Growing with Uncle Joe

One of the reasons I like Pilates is because I am short.  Pilates helps me feel taller.  How?  The principle, in Pilates language, is axial elongation.  Normal people might call it standing up straighter.

 

It’s a little more complicated than that, but not too much.  Gravity is an inescapable fact of our lives and as we walk around and do the things we do, it pulls our spines down toward the earth.  When we do Pilates, we work to create space between our vertebrae in an anti-gravity kind of way.

 

Want to feel taller?  Here’s how.  We’re going to do a bridge together.  We begin lying on our backs (yay!) with our knees bent and feet flat on the floor with our heels in line with our sitting bones.  We take a deep inhale.  Then, as we exhale, we tilt our pelvises back toward our belly buttons and then keep tilting until our pelvises begin to lift in the air.  We peel one vertebra at a time off of the floor until we are supported on our shoulders and our feet.  Our bodies, from our shoulders to knees, should make a straight line.  We take another deep inhale.  Then, as we exhale, we peel ourselves back down on to the floor, pulling our hips away from our shoulders the whole time.  We imagine creating space between each vertebra on the way down and our hips will likely come down farther from our head than they started.  Voila!  Space in the spine!  We are taller!  (Please note:  people with osteopenia or osteoporosis should not do bridging with spinal articulation.  Those folks, instead of doing the pelvic tilt and the peel up and down, should lift the pelvis straight up toward the ceiling.  In the lowering phase, they can still pull the hips away from the head, but the spine should move as a unit rather than one vertebra at a time.)

 

Welcome to a taller future!

Forget about it

We’re back from the holiday weekend.  Now we’re going to forget about it.  No, not the great memories we made or the valuable lessons we learned about what not to ask Uncle Jerome at the dinner table; we need to keep those things.

 

We’re going to forget what we ate, how much pie we put away, and how little exercise we got.

 

We are going to start again, today, with the workout in front of us.  We’re going to eat our normal healthy foods.

 

There will be no punitive workouts and no one is being restricted to just bread and water.  Fitness, in the form of healthy eating and movement, is a gift we give our bodies.  We do it because we want to take care of ourselves, not because we think we are horrible people who deserve to suffer.

 

Go play.

Monday Workout: Both!

I love compound exercises and asymmetric ones, too.  So this week we get both!  Hooray!  Three rounds.

 

squat raise	30
flies	20
pushups	10
lunge punches	30
bench press	20
curls	10
1 arm clean and press	30
1 leg squat	20
brains	10

Thankful!

Happy Thanksgiving!  Things to be grateful for today in our bodies include:

 

1.     Food!  It fuels us and tastes good!

2.     Feet!  They take us where we want to go!

3.     Brains!  Consciously and unconsciously, brains figure out how to make all our body parts work and work together.

4.     Muscles and bones!  They move us and they support us, no matter what we are doing.

 

Now go eat.

Automatic Tools?

I’ve been reading about various tech processes and came across an interesting distinction that, of course, I want to apply to fitness.  To make processes easier, we can automate them, or we can use tools.

 

An automated process doesn’t require human action.  It just happens, on its own.  Sadly, fitness does require human action, but when we have a fitness habit, it almost feels automatic.  We get up and we work out before our brains even engage.

 

Mostly, though, we use tools in fitness.  Some of those tools are things like workout sheets that remind us to do cardio and strength training and stretching and balance work.  Others are pieces of equipment ranging from supportive shoes to 50-pound dumbbells.

 

Both tools and automation are handy.  We want them to make our workouts easier!

 

Go play.

Planning, or how not to be a bear

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.”  Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

 

I think we all feel like Pooh from time to time.  The stairs of life take over and we don’t have time to figure out a better way.  But, for better or worse, we are not bears of very little brain, so it is time to talk about… planning.

 

One part of the better way is figuring out how to make fitness fit into our lives.  We all want to live longer, be happier, have better sex, have more energy, and all the other good things that come from having a fitness practice, but then those stairs happen and we’re bumping our heads again.  What to do?

 

We start small.  And we commit.

 

I personally like small commitments that happen every day.  This takes the thinking out of it.  I know I get up in the morning and brush my teeth and do a couple more things and then I work out and then I shower.  Some people do well with weekday habits or weekend habits.  Do whatever works.  But make a plan.  Something like:  “I’m going to walk around the block every morning this week.”  It’s not too hard or too big.

 

Then we plan for contingencies.  Because life.  The plan might then be something like “I’m going to walk around the block every morning this week unless it is raining, in which case I will do some yoga in the kitchen.” 

 

Alternatively, we can set minimums:  “I’m going to walk around the block at least five mornings this week.”  That means that we have some grace on that day we forget to set the alarm and that other day when we’ve already done our five days and we can smugly rest.

 

Any plan is better than bumping down the stairs on the back of our heads.

 

Monday Workout: Simple

Because we’re all busy with Thanksgiving this week, I didn’t put anything new or fancy in the workout.  We have enough on our minds and our workout should be simple.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
deadlifts	20
Arnold press	10
kb swings	30
kb twists	20
kb 8s	10
mountain climbers	30
renegade rows	20
pretty princesses	10