Five Reasons You Must Start Resistance Training Today!

I love list posts.  They are so easy to write, and even easier to read.  If only adopting the habit they propose were so easy…

But in this case, it is!  Resistance training is not difficult to do.  You don’t need to join a gym.  There is no requirement for fancy equipment or expensive clothing.  While a routine does take a little bit of time, you will begin to see and feel significant results in as little as 20 minutes 2 or (ideally) 3 sessions per week.  You could multitask, and do your routine while watching Scrubs reruns.  How simple is that?

Your own body weight can provide all the resistance you want or need, or if you are so inclined, you can purchase some very reasonably priced resistance tubing to use in your living room.

Here’s the trick.  Don’t fall for the fitness magazine articles that suggest complex moves, or drop sets, or supersets, or unbelievably crazy-sets.  Pick exercises that target multiple muscle groups like squats, lunges, front and side plank, or good old fashioned push-ups, and just start doing them!  Here is why you should start today:

Reason 1) Resistance training is a friend of your metabolism.  Why is this?  As you begin to overload your muscles beyond what they are used to, you injure them slightly (don’t go for major injury…that doesn’t do any good at all).  You cause little tiny microtears in the muscle fibers, and this is why you are sore one or two days later.  But this is good news, because as your muscle fibers heal, they become stronger and bigger.  You add muscle mass, and over time, this increases your metabolic rate.

How does that work?  Body fat doesn’t do much.  It just sits there and looks back at you in the
mirror.  It doesn’t use up much energy.  Heck, it doesn’t even need much of a blood supply since it requires so little maintenance.  As a result, it burns very few calories.

On the other hand, muscle is very active.  It requires food (glucose and amino acids) and burns tons of calories by just being there.  Clearly, if you want to be a lean, mean, calorie burning machine, you want as much muscle as you can get.

Reason 2) Muscle, because it requires glucose and amino acids, is very sensitive to insulin.  Insulin opens the doorway to  to the little muscle cells, so glucose and amino acids can get in.  If you are insulin resistant, as in Type II diabetes  (and possibly CFRD), lifting weights will increase your insulin sensitivity as you build muscle mass.  A finely tuned insulin sensitivity mechanism is required for a stable blood glucose level, which leads to good health.

Reason 3) This is a big one for me, and maybe you can relate.  Building muscle and feeling and being strong physically is one area of my life where having cystic fibrosis doesn’t even matter!  My lungs may not be the best in the gym, but I will take on any woman my age in a push up or pull up contest!  This is a very empowering feeling…I have at least a modicum of control over my body which is otherwise at the mercy of my lung status.  Now, some days my lungs even interfere with my time at the gym, and that is OK.  I know that when I recover, I will be back, strutting around the gym with the big boys, knowing that my muscle fibers are no different than theirs:-)

If you have an illness other than CF, lifting may just provide the same benefit.  Lifting weights is a very black or white thing to do.  You do it and you see and feel results in as little as two or three weeks.  You have control of this.  It may not feel like you have control of much else, sometimes.  But you do have control over this.
Reason 4) More and more studies are showing that well-designed resistance training programs in post-treatment management of cancer patients and survivors are beneficial in improving health status and quality of life.   This is true in other chronic diseases as well.  Weight training is anabolic, meaning it builds up the body.  Often, treatment for illness is catabolic, or breaks down the body (think steroids or chemotherapy).  While these treatments are necessary, we can counter their bad side effect of breaking down tissue by weight training.

Reason 5) Weight training is fun!  Ok, maybe I’m in the minority thinking this, but stand by this statement.  When you get over the initial “I have no clue what I’m doing,” and move through the “Oh my God this huts,” you begin to see improvement!  And this is fun!

Are you ready to begin?  I’m starting a YouTube channel where I will teach easy, and very modifiable exercises that anyone can start doing today.  Check it out, and subscribe today!

