Updating Our Workout
Welcome to Music Strong, the home of professional flutist and NASM certified personal trainer and Corrective Exercise Specialist Angela McCuiston.
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What is Music Strong and what do we do?
Music Strong is Personal Training for Musicians. Musicians have the highest work-injury rate of any profession: 90-95%!! This is ridiculous, and we are here to change that! So many musicians spend hours and hours every day locked into positions with their instruments (including their voices!), so wrapped up in their head space they forget to feel the rest of their bodies and noticed the habits beginning to take place. These habits become compensations and compensations can affect you to the point of injury. Injury, a musician's worst fear.
We are here to erradicate pain, compensation and injury!
As a professional flutist, I understand the unique demands of playing an instrument - having been injured several times myself as a direct result of "over practicing" and not understanding how the body worked, I wanted to take my knowledge a step further and help other musicians overcome this problem.
Music Strong is a business unlike ANY other! I am not just like your run-of-the-mill trainer who yells in your face and makes your workout up on the spot when you get there. NO WAY! Every client of mine gets a personalized assessment to determine your individual muscle compensations and a consultation to determine your lifestyle, schedule and other factors that go into designing your workout. I'll design a workout geared towards balancing your body, increasing your own sense of body awareness and making you stronger overall so you not only leave with a better functioning body, you have the tools to empower you to walk into any gym with purpose and knowledge.
I address problems like: tendonitis, TMJ, shoulder strains, sleepigng glutes, low back pain, neck pain, plantar fasciitis, bursitis and we focus on muscles directly related to not only musicians, but the average desk worker who spends so much time at the computer:
Most Recent Blog Posts
Get Off the Hamster Wheel! Tip #9 to Change your Body and Your Life
How successful were you at writing things down last week? Did you do it every day? Most days?
What were your results, reactions? Were you surprised by how much, how little or the reality of what you were eating?
If you remember, the goal of last week was not to JUDGE what you ate, simply to make note of it. Now that you have a record of the TRUTH you have a choice to stop living in denial about how much and what you are putting in your body and actually change it…..or to keep running around on the hamster wheel of denial, blame and quick fixes.
Brutal? Yes. But sometimes the truth is brutal. That’s why you were on a hamster wheel in the first place and not getting results before isn’t it? The answer is yes if you are actually truthful with yourself.
If you’ve noticed, I haven’t mentioned exercise at all, and isn’t that one of the first things people jump into when they say “I’m going to get in shape!” Yup, and one of the first things to go because most people will start out with the mentality that “more is better” and do too much. Then, they don’t see results quickly enough (or instantaneously) get discouraged because they thing the amount of “work” they are putting in should yield instant results….and quit.
By now, you know what I’m going to suggest is neither instantaneous nor hardcore nor extreme. Just like everything else, it’s simple: easy to do, easy NOT to do. The choice is up to you:
Tip # 9: Do some sort of exercise everyday….or most days.
Getting in shape does not mean:
- running 5 miles every day
- joining a Crossfit gym
- doing P90X or Insanity for 30 days straight
- Doing every weight machine in the gym 100 times, every day.
There is no extreme here. There is nothing wrong with the above workouts, if you LIKE doing those, great! But the catch is this:
Do not start the above workouts JUST to lose weight. YOU WILL FAIL.
What I did say is do SOME SORT of exercise every day, or at least most days. What does that mean? It means:
- Do something you enjoy
- make it consistent
- get your heart rate up
That’s it.
The point here is consistency, and it doesn’t matter what you do. Let’s address these three aspects in short detail:
1. Do Something You Enjoy
If you hate lifting weights, don’t. If you hate running, don’t. If you hate yoga, don’t!
The point is not do a workout because some trainer told you to, or some person on the TV, internet, doctor’s waiting room, buddy of your best friend’s gym owner told you to. DO WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY!
Some examples of good fitness that make people happy, that they enjoy:
- Going for a 20 minute walk around the neighborhood or through a park, or a mall
- Ultimate frisbee
- cleaning the house (I don’t understand this one, but some people enjoy it, so whatever
) - yoga
- hill sprints
- tabatas
- bodyweight circuits
- lifting weights
- bike riding
- swimming
- running
Any of these are great. If you enjoy it that’s the key, you will not stick with an exercise routine you hate, so do something you enjoy!
2. Make it consistent
I cannot stress this enough. It is not the exercise that you do, it’s that you do it regularly that counts. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Not really, it’s STEADY THAT WINS THE RACE.
I’ve heard this a lot, but it really hit home when I read the book The Slight Edge.
This book has really opened my eyes to how to achieve what I really want in life. It comes down to consistency, doing the little, seeminly tiny insignificant things every day that are easy to do but are also easy NOT to do. Jim Collins talks about it in his book “Good to Great” about pushing the giant flywheel. It weighs so much there is no way possible for you to give it one giant push and it turn, no, it’s steady effort that builds momentum.
I’ll say that again.
It’s steady effort that builds momentum.
An overnight success does not happen overnight. It happened over the course of the years of obscurity, doing the tiny right actions every day.
This is the success curve. Take a close look at it and see if you can understand why consistency is key. Then make a plan for what TINY action you can do every day to help you reach your goal. Want to run a marathon but never done it before? It starts with taking a few steps every day, going for a walk every day, building your time, it doesn’t start with a 5 mile run.
