.  He discovered that by cooking he could improve his and his family’s health and wellbeing, spend time with his son, achieve some independence from the food industrial complex (I made that phrase up; blame me, not him), and generally improve the world.

Lest you think this is some boring do-gooder book, let me say that he is a hilarious writer.  His description of the taste of his first batch of home-brewed beer will crack you up.  He has adventures in pickling.  If you like his writing style, it is also worth checking out The Omnivore’s Dilemma for the section in which he goes boar hunting; I laughed until I cried and also learned things.

Also, he is realistic.  The man has a full-time job as a professor.  He writes books, which takes an enormous amount of time.  He doesn’t expect us to all go Mrs. Cleaver or Martha Stewart.  He talks about practical ways to make cooking work.

This is an essential part of fitness.  Consider reading it on one of your rest days.

(It's mostly cotton, with a little lycra...)

Boredom can be a good motivator.  No, I don’t mean that it is a good idea to wait around to exercise until you are so bored that it’s a question of working out or cataloguing the various different fabrics contributing to your dryer lint.  Bodies respond best to variety.  If your workout is always the same, you can move through it on autopilot and your body won’t continue to grow new skills.

Sometimes we need to forego our trusty elliptical trainer and try the stair-climber instead.  Go outside and try actual stairs, even.  The seasonal ice rink has opened at South Shore; ice skating can be aerobic with a side of balance training.

Beyond switching up the cardio choices, boredom can encourage us to do other types of healthy fitness activities.  We need more than cardio to thrive.  Choose a weight workout to build more lean muscle mass and increase your metabolism.  Spend some time in yoga to improve your flexibility and challenge your balance.  Try Pilates to become stronger, longer, and leaner.

We all need a balance of cardio, strength, balance, and flexibility.  Too much emphasis on any one aspect will compromise optimal fitness and bore the workout pants off of us.  Let’s make things interesting!

I do not swim like Leviathan

Let’s talk about pain.  Cheerful subject, right?  I am sure I will sound both vaguely Puritan and vaguely Buddhist when I say that pain has a lot to teach us, but it is true.  There are lots of kinds of pain.  For my current purpose, I will ignore heartache, grief, and hangnails. 

In a fitness context, the first kind of pain to pay attention to is the kind that attends injury.  It has one lesson:  stop what you are doing right now.  Working through a broken leg or a sprained wrist or a torn rotator cuff does nothing but make things worse.  We are not, for the most part, professional athletes; there is nothing to be won by continuing after injury.  In fact, it just means that it takes longer to get back to doing fun fitness stuff.  Don’t do it.  See your doctor and follow her or his instructions.

The second kind of pain is soreness.  Soreness is fascinating!  This morning, for example, my lower back is a little sore.  That means that there was an issue with my form when I was swimming yesterday, probably that I did not sufficiently engage my abdominals.  I now have a mandate for my next swimming session, courtesy of pain.  (And it is almost always a good idea to pay attention to what one’s abs are doing!)

My triceps are also sore from swimming.  Woohoo!  I worked them!  Thank you, pain, for providing feedback on the muscles that needed to exert themselves.  I will have to pay attention to my triceps to see if they continue sore past a reasonable time to make sure I challenge them enough to build strength without overtaxing them and creating injury.

Then there is the kind of pain that we actually do have to work through.  That’s the kind where you get off the couch for the first time since football season started and discover that walking around the block leaves you uncomfortably breathless.  That pain says that life is going to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Hobbes (the philosopher, not the tiger).  Your body wants you to know that if you don’t get moving, a dirt nap is going to be your lot in life sooner than you’d like.  This small pain is a warning to avoid greater pain.

Let me be clear:  I do not belong to the Church of No Pain No Gain.  I’m more of a Tune-Into-What-Your-Body-Is-Telling-You kind of believer.  Sometimes what your body tells you is that it hurts.  Pay attention; you could learn something!

(The photo is from an exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum a long time ago.  I wish I could remember the artist's name.  I did a bunch of poking around to try to figure it out to no avail.  The artist changed my way of looking at the world.  The particular piece in question is a skeleton in a glass case with a label reading "Somebody's sister."  I have not been all right with seeing human remains displayed in museums since.)

Check!

I have read a bewildering amount of material about goal-setting in my life.  I’ve read about the six most efficient strategies and the four simple tricks, the eight tips for better everything, and the nine ways to tailor my goals to my learning style, personality, astrological sign, dominant hand, and current biorhythm.  I only made some of that up.  Some of that reading turned out to be useful, but I couldn’t tell until I tried stuff out.  I am big on experimentation and real life experience.  This is what works for me.

