Buckling down in the present and gearing up for the future!

I've been looking at different options for where to get my Personal Fitness Training certification, and I'm thinking I'll be going with NASM.  I've been reading through their textbook and I really like their ideology.  I believe wholeheartedly in stressing the importance of preconditioning and stability training BEFORE engaging in strength, endurance and power training.  So SO important.

That being said, I have a lot to learn.  I know my bone names and that's pretty much it so the anatomy part will be a challenge, but again it's imperative that I know those things front to back, plus everything I can possibly absorb about nutrition (and information in that area is constantly being updated!). So, this is probably what my desk will look like for the next couple months...Computer, textbook, notebook and of course some topical treatment for aches from the OTHER kind of studying I'm doing, at the gym!

Overwhelmed

I think one of the toughest things for me to deal with as I learn more about this profession is that the average person doesn't want my help.  And even the people who ask for help often aren't accepting of what you tell them because its usually not quick or easy.  I know I can't just start going around telling everyone what they're consuming is slowly killing them and that their diet is probably the root of most or all of their current or future health issues.  Unsolicited information-giving like that will get you an unfavorable label really fast.

Which brings me to topic 2...the fact that most of this advice is totally unwanted by most of my coworkers.  After all, we get discounts on all these inflammation-inducing artery-hardening gut-scrambling products they sell here.  When I see someone I work with feeling like crap but buying a Diet Coke instead of the giant water they clearly need, I want to help them!  But I'm going to have to live my life now constantly reminding myself how difficult the food industry has made it for people to even be able to have the realizations they need to have about nutrition (although the soda for water swap should be fairly obvious no matter who you are...) and remembering that I can't force a healthy life on someone no matter how much I care about them or the ridiculous amounts of good I can see a healthy paleo-inspired diet would do them.

Maybe with age and experience you develop a better handle on how to get through to people who desperately need your input but won't take it?  I'm so exhausted by the thought of this battle already, but maybe I just don't have all the right armor yet.

Running and Screaming

Running Screaming

About  a year or so ago I decided to start putting some serious work into my body.   I was already pretty fit by the average person’s standards, a state I’d reached by a slooooow but mostly steady progression throughout the handful of years prior.  But after being a regular gym-goer since 21 without any remarkable change, I decided I didn’t want to go through the gym motions anymore.  I wanted to stand out!

I started attending my brother Steve’s Crossfit classes; sparingly, but enough to get some ideas.  He’s a great instructor and Crossfit is a great way to give myself a boost with some new ideas and get a good push from someone else when I’ve been failing to push myself.  But I mostly prefer to do my personal workouts alone, so when I’m not in need of help I’m usually alone. 

I started running…first a little, then a lot.  And always on the treadmill.  As I gained the endurance to take longer and longer distances, I began to escape into running with music bumping in my ears and for a while it was the greatest thing ever.  By July of last year I was running like crazy, although still a sad speed for the average person.  I have a vocal cord condition that has been present since birth called vocal cord paresis, and though my ability to take in adequate amounts of oxygen on my inhale has improved over the course of my life it’s been an uphill struggle learning to maintain a breathing pattern during cardio.  But I progressed in that area and once I had the ability to run for set times I started playing with speed.  I went faster and faster, not only burning calories but burning off all the negative thoughts I had going at the time.

 (Brief explanatory side note: In early June my boyfriend of 2.5 years and I decided mutually to end the charade of what was left of our relationship, and in July my brother and his girlfriend of 10 years tied their knot.  A beautiful day for them and for myself, but I can’t say it didn’t hit me in a weak spot…pretty shitty timing but better than having the ex in the wedding photos and THEN breaking up.  It can always be worse!)

Outside I was running. And running. And running. 

Inside I was screaming.  And screaming.  And screaming.

