TAC Blog

Running, and participation in races, has really picked up here in Linn/Benton County.   Each weekend through the summer will be packed with races from a 5k to the half marathon.    I have the privilege of helping to put on the Corvallis half marathon, and work with the HOTV (Heart of the Valley) running club in helping people train, and meet nutrition needs for the Corvallis half.   

It’s really fun to work with a new, highly motivated group.  Running is different from any other fitness type sport; there are some basic fundamental physiological rules that must be followed to be successful in this sport, especially in the nutrition hydration area.  Runners need to properly fuel their bodies both at rest and while training or racing.     Enclosed are a few of the main topic areas I think are important for new runners.

Let’s start with basic diet, and calorie intake. As this article talks about, you have to take in enough calories to meet your training needs and know what types of foods are right for endurance sports: http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/a-balanced-diet-for-runners/ 

More specific diet composition info for people who are training for longer distances more frequently http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/what-should-runners-eat-and-drink-during-training/

Fluid intake for runners:  http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/the-importance-of-fluids-to-runners/

Can we drink too much?  This is a national issue. Particularly in populations running marathon distances:   http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/is-it-possible-for-runners-to-drink-too-much-water/ 

Keep in mind total calories and diet composition (% of carbs, protein, fats) guidelines are based on one’s level of fitness, and years of training in the sport.    Know your level of fitness (or basic pace per mile when you run or walk) and the months/years of continuous or periodic training to make your diet and hydration choices.

Mike Waters, Director of Health Promotion for TAC has been helping runners of all distances for over 30 years with their nutrition and training needs.     If you’d like him to help you with yours, you may contact him at timberhill.mike@comcast.net  or 541-207-4368 

Creating Healthy Habits combines the joy of movement with cognitive work and emotional support to help us make healthy lifestyle changes.  The class employs a simple three-step process I call DREAM IT – DANCE IT – DO IT!
Dream it!
Imagination: The first step in making a change is visualizing where you would like to be.  We all have ideas about changes we could make to enhance health and wellbeing.  Maybe it’s sticking to our commitment to exercise regularly or practicing daily meditation.  Perhaps it’s a dietary change, such as reducing sugar consumption.  Letting go of an old habit that no longer serves us could also be a healthy change.  The first step is to dream it.
Dance it!
Dance can help transition ideas about what we would like to see from the mental realm into the physical.  (Kind of like labor, only way more fun!) The physical act of the dance gets us out of our heads and into our bodies, while the tone or energy of the music shifts our emotional state. By moving us physically, mentally, and emotionally, dance facilitates the release of stuck energy.  Nia class leaves participants feeling relaxed and energized.  You do not need to ‘be a dancer’ to participate, the class is easy to follow and you will discover your own dance as you continue.  Moving toward our goals together with focus and intention brings ease to the process.
Do it!
Sometimes we need a little extra support to make changes.  The class helps provide accountability for living our dreams.  We delve deeper into our own motivation and inspiration through the use of visualization, journaling, and other cognitive exercises. We learn from each other about strategies that have worked, and we’re buoyed on the journey by our own private cheerleading section.

If you are interested in participating in Creating Healthy Habits, we will meet on Sunday mornings starting January 8th.  The Dance it! part of the group takes place in the Nia class at 11:30am.  Creating Healthy Habits follows at 12:40pm for one hour.  Please email Leela at leeladevidancing@gmail.com, or call (541) 752-1784 to reserve a space.  The Nia class is free to TAC members and the Creating Healthy Habits part is $40.00 for the eight week session.  Would you like to share this experience with a friend who is not a TAC member?  The first Nia class on January 8 is free to nonmembers, with a special price of $40.00 for the rest of the session (seven more classes).  Creating Healthy Habits class is $50.00 for nonmembers of TAC.

1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.

Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular class (like Cycling) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 45 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9:15 a.m.

Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.

2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes. In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.

Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially. 

3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit after a few sessions.

It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.

The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.

4. What we resist persists.

Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self-control.