3. Get your heart rate up
The key to exercise is elevating your heart rate. Do you see the people on the treadmill sauntering along? It’s not different than the pace they take to walk to their car, walk around Wal-Mart or take up the entire aisle in a mall. (I secretly want to smack these people in the back of the head. I have always moved with a sense of purpose and being in the Army just amplified that urge. Sorry )
Any way, the point of exercise is to elevate your heart rate, this accomplishes all kinds of things including better respiratory response, increase oxygen flow to lungs, brain, blood, etc. better joint mobility, etc. If you do not elevate your heart rate, you aren’t exercising. Don’t kid yourself.
Now, that doesn’t mean you have to go all extreme and elevate it through the roof, I just said elevate. Anything above what it is when you’re sitting there doing nothing (called resting heart rate) is elevated. Now eventually you will want to put more effort out there, because your body adapts. It adapts to stress, to exercise and to everthing else so what is challenging for you now will not be challenging later IF YOU ARE CONSISTENT. That’s why you ladies lifting only 5 lb. weights in the gym bother me. It worked for you then….and then your body adapted and it’s no longer a challenge. You are wasting time at that point.
Sorry to get on a soap box, but as a personal trainer this is the area that frustrates me the most. If you like extreme, great, do that but please work up to it, or face injury. If you don’t like extreme, great, do SOMETHING.
This week’s goal:
So, the challenge this week is that while you are building on the blocks of consistency you’ve achieved in your eating habits, you will add one very small addition of consistent exercise. Whatever it is, commit to doing it every day or almost every day. That”s the caveat. If you are lifitng weights or doing aything strenuous, don’t do it 7 days a week, your body will not recover. If you are just going for a walk, that’s fine for every day.
- Do some sort of exercise you enjoy every day
- if your exercise is strenuous (like crossfit, weight lifting, etc.) do something on your “off days” that at least keeps you moving.
We are not trying to set records here, all you are doing is building cosistency in your exercise habits and getting used to moving every day. Progression comes later.
If you haven’t read the other tips in the series, they are meant to be read in order. Start here:
The 9 Things you need to do to change your habits and get off the hamster wheel!
Get Off the Hamster Wheel! Guide To Change Your Habits Tip #8
If you haven’t read last week’s post, you can do so here: Get Off the Hamster Wheel Tip #7
We are down to the last few tips, and you know, I really struggled with this week’s and next week’s tips, trying to figure out which should happen first. It came down to this:
Which small action do I have the hardest time doing? And that’s how I picked Tip #8 which is:
Tip #8 WRITE IT DOWN
I know you’ve probably heard this hundreds of times before, and that’s great, you’ve probably heard all the other 7 tips as well. The point of change comes not by KNOWING what you need to do but by DOING it.
The task here is to start a food journal. Write down every bit of food that goes into your mouth. What I find is most helpful is if I write down my mood/hunger level before and after I eat as well, which can help me tune into my hunger cues, if I’m really eating for hunger or to satisfy another need, as we talked about last week.
The simple task of taking the time to write down what you eat and take the few seconds to actually see it all on paper can bring huge amounts of awareness to your eating activity. Heck, this action alone has stopped me more than once from eating anything else, just because I didn’t want to have to write it down, to see it on paper, because when you write something down it becomes real. Have you ever noticed that? There are certain things in life you don’t want to say out loud or write down because then you are faced with the reality of them, sometimes we think that if the thoughts stay inside our heads, they never happened.
Commit to having fanatical levels of integrity on this one.
Why? Because when you start being honest with yourself in this one area, you can’t help but have it spill over into other areas of your life as well. Do not cheat yourself, do not lie to yourself. Make this commitment to yourself that for at least the next two weeks you will start writing down everything you eat and your mood and hunger level before and after. You do NOT need to do this the rest of your life, I don’t want this to become an obsessive habit (and boy have I been there with this one, I’d even get anxious that I’d forget to write it down because I didn’t have my notebook with me! ) what you are doing is bringing awareness to your actions. If you’ve stalled for awhile on your progress, go back to doing this and see what you find out.
I was perusing TJ Maxx awhile back and found a great journal. I really like the structure of having things laid out for me and this week, I commit to using it, consistently. That’s the key, being consistent in your actions. So, I’ll take it with me, leave it in the kitchen, etc. (The picture above is of said journal)
If you’d rather not hunt every TJ Maxx around, you can just get it here on Amazon as well: Buy the Ultimate Diet Log Here.
There are several other methods, I know a lot of people like FitDay, My Fitness Pal and Spark People, and I’m cool with those too, heck, whatever floats your boat! I don’t want you to get caught up in the trap of counting calories, though, and these sites do that. That’s why I”m a fan of simply putting it on paper, worry about the numbers later!
So now, with all those great habits you’ve put into place: drinking more water, eating undisturbed, having vegetables at every meal and focusing your diet on whole foods, Eating exactly what you want, stopping eating when your satisfied, eating when you’re hungry – not to meet an emotional need…. now you can put all of those into reality, by putting them all down on paper. This simple activity solidifies your activities into reality and makes them become habit.
If you haven’t read the other tips in the series, they are meant to be read in order. Start here:
The 9 Things you need to do to change your habits and get off the hamster wheel!
- Tip #1 Stop Being in a Hurry and Drink Water
- Tip #2 Turn the TV off, put the book down
- Tip #3 and 4 It’s not rocket science, you KNOW what to eat
- Tip #5 Eat whatever you want, no really
- Tip #6 Are you satisfied??
- Tip #7 Are you hungry, bored, tired or lonely?
