What to do: some principles

When we show up at the gym, it can be hard to decide what to do with all the cool stuff.  Here are a couple of things to think about when we pick up the weights:

 

1.     If you push it, also pull it.  Some people get all into bench press, for example, and get super strong chests, but don’t ever do any rows, so their backs are out of balance.

2.     Work both ends.  Some of us love upper body exercises and some of us love lower body exercises.  We need both, so sometimes we just have to suck it up and get through the ones we don’t love.

3.     Pay attention to the core.  On all sides.  Again, we know a lot about stuff like crunches, but the core goes all the way around the body, so we need to work those lower back muscles and those oblique abs as well.

4.     Put it all together.  As I said earlier this week, it is rare that we use just one muscle, all by itself, in real life.  We need to teach our muscles to cooperate and coordinate, so doing compound exercises like deadlifts, squats, woodchoppers, burpees, and the like help keep us functional.

 

Go play.

Options and an opinion

Assuming that folks don’t want to try anything actually dangerous, I’m completely in favor of experimenting with workouts.  There’s a lot of wiggle room for how to get our workouts done once basic safety is dealt with.  However, I do have preferences and reasons for them.

 

I do workouts in this order:  cardio, weights, flexibility/mindfulness.

 

Here’s the reasoning.  When we begin a workout, we need to warm up.  Cardio is the perfect way to do that.  So we start with some slow jogging before a run, a couple of easy laps before a more intense swim, and the like.  We finish our cardio workout all warmed up for our weight workout!  Hooray!  We lift, lift, lift with those nice warm muscles.  Then, when we’re good and tired, we approach the flexibility and mindfulness stuff.  Now a whole bunch of people want to stretch first, before cardio, before everything.  This is not how I do it for two reasons.  One is that our muscles stretch better after they are warmed up.  Doing flexibility at the end ensures that we don’t pull a hammie stretching that hammie.  The other is a little more academic:  science suggests that stretching before lifting weights has a slight negative effect on how much weight we can lift.  For most of us who are not competing in weight lifting events, this is probably not all that important, but I know that we all feel better when we lift better, so we might as well save the flexibility for the end.

 

All that said, it is always worth trying things another way.  If we really need to prioritize our weights, we can do a brief warm-up and get the weights done first.  If we don’t need to do cardio on a particular day, we can head straight to yoga (any competent teacher will ensure that there is a warm-up built into the class).  Maybe we need to center our minds before we can even consider facing the elliptical machine.  We can try all the options.

Or maybe I'm just weird...

When we lift weights, our muscles do three kinds of contractions:  concentric, isometric, and eccentric (that last one is pronounced EE-centric, not Ek-centric, which pains my English major self, but there it is.).

 

The concentric contraction is the one we usually think about:  the lift itself where we are working against gravity.  The isometric one is the part where we’re holding still at the beginning or end of the lift.  We are using just enough force to keep the weight from falling, but not enough to lift it farther.

 

The one I am interested in today is the eccentric one (and not just because I aspire to eccentricity as a character trait).  The eccentric contraction is the lowering phase where we return the weight to its starting position.  Now it is perfectly possible, though rarely desirable, to get to the top of the lift and let go, allowing gravity to do the work of lowering for us.  This often creates a very loud noise and sometimes dents the floor or any toes that happen to get in the way.  It also does nothing to build our strength.  However, if we focus on lowering the weight slooooooowwwwwwly back to the starting position, we do a lot more for our peak strength and we get bonus points for working our stabilizing muscles extra.  This contributes to good form as well.

 

How does it work in practice?  Let’s say we’re doing bench press.  There we are, on the bench, our dumbbells at our chest.  Keeping them from falling to the floor is an isometric contraction.  We take a breath in, exhale, and push the dumbbells up toward the ceiling for a count of one:  the concentric contraction.  Whatever time we spend with the weights up there is another isometric contraction, usually about another count of one.  Then, if we are emphasizing the eccentric contraction, we lower the weights slowly and with control for a count of four.  Yes, it takes mindfulness and a lot more work; I’m not sorry.  The same 1-1-4 count can be applied to any exercise we want.

 

Try it!

Monday Workout: Compound

I am a little obsessed with compound exercises, which are pretty much the opposite of what all those weight machines at the gym do.  Compound exercises use lots of muscles and move lots of joints, so they are more challenging, more metabolism-boosting, and more like real life, where we rarely just use our biceps or our hamstrings all by themselves.  However, please adapt to YOUR body—if your knees can’t do lunges, do the curls alone, for example.  Three rounds.

 

kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb overyets	10
woodchoppers	30
lunge to curl	20
renegade row	10
squat to leg lift	30
1 leg deadlift	20
pretty princesses	10

Nosy!