I don’t get too specific on the big stuff.  Lots of advice-givers suggest that the best goals are quantifiable and have deadlines.  I think that’s great for what I want to accomplish today.  For example, today I am going to do an hour of Pilates practice and either ride my bike or go swimming. 

I have a general idea of what my long-term fitness goals are, but I don’t have a goal of running a marathon by April 12, 2015 with a time of 2 hours while weighing in at 107 pounds.  Not just because that is a totally unrealistic goal (I don’t like running, at least not yet.).  If I did want to run a marathon, I would have to learn a whole bunch about what that entails.  I don’t know enough right now to make a realistic marathon-running goal.  I do know what I can do today that is both realistic and good for me, in line with my overarching principles.

On a slightly longer scale, I know that I will be a happier, healthier, more fit person if I make sure to do cardio every day this week, if I eat food that is good for me, and if I go outside.  I know that I will need to get enough rest, do something with heavy objects, and practice Pilates.  I will probably make a list with boxes to tick for each of those things because I like ticking boxes, but I know that I can’t get hung up on the boxes or I won’t do anything.

So the important question is:  what are you going to do today?

Drop and give me a few

I love pushups.  Interestingly, when you do an image search for pushups, you get a lot of bras, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I decided to draw my own pushup.  Now you know why I am not an artist.

Back to the point:  pushups are great.  I love exercises that do multiple things at once because I am lazy and want to be done quickly.  Pushups work the upper body and the abdominals at the same time!

Even better, they don’t require any equipment, so none of us has any excuse for not doing them.

How to do them?  The basic version is this:  lie on your belly on the floor.  Sadly, there is more after that.  Bend your arms and put your hands on the floor under your shoulders.  Flex your feet so that the balls of your feet are on the floor.  Hold your body straight from top of your head to ankles.  This is the part where your abs get involved.  Push up from the floor until your arms are straight.  Lower.  Raise.  Repeat until you have had enough.  Don’t forget to breathe; it is easier if you breathe out as you press away from the floor.  Also, you don’t pass out.

I love pushups so much that I will be writing more about variations in the future.  For now, consider the basics.

Just Breathe

(Today's post is taken from a paper I wrote for Pilates training.)

The Pilates experience, by design, goes beyond exercises to create a holistic experience.  A Pilates student does not simply wave body parts around in space or move heavy objects, but instead thoughtfully engages multiple body systems in a cooperative process of movement.  Because of this, Pilates exercises offer a unique pathway to communicate with the body.

Perhaps the most basic way in which Pilates exercises create a new relationship in the body is through the breath.  Ample evidence for the influence of breath on body systems practically bombards anyone who reads about body and fitness issues.  Not only do the Pilates exercises use breath to facilitate the actual motions (exhaling, for example, to encourage abdominal concentric contraction), but also as an actual element of the experience (as in the pulsing breaths of the Hundred).  The conscious use of the breath informs the bodymind that the work is not all about muscles, but about an entire system, or even system of systems.

That same breath links the respiratory system with the cardiovascular.  Efficient use of breath enables the cardiovascular system to promote traffic and communication throughout the body.  Obviously, oxygen needs to be moved through the body and carbon dioxide needs to be expelled, but the circulatory system moves more than the blood cells that carry that particular cargo. 

The same channels that carry the oxygen carry the white blood cells, the body’s first line of defense against pathogens.  Proper breathing influences how well the body can react to disease generators; the better the circulatory system works, the more effectively the defenses work.  In other words, breath promotes proper immune function.

Further, the breath plays an important role in managing stress in the body.  Of course breathing becomes more shallow and rapid under stress—anyone who has had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident knows this.  That accelerated breath correlates to an accelerated heart rate and a rush of stress hormones.  In a crisis, that is what is needed.  However, in our stress-junkie culture, it is useful to use the breath to relax the heart rate and stem the flow (overflow, really) of stress hormones, freeing up body energy for other uses.

The Pilates instructor has tremendous influence on how the breath works in the exercises.  Cuing breathing helps link the movement of muscle and bone to the flow of breath and blood, engaging the nervous system in a conscious dance.  Further, the intention of the instructor and his or her energy interact with the same elements of the client, allowing the client to synchronize his or her rhythms with the instructor.  The breath links each system within the body into a more coherent, larger system.  Then the breath of one individual links him or her to another into yet another larger, more coherent system of relationship.

Breathing, of course, is only one of the Pilates principles.  Each of the other principles has similar unifying effects on the body systems starting from its own unique space.  Pilates exercises, then, offer a multitude of ways to build something more wonderful from the already wonderful systems of the body.