Written by Happiness is always available to you.
Mind, Consciousness, Thought
Inspired by Sydney Banks and Michael Neill
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Gain Muscle and Mobility
Strength coach and religious studies teacher, Dan John, likes to say, “The goal is to keep the goal the goal.” Read that again after we talk about why you should gain muscle and mobility.
Do you have a goal for your training?
I believe that while workouts should have a basic structure, for those of us who aren’t trying to extend a National Football League career, it is also important to have some randomness to our exercise design. Having some randomness in our training can help us deal with some of the random stressors that life likes to throw at us.
Additionally, if you’re over 35, you should probably be focusing on gaining more muscle and moving better.
Not static stretching, not running a bunch of miles – putting on muscle and improving mobility are more important for your longevity and quality of life.
Why Muscle?
Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle size, strength, and function. Medical professionals say it begins during the fourth decade. But if symptoms tell the tale, I’ve seen it in people in their late 20′s and early 30′s (also Google the “Female Athlete Triad”). Unless you’re doing something to maintain and increase it, you’ll start to lose muscle in your 30′s. It’s important, and never too late, to create that “armor” now.
Muscle is so important that it’s maintenance or loss is predictive of the life span of someone with cancer, muscular dystrophy, AIDS, kidney disease, or heart disease.
Please don’t tell me you want to avoid putting on “too much muscle” – unless you’re comfortable with derisive laughter. The only people who need to worry about this are those with access to performance enhancing drugs – and they’ll have other issues to deal with down the line.
As you probably know, you put on muscle with resistance training. The body doesn’t know where the resistance is coming from so it can happen with barbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, your own bodyweight, or machines (last choice). Make the resistance challenging and progressive.
Mobility or Flexibility?
People get these two confused. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that when something feels tight, stiff, or sore, stretching that part feels good. The problem is that the cause of the pain is often not at the site of the pain. In fact, releasing tension in the neck can alleviate some shoulder pain. The lower back can be made to feel better by rolling your glutes on a tennis or lacrosse ball. Heel pain can be helped with a calf massage. The knee bone’s connected to the shinbone but…
You know how your lower back can sometimes be a little stiff? Your go-to remedy to relieve the stiffness is reaching down to your toes, going into a yoga child pose, or lying on your back and pulling one or both legs to your chest. It feels good. You get some relief but the irritation never completely goes away. For too many people, the back problem slowly morphs into other things.
A couple of years ago, you would have run for the bus before it pulled away but you don’t want to embarrass yourself. Moving around first thing in the morning requires its own ritual just so you don’t hurt yourself. You stop yourself before you break into a trot up the stairs from the subway or to your apartment. You’d like to take a bath but it’s a hassle to get up and down in the tub so you stick with the shower.
You wouldn’t even dream of putting on socks or shoes while standing up without something to hold on to. In addition to your lower back, your shoulder, your knee, your hip, or your heel seem to be nagging you as well. Mobility and muscle are lacking.
If this isn’t you, you’re probably under 30 or have been coming to Brownstone Fitness 3x/week for more than a year.
Stretching lengthens the muscle that is being stretched. The muscle generally won’t maintain that length and may even cause it to shorten in a protective reflex if the stretch is too aggressive. Intelligent stretching (certain forms of yoga, PNF, etc.) can help with joint position but when time is precious, you get the biggest bang for your buck with…
…mobility work.
Instead of just the muscle, improved mobility impacts the muscles crossing the joint, the ligaments, and the nervous system. Flexibility looks at the end ranges of motion. Mobility looks at how well you can move through those ranges of motion. Mobility work looks like Martha Peterson’s Essential Somatics,Tai Chi, some Pilates movements, certain flowing forms of yoga, the animal movements we do here, or gentle bending, twisting, and rotations at the different joints.
Do you want me to put up a short video of a mobility routine? Let me know in comments.
photo by: Paul L Dineen
Pain – Can You Still Play?
playing with pain
Apparently, there’s a phenomenon where, after heart surgery, men become more emotional. Well, I haven’t had heart surgery but I find that I spend more time reflecting on human pain and my role in alleviating it.
My children have asked me if I’ve ever gotten into a fight. My youngest daughter asked if anyone has ever given me “booboos,”while my youngest son asked if I’ve ever gotten my “ass kicked.” The smile that accompanies his question makes me wonder if this is part of the sizing up that is naturally done in the animal kingdom. My answer is that, yes, people have given me booboos AND kicked my ass.
I can name some of the perpetrators – Joseph D’Angelo, Shiro Oishi, and Col. Al Ridenhour (my guides in the Martial Way). Life has also gotten some swings in.
The good news is that I have been able to mostly avoid the effects of random violence by either running fast or striking first.
