bearing blog

You don't have to overdo it.

Article in the NYT Well Blog: Why 4 Workouts a Week May Be Better Than Six.

And how about just two workouts a week? Really -- almost as good.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily...

[R]esearchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women, ages 60 to 74, and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group... completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week...

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups....

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued....Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

I have long advised people who want to become "one of those people who works out" to start with twice a week, and try to keep that up for a good long while. I only manage three times a week myself, and that is if I am lucky and nothing derails me. Twice a week can be life-changing -- it is frequent enough to see and enjoy progress, but not enough to cause burnout. Whether it requires stressful schedule juggling depends on how full your schedule already is, and on what you are currently filling your time with.

 

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The semi-annual gluttony retrospective.

Well, it's that time of year again.

In May and November of every year --

yeah, I'm a little late this holiday season, but at least I made it to the crucial "between Thanksgiving and Christmas" metric --

I write a few posts about the maintenance of my 2008 weight loss.  

I do this for a couple of reasons.

First, it gives me the opportunity to clean up the links to old posts about gluttony, weight loss, and weight maintenance.  Taken all together, the posts about gluttony and weight loss and such form a lengthy and growing series, and it's one that gets a lot of hits.  I can see from the stats that often someone comes to read through the whole thing.  I like to keep it maintained if I can.  (Right now it's a little ragged.  I'll let you know when I get it all fixed up.)

Second, it gives me a needed semi-annual accountability fix.  It always seems that right about every six months, I've started to slide a bit, and writing publicly about my lazy bad habits generally shames me into paying attention to them again long enough to do me some good.  This is a long-term project and it needs regular upkeep, even as the frequency of upkeep has dropped quite low.

Third, time has refined and tested many of my theories and ideas about how to defeat gluttony and, secondarily, how to resist gaining the weight back; also, how to maintain mental health and raise children with healthy attitudes toward bodies, food, and fitness.  As I stumbled along, I got a lot of things wrong or at least not quite right, and as I get older and learn things, I like to go back and see what I used to think and write, and ask myself if I have learned anything new.  I want to find places where I was wrong, and point them out here in this space, maybe go back and update old posts.

Readers:  

• what would you like to see here in the next few posts?  
• any stories from the trenches you'd like to share?
• recommendations of articles or books?  (A few people have sent me some already that I've saved for this)
• any questions?

The combox is yours.

 EDITED TO ADD:   Really, only one comment or question?  Maybe I've finally exhausted the topic!

Adult swim, part II.

Jamie asked me to write about taking adult swim lessons.

Here's where I wrote about the year of lessons I took from my local YMCA.

After a while, I figured it was time to start learning and improving on my own. Continuing...

+ + +

All along, while I had been taking lessons from the instructors at the YMCA, I had been thinking: "Finally, I know how to swim laps. When I begin my next pregnancy, I'll stay strong and healthy by swimming laps every week. Maybe twice a week."

Soon after I decided to quit lessons and just swim on my own, I became pregnant with my third baby. I started out excited, and in those early weeks I plunged eagerly into the pool, secretly smiling and thinking about the little one who would soon be swimming inside me.

And then the first trimester hit me like a truck, and I spent every spare minute, for approximately 19 weeks, either sleeping or wishing I was sleeping.

Didn't even dip a toe in the pool. Mark took the older one to swim lessons by himself. I stayed home with the toddler. It was one of those long and grueling pregnancies, and the burst of energy never seemed to come. I never went back to the pool, even at the end.

Looking back on it, I wish I had dragged myself there anyway. I know now (after a fourth pregnancy) that swimming can be easy and relaxing, that the buoyancy of the water is a blessed relief from the weight of a swollen abdomen, that even a little large-muscle movement can restore a sense of total mental balance. At the time, it just seemed too hard. And that was more about my inexperience with regular exercise than it was about the pregnancy. I still thought of getting up and moving as something I ought to do rather than something I wanted to do, and that meant I was eager for an excuse to stay on the couch. Pregnancy was a great excuse. Nobody would blame me for sleeping all day. All pregnancy long.

