Not even muscular Christianity

I’m pretty sure that St. Paul was not a personal trainer or even a fitness enthusiast, but he sums up the problem of all of us who want to be more fit and struggle in his letter to the Romans (chapter 7, verse 19, for those who want to look it up):  “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

 

I do not at all even a little bit endorse the idea of working out as virtue and not working out as sin.  Food is not a vice, but rather a necessity for life.  But we all know that there are times when we really should work out, not just to be healthier, but to feel better.  And we know we should choose foods that are better for us.  And somehow we don’t.

 

What to do?

 

One thing we can do is make it easy on ourselves.  We just do the minimum.  So, for example, I know that I get grumpy if I don’t do my cardio.  I tell myself that the goal is 30 minutes on the spin bike.  I don’t have to pedal fast.  I don’t have to pedal hard.  I just have to put my butt on the bike and move.  Almost always I do end up pedaling fast and hard.  I get to the end of my half hour and I’m sweaty and breathless and I feel so much happier.   But if I tell myself I need to go fast and hard, I won’t do it.  It sounds too difficult, when I’m tired and comfy and I’d really rather read some more or look at dog videos on Facebook.  I have to make it easy.

 

Minimums work for all kinds of things.  We can say that we have to eat at least one vegetable at some point during the day.  We can promise ourselves one set of squats, or one stretch.  We can commit to balancing on one foot while we brush our teeth to work on our core and balance.  We can even say that we have to go outside once a day.

 

If we just do our minimum, great!  Gold stars for us!  And if our problem was just getting started, we might find that we do more than the minimum, which is extra bonus points.  Beware, however, the fake minimum.  We have to mean it when we say that our minimum is enough.  We can’t say we’re cool with one stretch and then beat ourselves up for not doing a whole yoga session.

 

Count the small victories.  They add up.

Pandemic Bare Minimum

We are all really tired, I think, of living in pandemic times.  It’s boring.  It’s frustrating.  It’s stressful in so many ways.

 

Under the circumstances, it is tempting to give up.  Sure, ice cream is a breakfast food.  Why should I even try to work out?  I don’t really have the right stuff and no one sees me anyway and besides, I’m tired from watching that new streaming show about great lawns of the world until three in the morning.  What the heck, I’ll get together with my friends—I see so many people’s posts about it and none of them are sick, so what can it hurt?  And I’ve really had it with my glasses fogging up—I’m just not doing the mask thing any more.

 

Let’s resist the temptation.

 

The only way through these terrible times is by consistent good decisions.

 

And yes, this is about fitness.  We can’t be fit if we are dead.  We use the same kind of science-based thinking to deal with the pandemic that we do when we decide what kind of workouts to do.  We have to use the same motivational techniques to get us through the not-always-pleasant process to reach our happy future.

 

Our bare minimum fitness right now is:  stay home as much as possible, wear a mask whenever we have to go out, and do not gather with our friends and loved ones who do not live with us.  If we manage to do this minimum, we’ll all live to the next workout.

 

And if we don’t want to do it for ourselves, we need to do it for others.  We want our parents, our kids, our neighbor with cancer, our immunocompromised coworker, everyone to make it out of this.  Exercising our empathy is always a good workout.

Monday Workout: Four!

While I love my usual workout format, I like to shake it up from time to time.  This week we have a shorter list of exercises, but we are going to do four rounds.  What I am not going to shake up is this piece of important advice:  change the workout to meet your needs and equipment!!!  If you don’t have an exercise ball, substitute any other ab exercise for the roll out abs.  If your knees hate lunges, do deadlifts instead.  This is YOUR workout and it needs to work for YOU.

 

1 arm clean and press	20
squats	20
kickbacks	20
db swings	20
lunge with twist	20
roll out abs	10

 

Cardio, fancy!

Once we have a cardio habit and our 30 minutes per day is easy-peasy, we can get fancy.  There are lots of ways to do that.

 

One is to go faster.  Maybe we’ve been walking and we can progress to jogging or running.  Maybe we’ve been biking and we get to go farther in the same amount of time.  If we’re on a treadmill, we set the pace higher.

 

Another way is to go harder.  We bike uphill.  We set the resistance on the elliptical trainer higher.

 

Alternatively, we can go longer.  Sure, we can do half an hour, but maybe an hour is not so much of a snap.  That 5K turns into a half marathon turns into a marathon…

 

My favorite way is to add intervals.  Intervals are kind of like sprinkles of harder/faster in our regular workout.  Once we’ve warmed up, we spend a minute going as hard and fast as possible to get our heart rate up toward the top of our cardio range.  Then we spend a minute or two at an easier level to bring the heart rate down to the bottom end of our cardio range (but still at or above 65% of our maximum).  A half-hour cardio workout might have five or six intervals in it (five minutes warm up, five minutes cool down, twenty minutes doing intervals).  Those sprinkles actually improve our cardio fitness faster because our bodies learn to recover from the hard work faster.  We burn more calories and boost our metabolism without spending all day at the gym.

 

It's also a good antidote to the boredom that can set in during long cardio sessions.  Yay!

How to Cardio, with math!

