Here’s a thought experiment: Please take a look at the following photo, and note in particular the embroidered figures on the socks, and in extra particular the colors of those figures.
Attention to detail
2
Tag Archives: exercise
Dealing out a healthy hand
London Underground playing cards, originally uploaded by cynthiacloskey.
In my ongoing quest to build healthy activity into my life, I’m embarking on the Lifehacker Workout Challenge.
The challenge is just to exercise at least 5 times a week for a month. Any workout will do, but the suggested workouts are so adorably simple for even a desk jockey like myself, I feel quite the fitness warrior when I complete them.
Case in point: The Deck of Cards Workout. Take a standard deck of 52 cards, assign an exercise to each suit, then flip through the deck. For each card, do the matching exercise the number of times the card indicates. For a three of hearts, for example, do your heart exercise (jumping jacks) three times. Keep going until the cards are done.
I did this workout last Wednesday. I have many, many decks of cards from which to choose, because back when I traveled for work I used to buy a deck of cards in every city I visited, and friends and family supplemented the collections with interesting finds. The deck I chose was the above London Underground set, which features historic posters from the Underground. It provided pleasant distraction from the rigors of the workout.
The official start of the challenge is today. It’s on Fleetly, and if you sign up please connect with me there so we can cheer each other on. Sign up here; connect with me here.
Onward!
Just in time for the 80s Prom Party this Friday
(Photo: Doug Menuez/Corbis for New York Magazine)
Though they may look (and sound) like Off Broadway send-ups, eighties-inspired workouts like Keightley’s are proliferating. Just as bat-winged sweaters and pegged pants are reappearing on runways, classic cardio burns from the eighties are back in fashion, too. The primary appeal: They’re simple and they make you sweat. “Gym classes have gotten so high-concept—Yogalates plus spinning plus meditation, all in 45 minutes!” says Keightley, whose classes are held at NYSC locations all over town. “It’s hard to know if you’re burning enough calories to make a difference.”
“What a Feeling!” New York Magazine
(Via Alex Balk, who is old enough to remember Jane Fonda but prefers not to remember.)
Fat Tuesday
Mardi Gras Masks and Beads, originally uploaded by biskuit.
It seems a kind of cheating to celebrate Mardi Gras when I have no intention of giving up anything for Lent.
Early in the evening I officially commemorated the holiday with a Sazerac cocktail — a classic drink of New Orleans. I listened to Madeleine Peyroux too, for extra Big Easy flair. I enjoyed both thoroughly.
I felt no extra thrill to them though: I may well have a Sazerac again before Easter, and Ms. Peyroux is almost certain to pop up again on my playlist. So what makes this evening different from any other for me?
I suppose there was one other way I celebrated: I skipped going to the gym.
Perhaps I can can turn today’s laziness to my advantage. I wrote a post some weeks back about needing a focus for my self- and health-improvement efforts. Here’s what I’ll do: For the next 40 days, I’ll exercise for at least 40 minutes each day. The exercise needn’t require a trip to the gym or a big sweat; 40 minutes of focused yoga or even dancing around the living room will do.
So, retroactively, I now feel a bit more justified in sitting about listening to music and drinking rye on Mardi Gras. And I look forward to arriving at Easter a little less gras.
Pump you up
I find it helpful to give names to my self-improvement efforts. A name puts a wrapper around little things, so they’re part of Something Bigger rather than yet another attempt to be more beautiful-healthy-smart-whatever.
So far, I have not yet devised a name for my latest attempt to get fit. (No, “Get Fit 2008″ won’t work. Not catchy enough.) I think this lack of name — of branding! — is at least part of why I am having trouble getting started.
Despite this setback, I have made a little progress. I’ve been drinking more water each day, and since it’s filtered tap water rather than bottled I feel extra virtuous. I’ve been going to sleep earlier and waking up before my alarm rings.
And I’ve been to the gym a few times this year, including twice this week.
I am not the sort to fear the gym or feel uncomfortable there. I’ve put in many hours at many gyms, and I’ve overcome my neuroses about the other regulars. Skinny girls with makeup who never break a sweat, leathery ladies who live only for the treadmills and the tanning beds, muscle-bound men hulking around the free weights who grunt and egg each other on — these people don’t frighten me.
Nor am I put off by the many and varied workout machines. The treadmills and elliptical whatsits are all just computer gadgets with moving parts. I press Quickstart and get going. The other machines have instructions and diagrams.
So all of that is fine. But there is one element of my gym that brings me down: the bank of televisions hanging from the ceiling.