+ + +

If you have been following my blog for a while, particularly if you are one of the people who followed me when it briefly became a Weight Loss Blog, you know that I gave birth to that daughter in mid-2006.

And you know my New Year's resolution for 2008 -- once my daughter was no longer a tiny baby -- was to start swimming twice a week.

And you know that I kept that resolution.

And you know that this is how I learned to embrace regular exercise instead of couch potatoship.

And you know that this was a transforming experience.

I still had a lot of learning to do about swimming, particularly the breaststroke, but I didn't think that any more lessons would help. So I turned to the Internet and to books.

+ + +

The first really helpful Internet resource I found was a trove of articles on the website of H2Ouston Swims, a USMS masters swimming club in Houston, TX. It contained so much information I was almost overwhelmed, but I read lots of it, took some notes, and tried some of the drills.

Probably the most useful concept I learned from the articles was the skill of "sculling." (The series entitled "Get a Better Grip!" talks about this.) It has to do with angling your hands to act as "propeller blades" as they move through the water, and how that ties into the arm strokes. (I wrote briefly about it here.)

Just as important as the skill itself was the revelation that I needed to take these movements into my mind and think about them -- in particular, I needed to read about them as described by a skilled writer. The real-life instruction in the pool was helpful to a point, but I needed to take the skills apart, analyze them, realize what each motion accomplished as part of the stroke, and then put them back together the way they were supposed to go. Once I understood how the arm motions and leg motions work together to cause body rotation -- how the rotation itself provides some of the propulsion -- how the relative position of the two arms during the catch can create more or less drag in the water -- then I found I felt stronger, purposeful, confident. As if I could choose how to make my body work. More in control.

In February of that year I ordered two books about swimming. One of them, I realized later, was written by the H2Ouston Swims coach. The other was a begin-at-the-beginning how-to-swim instructional manual. I used the latter one to teach myself, finally, how to swim the breaststroke. (The crucial mental breakthrough? I stopped trying to pull-breathe-kick-glide, and started thinking of it as kick-glide-pull-breathe. For some reason, that made my brain much happier and I became instantly able to integrate the pieces of the stroke together. I have never had anyone evaluate my breaststroke to tell me if I am doing it all wrong, but it seems to work, so I am kind of afraid to ask.)

The workouts in my books were too long for me to start, so I went online looking for short swimming workouts. I found these at BeginnerTriathlete.com. That website had a set of beginning swimming workouts that started at 400 meters (for me, 400 yards, since my pool isn't metric). Let me just point out that there are not many published workouts at under 1000 yards. But 400 yards is only 8 times across the pool. That is a nice, easy way to start out -- and if you can't do 400 yards yet, it won't be long before you can work your way up to it. Highly recommended. Even better, the workouts come in three kinds: endurance, form, and speed. I mostly did the endurance and form workouts, since I only had two swims per week, but I did occasionally dip into the speed workouts.

+ + +

I kept swimming, and later running too. All through my fourth pregnancy (until I worried about turning the baby breech in late pregnancy) I swam twice a week. I couldn't wait until I could get back in the pool at six weeks postpartum. Unless I have a sinus infection or lack pool access for some reason, I never go more than a week or so without craving the water.

I have played around with hand paddles, with lap counters. I have been through at least half a dozen swimsuits. These days I follow a minimalist, 1650-yard workout that requires little thought and takes a bit more than 45 minutes:

• 300 yard warmup: 2 laps pulling, 2 laps kicking, 2 laps backstroke
• 400 yards freestyle, 100 yards breaststroke
• 300 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
• 200 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
• 100 yards freestyle
• 150 yard cooldown: 1 lap backstroke, 1 lap kicking, 1 lap pulling

I am too busy right now to think about improving, so this is my holding pattern. I only have one goal, which is to get it reliably below 45 minutes -- an average of 1 minute 22 seconds per lap. The warmup and breaststroke are much slower than that, so I need to speed my freestyle up considerably to break that.

