https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/

I’m not a big fan of road trips.  Maybe it’s that I’m in my 40s, and I’ve had my share of them in my youth:

… As one of three kids, packed into the family car (not even a station wagon, just a regular car) driving for days (yes, days) across Canada’s vast hinterlands in the 1980s.

… As a broke-ass student, borrowing my mom’s car, to drive to a crappy city so I could go drink crappy beer in crappy bars with crappy people.

… Stuck behind a giant RV going 35 km/h — that’s just over 20 miles an hour for you Americans — for hours on a long, twisty, no-passing-allowed mountain road, meditating on the airbrushed “Ma and Pa Kessel” emblazoned on the back. (Ma and Pa Kessel, wherever you are, may you suffer karmically for being human traffic cones.)

… Getting so far out into the wilds that a diesel-soaked gas station bathroom with sodden muck for toilet paper seems like the Four Seasons compared to the terrifying outhouse at the campground.

But I get it. Some people really dig road trips. They like the process. The journey.

Of course, road trips are a great metaphor.

Jack Kerouac basically wrote his meal ticket with On the Road, a testament to the nomadic life. National Lampoon’s Vacation (and its modern remake) celebrates the life-changing, family-knitting shenanigans that inevitably occur whenever people pile into a vehicle and hit the asphalt. Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days was road-tripping gone “next level”.

The more Zen among you will like journeys, the moment-to-moment experience of processes.

As the joke goes:

Why don’t Buddhists run?
Because where they are now is as good as anywhere else.

I’m a fan of journeys too. I like moments. I like being present. I like sitting with things. But you’ve gotta know where the goal is.

If the purpose of a road trip is to road trip, you’ve nailed it. Bravo. Enjoy just driving.

If the purpose of a road trip is mostly to get somewhere else, don’t confuse the means and the end. And consider flying (which can also suck, but at least it’s usually quicker).

Here’s what I mean:

I like exercise. Which is to say I actually like doing exercise itself. I like being in my workouts. I like the way it feels to do the workout things. I like the way chalk feels and iron smells. I would probably exercise all day long if I could.

But that’s weird. I know. Most folks don’t really like actual exercise. Like the moments spent pounding the treadmill, or making constipated-cow unggggh noises, or wanting to barf after a set of squats, or feeling the sweat pool in unmentionable crevices throughout your body.

Instead, most folks like the results of exercise.

They like the person they are when they commit to a regular exercise program. They might feel better, look better, perform better, move better. They feel confident and capable, perhaps even calmer, after a good round of movement. They might now consider doing other things that they couldn’t do before.

To be clear: Despite my own personal love of the act of exercise, I side with most normal people’s point of view, which is that exercise is a way to get somewhere else.

Yet just like the road trip, we’ve gotten confused about this. We often confuse doing exercise (the means) with the goal (what we ultimately want).

We try, in very well-meaning, yet often misguided ways, to be good exercisers. We try to please the Fitbit, or match our run times, or do the right number of reps with the right amount of weight in the right sequence. We try to do the correct type of exercise, perhaps something involving aerial yoga spin balance for max reps or extreme pump.

We share the performance of our exercise with others. (Or maybe just take gym-bathroom selfies while sucking everything in, flexing, and duckfacing,)

We think this is the right thing to focus on. Being a good exerciser.

So we get all tweaked out about doing it perfectly. Or turning a workout into an achievement. Or cruising workouts like addicts looking for a fix.

This is like a road trip without a destination. Basically just driving around randomly.

This is like Instagramming the progress of your gas gauge.

This is like looking at other tires on Google and wondering if your own are round enough.

This is like hunkering down into the car seat, not looking out the window, and counting the spots of lint on the carpet, or the number of empty coffee cups tossed into the back, and posting that to Facebook, and thinking that that is the point.

Most of the time, it’s not the point. Most of the time, you are driving somewhere in particular. Again, unless you’re totally into the Zen of road tripping, the point is what the road trip lets you do, which is other things. Things that are not road trips, but actually being somewhere other than you are right now.

Most of the time, for most people, exercise is a way to get somewhere else. It’s a way to create capability and capacity to do other things.

Like play. Be out in the world. Have interesting experiences.

Enjoy living in your body. Turn your body into a well-oiled machine. Make your cells dance in sync like a high-kicking chorus line.

Unless you are competing right this moment in an activity that considers exercise a sport, or being a lab test subject, your reps and sets and weights and times and precise style of movement are absolutely irrelevant to anything in the real world. Much like your exact weight, body fat percentage, clothing size, calorie intake, or grams / percentages of macronutrients.

