I’ve been doing some research, and found a lovely article by Mike Robertson called Fixing your force couples: it has an explanation of pelvic tilt, the obligatory picture of some girls ass in anterior tilt, but it also has a workout! Awesome. Unfortunately it’s filled with exercises that don’t get explained in the article, and that aren’t familiar to me. So I went Youtubing.
Since you might also be in Anterior tilt and similarly noobish, I’ll post my movie-filled workout here.
Foam Rolling
Glutes, hamstrings, calves, adductors, quads, TFL/ITB, peroneals (additional focus on quads/hip flexors)
Static Stretching/Activation
1A) Psoas or Rectus Femoris Stretch, paired with
1B) Glute Bridge
2A) Piriformis Stretch, paired with
2B) Side-Lying Clam
Mobility Training
Knee Hugs,
Pull-Back Butt Kicks,
Warrior Lunge with Twist,
Running Butt Kicks,
Crossover Overhead Reverse Lunge
Strength Training Exercise Selection
Sumo Deadlift
Long-Stroke Walking Lunge
Pull-throughs (yeah, I’m looking forward to doing this one in the gym..)
Single-Leg RDL
Out-of-workout lengthening strategies
Reinforcement of good alignment throughout the day. In this case, a stand-up desk or even kneeling at your desk on an Airex pad will get the hips into extension and lengthen the short/stiff muscles.
So that’s it. Truthfully, I haven’t tried it yet. I’l have a restweek from NROL4W soon, then I’ll give this workout a whirl. After that, I might go add one APT workout to my 3 times a week routine. Till this crap is fixed!
of weight-loss month. Currently chewing on some chicken slices. My food is pretty blah, lots of dairy, salad, chicken, soup, tuna and other staples. I don’t have the time to make interesting meals right now, I’m busy as hell. How can I stand it? Because I know I only have to stand it for a month. You can do anything for a month, right?
My one-month leaning phase starts today! I’ve been gaining a nice bit of muscle, and now it’s time to shed the bit of fat that comes with every muscle gain – my pants are feeling tight again.
Why one month? Because I don’t want to get tricked into dieting forever again, because I’ll need my strength and energy for my workouts, because I don’t want my metabolism to slow down again. You can diet up to eight weeks before that happens, but a month is what I’m going to try. Also, it’ s a lot easier to maintain your diet if you know it’ll only last a month. And to be honest, I don’t need to lose all that much.
How am I going to do it?
By eating a little bit less (300kcal), making my meals even more nutritious, and by moving a lot more. I’m not very active outside of my workouts, and for this month I’m planning to increase my activity, be it stairclimbs, cycling, intervals, hikes, frisbeeing, or whatever.
After a month I’ll take a week or maybe two to go back up to my normal maintenance level. If that isn’t enough weight loss, I’ll wait a couple of weeks and then do another month.
My day:
Breakfast: kwark with wheat bran, proteïn powder and a few dried cranberries
Lunch: Vegetable soup made with chicken broth, steamed fish with spring onions (yay for tupperware!)
Snack: Deviled eggs and avocado slices
Post WO: small shake
Dinner: Chicken tortilla’s with spring beans
Ran into a lot of my own limitations at the gym yesterday. I did my deadlifts with 65kg/143 pounds, great! But around the 6th rep, I lose my grip. It’s not the sweat, my hands just can’t hold the bar anymore, my thumb slips, then my fingers slowly give way. Now what to do? I guess I have a couple of options:
- Do my 24 reps in sets of 4 (instead of sets of 3 like i do now), assume the deadlifts and other exercises I do will strengthen my grip as much as my other mucles
- Wear gloves. A gym buddy tells me this will help me keep grip, but I’m not so sure. I’m not slipping away, I just can’t grip the weight long enough.
- Experiment with different ways of holding the bar. Perhaps an alternating grip with one hand ‘backwards’. I tried that, and it feels very unnatural, but perhaps i should try again.
- Add in grip-strengthening exercises. But which ones?
I don’t know, I’ll have to do more research.
If that wasn’t enough flaws to discover in one day, then it was time for lunges.
My helpful gym buddy: Wow, could you lean any more forward?
Me: Yeah, I know I should point straight up, but I just can’t.
Me: I think it’s because I have an anterior pelvic tilt. You know, like Kim kardashian.
Gym buddy: You should fix that, your lunges are crap.
Me: What do you mean, fix? I thought it was just a characteristic like your starsign or your bodytype. Plus, my ass looks great now. Badadunk!
Gym buddy: Yeah, how’s your hernia going to look in 20 years?
Long story short, I gotta work on my pelvic tilt. My gym buddy has done a lot of back therapy and gave me useful pointer: to pull my navel to my spine. That sounds slightly unsettling, but by doing that, my lunges became a lot straighter. But if i want to untilt, I’ll need to do a lot more work than that.