 

One of my greatest pleasures comes weekly when I bring my now-six-year-old daughter to her swim lesson. Her lesson is 40 minutes, so I can almost get my whole workout in while she swims. When she is done, she patters over to the end of the lane where I am finishing up, sits down and dangles her feet in the water, and taps me on the hand when I arrive at the wall. "Can I swim with you?" she asks, and if the pool is not too crowded and no one is sharing the lane, I say "Yes" and she hops in with me. I tow her to the midline and back, nodding approvingly at her paddling form, grinning and clapping when she shows me how she has learned to dive to the bottom or to float on her back.

 

She cannot remember a time when I wasn't a swimmer, every week stuffing my hair under a cap and jumping right into the cold pool without hesitation or shudder. Every one of her lessons have been, for her, learning to do something she sees me do all the time.

Adult swim.

I wonder if the reason I'm having trouble writing blog posts lately is that my two older sons have started setting an alarm so they can be downstairs playing Minecraft before I wake up.  Even though, as the parent, I technically have the right to say "Begone, wretches!" and shoo them away so I can sit down with my coffee, I tend instead to wander off to the schoolroom for my iPad and settle down in the rocking chair with it.  And although I can blog from my iPad, it's not quite as comfortable.  On marginal mornings this might just be enough to destroy the muse.

+ + +

Jamie asked me yesterday if I would write about swim lessons, so I will.

I was made to have a few sessions of swimming lessons as a child, which left me able to mess around in a pool without drowning.  And that was good enough for me until after I'd had two babies.  

Back when my oldest was three and my second was a baby, we had a family membership at the YMCA.  I was sporadically lifting weights and using an exercise bike, Mark was running, and we were putting the three-year-old in swimming lessons for the first time.  As I brought him to the pool and picked him up afterward, I would watch swimmers swimming laps, literally something I had never done for fun or exercise.  

Swimming seemed to me a magical, mythical exercise.  It seems so difficult to arrange, all that changing and showering.  And there is the mysterious lap etiquette by which three or more swimmers can share a lane without hating each other, despite not being able to rely on eye contact because of their otherworldly goggles.  And I heard that it requires inhuman acts, like getting up early in the morning (isn't that what swimmers do?  swim early in the morning?) and possibly going outside with your hair wet in January.  Also, I didn't know any swimmers.  I just saw them in the locker room, peeling off their caps and heading for the shower as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

I found myself, though, saying to people over and over again:  "Oh, I lifted weights during my pregnancies... as long as I could... but I kind of wish I could swim better, so I could try swimming during my next one.  I can't really swim though."  I said it to H. often enough that one day she said to me, "Well, why don't you just take lessons then?"

And after a while I thought:  Indeed -- why not?  We were going to the YMCA at least once a week anyway.  I could have a swimming lesson and Mark could make sure the kids were settled (the one-year-old did not always like staying in the YMCA child care).  It would be a real once-a-week appointment to get some exercise, if nothing else.  I asked Mark if he could commit to it, and he happily agreed, and so I picked up a schedule for swimming lessons at the front desk.

+ + +

At the time, the YMCA had two kinds of adult swim lessons:  the one for people who are uncomfortable or fearful in the water, today called Basic Water Adjustment, and the one for people who aren't afraid of the water and who have some ability to maneuver around in it.  I was the latter kind, so that's what I signed up for.  Today that class is called Stroke Development.

I dug in my out-of-season clothes and found a swimsuit.  I didn't have goggles or a swim cap, so I didn't bring any.  I changed self-consciously in the locker room -- not because I was unused to changing, but because I was unused to putting on a swimsuit.  I felt that everybody could tell that I was not really a swimmer.  (Imposter syndrome had, apparently, followed me home from graduate school.) 

 

There were two other adults in my first class, both women.  The instructor was a woman who also taught children's lessons; I had seen her in the pool when I brought my four-year-old to the pool deck.  The first thing she asked us to do was to swim from the middle of the pool (just before the bottom started sloping down towards the deep end) to the shallow-end wall so that she could see what skills we already had.  

From that ten-yard swim, the instructor could learn that I remembered some of my childhood lessons:  I could put my head in the water, and I had the basic idea of what a front crawl should look like.

 But I learned something even MORE important:  this department-store swimsuit was not going to cut it.  I do not remember much from that first lesson except that I spent it alternately trying to follow the instructor's instructions and trying to stuff myself back into my suit.

