Exercise Posts

Pregnant? Then stick with more gentle forms of exercise like swimming. A Danish study shows that women who jog or play racquet sports have an increased risk of miscarriage. Exercise in later stages does not carry increased risks.

Sure, exercise is good for you. Wouldn’t it be great it if was good for the environment and your wallet, too?

Apparently, that’s not such a far-fetched notion. Inventors are working on ways to use exercise machines to power lighting and fixtures, with the excess stored in batteries for later use.

Whittling your waist and your bills at the same time? Now that’s a great incentive to exercise!

If rumors are to be believed, Courtney Love had gastric bypass surgery. Former Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell is battling bulimia — again — a condition which Lindsay Lohan also finally admitted to sharing.

And Angelina Jolie is allegedly addicted to diet pills. (Whether we’ll hear about Angie entering drug rehab for this is only a matter of time.)

How weird is it that we in America so greatly worship the thin body that we pursue a “perfection” based on the image of people who admittedly abuse their own bodies?

Today while working out to an exercise video from “The Firm” I had to pause the DVD player to answer the phone. Fifteen minutes later I returned and glanced at the screen before pressing the “Play” button again. What I saw was, when I think about it, rather horrifying.

Have you ever actually looked at the bodies of some of these “exercise gurus” and wondered what they’d look like wearing more than spandex shorts and sports bras? How they’d look if you couldn’t see their chiseled abs, their muscular biceps and squared-off shoulders?

These women look perfectly healthy when surrounded by a half-dozen or so fat-free, hard bodies just like their own. But throw a pair of jeans and a t-shirt on them and set them on Main Street U.S.A. and they’d look frighteningly thin. Anorexic, even. Sure, they’ve got cardiovascular fitness and definite muscle tone, but at what point did we begin thinking it “healthy” to so greatly reduce one’s body fat that we can see every tendon and vein in a woman’s arm?

Sure, I’d like to lose weight. I’d like to be able to survive a 55-minute step-aerobic workout without feeling at some point like my heart was going to leap out of my mouth (and that I’m so darned hungry I’d be tempted to eat it). But just as I think there are too many celebrities who abuse their body and drugs to acquire that “perfect” physique, I’m starting to wonder if those exercise gurus don’t engage in their own kind of self-abuse to achieve the same look.

I’ve always envied people who have a separate exercise room in their homes. Half of my reasons why I don’t exercise regularly have to do with lacking both a comfortable space and complete privacy.

My exercise bike, for instance, sits in a corner of my bedroom which, during the summer, feels like a sauna from around noon until sunset. To use my bike I have to move my reading chair aside then wheel and reposition the thing until it faces the TV… which gives me all of 3 inches of space between the bike and my side of the bed. It’s quite cramped, needless to say.

That space in my bedroom is too small for aerobic workouts, though. I learned that the hard way after injuring my foot while doing a roundhouse kick during Tae Bo. So aerobic workouts require a trek downstairs to the basement where I have to move my son’s PlayStation stuff, his video game rocker chair and our coffee table. By the time that’s done, I’m almost too tired to work out!

In either location, my husband and son are guaranteed to pop their heads in at least once while I work out. I hate that. I do not want to have to think about where we keep the ice cream scoop while I’m grunting through my third of five miles on the bike, nor do I want to hear from my husband how much he likes watching my “wobblies” wobble while I’m jumping up and down to an aerobic tape.

Lately, I’ve been eying our back patio as the ideal location for a sun room. Right now the only things on the patio are a plastic storage shed and our hot tub — something I don’t use very often precisely because it’s sitting on a patio near a storage shed, and not in some nice, clean spa-like room.

I mentioned to my husband the other day how nice it would be to turn that patio into actual living space. We’d use the hot tub, sure, but we could also put a TV out there once there were walls up. There would be room for my exercise bike, for aerobics, for my yoga mat and ball, and even room to spare for towel racks, spa supplies and a plant stand.

He, naturally, came up with all sorts of objections. First, it was the money: then I reminded him that he’s perfectly capable of building the sun room himself for a very reasonable price.

Then it was the fact that the room would get too hot in the summer. I pointed out that window A/C units are about to go on sale.