Let me be the first to disillusion you about the details of these things: they don’t matter.

They don’t matter, that is, except as a way to get a general sense of whether these numbers tell you that you are going somewhere useful.

There is a meme going around that amuses me:

I think you know what I mean.

Now, obviously, most of us are never going to ask someone to beat us up on purpose. But the point holds.

Substitute anything you like for “sweaty nut-punching in a cage”, such as:

• hiking a mountain
• playing with my kids
• frolicking in the surf
• zooming down a ski or snowboard hill
• smashing a wicked serve in tennis
• running for the bus
• dancing the tango

… etc.

Ask yourself:

What am I doing here, with this exercise thing?

What is the purpose? What is the point? Why is this meaningful to me?

What other things will exercise enable me to do?

Where am I trying to go? What awesome things await me there?

Am I confusing the numbers on a map with the real-life destination?

Enjoy road tripping — and exercising — as much as you can.

More importantly, enjoy the places you’ll get to!

Thanks to Craig Weller of Barefoot Fitness for inspiring this. Check out his related article Trips Worth Taking.

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

“Steve, what am I supposed to do on days when I’m not training?”

We get this question all the time here at Nerd Fitness. Since we advise most people to train 3 days per week with full body strength training routines, many Rebels have a few off days each week.

When you complete a full body workout routine, or do lots of compound movements like squats, push-ups, overhead presses or deadlifts, our muscles get broken down. Then, over the next 24-48 hours hours, those muscles get rebuilt a tiny bit stronger.That’s why it doesn’t benefit us to work out every day; we don’t want to destroy our muscles without giving them a chance to grow back stronger.

That then begs the question: what are we supposed to do on those days? How can we keep up the habit of exercise and not let a day of non-training derail our progress?

Are there things we CAN do on our off days?

That’s why I’m here, my dear Rebel friend: you ask the questions, I answer them! You set em up, I knock ‘em down!

So let’s dig into what you can do on a day “off” from training.

Plan Your Off Days Like a Training Day

The biggest problem most people have with off days is that they become cheat days! Because they’re not training, they’re not thinking about being fit and it’s much easier to slack off and lose momentum.

This is bad news bears.

Remember, exercise is probably 10-20% of the equation: how we eat and rest is the other 80-90%!

So plan your off days deliberately! They’re not off days, they’re rest days, and they serve a vital role in building an antifragile kickass body capable of fighting crime (or roughhousing with your kids in the backyard).

Whether it’s scheduling one of the activities below at the same time you normally train every day, or deliberately adding a morning mobility/stretching routine to your day, doing SOMETHING every day is a great way to remind ourselves “I am changing my life and I exercise daily.”

Personally, I know I am far less likely to eat poorly when I’m doing some active recovery than when I’m not doing anything deliberately. On days when I’m not training, I try to block off a similar amount of time to work on myself in some way to maintain momentum, and I encourage you to do the same if you struggle with losing momentum if even taking one day off.

It could be flexibility training, mobility training, meal prep, and more. I’ll cover these below! Whatever it is, do SOMETHING every day, even if it’s for just five minutes, to remind yourself that you are making progress towards your new life.

Let’s dive in to your off-day options!

Work on Mobility

We’ve all felt that soreness the day after (or two days after) strength training – our muscles have been broken down and are incredibly tight from all of the heavy lifting.

For that reason, one of the best things you can do on an off day is to work on your flexibility and mobility. After all, what good is strength if we can’t move our body properly to utilize it! Dynamic stretching and mobility work helps prepare our body for the rigors of strength training and keeps us injury free!

Regardless of whether or not you have a training day scheduled, start each morning with a mobility warm-up: a series of dynamic movements that gets your body activated and wakes up your muscles, joints, and tendons. If you live in an apartment or are just getting started, feel free to leave out the jumping jacks:

This gives us a chance every morning to check in with our bodies and reminds us mentally “I am leveling up physically, might as well eat right today too.”

Here’s another favorite mobility routine from my friend (and coach) Anthony Mychal. It says it’s a warm-up for tricking, but it’s quite helpful for those of us mere mortals: 

If you spend all day at a desk, doing some basic mobility movements throughout the day can keep your hips loose and keep you thinking positively. Here’s an article on how to dominate posture at your desk job.

Do a Fun Activity

We are genetically designed to move, not sit on our asses for 60+ hours a week. Not only that, but we are genetically designed to have fun doing so too!