(Perhaps the imposter syndrome was, er, truthful in this case.)

One week later I appeared at the swimming lesson with a brand new Speedo suit from the local sporting goods store.  Also a pair of goggles, which I did not know how to adjust.  Things went better after that.

+ + +

I took swim lessons from the YMCA for a year.  By the end of that year I had a passable front crawl and backstroke.  I had had three different instructors.  They had all tried to teach me breaststroke, and I could do each of the pieces (pull, breathe, kick, glide) but I could not put them together more than three times in a row before getting mixed up and decaying into thrashing and sinking.   I also gave up on learning flip-turns after it became clear that I always came off the wall pointed downwards, which hurts the ears in the deep end and the head in the shallow end.  

But I was now able to swim laps, which I'd always wanted to do.  It was time for me to start practicing and learning on my own. 

.... and I think I'll write about that in another post.

A little middle-aged motivation for you.

The NYT "Well Blog" describes a study that's good news for those of us who are committed to staying fit in middle age -- or who have time to practice better habits between now and then.

[W]e are spending more years living with chronic disease and ill health — not the outcome that most of us would hope for from a prolonged life span.

But a notable new study published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that a little advance planning could change that prospect. Being or becoming fit in middle age, the study found, even if you haven’t previously bothered with exercise, appears to reshape the landscape of aging.

Here's the deal, as best as I can figure it out:  Waaaay back in 1970, a group of more than 18,000 healthy, chronic-disease-free middle-aged men and women (average age:  49) had visited  a clinic for a treadmill test to determine their aerobic fitness.  

According to the blog, the data was still around in recent years, when researchers used it to divide the group into five "fitness categories" based on the results of that long-ago treadmill test.  (Most of them fell in the "least-fit" category.)  

Then, in a first-of-its-kind data comparison, the researchers checked the same individuals’ Medicare claim records (with permission) from 1999 through 2009, by which time most of the participants were in their 70s or 80s.

What they found was that those adults who had been the least fit at the time of their middle-age checkup also were the most likely to have developed any of eight serious or chronic conditions early in the aging process. These include heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and colon or lung cancer.

The adults who’d been the most fit in their 40s and 50s often developed many of the same conditions, but notably their maladies appeared significantly later in life than for the less fit. Typically, the most aerobically fit people lived with chronic illnesses in the final five years of their lives, instead of the final 10, 15 or even 20 years.

This is pretty good news, especially if you're

• (a) already a fit middle-aged person, 
• (b) not yet middle-aged, or
• (c) just beginning middle age and thinking about developing good habits.

Moving from the least-fit to the second-least-fit category appears to have the strongest effect.  If that's so, then going from total couch potato to not-quite-completely-a-couch-potato might make a big difference in how many years you spend as an infirm adult.

The aerobic fitness level at that middle-aged checkup did not affect lifespan nearly as strongly as it affected quality of life.   It "compressed" the years of infirmity.  To put it bluntly, this suggests that a public health effort which managed to encourage activity in the middle age years could well pay off in long-term health care costs.

+ + +

Of course, this might not demonstrate a causal relationship.  Even though all these adults were healthy and free of chronic disease in 1970, maybe the least-fit ones were unfit because of some underlying, deep condition that also caused them to develop chronic disease sooner than the fitter ones.  Maybe a choice to become fitter wouldn't have changed that.

But then again, maybe it would have.  Maybe individuals who decided to become fitter would have paid more attention to the signals their body sent them, and would have detected problems earlier.  Maybe a habit of exercise would have given them confidence to change other habits.  Maybe getting out of the house more would have improved their mental health.  We really don't know.  

I think this is really good news for my readers out there, most of whom are women in their childbearing years, and who don't see much concrete motivation to work on fitness habits.  You've got time, folks. 

+ + +

I would be interested in knowing more details about the age range and about how the individuals were divided into fitness quintiles, but don't have quick and easy access to the journal.  

(HINT HINT HINT, those of you with access to Arch. Intern. Med.   I believe this is the link.)

 

The secret to living a balanced life.