Sure, he said, but what about in the winter? I rolled my eyes and reminded him that between the hot tub’s steam and using the room to exercise in, freezing isn’t something I’d need to worry about. Besides, I said, we could always put in one of those portable wall fireplaces that use vent free gas logs, and wouldn’t it be romantic to sit in front of a fire while we soaked together in the hot tub?

So, OK, I played a bit dirty by reminding him that with actual walls and blinds on the windows to screen us from the neighbor’s prying eyes, we’d be soaking naked in the hot tub, bathed in flickering fire light, maybe even with a shelf of cocktails conveniently located within reach.

I woke up this morning and found a rough sketch of my future sun room laying on the kitchen counter and was thrilled… until I remembered that, once built, I won’t have any reason not to work out regularly.

By now the evidence favoring resistance training as a method of weight loss is well established. But new research shows that slow and steady repetitions may not be the optimal way to work out.

The researchers explored the effects of explosive verses slow contractions and exercise intensity on energy expenditure in their study.

The study showed that explosive or more rapid muscle contractions used more energy than slow contractions, even when the amount of weight lifted was identical, increasing the benefits of the exercise for weight loss.

The study does not indicate whether rapid, explosive movements can be performed in less time and still produce the same benefits. So 30 minutes of rapid movements will naturally lead to more repetitions than, say, more leisurely repetitions performed in the same amount of time. (This might explain why those rabid little old ladies who practically live at the Golden Nugget Las Vegas slot machines still have better-looking biceps than I do.)

On the other hand, it does mean that short, intense workouts can still reap benefits. Pressed for time? Knock out a couple dozen bicep curls, squats, lunges, crunches and jumping jacks and ditch the guilt.

A (skinny) friend recently suggested that one way to squeeze my workouts in with my other commitments is to incorporate exercise throughout my day.

“Do squats while you put away dishes,” she suggested. “Lunge while you vacuum the floors. Wear wrist weights when you dust. Instead of carrying all of the laundry in one basket from room-to-room, make several trips so you get the extra walking in.”

This is all easy for her to say. As I mentioned, she’s skinny. She has no idea that by the time I’ve made one trip up- and downstairs I’m so covered with sweat that I might as well have not bothered showering that morning.

But I do see her point: a little bit of extra thought and effort can actually add up to using some muscles that might otherwise have gone neglected all day long.

Note to self: do not use the kitchen cabinet hardware as handles when doing those squats.

P.S. Don’t forget to buy replacement hardware now.

Yesterday, for the first time in a month, my husband was home to take over parenting duties. This meant, of course, that I needed some excuse to lock myself in a room to do something more important (in my family’s perception) than merely trying to bathe or take a nap. So, I worked out.

I did, after all, have plans to eat a massive rib eye with a baked potato for dinner: something far more high-cal and high-fat than I’ve consumed in over a month. Burning additional calories beforehand seemed like a good idea. (And the steak, by the way, was fantastic!)

So, I shut myself in my bedroom and broke out one of my new step-aerobics DVDs. I hate those things: if I’m not tripping over my feet, I’m wincing at the way my sports bra seems to creep upward while everything else seems to tug downward. But I did it: I worked through the entire tape, and found myself afterwards surprisingly full of energy.

Why not a little yoga to unwind then, I thought. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

This morning, I ache everywhere, but nowhere near as much as in my thighs. This is most assuredly not a part of a 40-year-old’s body one wants uncooperative after a long night’s sleep when a swollen, 40-year-old bladder demands an immediate trip to the bathroom.

I’m fully aware that lactic acid is to blame, just as I’m also aware that one of the best ways of overcoming such pain is by working out again. Kind of the exercise equivalent of “the hair of the dog” hangover treatment.

But exercising yet again today is out of the question. My day is already overscheduled and, I confess, I’m a wuss. I’m leaning more toward a gentle solution like natural healing, the kind where a practitioner draws pain out of your body with physical touch therapy (which doesn’t actually involve touching at all and good thing, too, since that would most likely prompt me to tears at this point).

