Brow crinkles are not a real exercise

Exercise anxiety comes in lots of forms.

Take, for example, anxiety that comes from bringing our not-entirely-culturally-ideal bodies to the gym.  We all have it.  We all can work through it, and not by avoiding all mirrors everywhere forever (the mirror is form’s best friend because it shows that we might be mistaken when we think our knees are staying in line with our toes in a squat or that our back is straight in a plank…).  We can focus on what we are doing, not on what we look like doing it.  Maybe our bodies are not what we want them to be yet, but here we are in the gym working toward our goals.  Also, we are not so important that everyone is looking at us.  The rest of the world is focused on their own issues, and only jerks (a.k.a. violators of my Rule 1) will scoff at our imperfections.  Do we really want to let the jerks control our behavior?  Nope.  Further, we can laugh.  I think that Zumba was invented for just this reason.  I laugh at myself all the time, sometimes for singing along with the radio, or for dancing in the kitchen, or for getting caught doing those things, or for making grimaces at myself in the mirror when I am lifting weights.  It is hard to be anxious and laughing at the same time.

Then there is performance anxiety.  Who are we to think we can do this hard workout?  We are awesome people attempting the impossible and we darn well might do it, buddy.  As I say all the time, we are approximating our way to greatness and we will get there.  Maybe today we won’t lift that big old barbell, but we’ll be closer than if we don’t try.  It is not our fault if the barbell refuses to cooperate with our brilliant plans.  Some day soon, it will be more compliant because we will keep trying until we get there.

We are not racing.  We can pause whenever we need rest.  We can keep breathing and keep coming back.

It's growing season!

I did two spin classes in a row yesterday.  I’m not bragging:  I know lots of people who can kick my behind, literally and figuratively.  It was twice as many spin classes in one day than I’d ever done before, however, so I feel happy.  I moved up a notch.

Those notches are important.  We measure our growth with notches, just like we measure our kids with marks up the wall.  And, just like with kids, if the measurement doesn’t move, something is not right.

Challenge is where growth happens.  We can keep lifting the exact same weights, doing the exact same cardio, stretching the same old way, or we can mix it up and see what happens.  We might be pleasantly surprised to find ourselves capable of more than we expect.  Or unpleasantly surprised to discover that maybe we need to work on some other skills.  Either way, growth.

What new thing can we try today?

A reading from the label of...

Liking to cook is a good thing when it comes to eating for fitness.

Over the weekend, I went to the store for the weekly shopping.  I pay fairly good attention to labels, but this time I paid strict attention.  Sugar is added to pretty much every prepared food.  It was hiding in the spaghetti sauce.  It lurked in the beef jerky my husband likes for snacks and in his favorite peanut butter.  I already knew that all the fruity yogurts were out, as well as the packaged cereals.  The salad dressing I like best:  sugar’s in there.

But here’s the deal:  I like to cook.  I’m obviously not going to whip up any beef jerky any time soon, but I can make my own salad dressing.  I can eat actual fruit instead of sugary fruity yogurt, or I can mix that same real fruit into plain yogurt.  It doesn’t take that much time and it is worth it to begin to combat the sugar addiction that is rampant at my house.

Ours isn’t the only house made of gingerbread, so to speak.  Culturally, sugar consumption keeps rising along with our obesity rates.  Fight the power:  cook your own food. 

Dancin' in the...

I did some housework yesterday.  No, the world is not ending, although if it is going to, I will at least know that I died without dried dog vomit on the floor.  Housework, around here, includes loud music, which, in turn, includes dancing along.  I can, in fact, dance and dust at the same time.

T. was home sick from school, so there was a witness.  He threatened to make a video of me and post it on the internet.  Which means he is really impressed with my moves, right?  I told him to go ahead; I am good with going viral as a crazy old lady dancing.  I told him he’d be jealous when I got famous.  He snorted and said, “Infamous.”  And we both laughed.

The point is that many forms of exercise are inherently silly.  This morning I went to spin class.  Which is to say I sat in a room with a bunch of other people pedaling a pretend bike that didn’t go anywhere until we were all tired and sweaty.  There are yoga poses with names that can make me giggle and moves that make me tip over.  Think about some of the positions we get into when we swim.  Try and tell me it’s not funny.

Laughing is good for the soul.  It’s also good for the abs.  Try some kind of fitness today that makes you laugh until your stomach hurts.  Or, you know, come help me clean the rest of the house.

Marshmallows

Sometimes the hardest workouts are the ones where we don’t sweat that much.  Our brains might be the parts that hurt the most.  We have to be patient with those workouts.

Which workouts are those?  The ones where we work on our form or our flexibility or our mobility within a painless range of motion.  The ones where we gradually retrain our bodies after injury.  The ones where we attempt to learn new patterns of motion to keep us healthy in the long term.

It can be frustrating and humbling and annoying and boring when we have to use a very small weight or a minimal range of motion.  This is where the two marshmallows come in.

Someone did a study with small children.  The kids were offered one marshmallow now, which was sitting right there in front of them, or two marshmallows if they could wait five minutes.  The kids who made it to the two marshmallows turned out to be healthier than the one marshmallow kids because they knew how to delay gratification for a bigger payoff. (I know what you’re thinking:  I would work out for marshmallows.  That was not the point.  Although on the scale of indulgences, two marshmallows are not huge and if it makes you do it, knock yourself out.)

We motivate ourselves with (figurative) marshmallows.  I personally want to keep my own knees and hips my entire life, which is way better than marshmallows.  I want to be able to ski with my kids and grandkids, if I ever have any, which I hope I do, but not too soon.  Maybe your marshmallows are a little black dress, or the cute server flirting with you at coffee, or conquering that big barbell.  Let’s get through the stuff we need to do to get there.

Better than a double espresso

An often-missing ingredient in our fitness programs is adequate sleep.  I find it odd that we glorify not sleeping as a measure of our importance—who has time to sleep with all this crucial stuff that depends on us?  And then we hit the sugar/caffeine/adrenaline downward spiral.

I vote for an upward spiral.  Of course we all have work to do.  Working out can improve our sleep quality, which will give us more energy to do what we need to do.  Work hard; sleep hard.  A rested brain makes fewer mistakes.  A rested body grows stronger.

Give your body what it needs and it will take care of you.

The pencil push is harder than the bench press

The reality of keeping records bores me, at least when it comes to my own workouts; I track what my clients do because I am always excited to see how much progress they make.  In theory, I love the idea of keeping a food journal and logging the actual weights I lift and the time I spend at various exercise things.  I have started innumerable (see, I wasn’t counting!) systems for tracking all kinds of things that all break down on the fact that I don’t want to waste time writing it all down.  Here’s the thing, though:  when I look back at those records, they provide a useful snapshot to compare to the present moment.  I have my first weight lifting workout sheet from the Berkeley YMCA from back when I was 26 years old.  I bench pressed 30 pounds.  The weight is quite a bit more nowadays, so I could kick my own 26 year old butt.

My point is that while thorough record keeping is a fabulous tool, occasional record keeping has value also.  Jot down one workout and keep it somewhere you can run across it in six months.  See how it compares to what you are doing then.