New Year, New You? Let's Kick Ass in 2015!

photo upload via x-ray delta one

By Crabby McSlacker

And yes, I haven't forgotten: this is the post in which the Plus Sized Exercise DVD winners are announced! So please stay tuned; winners names below.

Also, for no reason in particular, this post is illustrated with random weird old album covers. If you are a fan of such things, this is perhaps another reason to suffer through the usual bloggity blah blah blah as I share the strange contents of my brain.

But, you may be wondering: given my reputation for whining, pessimism, and general cantankerousness, why on earth would I be filled with optimism and energy and annoying perkiness as we reach an arbitrary date on the calendar and a new year begins?

Monthly Support Post: Blow Your Own Horn (Plus, Life Coaching Flash-Sale )

By Crabby McSlacker

Regulars here may recall that about once a month, Cranky Fitness gets all nosy wants to know what you guys are up to.  These "goal support" posts may have started out being about New Years resolutions, but many people who check in are not actually pursuing any official resolutions or goals. And that's just peachy too! 

So how about we do something slightly different? This month, I'd like to encourage Cranky Fitness readers to say something nice about themselves. 

So join me, will you? Let's go ahead and brag a little!

And, like me, you can consider getting some practice promoting your business or blog or your employment qualifications or your leadership ability or the crafts you make or your athletic prowess or parenting skills.  Or you can acknowledge your determination, generosity, accomplishments or the tough challenges you've overcome. Or... 

Wait, no! Don't leave yet!

Crap.

This is such an unpretentious, humble, down-to-earth, non-braggy bunch of readers that it's gonna be like pulling teeth to get some of you to join me in this, but please stick around and hear me out, ok?

Get With the Program!

So this post started off being about the fact that I signed up for a new training program.

Yep, I'm currently I'm up to my eyeballs in oligosaccharides and polypeptides and phospholipids, trying not to freak out about making my way towards the ACE Health Coach Certification. Which I'm psyched about! It seems to offer a solid foundation for exercise/nutrition assessment, planning, and programming, for any life and wellness coaching clients who should want that.

But for clients who like to do their own thing, they still can. I promise it won't make me all bossy all of a sudden.   I'm still a wishy-washy psychotherapist at heart and am much more likely to ask annoying questions than provide concrete advice.

So will you be hearing more about this shiny new program at some point?  You betcha! Lucky readers! All the details and implications of my educational endeavors will no doubt make for fascinating reading. Blame Malevolent Andrea who alerted me to this thing.
  
However, my signing up for an official, structured program does bring up a more general question that comes up all the time in a health and fitness context:

Do you get the best results by picking a good program and following it by the book?  Or is it better to navigate your own best path through a field of intriguing but possibly conflicting alternatives?

Fitting in Fitness

Photo credit? Whoops. Forgot where I found it.

Are you a professional athlete? A circus performer? Or perhaps a reality-show contestant being tortured and humiliated trained and motivated to inspire a national TV audience with your astounding weight loss and newly-muscled physique?

Nope? Well, no big surprise there. Oddly enough, neither pro athletes nor famous people of any sort tend to hang out at Cranky Fitness. Go figure! But this post is not for them anyway.

How do normal folks find time to get enough exercise?

And sorry, Cranky Fitness regulars--as it happens, it's a subject that comes up for a lot of coaching clients. So please don't get too disoriented should you decide to... 

Sigh heavily, lift your finger from its comfortable resting place, and click over to the Life Coaching site to read the damn post.

Build Strength FAST: Two Incredibly Effective Tricks

(Photo: wolleydog)

So as I may have mentioned in the recent post on how to do pull-ups and push-ups, at one time I was able to eke out 3 unassisted pull-ups.

I was so damn proud I ran around telling everyone! But then surgery and a broken arm benched me for 7 months, and I had to start all over. I couldn't hoist myself an inch without 90 lbs of assistance on one of those gravitron contraptions.

And sure, over the past couple months, I made some progress, but despite prodigious amounts of cursing, pouting, and whining, my goal still felt miles away.

