Uncle Joe wants you to stand up straight.

Good posture is not a particularly sexy idea.  The cool kids slouch.  We curl up in comfy chairs.  We hunch over our desks.  And it isn’t good for us.

 

Uncle Joe (Pilates, that is) encourages us to buck this trend.  This is only partly because he was obsessed with breathing.  When we don’t have good alignment in our bodies, we can’t breathe as well, which affects everything from our cognitive function to our energy levels.

 

Another reason Uncle Joe wants us to get ourselves in line has to do with efficiency.  He was all about efficient movement and that starts with having correct length-tension relationships in our muscles.  What the heck are length-tension relationships?  Our muscles have an optimal default length when they are not contracting.  When they contract, or shorten, they move our bones.  If our muscles are too tense or too slack to begin with, they can’t exert as much force and we don’t move as well, as much, or as efficiently.  We end up doing a lot more work.

 

Good posture helps protect us from overuse injuries.  When we get out of alignment, our parts wear out faster (just like tires on a car!).

 

If all of that is too high-minded to be motivational, here’s one more reason to acquire good posture:  we’ll look thinner.

 

We can do it!

No stressed-out corpses

Lately a lot of people I talk with seem to feel overwhelmed.  Maybe it is cumulative exhaustion from more than a year’s worth of pandemic.  Maybe it is the relief that is starting to come from the better news about vaccines.  Even good change is stressful.

 

So when we get to our workouts, we need to begin slowly and we need to be patient.  I admit, this is not my favorite way of being in the world.  I love to jump right in and try to do all of it Right Now.  Except that doesn’t work for fitness.  Fitness works best when we build it as a habit, so we need to make sustainable habits.

 

Starting slowly might mean choosing a ridiculously easy goal, like maybe walking for five minutes a day.  Once we have that habit, we definitely want to build on it, but we have to be careful not to get into the mindset of more-is-better.

 

Let me digress for a moment:  I have and wear an Apple Watch to track my movement and exercise and standing (I don’t care that much if I stand up in 12 different hours during the day, but it’s part of the package, so I do it.)  I call it my Wristy Overlord because it is always telling me what to do and God forbid that I should end a day without completing my circles!  The Wristy Overlord, when it sees that I have met my movement goal all week, tries to get me to agree to a higher movement goal for the following week.  It wants me to get on the endless upward staircase to failure, because at some point, I won’t be able to meet the increased goal.  Every week, I talk back to the Wristy Overlord and tell him that I have set my goals at my minimum acceptable levels ON PURPOSE because I know when I’m going above and beyond; what I need to know is whether I have done just enough or not.

 

Whether there is a Wristy Overlord involved or not, we all feel a certain amount of pressure to achieve more, faster, and better.  This can cause us to push ourselves beyond what is desirable.  We do not want to be very fit stressed-out corpses.  We want to be happy human beings.  It is true that we sometimes have to do unpleasant things to be healthier, but we want to strike the right balance between what we need to do and what we like to do.

 

Go play.  The right amount.

Monday Workout: Ouch!

We don’t do hamstring curls that often because it is rare that we use our hamstrings all by themselves.  They don’t like it; they are cooperators by nature and they complain a lot when we do hamstring curls.  (I am a truth-teller:  hamstring curls hurt, but they’re supposed to; you will not be damaged, but you may want to call me some colorful names.)  All that said, every once in a while we need to do them because they help protect and/or strengthen our knees.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
squats	20
pushups	10
plank jacks	30
renegade rows	20
hamstring curls	10
overhead curtsey	30
1 leg deadlift	20
Russian twist	10

Five

We all have our favorite workout tools and toys.  Here are some of mine:

 

1.     The right water container.  Mine happens to be a travel cup I was gifted at Burning Man, but I’ve had other favorite cups and bottles before.  This one is insulated, red, and the right size.

2.     The right music.  This varies from day to day, so I am glad that my phone holds so much!  In general, I like loud and fast for spin and mellow and calming for yoga.

3.     Actual workout clothes.  I was a latecomer to the workout clothes thing, but once I realized that wearing workout fabrics instead of whatever old cotton t-shirt was lying around meant that I was not an entirely soggy mess at the end, I was sold.

4.     Protective gear.  For me, that’s wrist and elbow braces and the right shoes (when I’m not doing Pilates or yoga).  When I’m on my outside bike, that means a helmet, too.  Sunscreen, bug spray, hats, and masks also qualify in this category when needed.

5.     Foam rollers and other SMR tools.  They make every workout better because they help me get the kinks out of my muscles.

 

What are yours? 

Mine isn't yours

Sometimes people ask me about my workouts.  I am happy to tell them what I do, but I try very hard to emphasize that MY workout should NOT be their workout.  I am older or younger than whoever is asking.  I have a different injury history.  I have different skills I’ve acquired over my lifetime and my own set of aptitudes.  Heck, I have different stuff on hand to use for my workouts and I definitely have my own preferences.

 

It goes against so much in our culture to avoid comparing what we do to someone else’s deeds.  We have been trained from the start to compare and compete with each other.  (Spoiler alert:  life goes better if we cooperate instead.)  We even compete with ourselves in not-so-healthy ways.  I can only work out with the body I have today.  Sometimes this is good news (I am stronger now than I was in my twenties) and sometimes less good news (I pay more now if I don’t do enough warming up).  It is all right to say that today’s workout was not as hard as yesterday’s or that we want to work a bit heavier tomorrow, but mostly we just want to show up and do our best with what we have available in the moment.

 

Go play.  Your way.

Wiggling is good exercise...

I love making plans.  Plans are like slightly more practical fantasies.  They hold out the promise of achievement and progress and all those seductive words that speak to my Protestant-work-ethic soul.  Do this and be better!

 

What I am learning is that the best plans are not as tidy as my fantasies would prefer them to be.  I—and I will venture to say we—need some wiggle room.  If I say I will get up at 5 every morning and I’ll do my cardio straight after breakfast and then weights and then stretch, I’m not exactly lying, but I’m not going to do exactly that every day.  There will be a day when I forget to set my alarm and don’t wake up anyway.  There will be a day when I have a cold.  There will be the day after a hike that turned into an accidental death march.  It’s a good idea to leave some slack.

 

Maybe my plan is something more like this:  I will do 30 to 60 minutes of cardio in the morning 5 to 7 days a week; I’ll lift weights 2 or 3 times a week; I’ll do yoga as often as possible and for sure on days when I skip the cardio.

 

For this to work, I have to be happy with the minimums and not totally wiped out by the maximums.  Thirty minutes of cardio on five days a week meets the minimum requirements for general health.  Two weight workouts is enough for folks who are not professional athletes.  A guaranteed two days of yoga (assuming I miss two cardio workouts) is a reasonable minimum.  If I hit the maximums and I’m totally trashed, I can adjust the maximums down until I get stronger or fitter or whatever.

 

And (bad news alert!) even the best plan doesn’t work if we don’t actually do the workouts.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Back!

This week we’re thinking about core in a different way.  Most of us think of core exercises as ab exercises, and that is true, but not the whole story.  There are stabilizers in the back of the body, too, as we notice when we have to balance or do asymmetrical exercises.  We’ve got deadlifts to target those back of the body muscles and single arm clean and press and round lunges to practice using all our stabilizers.  And, of course, we have pretty princesses to cover the traditional ab exercises.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
deadlifts	20
Arnold press	10
1 arm clean and press	30
flies	20
round lunges	10
squat to leg lift	30
curls	20
pretty princesses	10