If you don’t want your hair pulled, eyes’ poked or favorite socks thrown out the window then don’t pull anyone else’s hair, poke anyone else’s eyes or pull any monkey business with someone else’s socks. This is the Golden Rule and it is a very effective tool for keeping things civilized in most communal venues.

But did you know that this magical rule also works in reverse? Instead of “do onto others as you would have done onto you” try, “do on to yourself as you would do on to others”. This is especially important for women and anyone with over powering caretaking instincts, with a tendency to treat others way better than they treat themselves.  Would you tell a friend to work long hours, skip exercise and eat pre-packaged cheese slices for dinner? Would you advise Uncle Jimbo to do a workout that he hates, is bored by or that just isn’t effective?  How about giving the thumbs up and high sign to skipping flexibility training or doing movements without proper technique or purpose? Yet you might be doing some of these no-no’s yourself without thinking twice about it.

Take a quick inventory of your health and fitness life and jot down anything that you wouldn’t recommend to a friend, family member or well-behaved stranger.  Another good way to approach this is to imagine that a friend (with remarkably similar strengths and limitations) came to you asking for health and fitness advice. How would you advise them? Most likely you would be encouraging, enthusiastic and eager to help them find creative solutions to any potential problems.

It’s seems a law of human nature that we give better, more thoughtful advice to others than we give ourselves.  So how about treating yourself as well as you would a friend for once? If your friend was nervous and lacking direction in the gym you would tell them to hire a trainer for a few sessions. Of course they and their priceless health are worth the investment. And if someone told you they not excited about exercising anymore you would suggest that they try a new class or sport, pick up some fitness magazines for fresh ideas or find a buddy to workout with.

Try approaching your struggles as if they belonged to a good looking stranger instead of little ol’ you and discover just the kick in your workout shorts that you need.

Just don’t accept candy from yourself.

Ah travel, a chance to get out of your rut and into your groove. Oh, to gander at startling horizons, take wrong turns and find surprising places and bombard your senses with the unexpected, delightful and unusual. Unfortunately, unless you’re on a yoga retreat, things are not so expansive for the major muscle groups of your lower body. Travel often involves a lot of sitting on planes, trains, Venetian gondoliers, elephant’s backs and cars.

Sitting is the world’s most popular form of hip tightening. Walking, whether up mountain trails, along the River Seine or between rides at Disneyland tends to tighten up the hips, hamstrings and calves. Though walking is still great exercise (do as much as possible to counter-balance the chocolate croissants and other traveling delights) in isolation it can cause a body to be tighty, tight, tight.

Having tight hips is the leg equivalent of fingers that are mostly stuck together and can’t move freely forward and back or side to side. Try walking with six-inch steps and you get the idea. Tight hips not only limit your range of motion, they can lead to lower back pain and injury. Tight hamstrings and calves also bring about back trouble and the feeling that you are about 30 years older than you actually are. Additionally, tight calves and inflexible ankles can cause “shuffle walk”, sprained ankles, loss of balance and an increased risk of falls.

Whether you are leading a pack llama up a steep slope, rafting down the Colorado or waiting in line at the Met losing your balance and falling over is not what you want to be writing about on your postcards.

The moral of the story is that it’s important to keep up with a basic stretching routine while you globe trot. Try spending 15 to 20 minutes in the morning or evening loosening up and reconnecting with your body. It’s a great opportunity for a little break from the maddening crowds and will keep you healthy and seeking out new horizons for many years to come.

As if it weren’t already a huge drag to be overweight in our thinness obsessed, french fry saturated culture, researches recently discovered that being obese can lead to an incredibly shrinking brain.

The study completed by UCLA professor of Neurology Paul Thompson investigated the brains of 94 people in the 70’s. The brains of the obese individuals (BMI of 30+) had eight percent less tissue than their normal weighted counter parts and their brains appeared to have aged prematurely by 16 years. People classified as overweight (BMI of 25-30) fared somewhat better with brain loss of four percent and eight years of premature aging. Brain loss was seen in key areas of the think box such as the frontal and temporal lobes used for critical planning and memory and the hippocampus, which is involved in long term memory. Researches hypothesis that being over-weight not only puts people at risk for ailments such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, but also Alzheimers and other degenerative brain diseases.

If you are currently overweight or obese and are wondering what to do with all that extra space in your head, the good news is that its possible to fill it back up with grey and white matter. Five years after the initial scans some of the study participants were able to reverse their brain loss by as much as four percent (and find their keys to that they could finally go home). It is so good to know that like bone and muscles, the brain is capable of regenerating itself. Go brain go!

The study is further evidence that ignoring the needs of the body while cultivating other lovely traits such as intelligence, compassion or the ability to play the flugelhorn is a dangerous path, because eventually you won’t even be able to find your flugelhorn. The brain body connection cannot be ignored. So go for a walk, take a yoga class or take all your big books off the shelf, put them in the kitchen and then put them back on the shelf again. Your brain will thank you.

Read more about the study at the online magazine Human Brain Mapping.

The modern workout is often more tiring for our minds and souls, than for our bodies. We slog through the reps and sets, the sets and reps, the machines you pulley-pulley and the ones you pushy-pushy; each one different, but somehow also the same. After a while a workout can become the equivalent of filing or doing your taxes, something you treat like a chore to get on to the better parts of your day.

If the above is your current predicament, you love a challenge and enjoy sports movies with inspiring training montages set to power ballads then the Mountain Challenge was made for you.

Though the Challenge only includes three movements, it will dare you physically and mentally. It’s a workout and a goal all rolled into one. While in its clutches, if don’t wonder at least once if you will be able to finish, you’re probably not doing it right (or to the safe edge of your abilities).

