It makes you look thinner, too

We are heading into party season, so it is time to talk about… posture.  Next to avoiding weird relatives and exercising care with the potent libations, maintaining good posture may be the one of the best strategies for feeling well the morning after the party.  Good posture helps prevent fatigue, low back pain, and shoulder tension.  It’s also free and easy to practice.

Good posture means standing with your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles in a line.  For many of us, this entails rolling our shoulders back (without puffing the chest forward like a pigeon!).  We are good at shoulders-forward because we do it all day at our desks.  We also need to bring our heads back over our shoulders—no more peering at screens when they aren’t there!

Next, a lot of us allow our lower backs to arch too much.  Engaging our abdominals to pull in our bellies and using our butt muscles to tuck our behinds a little help alleviate low back pain.  If you find that your abs have forgotten how to contract, it is time to remind them with some crunches (good form:  keep abs flat across your body as you curl up so you don’t train your abs too pooch out!).  Leg lifts to the back while keeping your hips forward and square will awaken your rear.  Consider it part of getting ready for the party.

...and sweet potatoes...

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  The directions are simple:  be grateful and eat food.

This is not actually bad advice for fitness, either.  We all have wonderful bodies.  They carry us around, regulate all the processes of life, provide constant messages about the state of the exterior and interior world, and generally enable us to experience all the joys of existence.  Taking a moment to appreciate that wonder can inspire us to give our bodies what they need: good nutrition, enough sleep, plenty of exercise, and love.

Food is not the enemy.  Without food, we die.  Worse, we get crabby.  Good food feeds the soul as well as the body.  Meals build community.  Cooking with real ingredients subverts the dominant paradigm, improves the environment (both immediate and local and global), and enables healthy eating.  Sure, we can overdo the food.  I don’t recommend that for lots of reasons.  But a little pumpkin pie between friends is just fine.

I am grateful for life, for family, friends, turkey, bikes, and light-up shoes.  Make your own list while you walk around the block between turkey bastings!

Why treadmills are better than horror movies

In theory, the point of cardio exercise is to strengthen your heart and improve your ability to oxygenate your cells.  To accomplish this, you have to get your heart rate up.  Lots of things raise heart rates, including the bad guy sneaking up on the blonde in the scary movie, the extra cup of coffee, the ride with your learning-to-drive kid.  We don’t choose those things as cardio exercise for at least one good reason:  no endorphins.

We all have that sense that, yeah, we probably should get out and exercise.  The doctor might make some remarks.  The jeans might be a little tighter than can be plausibly explained by a trip through the dryer.  Obligation and even guilt and shame can be motivators.

But isn’t happiness a better one?

Endorphins make you feel good.  When you get your heart rate up, when you start to breathe more heavily, you begin to tap into your body’s own supply of mood-enhancing chemicals.  Legal high!  Sure, it’s addictive, but unlike many other addictive substances, the cardio endorphin high is actually good for you.

Cardio reduces stress, ameliorates depression, and burns calories, so it has many of the same effects as chocolate without the weight gain and expense.  Go play!  Because it is fun!

Pilates for poets...

(I wrote this essay for my Pilates training.  It gives an overview of why I say all those crazy things about frogs, zombies, and the like during workouts.)

A new Pilates student enters a foreign world, one in which actions normally oriented vertically become horizontal, in which small movements can be more exhausting than large ones, in which words like “reformer,” “table,” and “chair” take on new connotations and functions.  Imagery functions like an interpreter.  The strange phenomena of the Pilates world translate into more familiar things through images.  The student can then begin to learn the customs and habits of Pilates without extreme homesickness for the everyday gym world of barbells, dumbbells, and cardio equipment.

The “Feet in Straps” exercise puts the student in a vulnerable position, supine, half suspended, legs akimbo.  Imagery, by bringing reassurance, comfort, and intelligibility to the experience, enables better performance.  Three aspects of the exercise can particularly benefit from the application of imagery: core awareness, disassociation of the hips, and efficient organization and alignment of the lower extremities.

Core awareness is such a central concept that the importance of grasping it cannot be overstated.  It is key.  One way to begin developing core awareness in this exercise is to picture some of the underlying anatomy.  A student can begin by picturing the familiar six-pack of the rectus abdominis and its orientation from top to bottom along the torso.  The tendency of this muscle to bulge pops into mind easily from there.  Then the student can learn about the transversus abdominis and its orientation across the torso.  Picturing this muscle stretched out from side to side, smoothing the surface and containing the underlying tissues and organs enables a connection between the feeling of flatness and the thing itself. On a metaphorical level, the student can imagine the abdominals as a rubber band stretched from hip bone to hip bone, continuing the theme of activity across the abdomen rather than up and down the abdomen.  A third imagery approach, sensory imagery, can draw on the previous two images.  As the student uses imagery to guide movement, the instructor can suggest the student pay attention to the sensations in the body during the movement.  Implanting the sensory data related to the movement allows the student to increase proprioception.  In other words, as the student pictures his or her transversus abdominis spread out across the abdomen, the instructor can indicate with touch or with words the location of the activity so the student can make the connection between the body and the mind.

     

Similarly, when it comes to disassociation of the hips, the same kinds of imagery can improve dynamic alignment in this exercise.  Visualizing the pelvis with its paired crests and spines and the balls of the femurs planted in the hip sockets serves to orient the student to the body territory.  Adding the metaphorical image of the pelvis floating on femur balls made of balloons or the familiar image of the bowl of water tipping as the pelvis moves in each direction activates the connection between the body and mind.  Sensory imagery, including, perhaps, the student finding the body landmarks with his or her hands or concentrating on the relations of those landmarks to each other in space at the different phases of the motion, can further  increase the understanding and performance of proper alignment during the movement.

     

Finally, imagery can facilitate the organization and alignment of the lower extremities.  A quick imagery tour of the leg bones and their spiral motion due to their structure in particular can open the understanding of what happens as the legs internally and externally rotate during leg circles, for example.  The metaphorical image of the legs zipping together provides a way to encourage the legs to stay in touch with the center of the body.  The sensory imagery of smooth circles rather than jerky polygons experienced both kinesthetically and visually adds another layer to the connection between the body and the mind’s dynamic awareness of alignment.

     

These are only a handful of possibilities for using imagery to facilitate aspects of this exercise.  Different instructors and different students create and benefit from their own unique imagery blends, all working toward the same ideal dynamic alignment.

(The picture is Amelia Bloomer, the reformer for whom I have named my Pilates reformer.  Hooray for pants for women!)

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!