Every once in a while someone, perhaps a fellow parishioner, or another mother in our preschool music class, or someone who reads my blog, will say to me:  "Aren't you the one who is some kind of fitness fanatic?  Who runs and swims all the time?"

No, no, I'm not.

It's really kind of funny.  I'm not sure how I give the impression that I spend lots and lots of time at the gym. 

Here is my theory.  I think it must be pretty rare for someone who gets a medium amount of regular exercise to be all excited about it and want to write and talk about it frequently.

It's definitely rare for you to see it as a sort of profile in the media.  The media spectrum of exercise is, I think, kind of bimodal, with a broad peak around "not a whole lot of exercise" and a smaller, intense peak around "fitness fan."  

I mean, we all know about couch potatoes, right?  And we all know about people who are constantly thinking about taking up a fitness plan, and maybe starting up a new one here and there or making hopeful and unrealistic New Year's resolutions, but petering out quickly?  And we all know about people who get active on a weekend, but not during the week, right?

Also, we all know about Olympic athletes and marathoners and Ironman competitors, and we know about those people in Thin For Life who say that they only manage to keep the pounds off with 90 minutes of cardio every single day, and we know about those people who say that they would go nuts if they didn't have a run, and we know about people who are actively training for a race (and if you have seen the recommended training programs, they are all at least 5 workouts a week), and we know about the marketing-defined consumer category of "fit moms" who "spend nearly every free minute working out, cross-training for triathlons and scheduling regular boot camps and yoga."  (I wrote about that here.)

Since I get to the gym regularly, and since I write about my own experiences as a runner and swimmer, I must be in the latter peak, right?

No.  I don't think I am.

This is my fitness regimen:

• One swim per week.  Ideally, a swimmer's mile in 40 minutes.  Often I only have 20 or 30 minutes.
• One run per week.  Ideally, I go 5K (including the warmup distance) or 45 minutes.  Often I only have 20 or 30 minutes total.
• One more, either swim or run, 30-45 minutes.

So no.  I do not work out every day.  I do not even work out 5 days a week.  

Well, then, I must aspire to that, right?  And I must wish I had the resolve, or could get my priorities in order, to become one of those?  To run half-marathons instead of just 5Ks, to get to the gym every morning, to take six-mile outdoor runs for fun, to add yoga and kettlebells?  

Not right now.

Why not? After all, the experts tell us the minimum is something like 30 minutes of moderate exercise 5 days a week, right, plus strength training?  

Answer:  Because I have a lot of other things going on, and I am not willing to cut back on the other things.  That's the truth.

 And (here's the part that explains why I write so happily and often about my medium level of fitness) -- I'm really satisfied with it right now.  I enjoy my three workouts a week.  I feel so great when they're done and I can check them off, and feel the slight ache that stays with me all the next day to remind me that I am still taking halfway-decent care of myself.  And on my four "rest" days, I am glad not to have to fit one more thing into my busy days.  Don't get me wrong -- if I get the chance to go hiking or bowling or take a walk with my husband or play in the park with the kids, I add that in and am grateful.  But I really want to teach and tidy and cook and blog and read and go out on the weekends, too, and if all my "me time" was working out, it would be hard to do all that.

Another thing: at this level, I don't grapple with constant low-level injuries, and I have yet to hit the plateau where a little more training doesn't gain much performance.  These are both nice bonuses.

+ + +

I decided last night, as I was settling into bed after my run (which had to be only 25 minutes because I split the gym time with Mark, since the 2.5-year-old refused to go into the childcare) that I had figured out the way to lead a balanced life.

The secret to leading a balanced life is to be satisfied with significantly less than the expert-recommended minimum of everything that's important.

I take an "expert's" idea of minimum requirements with a grain of salt.    Every "expert" is, by definition, narrowly focused on the thing that they know something about.  They see their job as promoting THEIR THING.  Often that is the expert's job:  to tell you to floss twice a day and brush after every meal (if he's a dentist), or to give you pages and pages of homeschooling history curriculum (if she's a history curriculum writer), or to suggest that you remove all your carpets and replace all your mattresses and pillows frequently (if they're advising you on your kid's dust mite allergy)  or to suggest that you shine your sink every morning and remember to dust the light diffusing globes in each room every month (if she is FlyLady).