You will complete a total of 10 sets, starting with 10 pull-ups and working your way down to the last set which will be only 1. With each set you will do one less pull-up, but the same amount of push-ups and hold the stretch each side for 30 seconds.

The bottom of the mountain looks like this:
10 Pull-ups (with assistance if needed, lat pull-downs can also be substituted)
10-15 push-ups (full or modified)
60 seconds of the lower body stretch that you know you need the most (probably hip or hamstring lengthening. This is your time to rest, so take it. By the end you’ll have given your most needy body parts the gift of an amazing 10 minute deep stretch).

This is an intermediate to advanced workout for those with no upper body injuries who have been training for at least three consecutive months. Start with some light cardio and dynamic upper body movements to get ready for action. Do it with a friend and good music and you’ll be more pumped than a bounce house at a birthday party.

Thanks to UCSF wonder-trainer Sarah Delaney, who contributed most of this workout. You can read more of her stuff at Sarah’s Health and Wellness Updates

The mountain awaits…

Since becoming a trainer I’ve come to hate the word “just.”  I hear it used constantly by clients describing their workouts as in, “I just did 30 minutes of cardio,” or “I just did a yoga class on Tuesday and a few weights on Wednesday.”  People use the word to let me, and themselves, know that no matter what was accomplished,  they feel they should have done more and are appropriately shameful.

Though I’m sure men occasionally use terms of self-degradation, I find that it is mostly a vice of women.  And I don’t think it’s the fitness equivalent of “does this make my butt look big?” Women who use this term aren’t usually looking to be told that their workouts were worthwhile and that they should be proud of themselves.  I know this, because I try to tell them and they don’t want to hear me.

So if you suspect that you may be doing a fitness downer on yourself, it’s time to take a step back and start to listen to how you talk about your own habits.  Do you degrade your workouts, downplay your accomplishments and focus all your attention on your shortcomings? Do you beat yourself up about missing a workout or two, and forget about all the workouts that you did show up for? How do you describe your workouts to yourself (most importantly) and others (important as well)?  Do you use words like the dreaded “just”, “only”, or “weak” or do you use actual descriptors such as 20 minutes or 3 miles?

Since it can be difficult to hear our own well ingrained verbal habits, it is a good idea to enlist a friend or trainer to help you catch yourself in the act. Ask them to let you know when you try to make mole hills out of whatever size mountains that you climb. You probably don’t even realize all the wretched things you are saying about yourself, but those words have the power to slowly crush your enthusiasm for getting and staying in shape. Because if no workout is ever enough, why workout at all? And if you’re going to feel bad about yourself no matter what you do, why not sit on a block of cheese instead of a bike?

Now go get sweaty and talk nice about it (and your butt looks great in those jeans).

Though the 1980’s comedy classic Ruthless People is not often thought of as fitness movie, it can be argued that the physical transformation of Barbara Stone, played with diabolical hilarity by Bette Milder, is the catalyst for her moral transformation from bitchy, over-privileged snot to cool, down to earth accomplice in a modern day Robinhood scam against her evil husband (Danny Devito).

For those of you who haven’t enjoyed the ab workout that is Ruthless People, the basic plot starts with Sam Stone marrying Barbara for her father’s money and eventually getting frustrated when the old man refuses to die. He decides to kill the wife he never wanted anyway, so that he can score her fortune and marry his mistress. Before Sam gets the chance to chase his darling bride around the house with a rag of chloroform, she is kidnapped by a cute and bumbling couple, who Sam has screwed out of a small fortune.

Barbara is locked in their basement for most of the film. To keep busy she inflicts mental terror on her captors and begins following along with the exercise programs showing on the television set her humane kidnappers have provided. Because her husband Sam doesn’t want her back alive she’s is chained to that bed for quite a while and starts getting pretty serious about her routines, culminating with an inspiring montage showing her doing pull-ups on her bed frame and using her chain as a jump rope.

For the first time in Barbara’s indulgent, corpulent life she is losing weight, getting fit and feeling great; despite the fact that she is chained to a bed in the basement of a rundown house. I think there are a lot of useful lessons here.

1. We should all be really glad that it’s not considered cool to workout in G-string leotards anymore.

2. In the film Barbara Stone has tried every faddish way to lose weight including enduring injections of the urine of pregnant women. Fads and “get fit quick schemes” almost never work.

3. Breaking out of your routine is one way to make rapid progress. In this case Barbara went from being an uber-rich heiress who could have anything she wanted to a captive. Your change doesn’t need to be quite so dramatic, but a shakeup can be helpful.

4. Sometimes it’s good not to have options.  In the film Barbara is chained to a bed and doesn’t have anything better to do then workout. What kind of “chain” can help you get fit? Is it canceling cable so that you have to walk to get a movie? Putting away your credit card so that you’re not tempted to eat out? Telling your spouse not to let you in the house unless you have gone to the gym for the day?

5. Give your goals the time they deserve. In the film Barbara has all day and night to workout and fitness is her main focus.  If losing weight or getting fit is the top priority in your life then plan your time accordingly (using chains when necessary).

6. Simplify. For Barbara losing her freedom is the best thing that has ever happened to her. Turns out when she doesn’t have very many options, she is able to make better choices.  What tempting options can you eliminate from your life so that a healthy diet and exercise become the obvious choices?

7. You don’t need fancy equipment to get fit, just determination and imagination. I don’t recommend jump roping a chain, but you certainly don’t need a fancy gym membership or thousand dollar piece of equipment.

Now go get Ruthless!