friend | Fitness is Sweet

Hello! I am currently sitting in bed in my PJs in my hotel room. I am 2 days into Idea World Fitness! It has been SUCH an awesome experience so far! Definitely tiring though! I think I’m finally getting the energy back that I could have really used this morning! I want to recap the first couple of days of the conference while it’s still fresh in my mind!

Thursday

My first session of the day was a Schwinn cycling class! They broke our their new computer consoles for the first time ever, and they were very intuitive! Although I’m more familiar with Spinning bikes, the Schwinn bikes are nice as well. The class was tough. We got to see our stats on the front screen for certain difficult portions of class, and when you’re in a class with 50 other spin instructors, you push pretty hard!

With jello legs, I walked straight over to my next session, RealRyder indoor cycling.

RealRyder bikes move side to side and mimic the feel of a real bike on the road. I hadn’t tried these before, and when I heard about them I was expecting them to be turning at a 45 degree angle sideways, which is not the case!

It’s more subtle, and it’s mostly the front of the bike/handlebars that move. This bike is considered a big advancement in indoor cycling because it allows cyclists to more accurately practice their sport. Additionally, it adds in an added core effort. Possibly one of its biggest selling points though is that it is much easier on the body than a regular spin bike, which can be beneficial to people rehabbing from back or knee injuries. This is because on a more traditional stationary bike, the frame of the bike and the rider’s joints absorb sideways movement, and these bikes allow movement so they aren’t so jarring.

This was a tough ride. When I stood on the bike, it immediately felt like standing on a road bike. I’m only now able to stand on my bike outside through lots of practice/added strength. Side story-when I came to college I hadn’t ridden a bike in years and riding for me was not pretty. At all. After taking this class, I think one of the reasons I had so much trouble outdoors was because I was so used to normal spin bikes, which don’t allow for movement at all!

Anyways, when I stood on this bike, it was not too pretty either. There is definitely a learning curve, and you can’t cheat. You have to keep your weight back towards the saddle and absorb everything with the quads. Otherwise, the handlebars will move side to side like crazy. I actually got an IDEA Inspiration medal for being the most improved in the class! This was a pretty small class, probably because it was the first morning, so the intimate setting made the experience even better because we could all ask questions. Additionally, I met a friend in the class who I was able to tag along to Opening Ceremonies with, immediately after (and I had no clue how to get there so this was lucky!).

Opening ceremonies were pretty cool. They gave out some fitness/trainer awards, and brought in a couple of motivational speakers, one of them being a wrestler who was born without a leg, and worked incredibly hard to win D1 NCAAs.

After that, we both walked over to the Expo. It was pretty intimidating. I was also starving, and the free samples were a welcome lunch. Kellogg’s had breakfast sandwiches which were heaven. I think I also had an absurd amount of granola bars yesterday, but what are you gonna do? It was nice having someone to navigate the Expo with who although it was also her first time, was much more savvy than I am.

My first after lunch session was Small Group Sports Conditioning, which was a lot of fun. We learned about training clients in a small group setting, and incorporating agility, power, and strength drills into the workouts. I really enjoyed this session because I’ve been on the other side of Small Group Sports Conditioning (as a participant) quite a bit in my softball-playing past. We did all kinds of cone and ladder drills, and it was a fun team setting. I hope to incorporate more of these things to my future workouts-even though I’m not an “athlete” anymore, I think agility is key to being fit for life and also for injury prevention. A couple of tidbits: For agility training, the work to rest ratio should be about 1:1. For Speedwork, the work to rest ratio should be about 1:3-4. Also interesting-for adult athletes with novice experience, the training volume per session should only be about 80-100 footsteps before you run into the potential for injury.

My final session was Women, Hormones, and Training. Honestly, I was pretty disappointed with this one.

I feel like it was mostly stating things that are fairly common knowledge, although maybe it’s because I have a pretty strong science background. The takeaway is that to change the shape of your body, you really need to strength train. You can use cardio to lose weight, but it won’t change your shape very much.

I walked out of the lecture starving and headed to the Expo to try a few samples I hadn’t hit up earlier, including Arctic Zero. I honestly don’t know what to think of it. It’s definitely not ice cream, and seemed pretty watery to me, but I might consider it as a lighter alternative on a hot day.

I then hightailed it back to my hotel to shove food in my mouth and clean up after a long day of workouts. Thursday night was the Idea party.

My new friend and I met up for drinks before heading over, and it was great to get to know new people! In addition, there was some pretty good food at the party! Healthy, of course. There was a really nice salad bar, a carving station, amazing cornbread, and pasta.