But then, about 10 days ago, I tried a new approach, and guess what? I can now complete ONE, count 'em ONE, unassisted pull-up!

For me, this was a huge jump in performance in a very short time.


So, wanna find out what the two secrets to FAST strength building were?

Strength Building Tip Number One: More Frequency, LESS Intensity

Does that make any sense at all? Of course not! And wait until you read the details, because it totally contradicts everything we've been told about how strength training is supposed to happen. I always thought the only way to make progress was to grapple with as huge and nasty a load as you could manage 'til exhaustion, then eat 27 cupcakes to restore your strength take a day or two off to let the muscles build back up even stronger.

But with this method, the idea is to do the exercise as often as possible, while staying as fresh as possible. I got this tip from Jen Sinkler in a post about pull ups over at Experience Life, and almost didn't try it because it sounded completely silly and doomed to failure counter-intuitive.  But it worked!

Apparently this technique came from a book by a dude with a difficult to pronounce name ("Tsatsouline"), and the Experience Life blog post above has more on that if you want to track down the source.  As is probably obvious, I haven't read the book myself and so my advice probably bears no resemblance whatever to how it's actually supposed to be done.

For those of you who like me, are nutty enough to want to try this, here are some step by step instructions:

1. Quit your day job.  (Note: if you are a personal trainer at a well-equipped gym, or you work at home within range of workout equipment, you may be able to skip this step). However, if quitting your day job isn't practical, you may want to use step #7 instead of step #5.

2. Translate your strength goal: What this works best for is dramatically increasing the number of reps of an exercise fairly quickly.  If you want to go from, say, a maximum of 4 push-ups to 10, then you don't need to do any translating.  In my case, however, the goal was doing unassisted chin ups and pull-ups, and I couldn't do any.  But what I could do was about 6 negatives (where you lower yourself slowly from the bar, rather than hoist yourself up).  So I figured if I could use this trick to double my negatives to 12, I'd have a pretty good shot of doing one "real" chin up or pull up.

My advice, then, is to try to find an exercise variation and an intensity that lets you do at least a few reps, but not too many--or this plan will drive you totally apesh#t crazy. (See below).

3.  Find your maximum number of reps.  Just do the target exercise as many times as you can with wrenching something apart or puking.

4.  Divide that number in half.  If it's odd, round DOWN. This is the number of repetitions you'll do in each set.

5.  Here comes the "quit your job" part:  Shoot for one of these half-max sets per hour, most of your waking day until you fatigue, 5 days a week.

6.  Pick your jaw back up off the floor.  Because (a) you can fall well short of this goal and it still works and (b) if you do happen to be at home, it's not nearly as awful as it sounds.  I did about 8 sets a day two days in a row, then took a day off, then repeated the cycle a couple more times.  The thing that's actually surprising?  Because you're not doing that many reps at a time, and you're "fresh" each time, the exercising itself is not even unpleasant.  Plus your muscles have that nice pumped feeling most of the day.

7.  Here's Jen's more practical variation, which you can do just 3 or 4 days a week: Start your workout with the half max set; rest until your heart rate returns to normal, then do another exercise that doesn’t use the same muscles. Rest again, then do another half-max set of your target exercise. Keep repeating. The goal? "Try to bag five to 10 sets with at least five minutes of rest between them."

And the second important Tip for Building Strength Fast?

This one is psychological, rather than physical, so I apologize in advance for requiring you to click an additional link. But just think you how strong your index finger will get as you power your way over to read the rest of the post over at the Cranky Fitness Department of  Life and Wellness Coaching!

"Strength Training"-- Not the Same Ol' Story

As is so often the case at Cranky Fitness, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I confess: I am a lowdown dirty shameless google-whore, prone to using searchable health and fitness keywords even if they're not quite on point.

So yeah, the post is not so much about strength-training in the traditional sense... but if you're looking for that, please don't go! We've got tons of slightly-used but perfectly good blog posts about strength training and working out here in the Cranky Fitness archives.  Weirdly enough, most of the tips that were good months or even years ago still seem to apply today!