One expert advocates for the best way to care for teeth, another expert advocates for the best way to treat allergies, a third for the best way to teach your child one subject, a fourth advocates for the best way to keep a clean organized home, and so on and so on.  That is their job.  Your job is to listen to all of this advice (politely and calmly, remembering that each is doing his own job in advising you narrowly) and figure out how much of each you can reasonably do in order to take care of your job -- which is neither teeth nor allergies nor history nor a clean house, but a whole family of whole persons.

The best way to take care of a whole person, or a whole family, is not the sum of the best way to take care of each of his or her parts.

You have to do less than the minimum, because we are each far more than a collection of minimum requirements.  

+ + +

This isn't to say that I don't look forward, someday, to squeezing in a fourth workout a week, or figuring out how to include regular strength training (which I concede is important, such that "zero" is probably way way under the recommended minimum, even though that amount fits quite nicely into my lifestyle).  My current plan is to wait for the kids to get older.  I walk a fine line between waiting till menopause (when I know I won't have any more little kids who will refuse to go in the child care) and waiting till menopause (by which time strength training will become even more important).  

But it is to say that you can, in fact, do things only half way, and still gain a whole lot.

The invisible hand.

Some time ago I quit the treadmill and started running around the indoor track that circles the upper half of the basketball court at the Y.

I'm not sure why I suddenly got so tired of the treadmill. Maybe because it is impossible to escape the television completely. Maybe it was the demoralizing effect of the digits slowly ticking away the miles or time elapsed; I found myself always wishing I'd brought a sticky-note to cover up my progress. Maybe it was all the people around that I couldn't quite tune out. Or maybe it was the view through the window -- not a bad view, of a residential cross-street -- but a view that rarely changed, except for the snow cover giving way to foliage and later taking over again. Or perhaps, after having a taste of running outside, around the lakes, I just couldn't stand running in place anymore, and running around a bare room seemed like an improvement.

At first I took my iPod with me, and had five different running playlists cued up all ready to go. But after a while I stopped taking that, too. I don't want to hear music; I want to hear my footfalls, so I can work on correcting them. I want to hear my own breathing and feel the goosebumps from the air-conditioned chill give way to warmth, flushing, sweat. I think I am tired of trying to distract myself from the running. I am trying to be fully present in it instead, to feel the aching muscles, to force my mind to deal with the urge to stop instead of just wishing it away and pretending it isn't there.

Sometimes i have no choice but to think about running. But occasionally I get a surprising pay off.

This evening I was running laps and using my swimming lap counter -- it's a one-button, finger-ring style -- to check my speed on each lap. In the previous two weeks I had swum 5 times, but not gone for a run at all, and I was feeling rusty -- and the times showed it. Each lap around the gym is 1/18 of a mile, and my training pace on a treadmill is around 9:50, so I like to see times between 30 and 33 seconds. I was seeing 35--37-second laps. Not so good.

As I chugged along, endlessly circling, I thought back to the running clinic I attended in December 2010, the one where I learned forefoot running. I tried to remember what I learned from watching the before-and-after videos of myself. One of the form corrections that comes along with the switch from a heel strike to a forefoot or midfoot strike is in lean -- runners with a heel strike tend to lean back as they run, while runs with a forefoot strike tend to be straight-backed or lean forward. The more you lean forward when you have a forefoot strike, the faster you tend to go. It doesn't work that way with a heel strike.

If you have never learned forefoot running (sometimes called the pose method), here is something you can try to give you an idea of how the leaning thing works. Stand up, either barefoot or in running shoes. If you are indoors face a direction that gives you enough room to take several steps without tripping over something or walking into a wall. Now start jogging gently in place. If you are a fairly normal person, you will find that you naturally choose a forefoot-strike to do this: the first part of your foot to touch the ground is somewhere in the front half of your foot. Your heel might come down and "kiss" the ground at the end of its descent, or it might not. But you are certainly not hitting the ground with your heel and using your heel to absorb the impact of your weight coming down on the floor, the way you do when you walk, or the way many people do when they run in cushiony running shoes.

