Keepin’ It Real
What does the phrase “keepin’ it real” mean to you? Do images of surfers riding through the sunset come to mind? (Or maybe that’s a different phrase…)
Why would we want to “keep it real” in the first place? Is it better than not “keepin’ it real”?
What are the health benefits of “keepin’ it real”?
Let’s keep it real and jump into these questions –
When I think of what keepin’ it real looks like, I first think of speaking honestly and of giving an accurate account. This might look like describing the tough times, along with the great times, when talking to a friend about a relationship.
Keepin’ it real might also look like recounting both the ups and the downs of a recent lifestyle change (nutrition, physical activity, sleep patterns, etc.).
So why keep it real? Why tell all sides of the story, as vulnerable as it may make us feel?
When we keep it real, we embrace humility and admit that as humans, we have flaws.
Yet, flaws keep us relatable. They inadvertently make us accessible to other people who are going through the same thing. What better feeling than to have someone in your corner (and hopefully your corner of the gym).
I am proposing that we keep it real at the gym, whatever that may look like for you right now – a yoga mat and section of garage space if you’re a UA’er, an open field, or your squad of running pals.
Keepin’ it real improves exercise adherence. If we are open with our workout neighbor about such things as getting back into the swing of workouts after a long vacation, or feeling as though we don’t have enough time after work, we open the door to acceptance.
People can come to the gym as they are. They don’t have to wait for x, y, and z to have or have not happened – they can just come.
They can come, because they know that people there are keepin’ it real, so they can keep it real too.
Ready to keep it real with us? Send us a message at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com !
Green Workouts: UA On the Field
I recently read a research article, written by Gladwell and colleagues, from the Journal of Extreme Physiology and Medicine, titled “The green outdoors: how a green exercise environment can benefit all.”
I found this article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710158/) after searching for the relationship between green space and exercise. My time spent working in Auburn University’s Psychophysiology Lab told me that there already was a correlation.
Why even research the correlation to begin with?
Currently, many industries (including the fitness industry) are delivering their goods and services over different platforms. We’ve already discussed virtual workouts, but we have yet to discuss green workouts.
In order to accommodate higher volumes of people outside gym doors, fitness facilities (like UA) have found green workout spaces.
What began as a way to reinforce social distancing, turned into a highly motivating exercise environment simply because it was green.
According to the review of literature by Gladwell and colleagues in 2013, green workouts cause “…greater feelings of revitalization and positive engagement” and “improve self-esteem and negative mood…”
However, what I found most interesting was that green workouts reduced exercisers’ ratings of perceived exertion (RPE). Following this train of thought, some people will be more likely to continue exercising (adherence), if they don’t believe the workout to be as tough (Gladwell et al., 2013).
As you can see from the date of the review, this is not new information – so it begs the question…
Pandemic or no pandemic – why not always exercise outside? (Until it snows that is…and then I’ll be the first person inside…)
Want to work out On the Field with us, while the weather is still beautiful? Send us an email at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com or visit our website http://urbanathlete.tv !
Relaxing is Tough
This blog post is one of the easier ones to write because of how close to home it hits. Some of you may relate to it in different ways, but I definitely know that I do.
Here it goes…
Resting is hard for me. If there is more time left in the day, I assume that something productive must be done with it. (You likely already see the flaws in my thinking, but alas we are human…)
Similarly, if I don’t feel like I’ve been productive that day, I don’t give myself permission to relax. So there exists this relationship in my mind between productivity and relaxation.
The more productive I am, the more I allow myself to relax.
Now – the best days I have are the days where I schedule the time that I will work and the time that I will relax. I laugh as I type this, because I understand that we don’t always have this luxury…
My ultimate goal for myself is that I am able to be at peace (or at rest if you will) always and regardless of my external circumstances.
However, sometimes we need tools to help us get where we are looking to go. Take rest in a workout for instance. We briefly mentioned this in an earlier blog post, but I wanted to highlight it again, as our lives and habits have inadvertently become more fluid.
Rest in a workout is proportional to the amount of work that we do, depending on what we wish to accomplish – endurance, hypertrophy, strength, power. We can minimize our rest time to give our muscles less time to restore, less time to gather the ingredients they need for contraction. However, when going for max lifts, we give ourselves ample rest time between sets.
