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Welcome to Physical Activity QuickPlays with Lisa Workman. Creating a resistance training program that supports your goals can be tricky. Let me share with you one quick tool to help you work toward your goals. Stay well and happy moving, Lisa
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Welcome to the next instalment of Real Moves for Real Life. Do you sometimes feel like you are running in circles? Don't fret! The circles I am sharing in this video won't make you want to pull your hair out or scream in frustration! (I sure don't hope so!) In this video I share the amazing feat of the super duper hip joint. Circles and circles and circles. Jump on in! Once you'd watched the video (and took a crack at the movements), email me back and let me know what movements or joint you want me to feature next in the Real Moves for Real Life series! I'm all ears! Stay well and happy moving, Lisa P.S. If you have missed my other Real Moves for Real Life videos, here is a link to the playlist. My friend, I know it’s a big question but let me tell you, it is an important one. Julia Hawkins, showed up on my LinkedIn feed this week and I had to simply share. Julia, at 105 years and multiple health complications, ran the 100 m sprint at the Louisiana Senior Games. Julia was a 5th grade teacher when World War II broke out. A group of her students, now in their 8th and 9th decades, came to watch their former teacher deliver her most important lesson ever – life is for living and some risks are worth taking. See it for yourself! I'm not sure about you but that is exactly what I want to be doing at 105 years old! Stay well and happy moving, Lisa Welcome to Physical Activity QuickPlays with Lisa Workman. Do you wish you could make your physical activity routine work? You can with this simple scheduling tool you can borrow from your high school days! Join me as I guide you through how you can manipulate your schedule to fit in your physical activity. Have a great week, and feel free to share the Physical Activity QuickPlay with anyone you think it will help. Stay well and happy moving, Lisa P.S., I recently sent an email about another key strategy to being a more physically active person. And I think this strategy goes hand and hand with today's QuickPlay. If you missed out - no worries - you can read about it here. Are you a proactive person? If you have your Christmas presents all bought already, then you definitely are! I, on the other hand, am happy I've got all my Halloween candy bought this past week. Being prepared and having a plan is one key strategy to being a more physically active person. Why you may ask? Because when excuses and obstacles come up (they will!) and challenge your ability to move, the plan is there to support you. One way I can help you today, is to assist you with your planning. We all know come Halloween, the days start to get colder and potentially the days get shorter (all my Canadian subscribers know this more than ever!!) And with the change of season, we may need to make some adjustments particularly related to any outdoor activities we may choose. I say a little prayer every October that the snow (yes, I said it) doesn't arrive until after Halloween. Poor kids traipsing through snow on October 31. I've done it before, have you? Yet we know the S word is on its way at some point. There is no time like the present to prepare and today I'm sharing a video with you that I wrote the script and "starred" in many years back. The content is still relevant as we move into the colder season. NOTE: Although the audience was walking leaders, you too are your very own walking leader! The advice still applies. Insight to Action:
What is one suggestion from the video you could implement in your physical activity (it doesn't have to be only walking) to make sure you have a plan for the winter months?
I invite you to start planning before the S word arrives! ❄️ Stay well and happy moving, Lisa P.S. If you haven't signed up for my online course, Top 3 Problems with Outdoor Walking: A detailed guide to the unexpected tips about outdoor walking, this is the time to prepare for outdoor walking! And it is completely free! 🎉 If you have done the course already, it is time to review it again to ensure you have all the tools ready for the upcoming outdoor walking season. 600 seconds.