A couple of months ago I was down to a nine-minute mile, and had actually hit the 8:35 area a couple of times.  Then I started to get shin splints, mostly in the left leg but it affected both.  Once I finally faced the pain instead of continuing to run over it (did that for a good week and a half) I was out of the running game for 12 days.  I came back strong but started out slow, only to find my calves had stiffened immensely in the course of my shin splint healing—something had to take that weight while they were weak.  I continued to run, and run, and run, although still slower than before.  But eventually I started working in short sprints, and for a very brief period things seemed to be okay.  I was foam rolling my calves and stretching them daily, and it seemed to be helping. 

Then my knee started to hurt.  First it was just while running, and of course I just adjusted my stride a little hoping that would be enough, and was silly enough to let the adrenaline of a good workout fool me into thinking it wasn’t hurting me to keep running.  Soon my knee was actually hurting outside of the gym, and I decided I should stop (DUH!  We athletes can be so stubborn…and sometimes just stupid.  It should not have taken me this long to realize I needed to stop.  But I digress.)  and get some professional opinions on what was going on.  A friend who trains at my gym helped me out with stretching and brought to my attention the fact that pretty much EVERYthing in my legs was incredibly tight, particularly my Achilles’.  The backs of my knees would barely straighten, my hamstrings were weak and my ankle mobility was awful!  I was also squatting and crouching incorrectly, not while working out but in my day-to-day life.  As I do a lot of physical labor at work (I work for CVS but try to stay away from the registers in favor of merchandising) I felt SO stupid for never having thought much about my form there.  I’d adjusted the way I lift things but that was pretty much it, and my friend pointed out that the fact I was squatting and crouching so hurriedly all the time while working was probably the reason my knees were hurting.  Aside from the running, obviously, which I was also doing wrong!  Heel to toe was not the name of my game, and I was leaning back which led to my feet striking the floor in front of my body as opposed to underneath it.  Wrong, wrong, wrong. 

Best and most valuable piece of advice I have to give so far as a would-be trainer: if you’re not sure about your form, DO NOT BE TOO PROUD TO ASK SOMEONE TO WATCH YOU.  If you want to correct yourself, have someone record you, but if you don’t know, just ask.  I wish I’d asked months ago for someone to comment on my form…one of the handful of things I could have done differently to prevent the irritation I’m dealing with now.

So now I’ve basically been resting my knees and stretching for the past week, and though it would help if I wasn’t on my feet for 8 hours five days out of the week, I’m feeling improvement and hearing less of those scary crackly noises when I bend.  But as a new runner who felt I was progressing so much, it’s been extremely frustrating pulling back and giving into the cold hard fact that if I want to continue running in the future, I have to start over now and recondition my whole lower body before I continue. 

As soon as I started resting and using low-impact moves to strengthen the muscles surrounding my knees, the pain started to recede within two days, although the tightness and a little pain are still creeping up by the end of a shift.  At least I'm on the right track again even if it is slow-moving, but I feel like I have a million things to remember.  Walk heel-to-toe. Stretch my calves in between throughout the day so that training myself to walk that way won’t cause them injury.  Never let my knees come out past my toes.  Okay so that's only three, but I have to say all this is definitely slowing down the rate at which I can work; luckily I’ve always worked fast and no one notices the difference.  Correcting bad form is not an easy task and it’s sure taking a lot of my patience, but on a positive note spending my shifts focusing on what I’m doing with my body is definitely making it easier to ignore how stupid and annoying customers can be and how incredibly tedious my job sometimes is.  All in all, I’m positive it will be worth the time I’m taking to relearn and correct what I’ve been doing wrong all this time. 

My biggest obstacle in conquering this problem: Stretching always sucks.  I’ve never enjoyed it and have always slacked on it in a pretty hardcore fashion, but now I’ve learned my lesson.  It may be painful and sometimes boring and time-consuming, and there may sometimes be screaming when I’m having a stiff day.  But maybe it’s better to learn to get that pain out in ways other than running, where I keep all my screaming inside. 

Knee pain: just another one of the reasons you can’t run from your problems.

Cut Out All Sugar...Then Have a Free Donut.