But sorry for the trickery; this post is about "strength training" in a different sense.  In a life-coachy way? Well perhaps. (But don't worry, there will be more Health and Fitness stuff too, in coming weeks).

Read the rest of the post here!

(And yeah, more sneakiness and misdirection. Feel free to comment either place if you want.)

Fresh Starts!

Image: Plan59

Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Helloooo... Um, is anyone still out there?

I'm thinking it's a long shot, what with my semi-abandoning the blog and all. But on the off chance there might be a few old friends and followers still lurking out there, I thought it was about time for a new post. (And if you hang in there, or skip straight down to the end, you'll find out the sneaky secret mission behind this post. You may even score a semi-valuable service for free!) But, putting hidden agendas aside: let's talk about: Starting All Over Again, Damnit.

(Hmm, SAOAD isn't a very catchy acronym, is it? I don't envision going viral with handy SAOAD tips. And sadly, "Fresh Starts" sounds too much like a fruit-flavored laxative or a meth rehab clinic).

So... have you ever worked really hard at something, gained a lot of ground, and then for whatever reason, found yourself right back at the beginning again? Perhaps you lost 30 pounds, hooray! And then gained back 45 pounds, not-so-hooray! Or maybe you took a job at a big company and worked your ass off for decades, gaining massive expertise, taking on more and more responsibility, until management finally recognized your enormous contributions by shipping your job offshore and laying you off.

There are lots of reasons for having to Start All Over Again, Damnit, and many possible happy outcomes. Haven't we all heard the stories about people who were plucky and they never gave up finally one day they invented gravity or became invisible or dug a hole clear to China with their bare hands? (OK, so maybe not those stories exactly).

The problem? If you're an over-thinker like me, you may have to deal with a couple of stubborn mental obstacles in order to get from Starting Over Again Damnit to Happy Outcome.

1. Shoulds and Shouldn'ts
These are potent de-motivators in any situation, but they're particularly tough to avoid when you're trying to accomplish a goal that you've already achieved.  "I shouldn't have to go through this again, I already did it once!" "I shouldn't have to respond to 500 job postings to get one measly interview, last time I landed a great job at the first place I applied!" Or, "WTF? I've been starving myself and working out like a maniac, and I've only lost 5 pounds--I should be WAY thinner by now!"

Thing is, an aggrieved attitude, even if perfectly justified, is rarely helpful. (And this is coming from someone who has studied and perfected whining as an art form). Sure, sometimes it's great to vent and commiserate with others. But at some point, it's worth shaking off the self-pity and trying to deal with sucky reality in a constructive way.

Hey, here's a happy thought: people all over the world are being tortured or are dying of horrible diseases or are suffering from actual, not self-imposed, starvation. If you're not one of them, do you really want to spend much time pondering what "should" and "shouldn't" be happening to you? Chances are there lots of things you are grateful for, and plenty of accomplishments you are proud of, and even some silver linings to your current unwelcome situation. And so if you can catch yourself descending into a cycle of "this shouldn't be," try thinking: is there anything good that might come of this? Am I learning and accomplishing anything different, or deeper, the second time around? And if you can't find anything at all to celebrate, are there any other ways in which you're still a pretty darn lucky person?

2. Been-Down-This-Road-Before Buzz-kill

It may be hard to recapture the innocent enthusiasm you had about your goals a second time around. You got there! You ran that marathon! You wrote that novel! You met the perfect person and found the perfect house and started the perfect family!  But then maybe you got injured, or your masterpiece was roundly rejected, or your scumbag husband squandered your life savings at the racetrack and ran off to Albuquerque with a cocktail waitress. Now how are you ever supposed to feel that same sense of drive and motivation to achieve your dreams, knowing that you did it all before and yet here you are back at the starting line again? It can be easy to sabotage yourself with an unconscious "what's the use" defeatism, even as you are going through the motions of working towards your goal.