Actually, I’ve been giving the whole area of alternative healing much consideration lately. What better incentive to exercise than by promising myself I can indulge in a massage afterwards?

My husband, of course, has volunteered to act as my “healer,” although his qualifications are as dubious as his methods. See, when I mention “touch therapy” to him, he gets a whole different picture in his mind than the actual practice itself.

But, hey, his approach would probably be good for burning off a few calories, too!

Ever wonder what the other people at your gym are thinking?

Now you know.

One year ago today, I’d signed up for a membership at our local Curves gym. It was an impulse thing, to be honest: I’d had a day to myself and decided to visit the mall where I saw a group of women my age, and about my build, walking in to the place. They were actually smiling.

Smiling before going to the gym? Hey, that was something I needed to check out, I figured.

The skinny little woman behind the desk was only too happy to show me around the place, not that I needed much help: all of the machines were in one room where butcher paper blocked the windows and prevented inquiring eyes from watching the ladies work out. There was a tiny little changing area off to one side — no showers, no dreaded locker room — and a half-dozen women, most older than me, going through the exercise circuit.

I signed up right then and there, not particularly caring that the monthly membership cost twice as much as the fancy new gym located behind the very same strip mall. (One which, incidentally, offers spa services, tanning beds, an indoor track, classes, a juice bar, yoga, personal TVs on the various machines and child care.)

The next day, I made it to Curves at 7 a.m., the perfect time to squeeze in a half-hour workout and return home before my husband had to leave for work. The routine was fun, although the oldies music was rather annoying. I spent the rest of the day with Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me” stuck in my head.

A day later, I was back again: this time, however, a different director was there. She wasn’t just skinny, she was downright emaciated and terribly, terribly perky. Halfway through the circuit, she decided we all needed to play a game: this one happened to involve fuzzy dice that we were to pick up and roll, and if you threw an even number you got to pick out a silly movement that everyone else had to repeat while they were on the jogging stations between machines.

I stood there patting my head and rubbing my stomach thanks to a 60-something year-old woman’s “lucky” toss of the dice and found myself thinking: Oh, no. I am not playing stupid games every time I come here. I want to work out, and I want to do it without being self-conscious. I do not want to have to participate in a group activity like I’m some kindergarten child who needs to be entertained.

The next time I went back it was in the evening. I’d hoped going at a different time of day might mean no stupid games. I was wrong. This time there was a spinner in the middle of the floor and whomever was on a particular station got to spin the dial. The person it pointed to had to sing along with the Supremes — or whatever other oldie band was playing — in front of the others.

I “twisted my ankle” as an excuse to get the hell out of there, and I never went back.

As of yesterday, my contract with Curves expired. One year of payments on a membership to a gym I only went to three times. A gym, I might add, that’s now rumored to be closing in part because people figured out that the fancy one not three doors down didn’t make them play stupid games while only costing half as much for ten times as many amenities.

I’ve got nothing to show for that membership: not firmer thighs, not a flatter stomach, not a higher and more firmly toned butt. I’m out a couple of hundred dollars. But hey, at least I have one of their cute little personalized pens.

Six months out of the year, I look to outdoor playtime with my son as one way to get in additional exercise. Now that August is here, the season during which both his and my allergies are worst, we’re pretty much cooped up indoors praying for rain to wash the pollen out of the air.

It’s just not the same as getting outside to play. After all, you can’t climb silk trees and, although jumping on the sofa makes a nice substitute for a trampoline, even that gets boring after a while.

So we’ve been playing DDR quite a bit, along with Eye Toy. The latter has managed to help tone my arms quite a bit this past week, as a matter of fact. I’ve been strapping on wrist weights and doing the “Window Washing” routine: talk about an upper body workout!

The Eye Toy game that involves trying to “head” a soccer ball actually makes a great butt-blasting routine. Last time we played it, I wound up doing 72 squats in a little over 2 minutes. Sure, my thighs burned afterwards and I spent the rest of my day dragging my ass around like overstuffed luggage, but the time flew by faster than any I’ve spent with a workout DVD.

What do you do for indoor exercise when it’s too hot to get outside and play?

(Sponsorship plug: Check out NC waterfront property.)