The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your full attention.

The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do when it is time to eat, the more successful you're likely to be.

5. Competing Commitments.

We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change." Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen "competing" commitment not to change.

Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.

For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"

6. Keep the faith.

Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures.

Remembering the good times, learning from the bad

Memory can be used for good or for evil. If you use your past as a source of learning, it's worth remembering. If, however, all you do is mull over your mistakes and punish yourself for your failures, it's a waste of time. Rehashing failure can paralyze you in mortal fear of making another mistake, which, of course, just makes the feeling worse and practically guarantees future letdowns. The key to making meaningful changes is to pay more attention to the future than to the past. Have you ever noticed that the best athletes also have the shortest and most selective memories? Instead of dwelling on a missed shot or a flawed dive, they concentrate on making corrections and getting the next one right. It's as if the failed attempt never happened. It's forgotten and they don't fear trying again. If you mess up, even in an epic, life-altering way, work hard to leave it behind and concentrate on the possibilities yet to come. Tomorrow is much brighter when it's not smeared with a fixation on yesterday.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

Our environment and the changing season come together to provide opportunities for fun recreation, physical activity, and quality seasonal food. 
Schedule and Seasonal changes
Kids go back to school.  The days sunlight get shorter, and in the Willamette valley the rains start to come in. Family vacations are over, and there’s less free time. But we can still enjoy some smaller scale activities.   Throughout the valley there are health, fitness clubs,  parks and recreation programs that are still offering limited outdoor seasonal activity programs.    These professional organizations are aware that adult and youth physical activity drops when the cooler, cloudy rain sets in.   Even health clubs are getting better at providing more indoor fun game programs.   These facilities and events help keep the “nonlinear” exerciser motivated to stay active while indoors.    Being active this way is not quite as fun as being outside in the sun, with organized and/or random “free” play, but it’s a lot better for the less structured activity personality that doesn’t liked to be pushed hard by external motivators like equipment, and fitness coaches.  
The other opportunity to be more active in the fall and early winter is to go outside and do pursuits that require physical activity but yet have a more recreationally entertaining goal in mind.    People who enjoy activities such as bird watching and seeing environmental landscape changes can bundle up in rain gear and go out for hours to enjoy the valley’s many parks and wildlife spots.   These people are using what health psychologists call “dissociative techniques”.   They’re getting lots of physical activity by walking or cycling, but enjoying viewing other things around them.   In a nut shell these types of adults, or kids, get exercise without really thinking about it.
Changes in seasonal dietary choices
One of the biggest laments in the seasonal change I hear is the shift in the choices of fresh, local fruits and vegetables.   Some produce (including my wife’s favorite - blueberries) can be picked and frozen or processed and canned to enjoy throughout the rest of the year utill next summer.  The selection fpr most fruits and vegetables goes down, and we have to pay more at the store if we want to continue with many of our summertime favorites.  
This change in the season can allow us to try new fall fruit and vegetable combinations.   There are many winter crops that some area local farms grow.   The winter farmers markets provides our area with fresh, local produce.  They don't have the bounty that we enjoy in the summer but it is worth looking forward to.  Valley restaurants who are more creative in their menu options will build recipes with food that is in season as well.    With the trend in supporting local agricultural area restaurants will feature dishes that use produce from their immediate area.     
It’s okay with busy schedules to occasionally enjoy fast food, prepackaged foods for meals.   But if you’ve created an individual or family culture of eating more meals with fresh products, work on trying to keep this meal design for as many meals as you can.  Like I’ve said, you live in a valley that promotes and supports this type of food.   We’re fortunate that we’re not in a huge heavily populated metro area where it would be more of a challenge to eat well like this. 
It’s all about staying motivated
From a public health perspective, many regions in the U.S. get healthier during the summer with the changes in the environment. The trick is not to lose that total life schedule.    You can’t replicate the warm sun, and the beautiful green spaces year round that helped motivate healthy behavior but there are a few things I’ve suggested here, and many more good ideas from others, that can help us continue to enjoy the areas and environments we live in. 