I had to #leavemymark. #GoStanford. There was supposed to be a place for the students in the college program to meet up at the party, but I never found it.

We ended up not spending too much time at the party and instead went down to the lobby of the hotel where the event was being held and met more new people. I ended up staying out far too late given I had an 8am session the next morning, but it was a great first day! More recaps to come 🙂

First and foremost, I want to apologize for this morning‘s post. After reading it, I realized that every sentence except for one ended in an explanation point. Which was probably kind of annoying to read.

Next order of business…who’s going to the Healthy Living Summit in September? I really, really want to go, and it’s before school starts so it’s plausible. Besides how awesome it would be to meet a ton of bloggers, I feel that as a new blogger, there’s so much I can learn!

I’ve been promising you guys a leg workout for a while, but here’s the thing. I want to make it look pretty. And I really don’t know how. Help? What do you guys use to make those pretty images with your workouts? (I’m looking at you Miranda!) So look out for that workout once I figure out all that.

As for my day, I went to abs class in the morning, and then blogged a bit before heading down to school to log a couple of hours of research. I swear, my car uses SO much gas. I’m NOT down for filling it up more than once a week-that’s just crazy.

I came home to a fabulous lunch of leftovers-Greek seasoned chicken, and tons of salad with a little Greek dressing and red pepper hummus. Perfect!

My afternoon was spent not doing my homework for my Health Psych class…which coincidentally is what I should be doing right now…In my defense, I did read the first chapter, which was about old beliefs about the 4 bodily excretions associated with illness (yum), and more interestingly, different cultural beliefs and attitudes to health and illness. One thing we’ve talked about in class is how important it is to think about the cultural aspect when trying to communicate about health to people.

This evening, I hit up the gym for an awesome spin class by one of my favorite teachers. I actually ran into one of my long lost best friends at the gym as well (she’s pretty busy so texting her is basically a black hole). We chatted some and made plans to figure out when to get together sometime (very concrete, right?). I had to get to the gym early to sign up for the class, and didn’t have any particular plans on what to do in the meantime. All the ergs were full, booo. I hate going to the gym in the evening-it’s so crowded and I can’t get on any of the equipment!

Dinner afterwards was pretty basic.

Salad with Farmer’s market heirloom tomatoes, a veggie scramble with sauteed mushrooms, spinach, and gouda, and squash topped with butter and cinnamon sugar (yumm). I don’t really know my squashes too well…can anyone tell me what type of squash this is? I got it at the Farmer’s market. My guess is either acorn or kabocha?

After eating a snack, I started talking to my mom about health and the brain (LOVE these conversations). It came up that it takes 3 weeks to break a habit. This has been proven in many different respects-my favorite in that if you give up sugar, you stop craving it after 3 weeks. So here’s my challenge-what do you want to change? Now’s the time. Whatever it is, what if it was no longer an issue in 3 weeks? How much happier could you be 3 weeks from now? Maybe you bite your nails. Maybe you procrastinate on dishes (guilty…). Maybe you weigh yourself every day and stress about it. We’re at the half way point of the year-get after it!

What am I doing? I want to break my habit of snacking. I would really like to work on Mindful Eating (my mom bought me a couple of books so I can read more about it). Breaking my snacking habit is a big step for me in this. Specifically, my habit of eating everything in sight after a nap, regardless of whether or not I’m hungry. My goal for eh next 21 days is to eat no snacks. Before anyone gets too crazy on me, I’m not necessarily trying to eat less. I may bulk up a little more on my meals if need be, but the biggest goal is to break the habit.

Need some help? Try this:

1. Distract yourself. Find another activity to replace whatever habit you are trying to break. At school, I tried to get in the habit of drinking a mug of water immediately upon walking in the door. You can retrain your brain!

You can be a psychologist! Classical conditioning (think Pavlov’s dog) is when people (or animals) associate a certain stimulus with a reward. For instance, Pavlov’s dogs associated a bell with food, so whenever the bell was rung, the dogs eventually began drooling. Retrain yourself! For me at school, the moment I walked into my dorm room, I wanted a snack. The environment was my stimulus, my bell. Out think yourself! Build a new habit and condition yourself to it, through repeated exposure. For my goal, maybe going in the kitchen will start making my thirsty if I drink a glass of water every time I walk in.

3. Avoidance-avoid any stimuli that might lead to the habit. If I normally snack in the afternoon, I could try going to the library (to finally to my homework) during the time I normally spend munching away.

4. Support and attention- tell people around you what your goal is. If you bite your nails and are trying to break that habit, you might not even realize what you’re doing until someone else points it out.

Good luck and Happy July!

What would you do to change your life in 21 days?

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