TRX, Lunges, Learning, and More
What to do, how to do it, how to think about learning, and why lifting weights is good
Workout: TRX
Time for a TRX workout! Do two or three rounds. Cardio of your choice between sets.
kneeling roll out 20 sprinter start with pause 20 1 arm row 10/side 2 minutes cardio TY deltoid fly 20 1 leg squat 10/side chest press with abducted leg 10/side 2 minutes cardio oblique crunch 20 hamstring curl 20 plank to fatigue 2 minutes cardio
The Amazing Stickie and Lunges
Yes, lunges are evil. I once invented an entire song about how much I hate them while I was doing what felt like an infinite number of walking lunges. The thing is, they are really useful.
Lunges work both your quads and glutes. They challenge your balance. They even give you a stretch! You can do them almost anywhere, with or without weights. If you want cardio, too, you can do them as jumps.
Here’s how to do them. Start standing. (Digression: standing in this context, as Lemony Snicket would say, means your feet are hip distance apart and parallel to each other. Your abdominals are engaged. You could connect your ears, shoulders, hip bones, knees, and ankle bones with a straight line—if you weren’t standing still and all—this is what friends are for, among other things.) Take a giant step forward. It is important that the step really is pretty giant to protect your knees. Bend both knees until the front shin is perpendicular to the floor (not any further forward over your foot!) and the back thigh is perpendicular to the floor. Your torso may try to sneak forward; do not let it. You will know you are doing something right if you feel a good pulling sensation in your back thigh. Straighten both knees and return to your initial standing position.
You can continue doing one side until the end of your set, or you can alternate sides. If you need more challenge, you can walk your lunges, add weight, or step back into the lunge position rather than forward.
As always, pay attention to your body. If lunges hurt your knees, don’t do them.
Teachers and Learners
Teachers come in lots of different flavors, although most of them will not let you lick them to figure out what flavor they are. This is a good thing because we learners also come in lots of flavors. (You can pause here to lick your arm to detect your own flavor if you like.) Some teachers are peanut butter to our chocolate, lox to our cream cheese, rosemary to our roast potatoes. What we need to know comes flowing out of those teachers in ways that we can easily absorb. The challenges become manageable with their help.
Then there are the kind of teachers who are cheddar to our peppermint, pickles to our fruit salad, or ice cream on our steak. We can still learn from that second kind. And, no, I don’t mean how to avoid them, although that is definitely a useful skill. We can learn, by managing our attitudes, how to translate a totally foreign language into something we can understand.
Once my son T.R. and I took a ski lesson together because we both wanted to improve. Our instructor was blunt. T. does better with a more encouraging style of teaching. He heard that he was less competent than he thought he was and took that to mean that he was less competent than he really is. It took a couple of days for him to process what the instructor said into something he could use, and even then he did better at applying what the instructor told me to do. He made the best of a less than ideal situation. And next time I would choose a different instructor for him.
For me, the bluntness worked. Sure, my ego hurt a bit, but I came to the lesson knowing that I needed to learn and that I was not able to figure that out by myself. Bluntness saves time.
My point, and yes, there is one in there somewhere, is that we, as learners have the responsibility to find the lessons. When I am wearing my instructor/trainer/teacher hat, I try to make those lessons fun and accessible. I do that by remembering that I am a learner, too.
Real Weights
I believe in lifting weights, but I draw the line at imaginary ones. Let’s heft the real dumbbells in front of us, not the ones made of guilt or regret or whatever intangible but psychically heavy stuff.
Step in to the gym with me as a brand new person, created just this very minute. Your ten-year-old self who could run for hours doesn’t exist. Neither does your eighteen-year-old bathing beauty or your twenty-year-old running back, unless you are eighteen or twenty right now. Even your last-year 50-pound-overweight self is gone, replaced by you, here, now.
The best workout you can do is the one that fully exhausts the body you inhabit today. Some days, that body is stronger than others. Some days, that body has a cold. Some days, it’s a good idea to take out aggression on the weights instead of other targets; besides, the dog who sometimes has trouble distinguishing inside from outside doesn’t weigh very much.
Often, it turns out that dropping the psychic weights opens up the ability to lift the real ones.