THE TRYING, I MEAN ADOLESCENT, YEARS

My oldest son is about to turn 12, and I am getting a first taste of what is to come.  This will require fortitude….and the ability to dance.  No, I don’t mean really “dance,” I mean mentally and emotionally dance with him, as he comes into his own.  Now, if he had CF and I were trying to get him to exercise as a method of airway clearance and self-esteem enhancement, I would:

1. Not exactly phrase it that way.
2. Make sure it included other peers (unless this causes additional discomfort, embarrassment, etc…).
3. Introduce weight training as soon as he/she is capable of following direction and mature enough to be safe.
4. Strictly enforce the bike/walk/scooter/skate to school, the store, a friend’s house, etc… rule.
5. Hope that he/she liked to play soccer, basketball, baseball, or whatever team sport was available, so that a “coach” ordered the training, and not me.
6. Continue to use enticement, aka bribery, to encourage daily exercise.

Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?

The Wording and the Timing of the Wording
First, the word “exercise” has unfortunately taken on a negative connotation among many of our youth these days.  I don’t quite get it, frankly.  When I was a kid, the trick was in getting me and my friends to come in at night.  Now it is the exact opposite.  I suppose it has something to do with the myriad forms of indoor entertainment these days.  The problem has become that in trying to entice some form of movement away from electronic screens, we (and by we, I mean I) use the words “You need to get some exercise!”  Instant negative reinforcement.  “Exercise” is equated with  the taking away of something good…screentime.

If you are a psychology buff, you know that this negative reinforcement is not going to promote the behavior (exercise) that you want.  A more useful way to reinforce that behavior is to associate something positive with it.  Like Pavlov and the dog! Remember, bell…food.   So yes, get them away from the screen.  By all means.  But don’t repeat my mistake, and use getting exercise as the reason why.  Bad idea.

More on positive reinforcement later.

Make it Social

Though not a universal characteristic of teenagers, most would rather hang out with friends than do pretty much anything else.  If I ask my son to please take the dog for a walk, I get a, “Why….?  I don’t want to….I had gym class today….I’m tired…etc…”  If I instead say, “Will you take the dog over to your friend’s house and see if he’ll walk his dog with you?”, he’s off like a flash.  It’s just (teenage) human nature.  So why fight it?  This is one of those Aikido moments…use the opponents force to get them to do what you want.

When I was a teenager, it was only by starting to hang out with active friends that I discovered my inner athlete.  My parents didn’t really encourage it….it just happened.  I still wonder what would have happened had I stayed in my shell.

Weight Training

It is an old wives’ tale that teenagers shouldn’t lift weights until they are fully grown for fear of damage to the epiphyseal plates.  The truth is that as soon as a kid is mature enough to follow instructions and be safe in a gym with a trainer, it is perfectly fine to start weight training.

And the teenage years are the best for starting this habit early on.  Why?  For one thing, body image issues become overwhelming at this age, as we all can remember.  Now imagine going through that again, but this time with CF.  As a teen with CF, you deal with growth delay, puberty delay, an “unpredictable” body when it comes to lung function and GI function.  Your friends see you take a handful of pills and wonder what is wrong with you.  You spend inordinate amounts of time in bathrooms, your fingernails look weird…you get the picture.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do something that had a visible, positive effect on your body that CF didn’t really affect?

The answer is unquestionably, yes!  It had a profound effect on me, and I have spoken with many other adults who say the same thing.  This is an issue where a child can actually have an “internal locus of control.”  They can get stronger!  They can put on muscle!  They can start winning arm wrestiing matches!  And CF can’t touch this.

Make Use of Multitasking

We are all pretty good at multitasking, so this one should be a no-brainer.  We all have to go places…even our children.  School, friends’ houses, the store, downtown, ball games, church….whatever.  We travel.  It is easy (I know) to get locked into a pattern of driving to all of these places.  Certainly, when the weather is bad, we need to do this.  But how many times could we just say, “I’m not driving you today.  I’ll walk or ride bikes with you…but we are going to get there the low tech way today….just for fun.”

