Monday Workout: Simple

Sometimes simple is good.  Nothing fancy this time, but still plenty of work!  Three rounds.

 

 

step ups	30
flies	20
lateral raise	10
jacks	30
renegade rows	20
pushups	10
woodchoppers	30
bench press	20
pretty princesses	10

The Amazing Stickie and Pelvic Clock

Today the Amazing Stickie is working on her Pilates exercises.  One of her favorites is one of the simplest because it increases her proprioception, helps her maintain a neutral spine in her daily life, and releases any tension she has from prolonged sitting.  She’s demonstrating the pelvic clock.

She begins by lying down on her back, arms at her sides, knees bent so that her feet are flat on the floor.  It is hard to see in the picture, but her spine is maintaining its natural curve in the starting position.  That means that there is a little bit of space between her lower back and the floor, enough for a ladybug to crawl through like a tunnel, but not enough for a badger.  (No, I don’t know why ladybugs or badgers would want to crawl under Stickie’s back.)

 

Stickie is going to do three variations of this exercise, but there are certainly more out there and she encourages everyone to experiment.

 

First, she is going to rock her pelvis up and down her body.  As Stickie exhales, she uses her abdominals to tilt her pelvis back toward her belly button.  (This presses her lower back into the floor and would squish our ladybug friend.)  Then she inhales and tilts her pelvis forward toward her pubic bone.  Working with the breath on this exercise is very useful.  She keeps the movement small to minimize the engagement of her powerful thigh muscles.

 

After several reps, Stickie shifts her attention to moving her pelvis from side to side.  When she does this, she tries to maintain the distance between her ribcage and her pelvis.  She knows that many of us, when we shift our weight from one side of our pelvis to the other, tend to hike our hip up toward our ribcage.  This might look slightly sexier, but does not help.  We want to be using our obliques to practice keeping our pelvis level even as we press one hip bone and then the other into the ground.

 

Then Stickie combines both movements.  She makes pelvic circles by pressing first her belly button, then one hip, then her pubic bone, then the other hip toward the floor.  Some people do this by envisioning a clock lying on their pelvises and pressing down the various numbers (thus the name of the exercise).  Alternatively, Stickie can imagine that she has a shallow bowl of water on her belly and she is swirling the water around.  Of course, she makes circles in both directions.

 

After she is done, her lower back often feels much nicer.

Why, yes, I AM the funglepress champion of the world

Yesterday I talked a little about montages.  They’re awesome, right?  But in real life, how do we see our progress?

In small steps.  Most of them go forward, but not all of them.

 

With our cardio workouts, we don’t want to increase our time by more than about 10 percent per week.  If that’s too mathy, we can just add a minute a week until we get to our target time.  When we want to increase our intensity, our best choice is to add in a minute of high intensity here and there, either by going faster or adding incline or resistance. 

 

With weights, we want to choose a weight that barely allows us to complete a set of reps.  When completing the set isn’t hard anymore, we increase the weight and see how many reps we can do with good form, even if that is fewer than we were doing before.  For example, let’s say we start doing funglepresses (yes, I made that up so no one has any judgy opinions about the exercise) with 5 pound weights.  After a couple workouts, it's easy to complete ten reps.  We trade our 5s in for 8s, but now we can only do six good-looking reps.  Over the next weeks, we work up to ten reps with the 8s.  When we switch to 10s, we have to drop back to four reps.  And so on until we are eventually, 25 years later, doing our funglepresses with 3 tons.

 

In either scenario, cardio or weights, we will have days when we need to back off.  Maybe the baby kept us up all night and all we can manage is five minutes of random stumbling on the treadmill.  Or we foolishly offered to help our friend move and all her furniture is solid oak, so we’re lucky to complete a single funglepress with 3 pound weights.  This is all part of the process.  Stuff happens.  We listen to our bodies and we do the right amount of work for this day.

 

Go play.

Not just the eye of the tiger...

We all love a good fitness montage.  Think about, say, any Rocky movie.  There’s always a series of clips of Rocky working out in various weird ways with an inspiring sound track and five minutes later he’s ready to have that big match.  (Also applies to the Creed movies I’ve seen, but I haven’t seen the last one.  I’m going to guess it still works.)

Sadly, here in real life, we don’t get fit by montage.  (Neither do we get to travel by map, as they do in The Muppets, but I digress.)  We get fit by showing up over and over again and getting sweaty.  The good news is that we can have any kind of inspiring soundtrack we want!

 

Go put on some Survivor and lift, kids.

Monday Workout: Bound!

Jumping makes everything both more fun and more challenging.  Not jumping is also good, if jumping is not appropriate.  Three rounds.

 

kb alternate arm swing	30
kb hammer curls	20
kb pushups	10
lateral bound/lateral lunge	30
bench press	20
truck driver	10
clean and press	30
rows	20
plank	10

The Amazing Stickie and Kettlebell Halo

The Amazing Stickie was thrilled to learn about another thing to do with her kettlebells!  Today she is doing the kettlebell halo.

She begins standing with good posture holding a kettlebell with both hands in front of her chest.  She circles the kettlebell around behind her head and back to the starting position while maintaining a neutral spine (and not bonking herself in the back of the head with a kettlebell, natch).  Five circles in each direction is good.

 

Variation:  this exercise can be done in a tall kneeling position or in a lunge position for extra fun.

Systematically unsystematic

I love systems.  And office supplies.  I have never met a planning system with color coding that I didn’t think I could use to transform my life.  And yet, here I am, mostly untransformed.

 

The thing about systems is that they want things to fit.  Tasks need to be categorized.  Hours need to be accounted for.  Nothing must be wasted.

 

Life, on the other hand, doesn’t care if stuff fits.  (This is why lycra was invented.)  No matter how carefully we write our workout on the calendar in the correct color of pen, life can still say, “Hey, but the car is going to break down right then and actually we’re going to spend the day talking to tow people and insurance agents and repair guys.”  We can plan the perfect workout that uses every single muscle group the optimum amount and life can hand us food poisoning instead.

 

I am not saying that we shouldn’t plan.  I’m just saying that we need to understand that life is bigger than our plans.  The world is not going to end if we miss one workout, or even if we write it on the chart in the wrong color.  If we end up getting in our steps pacing the hospital corridors while we wait to hear about a loved one’s test results, that still counts.  If someone offers us a spontaneous hike to see waterfalls, we don’t need to say no because we were planning on lifting weights right then.

 

The system is not important.  We are important.  When the system doesn’t serve us, we need to ignore it.

 

Go play.