Rest is adjustable.
I may need to schedule rest now, but my ultimate goal is to be able to rest wherever and whenever.
Who’s with me?
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Give us a call at 215-248-2130 to schedule your free & outdoor Success Session!
Exercising Inside the Box, Outside the Gym
Nowadays, thinking inside the box isn’t necessarily a bad thing – especially when it’s in an exercise box…
To the left of where the photo was taken is Urban Athlete’s physical location. It just so happens that it comes with this awesome garage space conducive to exercising during a pandemic. (Hats off to Pamela for foreseeing this 11 years ago.)
All joking aside, you don’t need me to tell you that exercise and your health are serious business. Exercise is our business but so is leveraging it to enhance your mental health and wellness.
Here’s how that works:
Your body releases endorphins in response to stress. There are many different types of stress, and exercise is one of them.
I knew this feeling well after long weekends of travel softball – when my body could barely move from the car to the front door, but mentally I never felt better.
Workouts do the same thing but without the bruises and jammed fingers.
You work hard for 25-30 minutes, and then your body feels a sense of release. Like you just let out a ginormous exhale. The shoulders that were pinched-up towards your ears now move when you walk.
This feeling transfers over to your work – you feel alert and purposeful (at least for a few hours!). Pretty soon, the time you spend with your family begins to feel more intentional, too.
This is what we mean by enhancing wellness.
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Illness and disease are stressors, too. They stress our organs and our minds, but exercise prepares our bodies for that stress.
Give us a call at 215-248-2130 to schedule your free & outdoor Success Session!
Dogs and Tomatoes
Until today, I never much cared for cherry tomatoes.
I love ketchup, tomato sauce, and all the many tomato things – but ask me to grab a tomato off the vine and take a bite…Let’s just say I had other opinions! I blame the texture…
So what inspired me to try one today? To venture outside of my comfort zone and try something new?
One place we could look is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is also an interesting topic to consider amidst a pandemic.
Try your best to visualize this description as a pyramid with five tiers. At the base is Physiological Needs. These needs are air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, and reproduction. Maslow theorized that these needs have to be satisfied before we can do anything else.
The next level is Safety Needs. These are personal security, employment, resources, health, and property. Following this thinking, once we have satisfied our basic needs of food, water, and shelter – then we can focus on our workplace and health.
Following our needs for safety is Love and belonging, which looks like friendship, intimacy, family, and sense of connection.
The next level in the hierarchy is Esteem – respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, strength, and freedom.
At the very top of the pyramid is Self-actualization. This is your desire to become the most or best that you can be. However, before we get to the very top of the pyramid, we have to first satisfy all of the needs that came before it (according to Maslow).
We could easily translate these levels of needs into what we are currently experiencing.
First, people are focusing on providing food, water, and shelter for their families. (Physiological)
Next, we are working hard to maintain and protect our quality of health. (Safety)
Now – these next tiers get a little tricky. The top three needs might be getting a little less love during the pandemic, as we put all of our energy into our physiological and safety needs.
This brings me back to my tomato. It struck me as interesting that, for a brief moment, I thought about something beyond my immediate, basic needs. I thought about the joy and simplicity of picking a vegetable right from the vine and not even washing it.
Have you checked out our 30 Day Resilience Challenge?
Send us questions at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com or head straight to our Online Portal to get started!
In Your (Core)Corner
It’s 6:40 AM on a Monday, and you’re exhausted (the good kind). You just finished an Urban Athlete workout, and you start to grab your things to leave and head to work, when…
Your workout buddy (the one who’s had more coffee than you) asks, “You doing the CoreCorner today?”
You were never one for excuses, so you sigh internally and then say, “Uh yeah sure, I got a few minutes.”
All joking aside, the CoreCorner has become something that is both incredibly unifying for our community, as well as essential to our workouts, during our time in quarantine.
Let me give you a brief description of what exactly the CoreCorner is:
The CoreCorner is quick. It is a brief finisher to the workout and lasts about 3-5 minutes.
The CoreCorner is optional. Need to get to work? No problem – catch it the next morning.
The CoreCorner is challenging. Daily increases to your plank? You have your friends to complain to!