Which means we can spend time on our off days working on our happiness AND stay active at the same time.

This fun activity can mean something different for everybody:

• Go for a bike ride with your kids
• Go for a run around your neighborhood
• Play kickball in a city league (I play on Thursdays!)
• Play softball
• Swim
• Go for a walk with your significant other
• Go rock climbing
• Learn martial arts like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Capoeira or Kung Fu
• Take a dance class
• Try Live Action Role-Playing (LARP!)
• Play on a playground
• Roll down a hill and run back up it

I honestly don’t care WHAT you do, as long as it’s something you truly enjoy doing – it puts a smile on your face, it gets your heart pumping. Exercise does not need to be exhausting or miserable. If you haven’t found an activity you enjoy yet, you haven’t tried enough new things.

The point is to get outside, remember it’s a damn good day to be alive, and that we are built to move.

Intervals, Sprints, Or Walking

“But Steve, I have this big party coming up and I really am trying to lose as much weight as possible.”

Okay okay, I hear you – if that’s the case, then 90% of the battle is going to be with your diet (which you can learn about here), but there are SOME things you can do on your off days that can help you burn more calories:

1) Interval Training –  In interval training, you’ll be varying your running pace. This means you may switch between jogging and walking, or walking and sprinting (there are few different methods of interval training). This training style can help speed up your metabolism for the hours after you finish.

2) Sprinting – If you like the idea of burning extra calories and building explosive power and speed, check out our article on becoming the Flash. Find a hill, sprint up it, walk down, and repeat the process for 10-20 minutes. No need to overthink it!

3) Long walks – Walking is a low-impact activity that burns extra calories and doesn’t overly tax your body. What a “long walk” will be is different for everybody based on their level of fitness, but walking is one of the best things you can do for yourself!

If you want to take a more active recovery day, the most important thing is to listen to your body. Destroying ourselves for 6+ days a week can really wear us down, causing long term problems if we’re not careful.

Yoga for the win!

You might not realize it, but yoga is the perfect complement to strength training:

Strength training makes us stronger, but it can tighten up our muscles and make us sore.

Yoga, on the other hand, lengthens our muscles and tendons, aids in their recovery, and helps our body develop better mobility and flexibility.

It’s the perfect way to create a strong AND mobile body, ready for anything and everything we throw at it. It’s kind of like turning your body into a swiss-army knife: prepared to be strong, flexible enough to avoid injury, and truly antifragile.

Now, if you’ve never been to a yoga class before, it can certainly be intimidating, especially if you’re a ones-and-zeros programmer wary of the practice’s more spiritual aspects. That was my concern years ago before I got started with it; I had to muster up 20 seconds of courage to attend my first yoga class, and I’m so glad I did.

Here’s how to get started with Yoga!

• Nearly any commercial gym you join will have yoga classes.
• Most yoga studios have classes throughout the day.
• Follow a plethora of videos online if you want to get started at home.
• Check out Nerd Fitness Yoga launching soon!

Nerd Fitness Yoga is something we’ve been working on for months and I can’t wait to share it with you!

When you sign up for more information here we’ll be sharing a cool flexibility challenge to help you gauge just how flexible you are and how you can improve your flexibility.

what do you Do On Your Off Days?

As we know, a healthy body is made in the kitchen, not in the gym. It’s important to stay diligent with healthy nutrition even on days when you’re not hitting the gym.

One of the best ways to do that is to use one of your non-training days to prepare your meals for the week! NF Team Member Staci Ardison does all of her meal prep for the week on Sundays, and looks at it like an activity that is furthering her fitness journey.

I like to use one of my off days to break a mental sweat too! On Tuesdays, I take fiddle lessons, which is a mental workout so taxing that I can’t wait to get back to deadlifts!

Here’s another thing you can do on off days: Have fun. 

Whether it’s playing a video game, getting caught up on a movie or TV show, or reading a book, it’s important for us to do the nerdy or fun things that make us who we are. As the Rules of the Rebellion state: fitness can become part of we do, but not at the expense of who we are!

I’m currently playing through Batman Arkham Knight (add me on PS4 and Xbox One: “RebelOneNF”!), and as I collect the Riddler Trophies, I think to myself: “I am rebuilding muscle like Batman.”

How do you stay on target even on days when you’re not “training?”

I’d love to hear from you – do you take the day off completely? Do you challenge yourself in a different way?  Do you try to do something every day to keep the momentum up, or do you actually take days off?

Leave it in the comments!