Still jogging? Okay, here is the second part of the demonstration. While you're jogging in place, lean your body slightly forward. What happened?

What happened to me, when the instructor in my running clinic taught me to do this, is that I rocketed forward -- running a few steps (before hitting the wall) with a natural forefoot strike. You don't have to work to bring your legs far forward of your body and to push against the ground; you just have to let gravity pull you down and allow your legs to prevent you from tipping all the way over. It is a very natural and instinctive motion.

Although It does take reprogramming and practice to adopt forefoot striking as a training stride, that short demonstration gets across how leaning forward is related to speed. The more you lean, the faster you go. I you lean so far that your legs can't keep up, you fall, of course, so it isn't a magic formula or anything. You still need to be strong and move your legs fast. But it is kind of a form check.

As I remembered this, I noticed that as I ran around the gym, I tended to focus my eyes on the wall across from me. The track is a rounded-off rectangle, so I'd be staring at the telephone pole through the window... then turn and stare at the water fountain... then turn and stare at the church steeple through the oth window... then the banner with donors' names... then the telephone pole again.

I tried keeping my neck and back aligned and tipping my body ever so slightly forward. Now I was focusing on the floor a few yards ahead of my toes. I concentrated on that moving point, dancing away from me along the seam in the flooring, and ran one lap, and checked my lap counter: 30 seconds.

Really? I checked it again: 30. I ran another lap: 31. And another: 29. I almost couldn't believe it. Before this, it had taken real effort to push myself to go faster, if I wanted to see lap times consistently under 34 seconds. This didn't feel more tiring at all. I just had to remember to tip ever so slightly forward.

As I circled around and around, though, it did start to wear on me mentally. I found that if I stopped concentrating on the slight forward lean, it went away. I really had to keep it front and center in my attention, carefully hold it, so it would not slip. After a while I started to feel as if there was an invisible hand between my shoulder blades, pressing slightly but firmly, and always just at the threshold of knocking me off balance. I found that if I vividly imagined that there really was a hand pressing me, it was easier to maintain my pace.

It wasn't that I actually had the sensation of a physical pressure on my back in that spot. It was more that I started to feel irritated by it. After awhile I wanted to turn around and snap, "WILL you STOP pushing me?!" to the owner of the invisible hand invading my personal space.

But of course there was no one but me, running all by myself in the upper half of the gym, my peripheral vision only occasionally interrupted by a lone basketball rebounding off the backboards just below the track.

I discovered something today. It is possible to make a gain in training that cannot be taken away even by weeks of inactivity. This is something I learned with my brain, you know, from information I picked up back in my running clinic. I think I will remember it: tip a little forward, gain a little efficient speed. It can be hard to keep all the different form tweaks active in mind at the same time, of course; practice can move that kind of skill out of the brain and into the muscles. But still, the understanding remains, and can't be lost -- if I take pains to write about it, that is.

____________

(disclaimer: do not switch abruptly from heel striking to forefoot running without doing some research to avoid injury, and consider working with a personal trainer. I do not think the lean-forward tip will work for runners who use a heel-striking stride instead of a forefoot-striking stride.)

 

 

A different image of women's fitness.

Pausing on my long drive back from Ohio to Minneapolis to share a link: Check out this inspiring and interesting article on Olympic powerlifter Holly Mangold.

Exercise can make you fat. So what?

This Daily Mail article has been getting around -- it's a popular-press take on the theme "exercise can make you fat."

I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying "Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?"

And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra "rules" to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

• Choosing "fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling," over weight training
• Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
• Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume "a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout" and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking "squash" as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
• Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

 

• You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
  
• You don't need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
• Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

 

Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

 

• Don't start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
• I recommend starting with exercise. If you're starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day -- whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. "Gradually" means "slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule."
• Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
• The first metric of performance is "Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?" Once you have "showing up" pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is "Did I finish my session?" After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
• Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don't worry about it -- except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like "Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda."
• A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don't anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point -- when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week -- that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
• If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

It isn't terribly scientific, but I can't see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

Being a marketing trend.