That's all the time you need to reap the rewards of physical activity. Or is it? Does that sound like a lot of your time? To put it into perspective, your entire day is 86,400 seconds! Since we typically don't speak of time in seconds, let's go with minutes. That is 10 minutes out of the 1440 minutes in a day. Still pretty astounding stuff! This is the health promoting messaging I speak of every week with my patients: For as little as 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity, you will get health benefits. Yet, this week some new research passed over my desk. Research out of the UK that looked at over 79,000 adults' physical activity and mortality risk. The research findings concluded that any time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity was beneficial to reduce the risk of death. So imagine all the combination of ways to accumulate your physical activity in a day! Got 7 minutes? Take a walk around the block. Got 5 minutes? Climb up and down a set of stairs. Got less than 3 minutes? Turn on your favourite song and dance! 🕺🏽 Top 1950's song, Jailhouse Rock is only 2 minutes 26 seconds. Top 1960's song, Twist and Shout is only 2 minutes 34 seconds. Top 1970's song, Love Train is only 2 minutes 58 seconds. Top 1980's song, The Loco-Motion is only 3 minutes 13 seconds. Top 1990's song, Wannabe is only 2 minutes 52 seconds. So many songs to choose from! Here is the Spotify playlist for you! Now, we always need to remember that this is only one study and this research was not done on you. There is a growing body of research that is demonstrating the benefits of short duration physical activity. Time for insight to action: What are the ways you could build in short duration physical activity into your day? If you deal with pain, injury or a chronic health condition, could you slice and dice your physical activity into 10 three minute bouts in the day? Make a list of all the places in your day that you could sneak in an extra 3 minutes of movement. Overall, keep in mind that the more you move your body, the more benefits to be had! Stay well and happy moving, Lisa Happy Thanksgiving weekend! It can be hard sometimes to appreciate our bodies. A pull here. An ache there. And sometimes outright pain that makes us feel like not moving at all. You feel broken. I get it. I'm there right with you. How do you manage the pulls, aches and pains your body has? Is it time to listen to what your body is telling you? I mean, really listen. How can you change the way you interpret your discomforts? Recently, I've been learning about the Japanese art of repairing the broken, Kintsugi. Essentially, it is the practice of physically mending areas of breakage in pottery. Think shattered plate dropped on the floor!  The Kintsugi practice takes all those broken pieces of ceramic and reforms the plate by filling the cracks with lacquer either dusted or mixed with gold, silver and platinum.
Talk about highlighting the cracks with some valuable material! Now you might ask, "Lisa, what does pottery have to do with physical activity?!" Well, I'd like you to look beyond the surface and to the deeper meaning of Kintsugi - the appreciation of what is imperfect. Our bodies have and will continue to have pulls, aches and pains. Thank goodness we get these signals before we really push too hard. Is there a place where we can appreciate these signals? Can we value and embrace our bodies' cracks and the history they represent? With doing so, will this allow you to connect to your story, your history and more the way your body can move in this moment? On this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, I encourage you to consider the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Look for the ways your body, with its imperfections, can move well. Say thank you. Give thanks to all the cracks that can be highlighted with liquid gold. If this is intriguing to you, watch this recent video on the concept of Kintsgui and how it relates to how our bodies feel. Stay well and happy moving, Lisa Do you ever have a day when you go from one thing to another? And at the end of all of it, you feel too tired to even think about exercise? When you get to the point in your day when the TV is calling with whispers saying, "Watch me. Come on, just one show." Your day has been filled to the brim and you can't imagine putting one more foot in front of the other.  Maybe you feel:
It may in fact be mental rather than physical fatigue that drives you to the couch. Because on reflection you realize that most of the many activities in your day were in fact not active at all. This week, I had a day just like this. And believe it or not, I did not want to get to my workout. Negotiations began in my head. "Oh, tomorrow you'll get to it." "Oh, you deserve to stop and turn on Netflix." "Oh, Lisa, you are SO tired. How could you ever exercise now?" This may be something that happens to you every week (or day for that matter). Can you guess what I did? I recognized my thoughts. And I simply tried. Trying is all you can do. Was the workout the best? Nope. Was I pushing myself hard? No way. Did I get through it? Yes! One workout. One is better than none. So what can you do when this inevitability happens to you? Check you thoughts. Check them again. And maybe, just maybe imagine your thoughts AND feelings once you've completed your physical activity. Because moving