Most days I workout in the afternoon, when my viewing choices include soap operas, Judge Judy, repetitive sports coverage, obsessive news coverage of the day’s tragedy, and something from VH1. Today for the first time I saw “I Love New York,” and I began to doubt my faith in the future of man.
The problem is that I can’t help but watch whatever is on the screens. I can look elsewhere in the gym, but then I find myself staring at the ass of the person jogging in front of me. That’s never good.
When I whined to my brother about this, he suggested that I change the channel to the financial report. “No one can complain about your wanting to turn on the stock reports.”
“But I don’t want to watch financial reports.”
“You don’t have to pay attention to it,” he said. “Turn it on and stare at it while you listen to your iPod.”
It’s a brilliant solution.
Plus, maybe while I’m staring at the screen, valuable insights into financial trends will work their way subliminally into my brain. Then I can invest and become rich — rich enough to build a home gym.
Gonna make you sweat
You wouldn’t guess it to look at me, but I enjoy exercising. No, honest, it’s true. Especially weight training or heading out for a little jog at the end of the day.
I can still get bored though, so I keep an eye out for new twists: a funky pair of socks, new equipment, and especially a new, entertaining workout. Lately I’ve been enjoying the online workouts at Nike.com: full-length, completely free workouts led by motivating, super-athletic but amazingly non-frightening trainers. Sure, they’re also showing off workout gear that you can order online with just a couple of clicks, but there’s no obligation to buy.
My main fave has been the Warrior Moves Cardio workout on nikewomen.com. It seems like a relatively low-key combination of shadowboxing and pilates with a thick layer of empowerment all over it. (Sample guidance from the instructor: “A warrior is someone who loves her body and her life and is dedicated to being all she can be.”) But the next day you discover that you’ve made extensive use of muscles all over the upper and lower body both — muscles that you may have forgotten but that will for several days scream for attention. If you can survive a couple of workouts of Warrior Moves, you really do start to respect your body.
But as of today I have a new contender for favorite workout: the OK Go Treadmill Workout. It’s available via iTunes and is sponsored by Nike, but the grand thing is that the trainer/narrator is my sweetie Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go.
I don’t have easy access to a treadmill, and I already have the album versions of all but one of the songs included with it, but I bought the workout anyway and used it as my guide for this evening’s jog.
It’s a fairly basic interval training workout: warmup, come up to pace, then run intervals of increasing duration with recovery breaks in between, and finally come back down. All set to the music of — you know it — OK Go. And through it all there’s Damian, urging you to push a little harder here, take it easy there, get ready for the big interval now, etc.
And it’s quite a fine workout, assuming you enjoy upbeat indie-pop music and don’t mind having a cute-sounding guy say charming things to you while you run. I assume that Nike trainers and highly paid copywriters wrote the script, but it doesn’t feel terribly forced, and it is encouraging for real. I’ll know tomorrow just how hard I worked, but I felt like a pushed myself much harder than I would have just running to music.
Nike has a bunch of other workouts on iTunes also — search for Nike Sport Music for the full list. And anyone can submit a Sport iMix. Lots to choose from.
Or, if you’d rather not, you can always just enjoy the video one more time:
Gonna make you sweat
I attended an all girls’ boarding school — Villa Maria High School, unfortunately now closed — and I lived in the dorm for the first three years. Each year around this time all the girls would start to worry about weight we’d gained over the winter months. The cafeteria specialized in heavy carbs, and there was ice cream every night, so it wasn’t surprising some of us would bulk up a bit each year. We’d then go through every possible diet and exercise craze to slim down.
My friend Mary Jean and I ran stairs each night. We’d jog up and down the back stairs of the dorm, three flights, sometimes listening to a boom box we’d park on the top landing.
Mary Jean was particularly weight-conscious. She had lived most of her life in the Aramco company compound in Saudi Arabia, an American outpost full of families and kids and basically on the beach, and she was almost Los Angelean in her concern for remaining bikini-ready. She hung a pink and green string bikini from the light fixture in her ceiling, as a constant reminder of the goal.
Anyway, Mary Jean took the stair running extra-seriously, and to give her efforts a boost she wrapped herself — each leg and her torso, and sometimes her arms — in cellophane wrap, underneath her sweat suit. You could hear the cellophane squeak and rustle as she ran up and down. I don’t know that the cellophane accelerated her progress but she was convinced it was a good thing.
I was reminded of this technique when I saw this photo. Except I think this woman would have trouble running in her getup.