Just as it is with small kids, it is not necessary to get all of ones aerobic exercise for the day done in one session.  It works just as well to break it into two or three smaller chunks.  So that 15 minute bike ride (each way) to school, if done intensely, could be just what the doctor (or coach) ordered for the daily goal.

Defer to the Coach

This trick works if you son or daughter is on a sport team, and practices with the team.  Then your job is easy…the coach makes your kid work, and you are off the hook.  If this describes your situation, count your lucky stars.

Not all kids are “team” types, of course.  So then what do you do?  Well, here is my pitch for wellness coaching.  If your child is mature and appreciates the need to  establish an exercise habit, working with a wellness coach is a great idea.  There are a couple of caveats, though.  First, if your child is not into the idea and only you are…it doesn’t work.  Behavior change is tricky business, and one thing is for sure, the changee has to want to do the hard work of changing.  The coach doesn’t do it….the parent doesn’t do it.  Second, I’ve learned through doing this that until a child is in their teens, it is best to schedule “family coaching” sessions.  Taking on a new habit is a big job, and a child needs support from not just a coach, but also from their family members.  Everyone in the familly needs to understand the plan, and be ready with support and encouragement.

Bribery

Now, we could call this something else I suppose.  But the truth is that is isn’t such a bad thing for a kid to understand the concept of quid pro quo.  Just as I said this works for younger aged children (remember pedometer steps for video time, stickers for exercise), when kids become teens, the concept still works; the stakes just get to be a bit higher.  Now we may be talking going to the movies, getting the car keys, going out with friends…you name it.

When you start feeling guilty about this, remember that the ultimate goal is for your chilld to learn for themselves during this time that they actually feel better when they exercise, and will hopefully find some activities that they love to do, and will keep loving to do into adulthood.  This is a critical time..and it calls for some …unorthodox methods.

If you have great ideas that have worked for you in encouraging your teenager with CF to exercise, please share them here.

How To Fit Exercise In

In a previous post, I discussed time in a very esoteric way.  Yes, Eckhart Tolle is right in a way…time only exists in a horizontal dimension, the one we are used to dealing with most of the time.  CF and all of its accompanying “life situations” exist there, too. It’s enlightening to understand that we don’t have to be dictated by that dimension all of the time.  We can practice entering the “now” and get vertical anytime we want…

Alas, one must also be practical in this world.  So, let’s get real about time, shall we?  Yesterday, when I finally got in the shower and first brushed my teeth at 3:30 pm…exactly 9.5 hours after awakening, I realized I needed to write this post.  Mind you, none of those 9.5 hours were wasted.  And I don’t even have a real job!

I don’t need to go into the specifics.  If you are reading this, you already know the laundry list of things that must be done once, twice, or even three times daily regarding health care.  The meds, the nebs, the Vest, the food, the insulin, the enzymes, the vitamins, the doctor’s appointments, the trips to the pharmacy, the uncomfortable moments (hours) where you just want to be left alone to deal with your digestive system…

This is all before “life” stuff…work, school, kids, spouses, friends, churches or spiritual activities, fun, Grey’s Anatomy….

My first point:  “When in the WORLD is there time to exercise?” is a reasonable question.

My second point:  It needs to be part of that first list…the essential health care activities, or else it just isn’t going to happen.

The number one reason CFTR-able people don’t exercise is TIME, so it stands to reason that the addition of hours of self-care does not make the problem any easier.  Nobody has time.  That is a given.  Accept it as a given, and make time anyway.

I have coached and known many people with CF, and I have not once met someone who was not happy and proud of themselves for having started an exercise program.  Yes, it is hard to fit in.  Yes, it is frustrating to get sick and have to start over from what feels like ground-zero.  But, it is always worth it.

