Monday Workout: 12 Days of Christmas In JULY!

This 12-days-of-Christmas (in July this time!) might be the most notorious workout I do with my clients.  It is not an easy workout, but my clients who have been with me a while have realized that it’s not as hard as they first thought because, amazingly, they’ve made a bunch of progress.  It is all right to go slow and to rest when needed, although we try to make the rests happen between “days.”

Here’s how it works.  On the first “day,” we do one push press.  Day over!  Hooray!  Then it is day two and we do two goblet squats and one push press.  Day three we do three overhead presses, two goblet squats, and one push press.  Yes, I do realize that this workout has burpees in it and that we end up doing 42 of them before we are done.  Since I am giving this gift, I may not be everyone’s true love this time.

When we have finished all twelve days, that’s it.  We get to stretch and go home.

1 push press

2 goblet squats

3 Overhead press

4 1 leg squats each leg

5 deadlifts

6 burpees

7 pushups

8 renegade rows

9 mountain climbers

10 jump lunges

11 kb swings

12 plyojacks

Four things

Fitness does not happen just in the gym or just with a trainer.  This should not be big news.  Here are some things we can all do in our regular lives to increase our fitness:

• Stand on one foot.  Balance is a skill that pays off in the long run.  It helps us avoid injury, or worse, embarrassment!  Practice while doing the dishes, brushing teeth, in line at the store.

• Squat.  I love chairs, but they steal strength and range of motion from us.  Those of us who would like to avoid ending up in a nursing home need to practice squatting and getting up and down from chairs and the floor without using our hands.  Need to pick up the dirty socks from the floor?  Squat to do it.  Package on the porch?  Squat to lift.  Or we can challenge ourselves to squat for time:  can we make it through the commercials during the game in a squat?

• Cut the added sugar.  It is just extra calories.  It’s addictive, inflammatory, and bad for the environment.

• Sleep.  We are not robots.  We need to rest.  Those of us who struggle with the whole productivity thing can justify it by noting that we work better afterwards; the rest of us can just luxuriate knowing that our bodies and minds will be healthier for it.

Change is good

When I plan workouts, I think about what muscle groups are working in each exercise, how much an exercise challenges cardio fitness, how to adapt for injury, and a whole bunch of other things.  Even so, workouts often need to be changed in the moment for any number of reasons.

Sometimes, as I am taking a client through what I planned, my client wants to try a different order of exercises.  So we try it and find out what happens.  Sometimes the new order is better.  Sometimes it turns out that I had good reasons for ordering things the way I did.  Either way, we’ve learned something.

I am not the boss of the workouts I do with my clients.  I have several jobs when we work together:  keeping the client safe, providing appropriate challenge, watching and assisting with form, encouraging, and, of course, counting reps.   We work together to make the workout work.

We can do this.