A friend was asking me recently what some easy things were that she could do to adjust her diet to lose weight...a question I'm becoming more and more accustomed to.  The question itself is a sensible one, and one I wish more people would ask--but it almost always comes with the repetition of some kind of poor advice the person has received in the past and whose validity they are now rightfully questioning.  But this one was a gem: she told me "I heard you should cut out all sugar."

Now, let me start by saying that any fitness tips that advise cutting out any food group entirely, forever, are probably not correct and may even be dangerous to follow.  If someone had said to this woman, "You should try to cut out sugar that comes from packaged foods and preservatives and obviously harmful and nutritionally useless things like candy, and limit your intake to sugars that come from whole foods like fruit," I'd have been able to say "Good advice." 

What I'm trying to get at here is not an attack on sugar, but an attack on poor terminology and clarification.  Sugar overload IS what's killing us and it IS a huge problem, but simply telling people "cut out sugar" is not going to help a damn thing unless they understand exactly why it can be so harmful and what they should really replace it with.  I understand that usually when most health professionals comment on lowering your sugar intake they are speaking in the sense of limiting foods and drinks that are obviously overloaded with sugar, and replacing those things with more naturally sweetened or unsweetened food items with higher protein and good fat (yes, I said good fat) content. 

But that understanding is the problem...not a lot of people share it, and for the average person with no nutritional knowledge being told "stop eating sugar" can easily translate into thinking switching from Mountain Dew to flavored sparkling water sickeningly sweetened with aspartame is a healthy switch when in reality it will probably give them cancer.  Sweet, huh? (Pun totally intended.) Incomplete advice is almost as bad as no advice at all if it's going to result in someone replacing their usual amount blatantly sugar-loaded food items with a similar amount of things that are full of sodium and artificial sweeteners instead (because carbs are the opposite of sugar, right?....says the clueless consumer.)

The ending of this rant (for now) brings me to a slightly unrelated but equally disturbing topic...National Donut Day.  I went in to Dunkin Donuts for my usual iced coffee last week (speaking of sugar, I'm learning to drink it with less and less!) and not only was I offered a free donut (which is fine, I guess even though no one needs that crap) but when I turned it down I WAS ARGUED WITH BY THE EMPLOYEES!  Not unpleasantly of course, more of a "but it's free!" type of thing, and I'm inclined to believe the chain actually told them to play it up like that and they were probably doing their jobs well in the eyes of DD at that moment.  One of them will probably get Employee of the Month.

I have to say, I really have a problem with this.  The concept itself of giving away free samples of your trademark item is fine; a donut once in a while isn't going to kill anybody and Dunkin's really does have the best donuts I've had so far in my 26 years.  But how does it hurt the store for someone NOT to want a free donut?  Also, I really believe food choices are up to the consumer to control and be aware of, but that's not to say that it's easy!  And for some people I understand it's just downright impossible to turn down their favorite foods when they're offered.  Not literally impossible of course, but I'm sure you all know what I mean.  Temptation can get the best of anyone, and what if someone who's making their best effort to fight the good fight even though they happen to LOVE donuts and is just running in for a coffee is accosted in this way?  I'm sure that happened thousands of times from all the chain locations combined on just that one day because they were pushing donuts on people, and plus, they were FREE! 

Sometimes it can make all the difference in a dieter's day to have someone just refrain from offering them something they know they shouldn't have; self control is so much easier said than done.  That's what makes it important and helpful to let your friends and family and maybe even coworkers know when you're trying to change your habits, and I shudder to think how many people's good intentions for the day were shattered by what for some is as good as a forced failure.  The offering is one thing; the realizing someone has reasons for saying no and continuing to push them is entirely different and completely offensive. 

For shame, Dunkin Donuts.  You want to sell artery-hardening food all day?  By all means, do so--I won't say I don't indulge on occasion.  But don't try to sell (or give) me what I've already said I don't want.  Next time just shut the hell up and save that donut for the next willing victim.

