Not the Easy Way

Some portion of us got up Monday morning, took a look at the scale, and went into Vengeful God(dess) mode.  Now that it is Tuesday, we’re tired from all that frenetic exercising and we’re not feeling better or thinner or lighter.

 

May I suggest a different approach (and maybe theology, although that is well outside my area of expertise)?  How about some love?

 

When we treat ourselves with love, even when we make less than optimal decisions, we are much more likely to succeed and we’re definitely going to be happier.  Starting from love helps us begin right now—we can’t change the past, so yelling and carrying on about it is not going to make a difference.  Love is a forward-looking thing that can envision our better selves.  It encourages us to take steps, even hard steps, to move toward our ideals.  (Note:  ideals, in this context, have little to do with the weird body-image messages we get from our culture and advertising, but everything to do with our personal values for health, beauty, and happiness.)

 

Starting from love, we recognize that we have time to make incremental changes, ones we can live with in the long term.  We are able to balance our long-term need to build good habits with our short-term need not to croak over dead while working out.  We can gently remind ourselves, as if we were our favorite toddler, that while cookies are delicious, we do also need to eat the occasional vegetable.

 

Perhaps what I am trying to say is that we’re not letting ourselves off easy when we begin from love.  We are giving ourselves a reason to choose the best options, which will sometimes be pie and more often sweaty breathlessness.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Oblique

This week we’re working some obliques with cross-body movements.  These are good for stability.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
rows	20
curls	10
squat to leg lift	30
deadlifts	20
pushups	10
overhead high knees	30
lunges	20
Russian twist	10

 

Grateful!

It’s time for the annual gratitude list, focusing on fitness things.  Here are ten things I am thankful for:

 

1.     My body.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but it is one amazing gizmo.  It breathes!  It moves!  It lets me experience the world!

2.     Food.  I have plenty of access to healthy and nourishing food.  Also, food is tasty and makes me happy.

3.     Clean water.  So much of the world does not have access to reliable, clean water.  I can stay hydrated, cook food, and even get clean!

4.     Health care.  This could be several gratitude items, but the one that is top of mind right now, not surprisingly, is vaccinations.  Not only do I not have COVID, I also do not have polio or measles or chicken pox or smallpox or diptheria.  My children did not die when they were small from preventable diseases.

5.     Outside.  Walking, hiking, swimming, and biking out in the world are joys in my fitness life.  Nature is beautiful and restorative.

6.     Spin bike.  Or as I often call it, the Magic Mood Machine.  Cardio in general is good for moods, but my spin bike in particular is excellent.

7.     Uncle Joe.  Pilates, that is.  He created a system that makes my body feel so much better.

8.     Uncle Patanjali.  He’s the author of one of the basic yoga texts.  Yoga helps address the challenges my mind and body present.

9.     Weights.  They make me stronger and they do not mind when I take my bad moods out on them.

10.  Getting to work with wonderful clients.  I am very very lucky to work with such strong, funny, smart humans.

 

What are yours?

How to Modify

Workouts are not one-size-fits-all.  I mean, I’m not going to try to do a marathoner’s workout because I like continuing to breathe and I’m not going to get what I need from a workout geared toward someone who has been bedridden for the last year.  That part is obvious.  However, even workouts that are designed for people with more or less our level of fitness may need modifications to be right for the individuals we are.  Here are some ways to customize the exercises to make them optimal for us.

 

If we have an injury, current or chronic:  we may need to make some substitutions.  Folks with bad knees will want to avoid jumping.  People who have recently given birth may also prefer non-impact exercises to avoid leakage.  Those of us who are older and may have bone density issues will want to avoid spinal flexion.  These are only a few examples, but the basic principle is that if it hurts, don’t do it.

 

If the workout is too hard:  we have some choices to make, depending on how it is too hard.  If we are too out of breath, we need to tone down the cardio by moving slower, moving smaller, or resting more.  This is another place where lower- or no-impact exercises can help.  If our muscles can’t cope with the load, we can, obviously, use smaller weights, but we can also do fewer repetitions.  Also, there are many ways to work the same muscle groups.  If, for example, a renegade row is too challenging, we can do a bent-over row instead.

 

If the workout is too easy:  we can increase the challenge.  From a cardio standpoint, if we want more challenge, the easiest way to do that is to add jumping.  Plain squats become jump squats.  Step ups become jump ups.  It is also possible to increase the cardio aspect of a workout by making movements bigger.  This is the cardio difference between overhead presses and clean and presses.  Heavier weights can also add more cardio to the mix.  And there are always cardio intervals:  throw in a minute of jump rope or a quick sprint on the treadmill between sets of weights for cardio fun.  The solution if the weight part is too easy is not always just throwing more weight at ourselves, although that does often do the trick.  It depends on what our goals are.  Many of us may find that we get the challenge we want from doing more compound exercises and fewer isolation exercises (lunge to curl versus bicep curl, for example).  In general, when we increase weight, we want to reduce the number of repetitions until we get used to the new weight.  Then when the new weight gets easy, we add reps, alternating our way upward to greatness.