Well, here's one idea: make it a slightly different goal.  Make it bigger, or broader, or more meaningful.  Or, hey, remind yourself that "it's all about the journey, not the destination." (Which, while it's a tedious cliche, is actually kinda good advice.) For example, that marathon?  Perhaps it could be a triathlon. Or it could be about being in the best shape of your life, and still enjoying most every run or workout.  That new job? Perhaps it won't be the same as your old job. It may be that in discovering new priorities, you're now looking for a better job: one that may not pay as much money, but is more creative or satisfying.  Those 45 pounds you gained? Maybe they're not about the scale anymore, so much as regaining your strength and vitality.

So Why All this Talk of Starting Over?

Well, as you may have guessed, I'm currently in "Start Over" mode myself, on several fronts. Physically, I'm only recently back to weight training, after a hysterectomy and a broken elbow. I'm trying hard not get discouraged at the huge amount of ground I need to cover to get back to where I was last fall.  (One goal on turning 50 was to be able to do an unassisted pull-up, and I got to FOUR!  Now, I can only hang from the bar helplessly like a 125 pound sack of very, very sad potatoes).

And another way I'm starting over?  Well, here's where we get to the "hidden agenda" part.  Before I became a lazy ill-tempered health and fitness blogger, I was a licensed psychotherapist with a practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Sadly, it's not really possible to live in two different states and maintain a psychotherapy practice.  But a Life and Wellness coach?  Much more portable!  The field of life coaching has its origins in executive coaching, and unlike therapy, is typically done at a distance over the phone.  And now, with Skype and email etc, a long-distance coaching relationship is even more feasible.  Plus, huge bonus: coaching, because it isn't therapy, will let me work with mentally healthy folks who don't need "fixing," but who want to focus energy on making their lives better.

The upshot:  I've retrained as a Life and Wellness coach, and I'm starting up a coaching practice. And I'm hoping to use Cranky Fitness to pimp for it! 

And so what does this mean for former Cranky Fitness readers?

1. More frequent Cranky Fitness blog posts.  Nah, not daily, but maybe once every week or two, not just a few times a year.

2. The same 'ol Crabby McSlacker, complete with swear words and whining.  Are life coaches allowed to be cranky, skeptical, irreverent, and even, on occasion, clueless?  Or do they have to be relentlessly well-informed and upbeat?  I shall find out, I guess!

3.  A blog that will shamelessly direct readers over to my life coaching website.  There will be ads for "Live a Little" Life and Wellness Coaching.  Also, Cranky Fitness blog posts may start with just a teaser here, and then end up over at my life & wellness coaching website, because I'm sneaky that way. And say, did you notice the annoying way I stuck in keyword links?  Expect a lot more of that sh#t.

IMPORTANT UPDATE!
Due to a way heavier volume of responses than I counted on, I'm afraid I have no more free slots right now.  But check this updated post if you're interested in heavily discounted life coaching after the first round. So sorry!!!! And thanks to all who commented or offered to be guinea pigs!

4. Discounted or maybe even FREE life coaching for CrankyFitness readers!  I figure if you've read this far, you're probably someone who is Cranky-Fitness-compatible, not some weirdo googling in hoping to find a colon cleansing cure that will magically eliminate 25 pounds by Thursday.


Here's the deal:  I'm trained, qualified, and ready to start life coaching, but I'm brand spankin' new at it and need some "beta" clients to work out the kinks before I officially open for business.  Ideally I'd like to find some easy-going, patient, highly motivated clients who are ready to make some changes in life, but feel like they'd have a better shot with a personal coach to bat things around with.  (And if the whole notion of Life Coaching sounds weird and confusing, check out "What is Life Coaching?" for some thoughts on that).


So, is anyone interested in an intake session plus four free life coaching sessions?  (Further sessions would be deeply discounted off normal rates if there were any interest in continuing).   Note: There's no guarantee we'll be compatible, so I'd reserve the right after our intake to refer you elsewhere if I didn't think we were a good match).  I'm also hoping to find some clients willing to do sessions by Skype or email too, not just by telephone.

Curious? Or just wanna be nice and check out my website and give me some feedback? It's at www.livealittlecoaching.com.  Email me here or there if you're interested in the possibility of some free coaching.

So, back to the topic of  "starting over "--anyone have any thoughts? Frustrating experiences, inspiring stories, or just wanna say hi?  I'd love to hear from you!