Get Back In The Exercise Game!

These are the tips no one tells you. Why? Because they're free! I'm not selling you anything. I want to help you get your body moving so that you can achieve your health & wellness goals. 

Find the right exercise: 

What is the “right” exercise? The one you do! Yup, it's that simple. I don’t care whether you are into pole dancing or curling on ice. Whatever you do that elevates your heart rate and gets you sweaty for more than 10 minutes a day is perfect & effective.

If you are starting a new exercise:

Allow yourself to do your exercise half-arsed for the first two weeks. This is because you must first learn the movement you are doing for exercise. If you don’t take the time to learn the correct movement, you put yourself at risk of injury. 

Warning: You’re gonna be sore. 

Any time you work a muscle more than usual, it will be sore. Depending on the intensity of your workout, you may start to feel it 12 -72 hours after exercising. The best medicine? Hydrate and do more exercise. It doesn’t have to be the same intensity, but it does have to get your heart pumping. This is because you want to increase the circulation to those muscle tissues so that the muscles' stagnant fluid (causing the pain) can be flushed out. 

Get Fancy: 

You deserve a clean towel on top of your yoga mat. Put on your “nice” gym outfit. Brush your teeth. I don’t care if you’re by yourself. Imagine you are being filmed for whatever exercise you are doing. This will cause you to engage your core, fix your posture, and add a little spring to your step. 

Auto Pilot:

One of my favorite exercise tips: Click on auto-pilot. No one is fired up to exercise every day. If you think about it enough, you will think yourself out of it. Put on your gear and do it. Here’s what I know: rarely have I regretted exercising.

Get High:

Ten minutes of moderate exercise is all you need for the feel-good hormones to kick in. 

Take A Break:

So often, women see exercise as selfish. Exercise is not “me time” any more than brushing your teeth is. As I’ve said before, exercise is a chore. It is hard work. Just because you have exercised does not mean you have used up your self-care time for the day.  Women's health requires a balance between rest and activity. Both are equally important. 

These are my favorite women's health exercise tips for establishing a lifetime of fitness.

1. Music is Key! Get yourself a good playlist. Join Apple Music, Spotify, or buy a Walkman on eBay so you can play your fave old-school mix tape. As long as it makes you want to shake your booty, queue it up! No Guilty Pleasure shame here – Color Me Baddd anyone? 
2. Gear Up! It doesn’t matter that you are exercising alone in a closet these days. Wear something you feel attractive in. Never do that self-punishing thing where you wear something body-shaming to motivate you to lose weight. That’s just wrong and disrespectful to your body. Your outfit doesn’t have to be expensive – the only requirement is that is makes you feel good! 
3. Take a Vacation From Mirrors. When starting a new exercise routine, we all have a tendency to want to look in the mirror for validation and to assess progress.  It takes some time to achieve noticeable results from any new routine. Take a 2-week vacation from mirrors when you first start.  You don’t need a mirror to tell you how awesome you are. 
4. Go on Autopilot. If you think about whether or not you want to exercise, guess what, there’s tons of other stuff you’d probably rather do. It’s not a choice. Imagine clicking on that autopilot switch: put on your gear, tie your shoes, and start.  You’ll be glad you did!
5. 10 Minutes ‘Till the High! Ten minutes and your mood-boosting neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine, will start to increase.[1] This is the best street-legal drug on the market! 
6. Put Your Blinders On:  Other people’s bodies are none of your business. YOUR body is all that matters. Sure, if you want to get inspiration from someone whose body you admire that’s fine. Keep in mind that if you have blue eyes, you will never have brown eyes naturally.  This seems obvious, but so often we forget this fact when we look at our bodies. Your body is perfect and unique. As is.
7. Your Favorite Thing. What is your favorite thing about your body? If you don’t have one. Find one. Now. Not about your “ideal” body. About your body as it is right now. This is the basis of self-respect. Your body deserves to be loved now as it is. Exercise is not a punishment. It is a gesture of respect to your body. This subtle mindset shift will allow you to enjoy exercise more.
8. Half-*ss It. Yup, do not go all out for the first 2 weeks of starting an exercise routine. Allow yourself to do 50%. Slow and steady wins the race. If you want to be successful, you must start off gradually. Otherwise, you will injure yourself and/or burn-out. Overdoing it is a cunning form of self-sabotage.  
9. Only Stretch Warm Muscles.  Never stretch cold muscles. Respect your muscles with at least 5 minutes of aerobic activity so that the muscle fibers can warm up and respond to stretch. If you don’t, you run the risk of wasting your time or worse, tearing a muscle.  
10. Thank Your Body. At the end of your exercise session, thank your body. Express gratitude for the ability to move and breathe and think and do. Your body is incredible! It is working hard for you all day every day. The ability to exercise is a gift. Treat it as such.

