The Mental and Physical Benefits of Ten Types of Exercise

Posted on by stilllearning2b

A Marine of the United States Marine Corps run...

We are all aware that exercise provides physical benefits, but we may not be as aware of the mental and emotional rewards that come with physical activity.  Here are ten popular types of exercise and the benefits you can expect to receive.

1) Zumba

Zumba is a Latin-dance based class that is fast-paced, fun, and accessible to all ages and fitness levels.

Physical Benefits: Zumba provides a cardiovascular workout as you are consistently moving for the hour long class.  Many classes also incorporate some lower body strengthening moves.

Mental Benefits: Zumba is fun.  I mean jump around like a little kid in your pajamas kind of fun.  Go ahead, I dare you; try to make it through an entire class without laughing.  Laughter and fun are enormously important elements of wellness.  Zumba will help you get your giggle on.

2) Yoga

Yoga focuses on moving the body into various poses and holding them for a period of time.  Yoga classes can vary greatly, from the most gentle and relaxing to Power 2 hot classes.

Physical Benefits: Yoga helps to lengthen and stretch our tight muscles like nothing else.  The more advanced flow classes also provide strengthening through holding more difficult poses.

Mental Benefits: Yoga teaches you how to soften and relax into discomfort.  It helps you to focus your mind and be in the present moment.  It help to calm anxiety and release anger.  Quite frankly, yoga makes you happy and makes you a nicer person to be around.

Yoga Class at a Gym

3) Kettlebells

Kettlebells were originally used as training tools in Russia, but luckily they made it across the border.  They are simply heavy weights with handles that you move around in prescribed patterns.

Physical Benefits: Kettlebells offer cardiovascular and strength training in one.  They are especially excellent for training the core, glutes, and hamstrings along with developing muscular endurance.

Emotional Benefits: Kettlebell training requires that everything flows from one move to the next.  This helps the mind to flow as well, opening the dams between segments of your mind.  If your thoughts are feeling stuck, try picking up a kettlebell.  I bet your thoughts will be flowing like a river before you know it.

4) High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

HIIT can take many forms (I have talked before about Tabata training – ouch!), but it is essentially intervals of very intense exercise followed by intervals of rest.

Physical Benefits: HIIT is excellent for shredding fat in a short period of time.  It also helps to build your anaerobic capacity, which it useful whenever you need a quick burst of energy.

Mental Benefits:  HIIT teaches you to breathe.  Really breathe.  Most of us walk around each day with our lungs only partly used.  Try running sprints  without ever taking a complete, full breath.  It won’t happen.  When you completely fill and empty your lungs, you release tension that you are holding in your mind.

5) Weight Lifting

Weight lifting can take many forms, but it is essentially contracting the muscles against some form of resistance.

Physical Benefits: Lifting weights helps to build muscle tissue which gives the body a pleasing shape, helps to maintain mobility, and helps to burn fat.  Sounds like a win-win-win to me.

Mental Benefits:  Weight lifting helps you to feel strong.  Empowered.  You may not be able to control everything in your life, but you can sure show that dumbbell who’s boss!

6) Walking

Right foot, left foot.  Repeat.

Physical Benefits:  Walking is an accessible exercise that, depending upon its intensity, can provide cardiovascular training and lower body conditioning.  It is an easy, low impact way to help stave off weight gain.

Mental Benefits:  Walking tells your brain that you’re making progress.  There are times in life when we begin to feel overwhelmed with the daily grind.  Go for walk and you’ll begin to see the place of today in the bigger picture.

7) Running

See “walking,” only faster.

Physical Benefits: Running burns a lot of calories in a short time frame due to its intensity.  It also gives you an excuse to wear itty-bitty shorts in public.

Mental Benefits: When you run, you have to find the rhythm between the body and the breath.  This rhythm extends to the mind as it trains you to breathe deeper and slower when feeling bogged down or facing a challenging hill.

8) Races

There are many types of races: 5K or 10K, running or biking, triathlon or adventure, they all put you in a competition against others or yourself.

Physical Benefits:  Signing up for a race encourages you to train consistently, leading to improved benefits over periodic exercise.

Mental Benefits:  I recommend signing up for a race that takes you just to the edge of your ability when you are facing a challenge in your life.  Whereas most of life’s challenges are messy and may take years to resolve, a race is over in a matter of minutes or hours, yet it gives you the critical feeling of victory over a challenge.  There is nothing so sweet as crossing that finish line.

9) Crossfit

Crossfit has taken the world by storm.  It is a group exercise class that consists of a Workout of the Day (WOD) that incorporates strength and cardiovascular moves.

Physical Benefits: Crossfit certainly lives up to its name.  If you can stick with it, it will make you leaner, fitter, and stronger.

Mental Benefits: Perhaps the best part of Crossfit is the community.  Everyone is so supportive of everyone else.  Be prepared for applause and “atta boys” or “girls” when you complete that first pull-up.  If you need to know that others have you back, try visiting a Crossfit gym.