HOW TO MAKE TIME ANYWAY

Tip number one:  If you keep a scheduler, or planner, or palm, or iphone…whatever,  schedule yourself in FIRST.  Start with just 20-30 minutes.  Go for a walk or do some yoga.  Get into moving your body in some way, every day.  Over time, splurge and give yourself an HOUR a day.

Tip number two: Schedule a reward for immediately after your exercise.  Make it small, but something you really want…a latte, a nap, whatever.  You have to really want it, and you DON”T get it unless you exercise.

Tip number three: Plan to exercise with someone else.  Set a date, time and place.  The accountability factor kicks in, and you tend to show up.

Tip number four: Try hard to establish the habit of doing your exercise first thing in the morning.  This is the only way I made it through medical school/residency and stayed healthy.  It was a grueling schedule, but I know that it was the early exercise (accompanied by the early to bed the previous night) that provided me the energy to live through it.

Tip number five: Set a goal.  Make it appropriate for you, but also, set it high enough that it will force you to stretch yourself a bit.  You don’t grow muscle mass or endurance or flexibility without stressing the system.  If you are new to running, schedule a 5K.  If you are new to yoga, try to make it through an entire class!  If you are new to weight training, work up to your first unassisted pull-up.

Tip number six: When you reach your  goal, tell everyone you know how great you are, and celebrate!