I ask my clients all kinds of nosy questions when we start working together (not that I necessarily stop after that, but eventually they get used to me…), but I do it to help me figure out how to make their workouts better for them.  In the spirit of DIY, here are a few of those questions and why I ask them so others can play along at home.

 

1.     What do you do now for exercise?  This gives me an idea of what the person in front of me likes to do and where we are starting from.  If they run marathons for fun and climb mountains every Thursday, I will design a very different workout than I will for someone who tells me they walk to the kitchen from the couch during commercials.  It also gives me a hint or two about where they might need to be encouraged—someone who lifts weights every day but never ever stretches might need a little help with flexibility.

2.     What have you done in the past?  This question allows people to remember that back in the day they really loved rollerblading or basketball or flamenco.  That can spark some interest.  It also lets me know what their bodies remember doing, which helps me know what skills I can build on.

3.     What do you like to do?  Notice that this is not the first question.  When I ask it first, I generally hear, “Nothing.”  The other benefits of this question are pretty obvious:  I want to design workouts that my clients don’t hate and sneak in the stuff that they don’t love but need to do anyway.  And even if they answer me with totally non-fitness-related stuff, I know what is important to them, which helps me know how to motivate them.

 

It is rare that the answers I get from asking these questions stick to the topic.  I usually get a lot more information about what they really hate, how many kids or grandkids they have, when the busy times of day or week or month are for them, how they broke their arm in third grade, and all kinds of other stuff.  This is important work.  I don’t work out with bodies; I work out with humans who have needs to meet, tastes to consider, and hearts to make happy.

Basic and fancy

While I firmly believe that variety is one of the keys to success in fitness, I also firmly believe that it is key to have some basic plans as go-tos.  This is not unlike meal planning for a family.  We all have staples like flour and salt and sugar and pantry basics like pasta and rice.  Most of us have at least one emergency meal ready to pull out at a moment’s notice—spaghetti night often happens this way at my house.  (Yes, there is also the call-the-pizza-man method, which definitely has a place, but should not be relied on as a major source of nutrition.)

 

Our fitness staples are our basic cardio, weight, and flexibility exercises that we can do pretty much no matter what.  They might be walking, body weight squats, and forward bends, for example.  The pantry basics are what we get from those staples:  a 30-minute interval run, twenty minutes of squats and pushups, a few sun salutations and five minutes of meditation.  Then we can spice things up with our trips to the fitness grocery store or farmer’s market—we do a little Zumba one day, hit the machines at the gym, do a heavy weight workout, or take a different Pilates class.  We have the basics so we don’t starve; we have the other stuff so we can enjoy eating.

 

No surprise:  I vote for both.

Sadly, the cake is metaphorical...

In high school, I was blessed to have a Czechoslovakian French teacher (yes, I went to high school a long time ago, before the Czech Republic and Slovakia were things).  Whenever somebody used a particularly stuffy phrase, he would call it a “five-dollar word” and then ask what we meant.  Unpacking five-dollar words is a very educational experience and I ended up learning a lot about English as well as French.  Today’s five-dollar word is synergy.  It is one of those words that gets used all the time in flavor-of-the-month business concepts where management is trying to disguise the fact that they really just want everyone who doesn’t want to be “downsized” or “outsourced” to work harder for longer for less money—“We need to work synergistically across departments…”  This has given the word a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve.

 

Synergy is when multiple things interact to have a greater effect than we expect.  Kind of like cake:  eggs, flour, sugar, butter and then suddenly a taste celebration!

 

Eventually, I will get to the point.  Which is:  we want to do different kinds of workouts because we get a synergy going.

 

On a basic level, this means that when we do cardio, we make our weight workouts better and vice versa.  Our work on flexibility improves our performance in other areas.  However, that’s not the whole story.  When we combine things like Pilates with our weight workouts, we create results we could not expect—the precision of Pilates and the way it builds connections between our brains and our muscles helps us lift weights with better efficiency and form, while lifting those weights improves our strength to execute the Pilates exercises.  Additionally, by mixing up what we do, we keep our bodies slightly confused, which is a precondition for growth.  But wait!  There’s more!  Working out in a variety of ways helps us prevent overuse injuries since running is not the same as swimming is not the same as yoga is not the same as biking is not the same as lifting weights.

 

I particularly like the results of fun cardio plus weights plus Pilates and/or yoga because that gives us everything we need to burn calories, improve metabolism, boost mood, get flexible, strengthen our muscles, and relax our bodies and minds, but I always encourage experimentation.

 

Go play.  A bunch of ways.