Mmmm... bacon!

This week I learned how to use my hamstrings for pedaling a bike.  It was a major epiphany, maybe not as major as figuring out how to create world peace or to eliminate traffic, but major.

Hamstrings are the muscles in the backs of your thighs that complain when you bend over to touch your toes.  They have plenty of reasons to complain.  They get tight from sitting, since they are responsible for flexing your knees, and bored because they help unbend your legs at the hips, which you don’t do much when you are stuck at your desk.  We all love our quadriceps more and tend to focus on working them instead.  Hamstrings feel like Clark Kent to the quadriceps’s Superman.

Strengthening the hamstrings helps with posture.  Strong hamstrings keep your knees safe.  And, when biking for long distances, hamstrings save your quadriceps’ bacon, so to speak; those front-of-the-thigh muscles get awfully worn out and appreciate any other muscle group that might be willing to take over for a while.

Even more important than what I learned was that I learned it.  Fitness is about the brain, too.  Conscious movement strengthens your body’s ability to understand where it is in space.  Your muscles work better when the connections between your nervous system and your muscles are active and quick.  This is why I love to take classes and get personal training sessions—I learn stuff that makes me a better mover.

(And, for those of you who have not already figured out how to use hamstrings in bike pedaling, the key, for me, was thinking about pulling the pedals down from the back of my thighs rather than pushing them down from the front.  Some people find that thinking about leading with their heels or focusing on pulling backwards works the same way.  Go try it out!)

Ukelele optional

I spend a lot of time thinking about abdominal muscles.  (You are now feeling incredibly grateful that you don’t have to live in my brain!)  I also spend more time than most people talking about abdominal muscles.  This is because they are important and because I don’t know that many people who want to talk about football, comic books, poetry, and food.  Almost everyone is willing to talk about abdominals in the same way that everyone loves to discuss stress.  And the two are related!

I’m not talking about stressing out about what our abs look like.  That’s not useful.  Let’s agree not to do it.  We are where we are, we can do amazing things, and we can always improve.

Stress, in life and in the body, often occurs as a result of lack of balance.  It comes from Too Much:  too much work, too much food, too much debt, too much of everything.  Sometimes it comes from Too Little:  too little sleep, too little whiskey… (ok, maybe that one is all right…).  When we lose our center of gravity, we spin out of balance and can crash.  That’s where the abdominals come in.

The abdominals are some of the most important core muscles of the body.  They are responsible for stability.  Keeping them on the job keeps us centered and powerful, able to meet whatever weird stuff comes flying at us.

How to engage them?  Of course there are the usual suspects:  crunches and their cohorts.  Tired of those?  Try hula, swimming, ballet, boxing, or Pilates.  Jump up on the Bosu for your arm work.  Skateboard!  Rollerblade!  Even just let go of the handles on the elliptical trainer or treadmill and notice that you need to keep those abs working.

Also, don’t forget to breathe!

Remember to take the bulb out first...

Weight lifting can be fun.  Maybe not wearing-a-lampshade-on-your-head fun, although I suppose that keeping the lampshade balanced would improve posture while lifting weights, but fun.  Here’s why:

You get to feel like a superhero. Wonder Woman has to practice with that magic lasso to develop the muscle memory to throw it accurately.  Spiderman needs strength as well as sticky feet to climb up those skyscrapers.  It would be a pretty poor rescue if Superman swooped up to catch Lois and didn’t have the arm strength to hold her.  (And maybe if Lois had worked out a bit more, she would have been able to pull herself back over the parapet of that tall building, preventing the need for rescue entirely!)

So your regular life may not require those superhero skills, but you may need to carry the 35-pound sewing box your son made you or a giant pile of packages or the 15 bags of groceries required to feed the family.  If you happen to be getting older (hey, every day we all do!) and you want to be independent, making sure you can squat and stand will allow you to maintain that superhero independence far longer.  I think we would all prefer to be self-rescuing.

You get to look good in your jeans.  Or out of your jeans!  There are a couple of reasons for this.  Weight training increases your lean body mass.  That lean mass burns more calories and takes up less space.  Even thin people can be flabby; training the muscles gives the body the beautiful toned shape we admire in art, fashion, and posters of scantily clad rock stars/models/etc.

You get to try lots of things.  Because we have so many muscles, we get to do lots of different exercises to target the various groups.  If you have a short attention span—hey!  What’s that?—you don’t have to worry because pretty soon you can stop doing squats and move on to hammer curls (or, as I call them, Drumming Monkeys).  There is always something new to try, which is good for your brain as well as your body.

And if the lampshade helps, by all means use it!

It makes you look thinner, too

We are heading into party season, so it is time to talk about… posture.  Next to avoiding weird relatives and exercising care with the potent libations, maintaining good posture may be the one of the best strategies for feeling well the morning after the party.  Good posture helps prevent fatigue, low back pain, and shoulder tension.  It’s also free and easy to practice.

Good posture means standing with your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles in a line.  For many of us, this entails rolling our shoulders back (without puffing the chest forward like a pigeon!).  We are good at shoulders-forward because we do it all day at our desks.  We also need to bring our heads back over our shoulders—no more peering at screens when they aren’t there!

Next, a lot of us allow our lower backs to arch too much.  Engaging our abdominals to pull in our bellies and using our butt muscles to tuck our behinds a little help alleviate low back pain.  If you find that your abs have forgotten how to contract, it is time to remind them with some crunches (good form:  keep abs flat across your body as you curl up so you don’t train your abs too pooch out!).  Leg lifts to the back while keeping your hips forward and square will awaken your rear.  Consider it part of getting ready for the party.