Once again, back to doing research (There’s a nice article on pelvic tilt here – it only uses normal english words, not of that physical therapy speak)
Last night the football team was in the gym again: 12 of well-behaved scrawny 18-year olds on a mission to get buff. Good for them. Less good for me: they love to squat and deadlift, and we only have one (yes, one) squat rack in our gym.
40 minutes later and I still haven’t been able to do my squats. I see a guy who just took a barbell off of the rack and who is deadlifting in a corner somewhere.
“Fuck it”, I say, “I don’t need a squat rack to do my damm squats, I’ll do them here on the floor”. “But how are you going to get it on your shoulders?”, my gym buddies ask. “You guys can be my rack”. One of my gym buddies balks: “That sounds like the stupidest idea ever, what if you drop it!”
Friendly barrel-chest Tommy is doing his curls next to us, and says “I can spot your squats if you want”. Hell yeah! So I did my squats in the middle of the gym, with a strange man standing behind me going “come on, come on, you can do it!”. It was a bit surreal.. and in a way a bit more intimate than i like my gym..
but at least I got my squats in!
Sure, you can eat broccoli, tuna, cottage cheese and steamed salmon every day. But that would be
- incredibly boring,
- demotivating,
- and in the end probably not as healthy as eating diverse meals.
I love making recipies I picked up from the blogosphere, but sometimes they suffer from not having a test-team like professional cookbook authors do. After a few disasters, I’ve gotten used to scouring the comments on a recipe to see if anyone has actually made it, with good results (and dutifully leave my own, if I did).
Here are some of the blogosophere’s recipes that I’ve tried out lately, and liked:
- Chicken Korma – Great recipe! Tasted like real korma, I could eat this every day!
- Stuffed mushrooms – Cheesy & tasty. A bit on the mushy side though, maybe add some bacon bits. Great party appetizer.
- Lamb Kofta Salad – The spice mix for the kofta balls was pretty good, but on the light side. We like our meat plenty spiced where I come from.
- Newcastle Brown Ale Chicken – Great comfort food, almost like thick chunky chicken soup
- Risotto - A great tasting risotto, next time I’ll leave out the cheese for a lighter taste and feel.
- Pineappple and shrimp teriyaki – yum! Really good!
- Celery Soup – Seriously good (even though it looks like snot soup)! And i’m normally not a fan of celery
I am stuck at home with a throat infection. Everytime I swallow it feels like tiny gilette razors are going down my throat. I can’t speak and am reduced to playing amusing mime games with my man in order to communicate. Fuck my my eating plan, I am stuck on tea and honey and DVD-boxes of Avatar until the pain goes away.
It’s too bad I’m stuck at home, because I’ve been kicking ass in the gym lately. The gym owner watched us lift the other day and said my deadlift technique was perfect. That’s a pretty nice compliment! My deadlifts are 132 pounds, which is 85% of my bodyweight. My squats are slacking a bit at a 100 pounds (only 65% of my BW). We only have about 4 more sessions on this first NROLfw workout, then we move on to phase two, which will feature front squats and “deadlifts on a box”. On a box? Are they trying to kill us?
If you’ve read my bio, you know I’m a big IT nerd, and have been for most of my life. So have all of my friends. I have to be the born-again fitness reformer who wants to save her friends from their posture-wrecking ways, but I do worry that when we’re old we won’t be able to go out and have fun any more. Or, you know, have DDR marathons and things. Sure, some of us go to the gym, but our computer ways really give us a specific set of weaknesses that we ourselves (including me) don’t know much about.
That’s why I was really happy to find this article “(De)-Constructing Computer Guy“, and “(De)-Constructing Computer Guy – The Other 23 Hours“, that go into great detail on the specific issues when computer guy (or gal) goes training, and what he can do during the other 23 hours of the day to help his own posture.
There’s so many useful and practical points in those articles, I’ll be pouring over them for a while!
1. Sugar free is back, baby! I will feed my boyfriend the leftover “midnight cookie special” icecream in his sleep and i’ll be tempatation free. I’m climbing the walls a bit, but that’s what banana flavored proteïn shakes are (also) for.
2. Eating your tuna salad in a crowded classroom during your break? Doesn’t make you new friends.
3. FitCast Podcasts – Fun to listen to while working – and to find out that even the jocks are dorks :)
I managed to eat sugarfree for two whole months – up until last week. I don’t need a lot of sweets, usually the sweetness of plain yogurt, (*swoon*) mascarpone, raisins and cranberries is enough to keep me going for a long time. I eat my oats unsweeted, my tea, etc. But somehow sugar has snuck its way back into my diet. I bought one of those delicate gourmet chocolate bars that I liked. Suddenly people are popping up, bringing us licorice and custard (don’t ask.. it’s a Dutch thing), and birthday people pop up left and right to shove pie into my face. Not that I’m so unwilling to take it…
Man, I hope to get back on the wagon soon.