The CoreCorner is fun. Your friends (now also sweaty & out of breath) will be cheering you on.
Step inside the doors to our gym, and you will see the CoreCorner written on a white board. Each week, members anxiously await its change.
Some weeks there are timing intervals, and other weeks there are exercises for reps.
However, the best part about the CoreCorner is that it’s not just abs! By core, we also mean the musculature surrounding your hips and spine. This leaves the door wide open for the types of exercises that you may see, and that’s half the fun!
What started as only a finisher, turned into a pillar of the UA community. Hardships headed your way? No problem – you’ll have plenty of people in your corner, and they’ll be awfully strong too…
We’re always happy to hear from you. Please send us an email at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com to get more information or to stay in touch.
Coffee Talk
I started drinking coffee during my senior year of college. You might be thinking – “Well, that makes sense. She’s staying up late applying to grad schools, on top of studying for her classes. No wonder she started to drink coffee – most people do.”
I started to drink coffee, because my social circles at the time revolved around coffee shops. Coffee became something social to me, as it is for a lot of people.
I don’t know if having my friends there made the coffee taste better, but I was hooked – hook, line, and coffee bean.
It is also important for me to note that these coffee shops were exactly that – coffee shops – not your typical chains. These were the places where even locals said, “You go where?”.
But these were places (I should clarify and say place and not places. I only went to one place. Every day.) where I felt good going and felt even better bringing my friends, new and old.
When the pandemic became a reality, this is something I stumbled over.
I am blessed that the coffee shop, that I frequent in our area, has a drive-thru. This checks one of the two boxes when you say “coffee talk.”
I had the coffee, but I didn’t have the talk. I mean, I talked to the Barista, but you understand…
Coffee is great, but can you go along with me here and say that people are better?
My friends and I solved this dilemma by coordinating when we were going through the drive-thru (say that 10x fast), so that we could meet-up at a walking trail about five minutes down the road.
Coffee – check. Friends – check. Exercise – a beautiful bonus.
Urban Athlete solves this dilemma by holding Coffee Talk after our 9AM virtual workout every Saturday.
This is a place where people can come as they are – sweaty (if they just worked out) or freshly showered (if…you know… they happened to sleep in).
I mean it is a Saturday!
Cheers to you and coffee. Cheers to you drinking your coffee.
We’re always happy to hear from you. Please send us an email at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com to get more information or to stay in touch.
Hitting Snooze
Blog posts should be nothing but relatable, right? Which is why this is a safe space for me to talk about something that you might also do, right? Right?
Okay, right.
Every evening, I set a very ambitious alarm on my phone (the keyword being ambitious). Sometimes, I find myself dreaming that I had an “old-fashioned” alarm clock that wasn’t on my phone, but that’s a whole other monologue…
By ambitious, I mean early – earlier than I need to wake up for the day’s activities. Let me explain this a bit further –
There are some (or maybe most) tasks throughout our day that external factors dictate that we must do. These external factors could be job requirements, set appointments (health, work, or otherwise), or instances where people or lives are relying on us.
To give you an example, I care for horses in my spare time. Several mornings a week, I am responsible for feeding the horses, taking them outside, and cleaning the barn. When my alarm clock, I mean phone, goes off at 5:45 AM – something inside of me says, “Jennifer, you have to get up.” The power that external circumstances (horses needing to be fed, in this case) have over our actions is incredible.
On the flip side of extrinsic (outside of you) motivation is intrinsic, or internal motivation. With intrinsic motivation, you accomplish tasks purely for your own enjoyment, or because you (and no one else) find them important.
To give you an example, last night I set my alarm for 5:45 AM – not because I had to take care of the horses, but because I wanted to read and have coffee before the 7 AM workout. Mind you, this was not a workout I was expected to coach, it was just a workout that I wanted to do.
I snoozed my alarm clock until 6:50 AM.
But Jennifer ! You still had 10 minutes !! (Not at the pace at which I tend to do things…)
In my very sleepy mind, external circumstances did not require that I wake up at 5:45 AM to drink coffee, read, and work out. Nothing was saying, “Jennifer, you have to get up.”
I do acknowledge that there are other factors at play here – quality of sleep, valuing exercise as a must, etc.
