The Amazing Stickie and Rollover

Having worked on spinal extension for the last two weeks, this week the Amazing Stickie decided to do some spinal flexion.  This exercise is not suitable for anyone with osteoporosis or osteopenia.  The Amazing Stickie wants everyone to work within their own personal safe range of motion and to stop if anything feels wrong.

To begin, Stickie lies on her back with her hands at her sides.  She inhales and raises her legs until they are perpendicular to the floor.  Then, as she exhales, she rolls her spine up, bringing her legs over her face until they are parallel with the floor.  She inhales and separates her legs so they make a narrow V shape.  On the exhale, she rolls her spine down, circling her legs as she returns to the position with her legs perpendicular to the floor.

 

Three reps are usually enough.

Attention!

What our personal trainer or Pilates instructor knows is certainly important.  We want them to keep us safe and to know how to get us to our goals.  But it might be just as important to think about how that person pays attention.

One of the things I watch for with my clients is form.  I want to ensure that they are using their bodies in ways that don’t lead to injury.  I’m checking to see that their knees line up right or their elbows are doing the correct thing.

 

I’m also watching for signs of effort.  It’s my job to notice that ten reps are not going to happen safely and to stop the set at eight.  I tune into the energy drops and ask about whether there was food today, or enough sleep.

 

When something unusual happens, a client moves in an unexpected way, I see it and I think about why.  We talk about what is going on.  We move together.  We experiment.  And we learn from the results.

 

Paying attention is what makes progress.

Play

I recently finished doing a continuing education course on flexibility and stretching.  One of the most interesting and useful things in the course was the attitude of the people demonstrating the assisted stretching techniques.

These were trained professionals.  They knew what the heck they were doing.  And yet, they brought a sense of exploration and play to what they were doing.  As they moved their “client” through the stretches, they talked about trying little shifts to find more movement.  They were never silly or inappropriate, but they were light, willing to go where the client’s tissue led, experimenting gently to find the most range of motion for the client.

 

So often we go into our workouts heavy, with a sense that this is serious.  We have to be productive and efficient and thorough and it’s going to be hard and terrible.  What if, every once in a while at least, we went in thinking about how we get to play today?

Monday Workout: Planes!

We are working in several planes today.  This is good for our global mobility and it’s practical because real life can come at us from all directions!  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
skullcrushers	20
curls	10
woodchoppers	30
deadlifts	20
lateral raise	10
plank jacks	30
renegade row	20
chest lift	10

 

The Amazing Stickie and Swan 2

This week, the Amazing Stickie is building on what she did last week.  Swan 2 in the Pilates repertoire is an extension (pun intended!) of Swan 1.  (You can find the directions for Swan 1 in last week’s post!).

Stickie gets into the starting position by lying on her belly with her hands under her shoulders.  She extends her elbows and brings her gaze forward and up as if she is watching a little bug crawl away from her, ending up with arms straight and her back curved evenly between her cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spine (a.k.a. her neck, torso, and lower back).

 

Now the fun starts.  Stickie bends her elbows slightly and then lifts her hands, allowing her body to rock forward and her legs to leave the floor.  In other words, she keeps the curved shape of her body and tilts the whole thing forward as if she were the rocker of a rocking horse.  Then she tilts back to the starting position, stabilizing with her hands.  She does this until she stops having fun or until she has completed five reps, whichever happens first.

Stretch Out Sleep

I know I bang on a lot about getting enough sleep.  What can I say?  It’s my countercultural side coming out.

 

Not having enough sleep and not having enough good sleep puts us at a higher risk for chronic disease, impairs our cognition, and makes us more likely to get hurt.

 

I realize that we can’t all sleep as much or as well as we’d like.  We have important stuff to do.  We’re stressed out.  We are always behind.  We say we’ll sleep when we’re dead, not really grokking that we’re more likely to get dead if we don’t get enough sleep.

 

One thing that can help:  stretching.  Whether it is the relaxation that comes from stretching or just the fact that we’ve moved our bodies, stretching improves our ability to sleep well.

 

Plus it feels good. 

Ten Bucks for Words

Proprioception has long been one of my favorite five-dollar fitness words (Does everybody have a teacher in their past who would call any fancy-pants vocabulary five-dollar words?  Or is it just me?).  In small-change words, proprioception is our sense of where we are in space.  It keeps us from bashing into things, mostly, and it is what makes us know where our feet are, even if they are under the desk where we can’t see them.

Now I have learned another word that gets to be proprioception’s friend:  interoception.  This is our sense of how things are inside.  Interoceptors in our body keep us posted on whether we are cold, tired, hungry, sore, and the like.

 

So far, we just have some fun facts.  Here’s the cool part:  when we do mindful exercise, like stretching and yoga and Pilates, we not only boost our proprioception, but we also tune in more to our interoception, which in turn gives us a more generalized sense of wellbeing.

 

Short version:  work out and feel better!