The Amazing Stickie loves making a basic exercise more challenging. Today she is doing multiplanar lunges with reaches. What that means is that she takes her basic front lunge, side lunge, and transverse lunge (or curtsy) and adds a reach with her upper body toward the floor. It makes the movement bigger, which means it’s harder. Additionally, it shifts the body weight more, making it more of a core challenge to return to the starting position. She usually does a set of five in each direction.
A lot of us have back pain and tight shoulders and hips that creak and stiff legs. One possible culprit? Too much sitting.
Those of us who commute don’t have too much choice. We’re stuck in that car for as long as we have to be. Then, when we arrive, we’re often stuck at our desks. We get home and we plop on the couch for yet more sitting.
We may not be able to fix all of that, but there are a few things we can do. Desks that adjust to allow us to stand or sit are really useful. Failing that, we can choose to walk over to talk to our coworkers rather than call them or message them. We can make sure we drink plenty of water—standing up and taking a bathroom break is a guaranteed way to keep us from sitting for too long at a stretch.
Our lives are designed to keep us sitting a lot. We have to tweak that design where we can to allow our bodies to move like they prefer to do!
Our moms probably just wanted some space when they told us to go outside and play. Kid noise isn’t as intense when it isn’t bouncing off the walls. But even if that was the whole reason, our moms were on to something.
Today, I’m everybody’s mom: go outside and play.
We human animals need natural light. It helps us sleep better and have more energy while we’re awake. We need fresh air. We need movement.
For bonus points, we can find some nature to hang out in. We were not designed for concrete living. A glimpse of sky and some trees or flowers will do us a world of good.
If you need a “scientific” reason, it’s about the Vitamin D, which we get from the sun.
Working in the frontal plane (that is, side to side, like we do with squat to leg lift) is goo practice for when life goes sideways on us. Three rounds.
kb alternate arm swing | 30 |
kb hammer curl | 20 |
kb halo | 10 |
| |
squat to leg lift | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
skullcrushers | 10 |
| |
mountain climbers | 30 |
flies | 20 |
V sit press | 10 |
The Amazing Stickie knows that small variations can keep workouts interesting and fresh. The prisoner squat variation will slightly alter the way she balances as she bends and extends her body. She loves a balance challenge! Sets of 10 are good.
I used to think I had a problem with time management. I was wrong. I had trouble with energy management. I’d get to the time I’d set aside for whatever it is I wanted to do and I just couldn’t find the oomph to do it. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who has had this problem. But now I have some tools for energy management!
The big one is regular cardio exercise. It’s a little counterintuitive that doing more will give us more energy, but it works. Bodies are made to move. Pretty much all our systems work better if we get sweaty on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount, either. A brisk, 30-minute walk can do the trick. (And it can even be two 15-minute walks, for those who like smaller doses!)
We get a bigger energy boost from higher-intensity exercise. Amping up that walk with some speed intervals or hills will bring us even more benefits.
There is, however, a limit. Too much exercise is as problematic as too little. If we find ourselves sore for more than a few days or if we find that we’re having trouble sleeping, it’s time to rethink how much we’re doing.
Aim for the sweet spot!
When it comes to change, a lot of us struggle. We look at where we are and where we want to be and the distance just seems too big. There are so many things we ought to be doing and it’s all so overwhelming. I get it. So here’s my suggestion: do one stupidly easy small change.
Let me break that down.
We’re going to choose ONE thing. Not one thing and seven super-secret bonus things. Not two things, because really, we’re the overachieving type and if we’re supposed to do one, we can certainly do two. One. Choosing one means that we’re living in a binary experiment. We either do the thing or we don’t do it. There’s not a ton of wiggle room.
We’re going to make it stupidly easy. We’re working a Jedi mind trick on ourselves here, showing ourselves that we can, in fact, change. It’s a proof of concept thing. If we can make this one small, easy change, we’re learning that we have efficacy, that we can make a difference. And, as we all know, that thousand-mile journey starts with one step. So this first change is going to be as easy as possible. This is not the time to say we’re going to work out for an hour every day when we don’t even know where our workout clothes are anymore. This is where we decide to walk for five minutes. Other examples might be not pushing snooze in the morning or cutting the sugar in our coffee in half or eating a vegetable every day.
We’re going to make it small. Again, no marathons here. No pantry-clear-out-diet-makeovers. Just one small shift. Five minutes of weights. A hard limit of one episode of TV at night. An apple.
When we make one stupidly easy small change and we stick to it for a month or so, we learn that we can learn. Then the change is our new normal and we can shift something else.
If we get carried away with enthusiasm and fail spectacularly, we can always return to one stupidly easy small change.
We can do this.
