Friday Exercise: Mountain Climbers

The Amazing Stickie works hard to ensure that she has strong abdominals and excellent cardiovascular condition.  One way she does this is by doing mountain climbers.

The starting position is more or less a pushup position, but with a slight pike to the body.  In other words, Stickie sticks her bootie in the air.  Then she brings one foot forward into a modified lunge position.  She jumps her legs up and switches which foot is forward, repeating rapidly until she is good and breathless, keeping her abdominals lifted the whole time.  A minute is a good amount of time to spend on this exercise.

It is also possible to do this exercise with the hands on a bench or on a BOSU.  Standing mountain climbers are also good; in that case, Stickie pretends she is Spiderman climbing a building, side bending as she lifts her knee toward her elbow on the same side of her body.

Thursday Book Report: The End of Overeating

David A. Kessler’s book The End of Overeating trots out many of the usual bad guys.  Hi added sugar, fat, and salt!  I’m looking at you!  He goes over the cultural shifts that have encouraged us to become larger.  He points to food industry practices that don’t help us.  He also discusses underlying brain chemistry in nice small words.  It’s a good introduction to all the reasons why we find it so challenging to eat enough of the right foods and not too much.  That takes up about two thirds of the book.

The final third discusses what to do about it.  He suggests regaining control over our behavior through awareness, competing behavior, competing thoughts, support, and emotional learning.  Most of those things should look familiar to us.

Overall, it is an engaging, personal, and personable book.  Depending on what you already know, it might be extremely informative.  I found it useful as a reminder about taking personal responsibility in the face of much societal pressure.

Work it out

Exercise works.

I see people come to workouts tired, worn down, anxious, stressed, even maybe a little grumpy.  They leave better.  It ain’t my personality that makes the difference, I’m sure.

It’s the movement.  It’s the pumping heart, the breathing, the push of muscles against resistance, the coordination of multiple body parts in multiple planes.

We are happy to take an aspirin and wait half an hour for the headache to go away.  Let’s give ourselves half an hour of exercise and rejoice in what that can do.

Bicycles are like watermelons; skis are like oranges

Fitness can be seasonal, just like produce.  It is challenging, without a lot of travel, to ski in the summer.  Similarly, unless we have special stuff, biking in the snow might not be the best plan.  This is all good.

However, it does require that we think about our fitness plans as the seasons change.  In biking season, the focus might be on the endurance required for long distances or the strength gains desired to conquer hills.  Skiing has its own particular special muscle groups that need both strength and flexibility for best results.

Maybe one season is more about weight lifting and another is about cardio.  That is not something to worry about as long as we keep moving and strike some kind of balance.

Go play.

Float

(This picture is scanned from a postcard I bought at the MOMA in New York in 2005.  It is a work by Christopher Wool called “Untitled, 1988.”)

Many people are currently writing about what Muhammad Ali meant to them.  To me, he was a touchstone for survival.

I don’t get boxing.  I try to avoid hitting people.  I try to avoid getting hit.  I deeply respect the athletic requirements of the sport, the essential strength, endurance, and grace needed to compete.  I somewhat understand the idea of athletic endeavor as battle.  I just don’t see that the battle needs to involve actual beating of other people.

Metaphorically, however, Ali gave me what I needed to make it through some of the worst parts of my depression journey.  I played Rope-a-Dope with the Depression Monster.  My goal was to take whatever it dished out for as many rounds as it took to get the monster to wear out and then smash that sucker.

Beyond pure survival, Ali provided an example of what one might want to survive for.  He was a man of principle, a fighter who would not fight for something he did not believe in and who would fight like crazy to advance causes he loved.

I am grateful for his life and example.

Friday Exercise: Push Press

Compound exercises increase the efficiency of a workout, and the Amazing Stickie is all about efficiency.  She has more to do than just work out, you know.  Because of this, she likes the push press because it works her whole body at once.

She begins the exercise in a squat position with dumbbells at her shoulders.  A barbell would also work.  On an exhale, she stands up tall and raises the weights above her head without raising her shoulders toward her ears.  Then she inhales back to the starting position.

Done quickly, this is an aerobic move.  Slower performance builds muscle endurance.  Using heavier weights for fewer repetitions will build maximum strength, but light weights and many repetitions add tone.  Choose according to your goals!

Thursday Book Report: Dirt

“Just as lifestyle influences a person’s life expectancy within the constraints of the human life span, the way societies treat their soil influences their longevity,” David R. Montgomery writes in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.  We cannot be fit without food and we cannot have food without soil, so Montgomery’s fascinating investigation of our relationship with the dirt in which we grow our food provides a bigger context for how we choose to live our lives.

Historically, humans have had some pretty unfortunate effects on the planet.  Erosion of topsoil, because it is usually a gradual process, tends to go unnoticed until there is a drastic event like the Dust Bowl.  However, many of our farming processes encourage erosion at a rate faster than soil can be replenished.

There is good news.  Research suggests that there are many avenues available to reverse the erosion trend and maintain the crucial and mostly invisible resource under our feet.  Many are already dear to the heart of environmentally minded folks:  local culture, organic farming, cover crops, fallowing, small, worker-owned farms.  Others involve shifting process from plowing to discing.  Still others require the kind of long-term thinking that comes hard when there are mouths to feed right now.

In any case, the book was interesting, often wryly funny, and informative.  All of us who like to eat could profit from this reading experience.