 

If we really really hate a particular exercise, most of the time we don’t have to do that one.  There are a lot of exercises out there and we can usually find a different way to attack the same problem.  There are very few things we just have to suck up; this is a good thing.

 

Ultimately, I encourage everyone to experiment and see what works.  As we work out more, we will need to continue to experiment as our capabilities expand.

 

Go play. 

(Not) Crunch Time

There are a fair number of misconceptions floating around out there about what our core muscles are and what they do and how we are supposed to work them.  I could write a very long post about that, but none of us has that kind of attention span.  Instead, I’m going to focus on one that I really dislike:  we can flatten our stomachs by doing crunches.  It’s a particularly sneaky misconception in that it is not entirely false, but definitely misleading. 

 

First of all, we cannot out-crunch a bad diet.  Doing a thousand crunches a day (and who has that kind of time?) will not help if we are living on Snickers bars and gravy.  The biggest step we can make toward a flatter stomach, if that is one of our goals, is to begin or recommit to healthy eating.

 

Second, crunches are not a good exercise for everyone.  Anyone with bone loss should avoid exercises with flexion (curving the spine forward, like we do when we bend over to tie our shoes).  Crunches can be challenging for people with low back pain as well.

 

Then there is the whole issue of form in crunches.  When we put our hands behind our heads and use our arms to yank our skulls forward, we are not getting the optimum bang for our exercise buck.  I teach crunches (which are called “chest lifts” in Pilates) very differently than many of us learned back in our P.E. days.  Yes, we put our hands behind our heads, but the only reason our heads lift when we do chest lifts is because they are attached to the top of our spines.  Instead, we focus on pulling our breast bones down toward our feet.  This focuses the work on the area of the abdominals just below where those of us who identify as female have our bra straps in the front.  Additionally, when we try to force ourselves up too high, our abdominals tend to puff out in the area between our navels and pubic bones.  It is important to take a moment to think about spreading the lower abdominals out across our bodies to encourage them to stay flat as we work them.  We also need to work with our breath when doing crunches:  we want to exhale as we curl up and inhale as we return to the starting position to allow for best recruitment of muscles.

 

Finally, crunches tend to focus on the upper abdominals.  We need a more comprehensive approach to our abdominals to assist our goal of flattening the stomach.  I suggest, at the very least, adding an exercise like femur arcs to target the lower abdominals and one like brains to recruit the obliques.

 

Let’s be effective.

Monday Workout: Core

This week we’re continuing to work on exercises with a sneaky commitment to our core and balance.  When we do asymmetric exercises, our bodies have to work harder to stabilize, which is good for us.  Also, we are remembering that our core muscles are not just in the front of our bodies—those reverse flies help us learn to recruit the core muscles in the back.  Three rounds.

 

(jump) squats	30
flies	20
1 leg deadlift	10
mountain climbers	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
1 arm clean and press	30
reverse flies	20
pretty princesses	10

On Balance

Balance is both a talent and a skill.  I can’t help the talent part, but here are some exercises to practice to build it as a skill.  (Note:  safety is key.  Have something nearby to hold if needed.)

 

1.     Stand on one foot.  Basic, I know.  A good time to do this is while brushing our teeth in the morning, since we are standing there anyway.

2.     Play one-leg catch.  We need a friend for this one and a soft ball.  I use a Koosh ball.  Both of us stand on one leg and toss the ball back and forth.  Then we switch legs.  This is more difficult than just standing on one leg because we’ve added movement and coordination to the mix.

3.     Do calf raises.  Stand with feet hip distance apart and rise up on the toes and come back down.  When that gets easy, try doing it on one leg at a time.

4.     Do single leg squats.  This is the opposite of a calf raise.  Stand on one foot and bend and straighten the knee of the standing leg.

5.     Do single leg dumbbell passes.  Stand on one leg holding a light dumbbell or kettle bell (start with 3 or 5 pounds).  Pass the weight from one hand to the other around the body five times in one direction and five times in the other direction.  Then repeat on the other leg.

6.     Do single leg deadlifts.  I call these drinking birds, after the toy.  Stand on one leg and bend the torso forward as the other leg lifts up behind.  Return to start and repeat five or ten times; then do the other leg.

 

For all of these exercises, make sure that the abs stay engaged.

 

Go play.