This week we are continuing to work our compound exercises and our balance. Choose weights that are heavy enough that it’s hard but not impossible to complete the number of reps. Three rounds.
1 arm clean and press | 30 |
rows | 20 |
1 leg squat | 10 |
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kb swings | 30 |
kb twists | 20 |
kb 8s | 10 |
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mountain climbers | 30 |
squats | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
This week I’ve been writing about reasons to get in a workout. Here are ten of mine, but we all need to make our own.
1. It improves my mood. I’m a depressive, so I am all about finding ways to cope with that. Cardio is the very best antidepressant I have found. (Please note: this does not mean that any of us should stop taking medication without talking with our doctors. Medications can save lives.)
2. It helps me sleep. Not just me. Research says so. Exercise improves the quantity and quality of our sleep.
3. It makes my brain work better. Exercise helps keep our brains functioning well. Also, it clears out all that hamster-wheel stuff in there.
4. It reduces stress. That thing about clearing the hamster-wheel stuff? That’s stress reduction. And the weights don’t mind if we take our anger and stress out on them the way our family and friends do.
5. It gives me more energy for the other things I want to do. I don’t poop out when I’m exploring a park or a museum or a new neighborhood because I’ve built my endurance during my workouts.
6. It means I can eat fries. Not all the time, but once in a while. No one can out-exercise a truly terrible diet, but working out means that there is a little space for treats.
7. I look better. I like what I look like when my muscles are toned and my posture is better and I’m a healthier weight.
8. I can open jars. My dad was convinced that I would starve to death back before I started lifting weights because I needed him to open stuff for me.
9. It improves my health markers. Exercise is good for reducing cholesterol, improving glucose tolerance, preventing heart disease, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
10. I have come to like it. That was a long road, I admit, but nowadays I look forward to my time with my spin bike or in the pool or around the weights.
Your turn.
Sometimes, no matter how many good reasons we have to work out, we don’t. What we need to do then is figure out how to get the obstacles out of the way.
Practical obstacles are relatively easy to overcome. We can go walk or run for free if the gym is too expensive. There are plenty of body weight exercises we can do if we don’t have a lot of equipment around. Almost all of us can find enough time in the day to work out without stealing from our sleep.
The inner obstacle course can be more difficult. Some of us have been scarred by our previous attempts to exercise—that mean coach in middle school or those girls who laughed at us the first time we circled the track and we felt like we were going to die or that time we broke a leg skiing and we had to hobble around on crutches forever. Some of us hate the whole idea of sweat. Some of us are convinced that hell is one big elliptical trainer or an endless aerobics class. Dealing with negative emotions is hard. In fact, it is harder than any workout. No matter what particular issues we have, we want to go gently. When we treat ourselves with kindness and respect and we set teeny tiny goals that we can nail, we encourage ourselves to keep going. We love ourselves through the tough parts because we know that working out is good for us and will make us feel better in the long run, if not in the actual moment.
Navigating all that stuff can feel overwhelming. This is where a friend or trainer can help—someone to be present for us while we work it through.
I’m here to help.
Even though I mostly enjoy working out, I don’t do it just for fun. This surprises people, who assume that I have no problem motivating myself to work out because I am a Trained Professional. Turns out I am human, too. All of us, me included, work out for our own reasons. There are some people out there who run or lift or whatever because they really love the thing itself, but the rest of us have to find other encouragement to hit the gym.
Some reasons are more effective than others. Research strongly suggests, and my experience confirms, that the best motivations are positive ones. Put another way, if shame, meanness, cultural pressure, fear, and screaming worked, we’d all be thin and fit already. What we need is the connection between our workouts and the things we deeply want in our lives.
Those deep wants don’t have to be actually deep—if we really want to be hot/gorgeous/thin out of personal vanity, that can be super motivating because we can see the link between showing up at the gym and how we look in that bikini. Of course, they can also plumb the very depths of our souls: we can work out to find peace, to live longer and better, to keep up with our kids or grandkids, or to reach the literal mountaintop.
So let’s ask the questions: what do we want and how does that link up to getting today’s workout done?
This week we’re doing some basics and some compound exercises. The idea is to mix things up so our bodies stay a little confused, which helps them adapt. Three rounds.
step ups | 30 |
flies | 20 |
Arnold press | 10 |
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mountain climbers | 30 |
lunge twist | 20 |
curls | 10 |
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squat to leg lift | 30 |
deadlifts | 20 |
Russian twist | 10 |
What counts as exercise? My Wristy Overlord (aka Apple Watch) has one definition, but it is not necessarily the right one. Here are a couple of ways to figure out whether what we are doing is exercise or not:
1. Are we getting sweaty? If we’re not working hard enough to sweat, it’s probably not exercise.
2. Are we getting breathless? This one applies more to cardio and strength training than yoga and other mindfulness-based practices, but it is still a useful indicator. Breathless, in this context, means that we are still capable of speech, but would really have trouble singing.
3. Are we a little sore later? We all have individual pain tolerances, but a good workout will leave us feeling like we did something the next day. If we hate the very idea of stairs, we might have worked a little too hard, but if we can perfectly happily skip up and down them, we might not want to count whatever we did as exercise.
4. Did we learn something new about our bodies in motion? This one applies more to Pilates and its sibling practices. Creating mobility in our joints, figuring out alignment issues, refining our proprioception (five-dollar word for our sense of where our bodies are in space), and improving our balance are all exercises that unite our bodies and minds. It can be very tiring, too.
As always, I am in favor of all kinds of activity, whether they are technically exercise or not, but we do want to ensure that we get some real workouts in. Go play.
Over the last several months, I have been doing what I call my “oilcan” exercises every day. These are the exercises that keep my body parts moving smoothly, little maintenance things that make a surprisingly big difference in how my regular workouts and the rest of my life go.
The practice grew out of work with my clients. Every client has individual needs based on all kinds of things, including injury history. I saw so many folks with knee issues that I just know to tack on a couple of specific exercises at the beginning of those workouts. I don’t have knee issues, but I realized one day (I might have been a little slow on the uptake here, but hey, I eventually figured it out) that I could create the same kind of thing for the parts of my body that were giving me trouble.
It turns out that it takes less than ten minutes to do the five or six things that make my body work better all day. Want to find out what yours are? Poke me!