When I work with clients, we focus on weight training because that is the best use of our time.  That does not mean that weight training is more important than cardio, just that it more conducive to having someone stand there and help with directions and form and motivation and counting.  However, we need to do our cardio, too.  In fact, for anyone just getting started with exercise, it is where we want to start.

 

At the most basic level, cardio exercise is whatever we do that makes us breathe heavily and gets our hearts to beat faster.  We want to aim for about thirty minutes of whatever that is at least five days a week.  The easiest way to know if we are working hard enough but not too hard is to see if we can hold a conversation.  If that’s too much to ask while we are dancing/walking/running/biking/rollerblading, we’re working too hard.  If we find that we can belt out “Eye of the Tiger,” we’re not working hard enough to channel our inner Rocky—we have enough lung power left to sing, so we need to devote that power to the work at hand instead.

 

In quantitative terms, we want to work out at 65 to 85% of our maximum heart rate.  Here’s the math:  subtract your age from 220 to get your maximum heart rate in beats per minute.  Multiply that number by .65 to get the bottom end of the cardio range and by .85 to get the top end.  Take your pulse for a minute during the workout to see how you are doing.  (Those of us who have fitness trackers can let the gizmos do the work.  Those of us without will quickly get a feel for when we are working hard enough and when we’re working too hard.)

 

(If you are just getting off the couch for the first time in months, you may need to work up to 65% of your maximum heart rate.  This is totally all right.  Go slow and steady and safe.  Start with five minutes of work and go up from there.)

 

That’s the whole deal.  Get the heart rate up, keep it there for 30 minutes, cool down.  Makes sense now why clients do this on their own time and not with me hanging out watching—my conversation is not that entertaining.

 

Well, that’s almost the whole deal.  Tomorrow I’ll add a bit more, but this is enough to get going.

 

Go play.

Two things to do...

I don’t know about you, but I am getting pretty worn down lately.  We’ve all been dealing with the pandemic for what feels like forever.  We’re in the midst of a really weird holiday season in which we love our dearest ones by staying away from them.  And there are moments when no amount of lights or tinsel, no fancy packaging or special foods can make things seem better.

 

What to do?  Two things, and one will probably make the other easier.

 

The first thing to do is to take care of the folks around us.  Even if we live alone and we are staying by ourselves to protect everyone from the spread of this stupid disease, we can still do some things to take care of other people.  Maybe Zoom isn’t as fabulous as actually seeing our friends face to face, but we can still offer a word of encouragement or a smile.  We can drop a note in the mail, make a phone call, send an email with a funny picture or nice sentiment.  Heck, we can do good things for people we don’t even know—make a donation or two or three.  If we live with other people, it’s even easier.  Give some hugs.  Take an extra turn doing the dishes.  Watch that movie that is the other person’s favorite.

 

Doing nice things for others makes us feel good.  Science says so.  (So if you are looking for a fitness connection, here it is:  fitness is what helps us feel good.)

 

The second thing to do is to take care of ourselves.  I have a deep-seated irritation with self-care lists.  They often involve rampant consumerism, symptom-treating, or both.  The kind of self-care I’m talking about here is the kind you would do for someone you love, which is why doing the first thing might make this one easier.  It’s practice.

 

For example, when we take care of our kids, we don’t always decide that what they need is a bunch of candy and a trip to the toy store (the child-friendly equivalent of a glass of wine and some retail therapy).  Sometimes we know that they really need to unplug from the screens and run around outside, or to eat a real meal that isn’t shaped like dinosaurs or bugs or goldfish.  Maybe they need to talk about their frustration with doing school remotely, or they need a good night of sleep, or a hug.  It can be hard to step outside of ourselves enough to figure out what it is we actually need to take care of ourselves; noticing what the people around us need might make it easier.

 

And it may seem obvious, but self-care doesn’t always feel great.  That kid who really needs a nap may kick and scream about taking it.  Getting the fractious kid outside for some quality time with the bike or scooter or soccer ball might feel like moving the Himalayas, complete with peeved yetis.  We might prefer to zone out over a drink and some impulse shopping, but we can eat our veggies and drink our water and get a little exercise instead.

 

So:  go do something real and nice for somebody and then for your own dear self.

Monday Workout: 12 days

It’s time.  We need to do the infamous 12 days of Christmas workout.  Here’s how it works.  On “day one” we do one push press.  We rest if needed (ha!) and then proceed to “day two, “ on which we do two goblet squats and one push press.  We continue on, trying to take our rests between “days.”  Eventually, we reach the twelfth day and we do twelve plyojacks, eleven kettlebell swings, ten jump lunges, nine mountain climbers, eight renegade rows, seven pushups, six burpees, five deadlifts, four one-leg squats on each leg, three overhead presses, two goblet squats, and one push press.  At the end, we may decide it is time to get a new true love.  The good news is that we only go through the twelve days one time.  As always, feel free to substitute exercises that better suit your body’s needs—plain lunges are fine if you don’t want to jump, woodchoppers make a good swap for plyojacks, etc.  And yes, I do know that at the end of the workout we will have done 42 burpees.  Merry Christmas.

 

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