I'm not usually one to read and comment on fluffy "demographic/marketing trends" stories, but this one seemed on-topic for bearing blog.  Via Kara, blogger and author of Hot Sweaty Mamas:  Five Secrets to Life as a Fit Mom, we have a profile in the Wall Street Journal of a marketing niche:  "Don't Hate Her Because She Finds Time for Being Fit:  More Moms Squeeze in Workouts as 'Me Time.'"

Drea McLarty, a 35-year-old mother of two, awoke before dawn to run nine miles on a recent Monday, then made breakfast for the family, did some errands and headed to the park for an hour of Pilates. Later that afternoon, she had a personal training session with a client.

"I really just love to be active," says Ms. McLarty, of Santa Barbara, Calif. "It's very addicting."

Ms. McLarty is one of the growing number of mothers who carve out time to maintain a high level of fitness. They are a far cry from the stereotype of the full-time homemaker as stressed out and starved for time to herself, seeking respite in a hot bath, the television or chocolate. They are also emerging as a tantalizing target for consumer-product marketers.

 The term "fit mom" as used in the article is apparently a marketing term for the type of person the athleticwear companies are targeting, rather than a term for athletically inclined mothers in general.  At least I hope so:

Fit moms spend nearly every free minute working out, cross-training for triathlons and scheduling regular boot camps and yoga....Most fit moms have enough money so they don't have to work at full-time jobs, but not so much that they have full-time child care. 

This, plus being data-thin, makes the article kind of annoying.   Not to mention this breathless style:

[Ms. McLarty] spends a lot of time in her minivan, where the back seat folds down to make room for her supplies—wet wipes, a change of clothes, snacks and a yoga mat. 

(This is why the author of the article thinks a mom needs to fold down the back seat of her minivan? Maybe she found a really good deal on wet wipes at Sam's Club.)

But the elite mother-athletes are only the hook for this article.  Whenever the marketers identify a certain type of person as the target, you can be sure that they also want to sell their stuff to us lesser beings who merely aspire to be the sort of person who might spend nearly every free minute working out... or who just want to look like one.  

I realize that the point of the article is to highlight rising sales of certain kinds of athletic apparel.  Although my hat's off to people who manage to sustain a serious training regimen while leading a busy life, I would hate to think that anyone might read this and think that you can't be a "fit mom" without spending every free minute at the gym.  I'm not at an elite level of fitness -- I run 9-and-a-half-minute miles, not seven-and-a-quarter, and believe me that's a big difference -- but I am at a level that is satisfactory to me, while still challenging enough to be interesting, at a time commitment that isn't hard for me to keep up as long as I make it a high priority.

On one hand, it can be inspiring to read about mothers who manage to make it work -- fitness at a high, time-consuming level.  

On the other hand, an intense lifestyle like this can seem impossible, while a more moderate level of fitness (like what I enjoy) is within the reach of so many more individuals and still SO worth it.    One of my pet peeves is this idea that exercise should be bimodal:  either you should be satisfied with "walking, the best form of exercise," or you should be some kind of an exercise addict who works out like a professional athlete.  Not to diss walking or professional athletes, but it seems like for the great majority of healthy adults, shooting for something in the middle -- light, but deliberate, daily exercise or (my pattern) vigorous exercise two to four times a week -- would hit the sweet spot of beneficial and realistic.  But we just don't hear much about that.  

Even though women like me -- who are reasonably fit and kinda sorta hope that someday we might find the time to increase our treadmill time -- might be the real driver of sales of Luna bars and maternity sports bras.  (Speaking of which:  I'll believe that clothing manufacturers are actually courting fit mothers when it's easy to find a supportive athletic nursing bra that really works.  I only know of two decent sports bras that have straps that open in front, and they are not marketed as nursing bras.  While we're at it, how about a real maternity lapsuit?)

As an aside, the article ends with a list of tips for fitting a workout into a busy day of child care.  I was rather surprised not to see a tip along the lines of "Join a gym that has child care,"  even in an article that focuses on people who have discretionary income to spend on such a thing.  Maybe that's too obvious to count as a tip!