REFERENCE:

[1]Basso JC, Suzuki WA. The Effects of Acute Exercise on Mood, Cognition, Neurophysiology, and Neurochemical Pathways: A Review. Brain Plast. 2017;2(2):127-152. Published 2017 Mar 28. doi:10.3233/BPL-160040

There are lots of ways to achieve wellness but here is one of my most important exercise tips: how to engage one’s core. The reason: knowing this is crucial to women's health and can prevent a lot of aches and pains!

First, let’s define the core.  It is made up of your abdominal muscles and the muscles of your spine. Some describe it like a corset of muscle that surrounds your middle. 

Remember back to physics class: the farther a load is from the axis of rotation, the greater the force.  Real life example:  a weight held close to the body feels lighter than a weight held farther away from the body. Your arms and legs allow you to do things away from our body all day long.  Most of the time you are lifting little to no weight. In the instance that you do perform an activity that adds force to your joints, though, the weakest/least supported joint will take the brunt of that force. 

Knowing how to engage your core muscles during movement will support your spine AND will create a stable center from which your arms and legs can move.  Net result: the force of the load is dispersed which means less chance for strain to your joints. 

The Dead Bug’s Got Abs Technique:

1. Lie on the floor on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor. 
2. Anchor your entire back to the floor throughout this exercise.  Imagine a string pulling your belly button through your body toward your back and into the floor. 
3. Raise your knees and feet up into a table-top position. 
4. Re-anchor as in step 2 and place your hands on your abdomen to feel the muscles engage. 
5. Slowly march your legs in the air as if you are a bug on its back. 
6. Do not allow your abdomen to pop out as you do this movement. Keep your belly button pulled down toward the floor.
7. Keep your shoulders, neck and face relaxed throughout this exercise. 

Ask yourself: what muscles am I using while I am doing this exercise? What does it feel like when I engage these muscles?

Those are your core muscles! It may take some practice to engage these muscles during your daily activities, but every time you go to lift an object or to reach for something, consciously engage your core muscles. You may feel silly at first, but you will reap the benefits of healthy, pain-free motion in the end. 

One women's health question I get regarding exercise is about women getting air trapped in the vagina during yoga. Of all the exercise tips out there, this one seems to be overlooked. I'm here to tell you though that many women get air trapped in the vagina during inversion poses (butt up, torso down) that then expels when they change position (the sound crudely known as a “queef”). This is because gravity pulls the organs toward the head. The components of our body are covered by the connective tissue, fascia, and as the organs shift, it creates a pull on the vagina. This causes the vagina to lengthen. As it does, air can be pulled into the vagina. When you transition into another pose, the trapped air pushes out of the vagina causing the loud noise.

In order to prevent this, I teach my patients to pre-lengthen the vagina before the problematic pose and throughout the pose.  This will prevent the shift of air into the vagina because it will already be lengthened and engaged.   

KNOW YOUR BODY

Knowing what it feels like to lengthen AND what it feels like to relax the vagina are equally important for pelvic health and wellness. AND there’s a bonus: better sex! The VL Exercise is my favorite way to achieve this awareness. 

VL Exercise: 

1. Depending on your comfort level, practice nude or with a long T-shirt on.
2. Insert a tampon and leave the string hanging out. 
3. Stand in front of a mirror with your legs apart.  Make sure you can see the string hanging out of your vagina while standing. 
4. Breathe normally and relax your belly throughout the exercise.
5. Using the muscles of your vagina, try to pull the tampon up into your body. The tampon string will appear to shorten as the vagina pulls the tampon up and into the body. This indicates that the vagina is lengthening. (Think elevator going up to the top floor).
6. Once you have reached the “top floor” relax the vaginal muscles and allow the tampon to descend to starting position. The tampon string will appear to lengthen down toward the floor indicating vaginal relaxation.  
7. Completely relax your vagina.
8. Repeat steps 3-7 until you are able to alter the length of the tampon string ~1 inch.  
9. Remove the tampon. 
10. When you have mastered lengthening and relaxing the vagina, you do not need to use the tampon for visual feedback. You can do it anywhere and no one will know!

This method is great because it doesn't require any expensive contraptions that need special cleaning.