...and sweet potatoes...

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  The directions are simple:  be grateful and eat food.

This is not actually bad advice for fitness, either.  We all have wonderful bodies.  They carry us around, regulate all the processes of life, provide constant messages about the state of the exterior and interior world, and generally enable us to experience all the joys of existence.  Taking a moment to appreciate that wonder can inspire us to give our bodies what they need: good nutrition, enough sleep, plenty of exercise, and love.

Food is not the enemy.  Without food, we die.  Worse, we get crabby.  Good food feeds the soul as well as the body.  Meals build community.  Cooking with real ingredients subverts the dominant paradigm, improves the environment (both immediate and local and global), and enables healthy eating.  Sure, we can overdo the food.  I don’t recommend that for lots of reasons.  But a little pumpkin pie between friends is just fine.

I am grateful for life, for family, friends, turkey, bikes, and light-up shoes.  Make your own list while you walk around the block between turkey bastings!

Why treadmills are better than horror movies

In theory, the point of cardio exercise is to strengthen your heart and improve your ability to oxygenate your cells.  To accomplish this, you have to get your heart rate up.  Lots of things raise heart rates, including the bad guy sneaking up on the blonde in the scary movie, the extra cup of coffee, the ride with your learning-to-drive kid.  We don’t choose those things as cardio exercise for at least one good reason:  no endorphins.

We all have that sense that, yeah, we probably should get out and exercise.  The doctor might make some remarks.  The jeans might be a little tighter than can be plausibly explained by a trip through the dryer.  Obligation and even guilt and shame can be motivators.

But isn’t happiness a better one?

Endorphins make you feel good.  When you get your heart rate up, when you start to breathe more heavily, you begin to tap into your body’s own supply of mood-enhancing chemicals.  Legal high!  Sure, it’s addictive, but unlike many other addictive substances, the cardio endorphin high is actually good for you.

Cardio reduces stress, ameliorates depression, and burns calories, so it has many of the same effects as chocolate without the weight gain and expense.  Go play!  Because it is fun!

Pilates for poets...

(I wrote this essay for my Pilates training.  It gives an overview of why I say all those crazy things about frogs, zombies, and the like during workouts.)

A new Pilates student enters a foreign world, one in which actions normally oriented vertically become horizontal, in which small movements can be more exhausting than large ones, in which words like “reformer,” “table,” and “chair” take on new connotations and functions.  Imagery functions like an interpreter.  The strange phenomena of the Pilates world translate into more familiar things through images.  The student can then begin to learn the customs and habits of Pilates without extreme homesickness for the everyday gym world of barbells, dumbbells, and cardio equipment.

The “Feet in Straps” exercise puts the student in a vulnerable position, supine, half suspended, legs akimbo.  Imagery, by bringing reassurance, comfort, and intelligibility to the experience, enables better performance.  Three aspects of the exercise can particularly benefit from the application of imagery: core awareness, disassociation of the hips, and efficient organization and alignment of the lower extremities.

Core awareness is such a central concept that the importance of grasping it cannot be overstated.  It is key.  One way to begin developing core awareness in this exercise is to picture some of the underlying anatomy.  A student can begin by picturing the familiar six-pack of the rectus abdominis and its orientation from top to bottom along the torso.  The tendency of this muscle to bulge pops into mind easily from there.  Then the student can learn about the transversus abdominis and its orientation across the torso.  Picturing this muscle stretched out from side to side, smoothing the surface and containing the underlying tissues and organs enables a connection between the feeling of flatness and the thing itself. On a metaphorical level, the student can imagine the abdominals as a rubber band stretched from hip bone to hip bone, continuing the theme of activity across the abdomen rather than up and down the abdomen.  A third imagery approach, sensory imagery, can draw on the previous two images.  As the student uses imagery to guide movement, the instructor can suggest the student pay attention to the sensations in the body during the movement.  Implanting the sensory data related to the movement allows the student to increase proprioception.  In other words, as the student pictures his or her transversus abdominis spread out across the abdomen, the instructor can indicate with touch or with words the location of the activity so the student can make the connection between the body and the mind.

     

Similarly, when it comes to disassociation of the hips, the same kinds of imagery can improve dynamic alignment in this exercise.  Visualizing the pelvis with its paired crests and spines and the balls of the femurs planted in the hip sockets serves to orient the student to the body territory.  Adding the metaphorical image of the pelvis floating on femur balls made of balloons or the familiar image of the bowl of water tipping as the pelvis moves in each direction activates the connection between the body and mind.  Sensory imagery, including, perhaps, the student finding the body landmarks with his or her hands or concentrating on the relations of those landmarks to each other in space at the different phases of the motion, can further  increase the understanding and performance of proper alignment during the movement.

     

Finally, imagery can facilitate the organization and alignment of the lower extremities.  A quick imagery tour of the leg bones and their spiral motion due to their structure in particular can open the understanding of what happens as the legs internally and externally rotate during leg circles, for example.  The metaphorical image of the legs zipping together provides a way to encourage the legs to stay in touch with the center of the body.  The sensory imagery of smooth circles rather than jerky polygons experienced both kinesthetically and visually adds another layer to the connection between the body and the mind’s dynamic awareness of alignment.

     

These are only a handful of possibilities for using imagery to facilitate aspects of this exercise.  Different instructors and different students create and benefit from their own unique imagery blends, all working toward the same ideal dynamic alignment.

(The picture is Amelia Bloomer, the reformer for whom I have named my Pilates reformer.  Hooray for pants for women!)