Speaking from human to human (although I am a fitness professional), I wanted to start the discussion on what motivates us to do the things that we want to do, so we don’t regret not doing them later.
**Disclaimer: I wasn’t going to say anything…but…I did wake up for an optional workout yesterday!
What changed in my motivation today? Reach out to us at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com !
Patience is Key
Like anything we talk about at UA – we always talk about lifestyle patterns as they relate to the whole person. By whole person, I mean physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Today, I am going to talk about patience, and I hope to discuss it holistically as I just mentioned.
First, let me ask: Do you have a positive or negative connotation with the word patience?
This might very well influence your perception of this blog post, but I am entrusting you to keep reading!
Second question: Can you think of a specific instance of patience or lack thereof?
I am going to share a personal example of patience that is both physical and mental. We’ll get to emotional patience in a bit…
My dad, like most dads, started as my sport’s coach and quickly became my life coach. For better or worse (mostly better), my dad was the head coach of my travel softball team, during my senior year of high school.
He should write a book on his opinions concerning mental toughness. However…I was a terrible hitter (but an amazing catcher…), and he needed to use every coaching phrase in the book to help me get a hit.
Wait for your pitch.
To which every player in a slump responds, “What do you meeaaan wait for my pitch!? I’ll be waiting forever!”
Waiting for your pitch is an example of being mentally patient – taking conscious control of your thoughts, telling yourself that you don’t need to act now.
This leads me to the part of my patience example that is physical. Something physical happens when you are mentally waiting for your pitch – as a hitter, your hands subconsciously stay back. There are physical consequences to your mental decisions. Seems simple enough!
But does it work in reverse? Can your hands stay back without first deciding that you are going to wait?
We can all relate differently to this, which is why I don’t want to give you any specific examples outside of my personal story.
But lastly, we also have the power to be patient with our emotions. To stay with my softball team example, you can imagine the frustrations that might occur within any team dynamic. If everyone acted on their very first emotion to surface, it would create a rather tumultuous experience…
That first emotion is incredibly valid, however other emotions often arise when you give yourself the time.
This week, be patient with yourself, as you try to be patient – in all areas of your life!
Cheers to you.
Growing impatient to get working out? Give us a call at 215-248-2130, or send us an email at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com !
Rooted
There are so many wonderful metaphors to be made with trees, and I am sure you’ve already heard quite a few.
The first metaphor to trees I heard came when I was riding a horse. (Seems accurate enough…)
My trainer told me that my core was the trunk of the tree and my arms were the branches. With a wobbly trunk, I had a tendency to stiffen my branches. I looked forced and rigid, when I needed to be fluid and effortless for the horse.
I needed a stronger base, a stronger trunk – stronger roots.
Physically, I needed to strengthen my legs and core muscles, in order to take the load off of my arms, shoulders, and neck.
What are you rooted in, physically?
Trees are smart. When the temperatures start to drop in the Fall, trees send the chlorophyll from their leaves to their trunk. Here, the chlorophyll is stored so that it can later be used for energy.
The tree receives information (cold weather) and then takes action (stores chlorophyll). It understands that its leaves must fall, in order to preserve its trunk and branches.
It can be good practice to take note of how we respond to a change in events, change in people, or even a change in temperature. The lens that we use to process information is incredibly important, because it sets us up for how we will respond. Our lens is often what is most important to us.
What are you rooted in, mentally?
Am I being too forward, when I say that we’ve all picked bark off a tree? We might have done this absentmindedly or purposefully – admiring how easy it was to do.
The bark is the tree’s outermost protection, its first line of defense. As soon as we pick it off, all sorts of unwanted organisms are free to grow!
As humans, we might all have a different emotional protection, but we all know the feeling of when someone or something starts to pick at it. We can feel ourselves being tested and exposed, and it hurts.
However, we need this ability to feel, because it is at the root of our decision making.
What are you rooted in, emotionally?
Unlike trees, we can choose where we put our roots physically. mentally, and emotionally. We also have the freedom to decide just how strong they are.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can work out with UA while at home, please follow this link: urbanathlete.wodify.com or send us an email at urbanathletephiladelphia@gmail.com!