Cross-Training & My Good Old Days List
May 7, 2010
I’d like you to read my newsletter today as if it is not coming from some energizer gym bunny who thinks of pull-ups as “fun”, works out for hours every day and has guns for biceps, but rather, as if it is coming from a middle-aged white lady from Connecticut stuck in the 80′s. Which is precisely what I felt like this week after my co-worker (a fellow aging energizer bunny) and I volunteered at the Women’s Fitness Expo last weekend. Let’s just say we (used to)consider ourselves to be in pretty good shape although we do tend to do the exact same workout, day after day, week after week, year in, year out. We arrogantly volunteered to help demonstrate some simple postural movements on a physioball (those huge beach ball thingies) which consisted of sitting on the ball, stretching side to side and maybe doing a few crunches.
Since we are in such “great shape” we were shocked Monday morning to find our muscles pasted to our skeleton which in turn was glued to our beds come Monday morning.
I did make it down the stairs but brushing my teeth was a challenge. What the heck just happened?
Here’s what. If you do the same activity all the time, you develop a very narrow fitness level, meaning that you are fit but just for that particular exercise.
Cross Training is a way to broaden your overall fitness base so that not only do you prevent soreness when you try new activities but you also prevent injuries by not overusing certain muscles, nor underusing muscles that need to stay strong (like the lower back for example) not to mention reducing boredom and burnout.
When exercise teachers come to me saying they want to give up a class, I recommend that, first, they change it up. Maybe they can try teaching a new class format.
New exercises renew your interest as well as keep you healthy.
Cross training is a terrific way to shape up different muscle groups and cultivate a new set of muscular skills.
Cross training also allows you the ability to vary the strain placed on certain muscle groups and also on your cardiovascular system. After doing the same movements over decades, your body becomes very efficient doing those movements.
The same is true mentally. Think the same thoughts over time and eventually you’ve worn a beaten path so well-worn that you cannot think different thoughts without getting a mental jigger.
Doing the same thing over time is perfect if you are a competitive athlete training for a race or event, but this limits your overall conditioning and makes it harder to get broader (smarter) benefits while training.
Your rate of return diminishes as you simply maintain a particular level of fitness.
Cross training will also keep you from tweaking a hamstring or your lower back.
Cross Training doesn’t JUST apply to exercising. It is also important to cross train your brain. One way to do this is by watching new sports.
This year my daughter is running track and who knew running from here to there could be made so exciting just with the addition of a uniform, a few competitors (especially if they have nice hair, which ticks off my daughter just enough to make her run faster-like I said, motivation is a funny thing). Add in a stop watch and a starting pistol and the fun begins.
There are so many sports options nowadays (I’m old enough now to use the word, “nowadays”) that there is no reason why a fifteen year old can’t find something to play that he or she enjoys. Back in the olden days, not only did we not have a track team or lacrosse, we didn’t even have tennis! Back then, we only had lafootball, labaseball and labasketball, in that order of importance.
Being so crippled from such a subtle exercise demo made me feel old in general, but more specifically I started thinking about how, in my 20′s, I used to move sofas up three flights of stairs by myself.
Do I miss those days? Sort of. But when I think back to what it really was like, I have mixed feelings. Which made me feel like making a LIST. So. I did. I call it my
Good Ol Days List-some of which I miss and most of which I do not)
~No internet for one thing. Did you have a set of encyclopedias? Our kids don’t even know what an encyclopedia is. I still remember what our Collier’s encyclopedia set smelled like.
~How about going TO the library and looking something up in a card catalog? A card catalog!!
~Plus there was no email. We had to write letters, which arrived a week later
~There was no Child Protective Services that I knew of. No one cared if our parents beat us. My dad occasionally found that his belt was a cross-training tool. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my neighbors also had permission to kick our asses!
~There was no iTunes.
~Or malls.
~ I do remember trying to tape songs off the radio, which never sounded too good. We did eventually get a Country Esquire Station Wagon with an 8-track tape deck
~ Call-Waiting.Our version of call-waiting was where we had to wait to make the call. We had a party line where you picked up the phone and listened to see if some yacky neighbor was using the line. Then you clicked on and off until they took the hint. If you were on the phone and someone tried to call you, they got a busy signal (which I kind of miss).
~There were no cell phones. If we left the house, we had to survive being out of touch. If we needed a ride home from band practice, our mom telepathically showed up. Or we walked home.
~Also, I could’ve used Caller ID. I remember picking up the phone and holding my breath
(“______Hellooo?…)hoping it was my boyfriend although usually it was Aunt Kate or Grandma Love.
~NOT answering was NOT an option. Plus, no answering machine.Nome sayin’?
~We had four TV stations, two of them fuzzy. If I was only missing Lawrence Welk, I could wait until next week (although Sissy and Bobby were quite enjoyable) BUT if I missed Carol Burnett
or H.R. Puffinstuff 
while I was gone, tough luck.
(Jeesh, I’m really off-topic now but let me add a few more to my list in a desperate attempt to make this make sense)
~No remote channel changer. But actually there was usually no more than one good show on at a time, unless you counted Star Trek re-runs.
~And cartoons were just Saturday morning.
~Seat belts? we cut them out.And the only kind of car seat we had was the back seat. I remember my baby brother Darrin in a basket on the back seat floor boards. Everybody hang on! The only safety belt we had was “the arm” across the chest at the last moment if Mom had to stop short.Which was our own darn fault for not hanging on.
Things have improved in this day and age. We’ve gotten smarter and have, at our fingertips, not only more knowledge,
but also more opportunity to use that knowledge.Not only do we have cross training, but we also have ultrasound,
prenatal screening, DNA testing AND the Prius (is that still a good thing?)
Nowadays, we all have more opportunities and every sport is smarter- no coaches banging helmets together or kids running until they toss their cookies-that I’ve seen.
Do you suppose we will look back in another few decades and be embarrassed by our central air conditioning and our big SUV’s and our zigzagging back and forth across town with not a carpool in sight?
Or maybe by our crazy repetitive fitness regimes? Will hanging clothes on the clothesline be the “new” dryer?
All I know is that, hopefully,we learn from our mistakes and that we will be willing to try new things, as well as to stop doing things if they are NOT working,
whether it’s in your workout routine
or how you bag your groceries.
Anyway, this olden days analogy is a long way of saying that change is good and even going back and unchanging changes (like taking up jogging again) is good sometimes.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying YOU NEED TO CROSS TRAIN.
Comments
Got something to say?
Sign Up for Special Insider Info and Tips!