CF and Time

I am researching for a talk I will give to a CF Education Day in a couple of weeks, and found this article that I wrote three years ago.  The talk is going to be about exercise, of course, and how to find both time and motivation to move when you live with CF.  But re-reading this made me slow down a bit (hard to do on Prednisone), and remember what this time thing is all about.  I hope you enjoy: CF and Time As a fellow anatomic pathologist, I fully respect Dr. Dorothy Anderson’s description and naming of the constellation of signs and symptoms that we now call Cystic Fibrosis back in 1938.  Her observations marked the beginning of several decades of medical research, the outcome of which allows me  to sit at my computer at age 45 and write this. But for now, I would like to think way, way outside the box, and ask a question posed by one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Eckhart Tolle.  Does chronic disease really exist?  Does CF really exist? In “The Power of Now”, Tolle differentiates your “life” from your “life situation”.  He speaks of your “life” as this very ”moment”, as opposed to your “life situation”, which is comprised of the circumstances or conditions of your life.  As such, your life situation is your “story”, which has a beginning, middle, and eventually, an end.  It exists on the horizontal axis of time.  However, there is a part of each of us that is unchanged over time and exists outside of time.  Think back to that day you learned to ride a bicycle.  Or think of throwing that high school graduation hat into the air with a big cheer.  Or perhaps, think to the moment when you said, “I do”….  In each of these situations, there was an awareness of what was happening, and that same awareness, unchanged, is aware that you are reading this page now.  That awareness is what Tolle would call “life”, and it does not exist in time.  It is NOW.  It does not change, because it lies on a “vertical” axis, with no past and no future. Try not be offended by this (many of us are very attached to our CF), but imagine for a moment the possibility that CF is part of your “story”, existing on the horizontal axis of time.  At some point you were diagnosed.  In other words, a combination of sounds emitted from your doctor’s mouth (copied from the sounds Dr. Anderson decided best described this disease) was suddenly ascribed to YOU.  Those sounds became part of “who you were”.  The beginning of your CF story may have been when you were a baby, or later, but part of your identity was now as a “sufferer of” CF. The story then continued, with a different trajectory for each of us.  For some of us, the story has already ended. Your story isn’t just CF, of course.  There is the story of what you do for a living, how your body has grown and changed, what you have learned over time, who you know, who is in your family, how many dogs you have loved and lost….If you think about it honestly, whenever you ask yourself the question “Who am I?”, the answer is usually just more of the story.  “I am a lawyer”, you say.  Then who were you before you got your JD?  “I am a father and husband”.  Who were you before you were married?  “I am sick” really means the physical part of “you” is not completely healthy at this point on the horizontal axis of time.  Yes, your body has weird and unusual chloride channels lining its epithelium.  But is your brain “sick”?  Is your heart “sick”?  Are your bones intact?  Can you see?  Are you breathing? Can you love? “I” (the author) am a 45-year-old female “sufferer” of CF, retired physician, mother of two, partner, wellness coach, friend, daughter, sister…  Yeeeees, but other than being “female”, all of that has been variable throughout my life (and as I understand it, even being female could be changed, if I wished…).   Who was I when I was 9 months old, and had no language yet? But, you argue, my brain is the same…!  No it isn’t.  Neuronal pathways are always changing; cells are dying; plaques and tangles are forming (at least, in our “old survivor” brains).  I’m sure you’ve heard that all of your cells are dying off and regenerating constantly. Nothing is constant on the horizontal axis of time.  The “life story” is ongoing, and ever changing, just as the body is. Do you see the point of this tirade?  A part of you, and I would argue, the ”real” you, is the observer of your story, or as Tolle would say, “the awareness” within which your story unfolds.  Does that “awareness” have CF?  NO!  The body in which the “awareness” resides has CF!  So does CF really exist?  Only in time!  Only in the content of your life, the content that always changes and that describes you, but is NOT you.  The content is your life story, but is not your LIFE.  The real you is life itself, and that life is now, this moment.  “CF,” then, in this moment, is really reduced to what you are actually experiencing now.  Maybe that is a cough.  Maybe it is rapid breathing.  Perhaps it is pain in your joints as you walk.  Or, possibly, in THIS MOMENT, it is nothing at all. “Wow,” you say, “Julie has completely lost it!”  But if it sounds kind of interesting to explore the idea of “this moment” where CF possibly doesn’t even exist, maybe you are asking, “How do I get there?” I’m glad you asked.  This is the cool part.  Tolle describes “portals” into the NOW.  Entering these portals is sort of like a meditation, yet it is not meditation in the way we usually think of it.  I don’t know about you, but when I focus on my breath, I do NOT enter a state of bliss!  These portals are much easier to use. One portal, my personal favorite, is to become aware of the “inner body”.  Another way to describe the inner body is your “life force”, or “life energy”.  To do this, you simple sit or lie in a comfortable place, close your eyes, and ask yourself without moving it or looking at it, “Is there life in my left hand?”  This may take a few moments.  You probably will be tempted to move your hand, but don’t.  Just sit or lie in stillness and find out, “How do I know that my left hand is there…without looking at it or moving it?”  After awhile you become aware of the energy of your hand.  That is your “inner body”.  When you become aware of it in one hand, you then move your attention to the other hand.  Then, when you can feel it there, you try to feel it in both hands at once.  After that, you get adventurous, and move to your feet, and up your legs, to your torso, then arms, then neck and head.  With some practice, you can soon, at will, become aware of the “inner body” within your entire “outer body” (the one you can see and move). Here’s the catch:  the only way to feel this “inner body” is in the NOW.  You can’t do it if you are remembering the past, or worrying about or anticipating something in the future.  You can only feel your inner body in THIS MOMENT.  This technique essentially forces you into the “NOW,” the vertical, timeless dimension called awareness.  In this space, I would argue that there IS NO CF.   There may be a cough (see if you can maintain awareness of this life energy while you cough), but the energy is separate from the cough… from the body… from your thinking mind.  It’s wild. If you get really into it, you can practice this awareness throughout the day.  You can do it during a treatment.  You can practice while folding clothes, or while walking, or while in a particularly unpleasant conversation with an ex-partner.  The more you practice, of course, the easier it becomes. There are other portals, of course.  But this is getting way too long.  I would be happy to share my experiences with them (all very legal!).  Just give me a call or email.  Until next time: BE FIT…BE STRONG…BE WELL!

Five Steps to Re-Energize

Sometimes it is easy to get bogged down on a project.  You let it “sit,” so you can think about it awhile, and before you know it, three other things have come up that need your attention, and your “big idea” starts gathering dust.