Mike Waters
Director of Health Promotion
Timberhill Athletic Club
541-207-4368

- Cardiovascular fitness. This aspect to me is the most important part of a workout.  Working the heart, lungs, and arteries above a resting state to promote better physical endurance capabilities.  The great thing is there are so many fantastic choices of how one can go about this, from all the cardiovascular machines in the fitness center, to the wide variety of group exercise classes on land and in the water.

- Muscular-skeletal fitness.  This is still an important aspect that enables us to move objects in our daily lives. Even our own body as we age. The amount of “functional” strength we need is where things sometimes get confusing.  There are several different levels of resistive training an adult needs based on strength for health, and strength for a higher level of fitness.   There are also several different types of equipment that can accommodate all these various needs.  From “Free” weights (plates, bars, hand held weight) to various machines, and now bands or tubes.  Rather than go into all this here, I suggest you schedule a time with a TAC fitness trainer to learn more about the various training systems, and what plan fits for your needs.

- Flexibility. The 3rd main component of adult fitness is becoming more critical because we, as a society, have become more sedentary with our work and home lives.  Since the early 90’s I’ve provided or hosted information sessions on strategies from P.T’s, Chiropractors, and fitness experts on how to stay flexible.  Again, we’re talking about functional flexibility for prevention of total body discomfort and lack of mobility.  This lack of mobility discourages us from enjoying fitness and a number of recreational activities.  With the advent of the various forms of Yoga, the new area of Pilates, and other timeless “art” forms of physical activity, we again have a fun, creative opportunity to stay mobile.  At TAC we offer Water classes, like Tri-Aqua, as fun, invigorating solutions. This doesn’t have to be the old days where we taught the individual to do a long list of stretches and told them to patiently wait for the muscle group to stretch.

Again. The basic principals of adult fitness still apply as they did 30 years ago. But hopefully I’ve given you some examples of some new things you can try in these various areas. 

The best overall advice I can give is to schedule a time with a TAC fitness staff member.  Look at these main components and have them help you on what is the best plan for you.   Mike Waters

Write it down.  Keep a journal or log with your goals and affirmations written down.  Take notes on activities that will help you through your day to achieve your goals.  Notice if there are certain situations that hinder your ability to be successful with your desired goals.  Write these down too.

When changing our routine it is easy to feel overwhelmed.  By keeping a journal or notes on these feelings it is more likely you will create the change you are looking for and remain more committed to your goals. 

Contact our staff today if you would like help with a fitness program (Steve Sackmann), have questions about our group exercise classes (Jen Humphreys), or are interested in swimming or aqua fitness classes (Shannon Brown). 

The only strategy that really works in achieving long term health and fitness results is to exercise regularly and eat well.  Most of us already know this yet fewer than 25% of Americans exercise three or more days a week and our meals are filled with processed/packaged foods that are overloaded with sugar, fat, and preservatives.

Every day it seems like we see or hear information about the benefits of regular exercise and eating well yet as a nation we continue to weigh more and be less fit.  So why is this?  What is missing?  It may be that we are offered an overabundance of physical information while there is a complete lack of mental information.  If you have the self-image of an unfit person, then all actions are doomed to fail.  By understanding more about the mental approach and creating a positive self-image, you can overcome obstacles that may have prevented you from succeeding in the past.

Become INSPIERED to be healthy and fit.

Some attitudes and beliefs that people who succeed all share in common:  take responsibility, know what you want, focus on the positive, get help (TAC staff), and take action.  Using these principles will help you to reach your health and fitness goals which will lead to immediate results.

Thoughts   --->   Actions   --->   Results.  The self-fulfilling prophecy:   Any positive or negative expectation about circumstances, events, or people that may affect a person's behavior toward them in a manner that causes those expectations to be fulfilled.  Your thoughts stem from your beliefs and your self-image. 

So if you want certain results the place to start is with your thoughts… state clear goals and create a mission statement.  More on this in the next article.