By now, our usual format should feel fresh again! Our friends the compound exercises are keeping us moving and building up our metabolisms. Three rounds!
kb swings | 30 |
kb twists | 20 |
kb 8s | 10 |
| |
leg kicks | 30 |
rows | 20 |
pushups | 10 |
| |
push press | 30 |
kickbacks | 20 |
femur arcs | 10 |
Today the Amazing Stickie is working on spinal extension, so she’s doing Swan 1. Yoga practitioners will know it as Cobra, but the Pilates process is a little different.
Stickie begins lying on her belly with her hands by her shoulders. As she inhales, she begins to curl her spine up, beginning with her head. She imagines she is watching a ladybug crawling away from her and she follows its path with her head. Her elbows gradually straighten and Stickie feels that her breastbone is pulling forward. This keeps her from using her neck too much by helping her thoracic spine to do its fair share.
She exhales to reverse the process to come back down. Three or four reps is about right.
I am a big believer in variety. It’s not just that I get bored, either. It turns out that variety is good for us.
I write a lot about what happens when I try new things, even if I don’t like them. I do like the sensation of being a beginner again, of having too many body parts and too much to think about in order to accomplish the task at hand, whether that’s tai chi or pickleball or whatever I decide to learn next. That is a useful kind of variety, but it’s not the only kind.
We also need variety in the things we do regularly. Cardio junkies need some weight training and gym rats need some stretching and couch surfing champions need to go outside and play from time to time. At an even more granular level, we need to mix up the kind of cardio and the kind of weight training and the stretches we do so that it isn’t all swimming all the time or all power lifting.
The reason behind this is pretty simple: bodies respond to the challenges we give them. The more different kinds of challenge we present ourselves with, the more adaptable we become. Adaptability is our very best insurance against injury.
Go play some other way today.
I went to Zumba exactly once. I could cope perfectly well with making a fool of myself by not knowing what the heck I was doing, but I kept running into other people and that was not OK.
Recently, I learned about why that happened. Or, more accurately, I learned about how to apply the rules of flocking or schooling behavior (in birds and fish, respectively) to large groups of humans attempting to take a fitness class. (Spoiler alert: it does not require the exclusion of inexperienced or relatively uncoordinated participants!)
A flock or school is a structure in motion that is defined by three basic parameters. They are separation, alignment, and cohesion.
Within the flock, each bird uses its kinesthetic senses to maintain separation from other birds. This is not a perfect system, but it’s pretty good. Some birds need a little more space than others. In a fitness class, setting things up so that participants have a reasonable amount of space around them is a good start. In a Pilates class, for example, the instructor can influence this by setting up mats in advance.
The second parameter, alignment, means that each individual bird in the flock is approximating toward the direction the flock as a whole is flying. As the leaders of the flock change their direction, the rest of the flock follows along. Again, in a group fitness situation, an instructor can create success by clearly defining the front (or redefining it, if the instructor wants to shake things up and make what was the back of the class the front, or even spiral the focus of the class around the room over time).
Finally, the flock uses cohesion. All the birds are doing the same thing, more or less. Fitness instructors can promote this behavior by ensuring that every participant can see either the instructor or another experienced student at all times.
None of this will work, of course, if the space allotted for the class is too small for everyone to move reasonably freely. It might be time to take it outside or to schedule more classes to alleviate the crunch.
Above and beyond all this, it is a good idea to explain that this is a game with simple rules, that we are playing. We all do our best to follow along.
Go play.
I am enjoying switching things up, so here’s another short circuit. Choose your favorite cardio for the minute at the top of each round (high knees, step ups, jacks, etc.). Short circuits mean four rounds.
1 min cardio | |
| |
squat raise | 20 |
flies | 20 |
truck driver | 10 |
mountain climbers | 20 |
YTA | 10 |
roll out abs | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie loves exercises that are related to plank because of the way they help her build upper body strength and whole body stability. Today she is doing the Pilates Leg Pull Front (still not a joke by Uncle Joe!).
She begins in plank position, hands directly under her shoulders, body a straight line from the top of her head to her heels. She inhales and then, as she exhales, she lengthens one leg away from her body and up toward the ceiling, keeping her knee straight and maintaining the plank position. Then she lowers the leg and repeats on the other side. She usually does about ten reps.
As I have said before, I took up tai chi some months back. I still have tons and tons to learn, which made me think about learning styles.
We all have them. Some of us like to be told how to do something. Others like to be shown. Some of us need to move our bodies to imprint the ideas in our brains. Yet others like to talk themselves through things. And, of course, most of us are some combination of all those different ways of learning.
As I try to learn the sequences of movement in tai chi, I find that I need both brain engagement and body engagement. I want to know how many repetitions there are of a particular sequence. I need to hook movements to images in my mind (much to the horror of my tai chi instructor when I described one motion as “pie to the face.” This does not capture the warrior nature of tai chi, apparently.). And I need to do the sequences over and over and over so that my body knows what to do all by itself.
Remaining a learner helps me when I am on the other side of the equation, teaching clients new exercises or helping them refine their performance of familiar ones. I need to stay awake and aware that one client may need to know what something is for, another may want to know what muscles are working, another may just need to see the movement a few more times.
We can all learn.