At least, that is how it often works for me.

This blog is a great example, but there have been others.  It has been a challenge to post lately.  Tom died.  Christmas happened.  I got sick.  I got busy.  Life happened.  Writing took a back seat.   In addition to writing, half-marathon training programs, book ideas, and piano lessons are also residing in the back seat.  Now don’t get me wrong…my motto for life in general––I get knocked down…but I get up again––applies to projects as well as it does to my health.  Usually I come back.  Like now, for example.

So I thought a good article to write might be one about just this:  How do you pick up where you left off, before life got in the way?  I’ve come up with a 5-step “Get Up Again” action plan to use when approaching that stack that is growing on your desk.

STEP ONE:  This is the most important one.   Get off your back already!  Unless you live alone, have no friends, have no other responsibilities, have only one interest, and generally have no life, things come up!  Life happens, and you get knocked off course now and then.  For most people I know, this is when the nasty little nagging voice speaks up.  “You are such a loser…!  Why aren’t you working on this?  You had such grand plans…such great ideas…Right.  What a lazy (%&#*!

First off, this is a true waste of energy and time.  It is, of course, much more efficient to use that energy in getting back up on the horse, to mix metaphors.  Everyone gets pulled off course, now and then.

STEP TWO:  Find your motivation!  If you are spinning your wheels, you need to get a grip on something, right?  The traction is found within something called motivation.  What lights your fire?  As much as possible, you need to recreate the energy you had when you began the project.  That’s a tall order, I know.  If I had the secret to that, I would be a bazillionairre.

Why did you want to do this project in the first place???  There must have been a really good reason.  The trick is to remember it. And get back into it!  Read about it again.  Read about how others have done or are doing what you want to do.  Talk to people about your idea.  Enlist their ideas…their help.

STEP THREE:  Set one goal.  This is obvious, but it is so overlooked.  You need a finish line.  It doesn’t have to be far away, but it needs to be a bit of a stretch for you.  It needs to be time-based and measurable.  You also need to really want it!  You need to be excited.  It helps to read the goal several times a day, imagining the feeling you will have when it is accomplished.  I know what you are thinking..”One goal?  But I have at least twenty to get back to!”  This may be true, but just pick one for now.  Just a little bit of traction goes a long way.

The most important aspect of setting a goal (to me) is setting a reward.  Seriously.  You need a carrot AND a stick.  If you are like me, the stick is taken care of.  It’s that voice in your head yelling all of the time.  The carrot is, of course, the reward you pick to give yourself when you’ve crossed that finish line.  Make the reward appropriate to the effort you need to put in to accomplishing the goal.  If you’re going to train for three months to run a 5K, give yourself something worth three months of hard training!

So let’s say, for instance, you had initiated a great workout program.  You were committed.  You had worked out all the details…and then…poof.  What program?

There are two ways to deal with this.  The usual way (for many) is to tell yourself you “don’t have it in you” to stick to a program, and then give up until the next time something wakes up your motivation again.

The second (better) way, is to get off your own back, remember your motivation, set a new and smaller goal (perhaps to just start to walk for 20 minutes a day)…add a carrot…and take STEP FOUR.

STEP FOUR:  Take a small step…every day.  Small is the important element here, especially at first.  The reason for this is that you will build on small successes.  If you do what you set out to do every day, then even if those action items are small, your confidence in yourself grows bigger and bigger.  Soon, you’ll start challenging yourself with larger daily action items without feeling overwhelmed.

STEP FIVE:  Stick to it until you can celebrate your achievement!  Your motivation may wax and wane a bit (have you noticed this?).  That’s ok…that’s just what it does.  If you have a day where you feel completely unmotivated, then make your daily action be to read about your goal.  Google it.  Find success stories.  Get your mojo back!  Tomorrow is a new day, and likely, you will feel more like playing.

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