-Steve 

PS: Speaking of flexibility, I’d love for you to join the Nerd Fitness mobility challenge that kicks off soon. We’ll be sending out an email series to all people on our Yoga Interest List with exercises, videos, and challenges to test your flexibility.

We put a lot of work into it and we can’t wait to help you get more limber!

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http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

How often do we bemoan people’s lack of expectations around their health? Their passivity. Their inertia. Their apathy. (Perhaps our own.) They just don’t seem to care or even expect that good health would offer them enough to justify the effort. I can feel heads shaking out there. Personally, I don’t get it either.

On the other hand, there are those people who hold good health on all encompassing pedestals. Maybe you know a few – or have identified as one yourself at some point. They’re the folks who believe that if they can only lose X pounds or get into great shape or achieve washboard abs that everything else in life will finally come together. They’d finally be happy, successful and otherwise “worthy.” And their thinking becomes a distortion that tells them they flat-out can’t be those things until they’ve achieved their physical end goals (as if there is such a thing). As odd as it might sound to some, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen latch onto this panacea principle.

I get it – why this discrepancy between expectation and reality. Is it much wonder people glom onto this notion when you consider how healthy, fit, athletic-looking people are often portrayed? It isn’t only that they’re active or doing exciting things in all the ads and entertainment news features. It’s that they supposedly have everything together. It’s suggested they have high-paying jobs with big titles. They have huge social circles and great relationships. Their kids do well in school. Can we just cut the bull already and remember what we’re doing here?

Let me back up and say that taking care of yourself can give you more energy (always a major plus). If your body is in good health, it will serve your hormonal balance and emotional resilience. You’ll likely sleep better and have a better immune response. You’ll be able to do more fun things like kayak or hike or surf for hours. There is almost no end to the benefits of being healthy and what it can do for your overall well-being.

That said, let’s be clear. Getting fit and healthy won’t make you more lovable. You won’t suddenly be showered with good fortune. You won’t be released from all your unhealthy tendencies and personal faults. Bad memories and past indiscretions won’t be carried away by a blue balloon. Insecurities won’t disintegrate. Life won’t suddenly morph into a convivial Miller High Life commercial.

Because the truth is that old mundane phrase – wherever you go, there you are – with all the baggage you came with.

That voice that seventy pounds ago told you were never as impressive as other people around you… That habit of always looking for a comparison between yourself and others… That uncomfortable feeling in crowds or fear of rejection… The propensity to live small and stay invisible… Guess what? They don’t vanish with lost pounds or muscle gained.

Whether it’s losing 20 or 120 pounds, running an endurance event or otherwise transforming your health, none of these accomplishments will give you what’s lacking in your emotional well-being.

This you have to claim from other kinds of work – a speaking back to those internal bogeys time and again. There’s no flip-switch here. Changing your inner environment takes effort in the same way transforming your physical state does. Taking the initiative to make substantive external changes surely can boost your confidence, but it’s still an inner job. Getting real about your health doesn’t preclude you from doing the necessary internal work to get right with your inner self.

The people I’ve seen meet with the most success in health goals are those who can appropriately distinguish their health endeavors from the overall outcome or meaningfulness of their lives. There’s an advantage to not hinging your success in life to a number on the scale or an athletic goal. It’s the difference between letting good health support our ability to go after other visions and expecting our dreams to be met if we achieve a certain fitness measure.

Why would anyone put that much pressure on their health process?

Instead of bringing impossible (i.e. self-defeating) expectations to our workouts and meals and nightly walks, how about we keep it simple? Getting healthy is worth getting healthy – all on its own without the push to fix every problem we perceive or elevate every dimension of our lives.

Gauge your expectations for the sake of your success. Consider the weight loss or fitness goal you’re going for as a positive base to expand from rather than the panacea for all that leaves us less satisfied or connected in our lives.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Let me know your thoughts, and have a good end to your week.

Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

The “butt wink” is a colloquialism for when the pelvis tucks under at the bottom of the squat. Research indicates that allowing the lower back to go into flexion makes it is more difficult to avoid staying out of flexion in other movements (i.e., butt winks before deadlifts could be dangerous). The rounding of the lower back can also aggravate pain and lead to injury.

read more

Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

The “butt wink” is a colloquialism for when the pelvis tucks under at the bottom of the squat. Research indicates that allowing the lower back to go into flexion makes it is more difficult to avoid staying out of flexion in other movements (i.e., butt winks before deadlifts could be dangerous). The rounding of the lower back can also aggravate pain and lead to injury.

read more