Choose hard

I’m wearing my Captain Obvious cape this morning, at least to start:  workouts can be hard.  This is pretty much the basis of my career.  If workouts were easy, no one would need me.

The thing is, not working out is also hard, just in a different way.  I tend to focus on the positive, but for a moment, I’m going to talk about what happens to us when we choose to avoid all the workouts.  When we don’t exercise, we find that stairs become more challenging.  We get tired and out of breath faster.  We lose muscle tone.  Jar lids defeat us.  Carrying the groceries gets harder.  We may lose our balance more often.  It even gets harder to pick up our socks from the floor.  And that’s just the direct physical stuff.

 

We may find that it is harder to manage our moods and our stress levels.  Our brains might feel a bit fuzzier.  We may not like how we feel or how we look.

 

Healthy bodies come in many, many shapes, so this is not intended in any way to be fat-shaming, but when we don’t exercise, we may find that it is harder to stay at the same weight.  This can be inconvenient, unless we have an unlimited budget for clothes.

 

A lot of things in life are hard.  This is unfortunate, but true.  The good news is that we can choose, in some cases, what kind of hard.  Working out is one of the hard things that, I think, is worth the trouble.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: More Balance

I really like balance exercises.  They’re practical and challenging.  So we get single leg deadlifts this week.  Three rounds.

 

squat to leg lift	30
1 leg deadlift	20
truck driver	10
1 arm clean and press	30
flies	20
lateral raise	10
jacks	30
bench press	20
femur arcs	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Front Raise

The Amazing Stickie, as we all know by now, loves a challenging exercise.  Today she is demonstrating the front raise.

She begins standing in her usual fabulous posture.  She holds some light weights out directly in front of her in what she likes to call the zombie position.  Then she raises the weights over her head until her upper arms are next to her ears.  She lowers back down to the starting position.

 

Stickie would like to remind us that it is important to keep good posture throughout.  Sometimes it can be hard to keep from arching the back while raising the arms.  It is always a good idea to keep the shoulders down out of our ears no matter what our arms are doing.

 

Because this exercise challenges the front part of the deltoids, Stickie likes to work in sets of ten to avoid listening to them complain too much.

Odious!

One of my clients, while she was working out with me, was chatting about a friend of hers whose workout routine is a weekly Pilates class and some walking.  My client was wondering if that could possibly be enough exercise.

I’m not going to answer that question, at least not right away, because there’s a much more important issue here.

 

We have to stop comparing.

 

We have to stop comparing our workouts to other people’s.  We have to stop comparing our performance to the person next to us in class.  We have to stop comparing what we are doing today to what we were doing when we were twenty or what we did last week.  We have to stop comparing our bodies to media images, to our ex-partners’ new flames, to professional athletes, to our own younger selves.

 

John Lydgate, around 1440, phrased it this way:  "Odyous of olde been comparisonis, And of comparisonis engendyrd is haterede."  Or, in plainer, more modern English:  Comparisons are odious.

 

What we need to do instead is to be present.  We need to work out in the now, with today’s body, however that happens to be.  It is not possible to work out with our past body or our future body, and it’s even less possible to work out with someone else’s body.  So:  let’s mind our own business and get sweaty.

 

Now:  to the question of how much exercise is enough.  It depends.  It depends on our age, ability, fitness level, injury history, health status, hydration level, past experience, and a whole bunch of other factors.  Most of us, as a general rule, want to aim for about 150 minutes of cardio a week, a weight workout or two, and some kind of flexibility and balance work, but that is purely a starting point for the usual experimentation I recommend to figure out our own perfect blend of activity.

Get up and go!

In response to one of last week’s posts about pain, a friend asked about how to deal with the pain of getting out of bed and doing a morning workout, so that’s what I’m going to talk about today. 

Let’s get the bad news out of the way:  there is no one right answer to this question.  Most likely it will take a fair amount of experimentation to find the solution that is right for each individual.  The good news is that experiments can be undertaken in a spirit of fun, like:  “I wonder what I’m going to get up to today with this?”

 

With that in mind, here are some questions to ask to guide our experiments:

 

Does the workout really have to be in the morning?  For some of us, the answer is yes, because we have very full lives and that’s the only time we can get some time to ourselves.  But if the comfy bed wins every single time, we might want to figure out if there is another time that works better for us, even if we have to get creative about it.  Lunch time is a reasonable time to work out for some of us.  Maybe it’s easier to say no to another episode of that really great show in the evening than it is to force ourselves out of the blankets in the morning.

 

Are we getting enough sleep?  Health is a holistic thing.  (I am allowed to use that word because I lived in Berkeley for 20 years.)  Working out is only one part of our total health.  If we are struggling to get up and work out, it might be because we are actually worn out.  Committing to getting enough sleep might be a good first step toward achieving that morning workout.

 

Are we excited about what we get to do at the gym?  (Or the pool, or the dance studio, or the ski slope, or whatever.)  There is very little in the world that could induce me to get up early to run.  I hate running.  But tell me I get to ride my bike and I’m ready to go!  Finding that perfect activity can mean trying a bunch of different stuff, but it is worth it.  One caveat:  sometimes we are going to have to do workouts we don’t love so much.  Yoga people sometimes have to do cardio.  Runners sometimes need to lift a weight or two.  But if we can make more of our workouts ones we love to do, we often find it easier to deal with the ones that are just good for us rather than fun.

 

Do we have to do it alone?  Friends and accountability partners can make all the difference in our ability to show up.  Maybe I don’t really feel like lifting weights, but I do feel like seeing my buddy and chatting, and we might as well lift while we do that.  It may take a while to find the right buddy.  It’s frustrating when we want to work out with someone who keeps flaking on us.  This is a place where classes come in handy:  it is unlikely that the entire class is going to flake out, so we will have somebody to play with!

 

Why are we doing this, anyway?  I know it’s not easy to face existential questions first thing in the morning, so maybe we figure this out at some time of day when our brains are really working well.  Then we remind ourselves about the reasons we want to work out when we’re debating the relative merits of staying under the blankets and putting on our tennies.  We have to find real reasons, even if they’re embarrassing.  Our fake-virtuous resolve to treat our body like a temple is not going to win over the really comfy pillow, but our honest desire to rock the bikini on the beach might do it.  (One of my personal reasons is that I always feel better afterward.  Always.)  It can be tempting to answer the why questions with intellect alone:  it’s good for us, we don’t want to die, we got a lecture from the doctor, blah blah blah.  What really gets us out of bed is emotion:  I want to be strong, I want to feel good, I want better sex, I want the joy of playing with my kids or grandkids, I feel light when I ride my bike.

 

I’m sure these are not all the possible questions, but they should give us a place to start.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Balance

I wanted to work on balance this week, so we all get to do single leg squat.  Three rounds. 

step ups	30
pushups	20
1 leg squats	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
reverse lunge twist	30
rows	20
brains	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Single Leg Deadlift Rows

The Amazing Stickie loves a challenge.  Today she is working her upper body while also working on balance by doing single leg deadlift rows.

She begins in the single leg deadlift position:  she stands on one leg with her other leg stretched out behind her parallel to the floor while her torso is also parallel to the floor.  She has a pair of fairly light dumbbells in her hands, which are hanging down to the floor.

 

Keeping the rest of her body still, Stickie bends her elbows and lifts the dumbbells toward her armpits.  She feels her shoulder blades move together toward the center of her back.  Then she lowers the dumbbells back to their starting position.  She keeps her abdominals engaged the entire time because they keep her from falling over.

 

Sets of five on a side are a good place to start.