I recently did a quick “booboo” inventory of my body. There’s the nose that’s been broken three times; the ribs that were fractured and had the cartilage between them torn; the scar along my knee where the quadriceps tendon that had ripped from my kneecap was sewn back after holes were drilled in the bone; the bone spur to go along with the arthritis in the same ankle; the two fingers that had to be reconstructed after being shattered into several pieces; and both elbows that don’t completely straighten because all the cartilage is gone and instead of a cushion between the bones of my upper and lower arm, the two bones have ground down into an offset position.
Does it hurt? Yes. It sometimes feels like ice picks are being driven into my joints. But I stand with my pal, T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”).
In the eponymous movie, Lawrence (as played by Peter O’Toole) holds his hand over a flame until his skin begins to burn. His colleague, William Potter asks: “Doesn’t it hurt?” Lawrence responds: “Of course it hurts, Potter. The trick is not minding that it hurts.”
Pain is temporary. Unless we try to deny the truth of what is. Then it will increase.
I catch myself making a deal with God that I will honor the pain if I can avoid the stroke that paralyzed my father or the Parkinson’s that weakened my mother. I stop this when I notice it (see above about denying the truth).
There is a symphony of human movement that is available to all of us. The instruments may be old and missing a string or a key. Practice can’t be missed. The challenge is to play the music that’s inside us to the best of our ability. It brings honor to us and to our Creator.
Are you in physical or emotional pain? Email me. I’ll write you back. We’ll talk. It’ll help.
Hans
photo by: VinothChandar
Happiness with Flow
Brownstone Fitness coaching
Finding Happiness Through Flow
How often are you in flow? Flow occurs when you’re engaged in an activity that’s challenging but not outside your skill set. It’s something so deeply interesting that you lose all sense of time and place and you have the feeling that, wherever this is, it’s exactly the place you are supposed to be.
Flow can occur on a job, in an athletic activity, through the creation of art, or in relationship with someone. In this state, your focus gives you access to your essential self. You tap into the source of natural pleasure that is our birthright. As me move into adulthood, this source gets polluted, blocked, covered up, diverted.
Losing It and Finding It Again
I enjoy (and miss) working with young people. Even the teenagers I worked with who had been beaten down, still retained a sense of the possible. For some it was rare, but almost all of them had times when they were able to access that internal flame of simple joy.
As we become adults, we’ve been clothed in “shoulds” and drugged by “must haves.” These paths take us away from the essential.
Bernadette and I think the work at Brownstone is important. There are many nights when we share our frustrations over the (small) group of individuals who pass through here thinking that what we provide is just another commodity. While I sit here writing this, Bernadette is putting in another three hours of study in physiology. She’ll then work on some relaxation visualizations. When I finish, I’ll do some reading on motivation, relieving shoulder impingement, and thinking about exercise circuits. No fast food burgers being served here.
Struggle
Running a small business like this is a struggle on many levels. We are asking people to spend a decent amount money on a regular basis to do something that is hard and that most people don’t want to do. We’re proud of you for engaging in the struggle nonetheless
In the world’s oldest wisdom book, the Bhagavad Gita Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna that “you are only entitled to your labors but not to the fruits of your labors.”
Our labor is not dedicated to toned arms and six-pack abs, but to freeing up your child inside, helping you to feel joy, and, when you let us, reminding you that you’re only one thought away from happiness.
You won’t find that in a 24-Hour Fitness brochure.
Meditation and The Principle of Least Action
There’s a principle of physics called the “principle of least action.” It kind of says that Nature will find the most efficient path from one point to another. This concept is easy to ignore in our workouts and as we make our way through the world. We look for quick fixes in every area of our lives. There are all sorts of “bright, shiny objects” in the worlds of diet and fitness that distract us from the most efficient path to wellness.
I received an email a little while ago from a distraught teenage girl desperate for help with her weight. She had stumbled onto the Brownstone Fitness website and is courageously reaching out for help. There are so many conflicting messages that this young lady has already received about what she is supposed to look like if she’s going to fit in and be popular. At times like these I am reminded that exercise programming and meal planning are only small pieces of the puzzle.
We pay for diet and exercise systems that we hope will get us where we think we want to go. There are at least two problems with this. One is that the conditions and environments that surround us (work, family, media messages, etc.) don’t allow us to work the systems.
A bigger problem is that a slavish adherence to a system blocks our awareness of the wisdom inside and around us. Find a time and a place every day to be quiet and listen for this wisdom. Accessing this wisdom calms the mind and allows the body to realize the healthy and vigorous state it was born for. Some people call this meditation.
Prayer happens when we talk to God. Meditation allows the space for God to talk to us. These may not be easy things but they are simple. You can discover for yourself the principle of least action.
The Shocking Truth About Health And Fitness
What do most of us miss on the path to health and fitness?
Healthy relationships, doing work you love, expressing yourself fully, avoiding exposure to environmental toxins, having a spiritual connection – these things are at least as important as your annual physical, how many miles you’ve run, or whether you’re buying organic.
This M.D. talks about how she discovered this for herself.
If you want help with the “work you love,” spiritual connection,” and relationship parts, you might want to sign up for this.