your body might simply be a reset button and you might become surprisingly recharged. On the harder days, it may serve you to use your thoughts to your advantage and use statements like: I am capable. I am strong. I am a movement maven/master (I dare you!) Believe it or not, sometimes I use my own name to help me get through. With every step, pedal, or stroke, I cheer myself on with "WORK" then "MAN", "WORK", "MAN", "WORK", "MAN", "WORK", "MAN". It is amazing how my own internal personal cheerleader keeps me going! What are some positive thoughts you use on those hard days? Hit the reply button and share your moving/engaging/uplifting/energizing/invigorating thoughts with me! Stuck on finding the right words? Check out this recent article on moving mantras. It might help you solidify your encouraging thoughts on those hard days! Stay well and happy moving, Lisa The amazing thing about the human body is that it does SO many great things automatically without us even thinking about it! Sometimes it takes a bit of reflection to appreciate how our bodies work. More specifically, what movements the body does day in and day out to keep us functioning. This is human kinetics or the study of how the body moves. And this is totally my shtick! The hip for example, is so good at its job that we sometimes miss if it isn't working properly especially with the movements I talk about in this week's video. We can compensate by using the spine or twisting the pelvis to get the movements to "work". Take this time now to connect to your own hips with these specific movement patterns! Old reliable.
A constant team player. Unwavering devotion to get you from point A to point B. Hip flexion and extension are the unsung heroes of the hips! I hope you enjoy this week's video. If you do, please like the video and share it with anyone who you think might benefit from some concentrated attention in their hips! I am here to support you in your physical activity journey. AND by learning about how your own body works, connecting the dots of what works and doesn't, you will find increased ease in your body AND your physical activity and exercise routines. Stay well and happy moving, Lisa A common question that I get asked time and time again is about what type of exercise should I do first. Do I start with cardiovascular exercise (cardio) like using the elliptical trainer or do I start with resistance training (RT)? The great thing about this question is that there have been multiple scientific studies that have looked at this specific question and found some interesting results. The most interesting outcome has been the interference effect. When I hear the word interference I think of a sporting context where the defence has "interfered" with the offensive play. Kind of like in football where the ref signals a foul when one player is illegally tripping, pushing, or pulling the other player who was eligible to catch the ball. You know those big plays in the end zone!  So within the exercise context, the interference effect means that the initial exercise mode interferes with the second mode.
When we structure our workouts with back to back cardio + RT or RT + cardio, it is possible for the interference effect to occur. More specifically, a moderately intense bike ride may fatigue the leg muscles so much so that when it is followed by squatting exercises, the legs are unable to produce the same amount of force they normally could if done without the prior bike ride. What is the common rationale is that the body is fatigued (physically and mentally) and is unable to perform as expected. However, it is also possible that the energy required to perform the second mode has been depleted and thus our performance is hindered as we don’t have the appropriate energy to complete the movements. Most studies (but not all) have shown that the second mode usually gets the short end of the stick. For example, Cardio + RT favours:
Whereas, RT + cardio favours:
Although science can provide some answers, it is also important to know what works best for your body. We have to remember that study results are not on you. And sometimes it takes some personal experimentation to determine the best order for you. I like to recommend to start with the mode that you want to focus on that day. Put all your energy resources from the start into the first mode then know the secondary may not get the best from you. To give you a glance into my exercise routine, I simply start with a brief cardio to warm-up then head into my RT, thus possibly limiting the fatiguing effects on my muscles by limiting my cardio time. When I want to focus on cardio, then I solely focus my efforts there. Little to no RT that session. Yet, in those time crunched moments, I jockey between intervals of cardio with RT for a real challenging session. I'll save more on that for another day! Finding the right balance of cardio and RT can be tricky. If you are finding you aren’t making the gains you'd like, sometimes it might be your exercise mode order. Feel free to reply back to this email if you need an exercise order tune up! I am here to support you in your physical activity journey. Stay well and happy moving, Lisa P.S. Need to read the science? This recent research article will have you covered! |
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November 2021
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