A Healthy Introduction to my Cause :)

I’ve started more than half a dozen blogs in the last few years (and that doesn’t even include the Livejournal please-oh-please-give-me-attention days) but none of them have really stuck as something I could feel my heart going into.  I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure out that that was the problem, but I suppose many things in life seem simpler than they really were in hindsight.  It’s been a very confusing few years for me, and though it’s scary to state my mission and turn my life into a commitment, I’m ready to do that.  I’m ready to focus on a career that I know is what I want, ready to blog about what matters to me—ready to write from my heart and share it with others.  I’m ready to talk about fitness, and why it’s become so important to me, and what I’m going to do about it.

My primary goal is to fight the overconsumption of OTC and prescription medications by people who really just need to treat their bodies better.  Before we start giving teenagers things like citalopram and amphetamines, how about asking them things like what they’re eating, how much soda they consume, how much sleep they’re getting, how much they exercise?  How about sitting gas and heartburn and gastritis victims down and really helping them understand how many harmful things they could be doing to their digestive systems on a day to day basis, before giving them gas pills or prescription antacids?  Why balance the existing problems with new ones instead of treating the foundation of the problems?  Nobody should be living on things like Prilosec for years at a time to prevent them from suffering…ever.   And yet it happens ALL. THE. TIME.

This brings me to one of the driving forces behind my mission.  What I just described is how one of my best friends died—his name was Ian Isberg, and he succumbed to esophageal adenocarcinoma on September 30, 2010 after a one-year battle.  For almost a decade previous to that he’d suffered from heartburn and had been treated with little other than antacids of various strength and dosage.  When someone finally started paying attention (at my insistence he made an appointment after having seen blood in his usual stomach acid vomit) he was at Stage 4 Esophageal Cancer, and a year later one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known was dead. 

I won’t say he lived the healthiest life, but nobody told him he had to, or what could happen if he didn’t.   None of the doctors he saw seemed to even consider that a tumor already developing at the junction of his stomach and esophagus could even be a possibility.  22 was unusually young to receive such a diagnosis for sure, but at least one of those doctors should have told him the risk for developing this type of cancer begins as soon as the damage to the esophagus begins.  The drugs that quelled the acid just enough for him to be comfortable from day to day ended up being what killed him.

I’m not trying to challenge the big drug manufacturers who make these “remedies” for our bodies’ valid complaints; I’ll let Pepto Bismol and Miralax go on filling the shelves.  Nor am I trying to attack doctors; they often have ridiculous overflows of patients and not enough information about them or time to get to know them.  (And even when the doctor is at fault, malpractice is a real bitch to prove in most cases.)  If I tried to go against either of those institutions case by case I’d be acting just like those remedies all around you, the ones that aim to calm your stomach because you just had to have that pizza and beer last night, or supply your feeble body with vitamins because you never learned how to eat your vegetables.  (I’d also probably have to be a lawyer.) No, I won’t try to fix what happens after the problem has taken its toll.  I’m going for the problem itself: The way the average person treats their body, and the astounding ignorance in this country about what it actually means to be healthy.   It's a seemingly endless cycle of people who don't want to put in the effort, and people and companies whose jobs it is to convince us that we don't have to because using their product is easier. 

I’m not a conspiracy theorist; I don’t sit around dissecting the relationships of the drug companies to the doctors and the stores that push these aisles and aisles of unnecessary medications, screaming about how cures are being withheld for whatever reason (although there is something to some of those theories.)  And ***I’m absolutely not trying to tell you with any sort of medical authority that any medication you may be taking currently is wrong.***  All I want is to help people wake up to the things their bodies are really asking…no, begging for, before they start popping pills and sipping Kaopectate.  I want to teach people to listen to their bodies before doing themselves harm, instead of only when it’s too late.  And I want to spread the message and legacy of a wonderfully unique and brilliant young man who was taken way too soon by a disease that I believe could have been prevented.

I hope you’ll follow me on my journey to become a certified personal trainer and begin helping people learn how to live fuller, healthier lives. 

Be well.

Lauren