10) Bootcamp

Bootcamp classes are usually held outside and combine plyometric moves along with body weight exercises and a variety of drills.

Physical Benefits: You will be sore all over.  These classes don’t leave a muscle untouched or a sweat gland un-emptied.

Mental Benefits: Bootcamp teaches you to push through those “I can’ts” that our minds love to throw up in defense of effort.  It gives you the mental discipline to work through your problems and see them to the end.

For the most physical and mental benefit, choose more than one type of exercise.  By cross training, you will learn to utilize and synergize your entire boy and mind.

July 2007 CrossFit Trainer certification, Sant...

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It is so easy to toughen under stress, to tense and tighten to carry the load.  Perhaps it is time to learn from the water around us.  Water is a most powerful force, able to carve mountains into great valleys, move enormous loads, and traverse even the most inhospitable terrain.  Water is able to this without rigidity, without tension.  It flows around obstacles, slowly wearing them away rather than getting stuck behind the barrier.  Let your inner ice thaw, relax and flow, and you may find the journey to be an easier one.

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Fifty Shades of Gray Through the Eyes of a Divorcee

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Fifty Shades of Grey at SeaTac newsstand

I read this book last week on assignment from a coworker.  She has the delightful idea of have a Fifty Shades of Gray party, which sounds like the perfect way to blow off some steam after two weeks of standardized testing.  I must admit, I was curious to read the book and see what all the buzz was about.

Let’s be frank.  It’s erotica.  Not that great.  Not that unique.  It’s spiced up with a little BDSM, but even that is pretty tame, at least in the first book.  The characters are unbelievable (22 and never really been kissed?  please!) and the writing a bit tedious at times.  So, why the appeal?

I did have a few insights as to why the book gained so much popularity, especially among the divorced crowd.

For those of us on the other side of a marriage, we have lost faith in the binding nature of that contract.  It has become a piece of paper, easily torn.  The characters in  Fifty Shades of Gray spend an inordinate amount of time debating the stipulations of their contract.  I could see the appeal, the comfort, that would be brought by such a document.  It spells out exactly the terms of the partnership and responsibilities of each person.  There is no gray area, no room for interpretation.

The contract gives a sense of security in the relationship, essentially saying, “You do these things and it will be okay.”  Real life certainly doesn’t come with assurance like that.

Many women probably enjoy the return to innocence that can be found in the female character. It can take them back to a time before their views of relationships were sullied.  They can experience those early thrills again through her doe-like eyes.

Most of all; however, the book is simply sex.  And, due to its popularity, it is sex that is safe for public consumption and discussion, encouraging women to be open about their thoughts and desires.  That is the true value of the book.

Well, that and Fifty Shades of Gray parties, of course:)

(You can find my full story in my book Lessons From the End of a Marriage.)

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Learning to go Downhill

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Downhill

I’ve never been very good at going downhill.

I was bribed with banana splits to encourage me to learn how to ride a bike.  I was ten.  I still am not comfortable on a bike; the slightest decline inspires panic and usually results in a dismount and walk.  I used to think I could roller blade when I lived in San Antonio.  It turns out that San Antonio is flat.  Really flat.  As soon as I took my “skills” to other less elevation-challenged cities, I realized that I really had no skill at all.  But I did have a really sore behind.  When I drive my standard-transmission car on the downside of a hill, I inevitably downshift beyond what is necessary.  Even while running (look ma, no wheels!), I power up the hills and slow down on the decent.

I’m not sure what it is about hills that causes me pause.  I know I get panicky, afraid that the situation will get out of control.  It seems like any slight miscalculation is amplified through momentum, the snowball gaining size as it tumbles down the slope.  Perhaps I don’t trust progress made that is not under my own power.  Maybe I just need to learn to surrender to gravity.

I’ve tried to address this shortcoming at various times with varying degrees of success (okay, really with varying degrees of failure), but I have never fully committed to the cause.  My recent work on taming my monkey mind has encourage me to attempt a different approach.  Maybe I need to work to calm my mind before the downhill attempt and focus on breathing throughout.  This is where I struggle, as the inevitable increase in speed on a decent makes me feel as though my mind and breathe must also increase so as to keep up.   My brain doesn’t seem to understand that acceleration due to gravity does not have to apply to breath.

Who knows, maybe one day, I will learn to delight in the respite a downhill can provide. Until then, I think I’ll stick to the bunny slopes and stay low to the ground.

 

 

 

Does Your Past Still Rule Your Life? 6 Questions to Create More Freedom

Posted on by stilllearning2b

It is so easy to become stuck in pain or anger or victimhood.  Are you letting your past dictate your current emotions and state of being?  Although your past helped shape you, it does not define you.  Here are some thoughts to help you leave the past where it belongs – behind you.

Does Your Past Still Rule Your Life? 6 Questions to Create More Freedom.