Goal Setting From the Heart; Polar HRM Giveaway

Yep, this is another Goal Post!

Which means it's time for another chance for clever and inspiring Cranketeers to chat and offer support around our various goals.

Are your goals perennial old favorites that you return to time and again? Or are they all fresh and new and shiny? Are they easy-peasey no-brainers, or are they awe-inspiring challenges or are they just plain crazy-ass outrageous?

It's all good!  I'll be very curious about how the last part of February went and what you're all up to in March.

As it happens, my thoughts on goal setting aren't really all that "from the heart."  It's honestly more of a "head' than "heart" post. But hell, "Goals From the Head" doesn't fit in very well thematically since we're just about at the end of National Please Don't Croak From A Heart Attack Month*** plus we've got a nifty Polar FT7 Heart Rate monitor to give away designed to keep your ticker tickin' throughout the year.

The Alzheimer's Diet! Interview & Giveaway & Mini-Review

 

Good luck clicking.
 Image swiped from Amazon 'cause I forgot (!) to ask for one.

Alzheimer's is one of those tragic diseases many of us don't like to think about, despite how common it is.  I know very few people whose lives haven't been touched by it in some way.

And no lifestyle intervention can guarantee a healthy brain in old age. Let's hope for a cure, pronto.

Hurry Up, 'K? Thanks!

But in the meantime, there is a lot that clever scientists have discovered about stuff that you can do to make contracting Alzheimer's less likely.

Is it worth making a few changes now, perhaps decades ahead of Possible Trouble, in order to lessen your risk?  Admittedly, it's not as sexy a goal as having six-pack abs or buns of steel. So I worry that books like this The Alzheimer's Diet: A Step-by-Step Nutritional Approach for Memory Loss Prevention and Treatment may have an uphill battle in the Diet Marketing Wars.  But it would be great if resources like this found an audience. Plus, many of these suggestions are targeted at memory boosting now, even ahead of dire diseases.

So stick around, we have an interview with the two very thoughtful authors, plus 4 copies of The Alzheimer's Diet to give away.  Note:  one copy I'm going to reserve for Canadians, even if it means confronting my laziness and shipping it myself. And another copy is specifically set aside for Cranketeers who've been participating in the monthly Goal Support Group post,  aka ¡Toma! (And there's a fresh one coming soon!)

It's Free!

As anyone knows who has seen me scarf up 20,000 calories worth of junk food samples at Costco, I am very fond of stuff that is Free. Often my lusting after Free leads to poor choices, but sometimes, free is good!

For others who like Free, I wanted to pass along a link for a free 12 week lecture series on self acceptance by some of the rockstars of evidence-based personal growth. Hosted by Sounds True, the Self-Acceptance Project has presentations by folks like the awesome Brené Brown, my geek-crush Rick Hanson, Harville Hendricks, Kelly McGonigal... the list goes on and on and on.

And yeah, the skeptical cranky part of me still cringes a bit inwardly at enthusiastic advice to embrace "Self-Acceptance" or to "Love Ourselves" or "To Be Our Own Best Friends" or whatever.  In fact, I couldn't help noticing that the acronym for this series is "SAP."

But wait, what the hell is that about?  It's better that we should all go around feeling crappy about ourselves?

I'm finally getting it that those of us who tend to feel reflexively barfy when we encounter the earnest vocabulary of self-improvement often miss out on cool stuff. So I'm gonna try to suck it up and watch some of these myself; anyone else?

Oh, and a couple more things to alert you to, including a link I couldn't stop laughing at...

Do You Wait Until Things Break to Pay Attention?

So I am writing this on a laptop that appeared to have totally crashed this morning.  I kept getting an error message that gave me only one option: turn off the computer.

Have I backed up my important documents in the last several months? No! But I've sure as hell been meaning too, especially as I've been noticing all kinds of suspicious computer behavior of late.

After the first 3 tries rebooting, I figured it was hopeless.  But I so WANTED to deny reality that I tried 3 more times.  Nothing.  And then once more... and voila, suddenly after the 7th try it's back from the dead!  Sure, it still freezes up every so often for no reason, but it looks like I can at least crank out a quick blog post.

Of course I am sorely tempted to go on my merry way and forget any of these warning signs of impending computer disaster because hell, it's working again now.  I really don't want to go without my precious pc for who knows how long, leaving it in the clutches of some brightly lit and hideously overpriced National Chain, or at the workshop of some cheaper yet possibly creepier random geek from Craigslist.

And as I contemplate my course of action, it occurs to me that this issue comes up a lot for busy people: when to ignore signs of trouble and when to take the time to fix them.

It seems an especially common dilemma for those looking to get fit and strong in the most efficient way possible, yet who may be dealing with body parts that are sending out subtle or not-so-subtle signals that they may need a break and/or some maintenance or repair work.

So how much attention do you pay now to stuff that is not actually "broken" yet?

Doing "Real" Push-Ups Without Pain? Ask the Trainers!

Lots of people, women in particular, would like to work up to "real" full-body push ups. They're a great upper body workout, and wouldn't it be cool to one day have such awesome upper body strength you get compliments like "wow, check out those guns?"

Er... OK. A tad too literal?

Well, as long as we're trolling around in public domain images (and hoping that Wikipedia is correct in asserting that an image which is "a work of a U.S. military employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties" is indeed in the public domain, because who wants to piss off gals with guns?) lets just go with a classic.

There, that's better.

Anyway, despite the awesomeness of push-ups, many folks seem to have wrist or shoulder or other bio-mechanical issues that make them problematic.

We, (and by "we" I mean the entire imaginary Cranky Fitness Editorial Staff), asked four knowledgeable personal trainers for their advice.

How to do push ups without pain?

They also coughed up instructional pictures and videos, hooray!

And of course the least-expert fitness blogger on the planet had to weigh in at the end too. Let's start with the smart advice, shall we?