Today's Exercise, new exercises, ETS, and grains

For exercising today, I had been thinking of getting out on my bike, but it was in the mid 80's outside, and I recently read an article in Runner's World about someone who had died of heatstroke while running in 90 degree weather in late July. So I stayed indoors and ran in place on my mini trampoline while listening to side 1 of Rubycon by Tangerine Dream. I initially wore 2.5# wrist weights, but I soon switched them for 1# wrist weights. Pumping and otherwise moving my arms helped increase the cardiovascular intensity of the exercise. Despite having the air conditioner on, I was working up a sweat. After the tape ended, I stopped running, walked a bit to cool down, then put on Keiko Matsui's White Owl concert DVD, which I watched and listened to while doing an upper body workout. This was drawn mainly from Teach Yourself Visually Weight Training, which I now own a copy of. I also added some exercises from Strength Ball Training, a book on balance ball and medicine ball exercises I recently got from the library. Although I don't have a medicine ball, I do have a balance ball. Since my left hand has been having some difficulty with rotator cuff exercises, I experimented with other ways to exercise the rotator cuff. With my resistance band hung from two folding doors, I pulled on both handles and rotated my arms. Later, I held a weight in each hand, let the arms hang down, and rotated them back and forth. Both exercises seemed to be working the rotator cuff in both directions, and they were both easy enough for my left hand. I cooled down with calisthenic dancing to Keiko Matsui's music, using 3# curved weights, then 2.5# wrist weights, then finally 1# wrist weights.

I also read about doing full squats today. This was in an article on Clarence Bass's Ripped website. I discovered this site while searching Google for Heavyhands. Besides its two articles on Heavyhands, this site is loaded with many good articles on exercising. I've downloaded the whole site and have been reading through the articles. Anyway, a full squat is one in which the hamstrings touch the calves. When I first tried it, I couldn't do it. A fear of falling backwards was keeping me from doing it. So I decided to try a full wall squat with my balance ball supporting my back. This worked well, and my hamstrings nearly touched my calves. Later, during my calisthenics, I was doing full squats with 3# weights without any support from my balance ball. Later in the evening, I found myself spontaneously doing a full squat as I bent down to pick something up.

While on the subject of websites, I have been becoming more and more skeptical of Dr. Mercola's website. While I continue to think he's on target about some things, I am seriously skeptical about the Emotional Freedom Technique he keeps trying to push, and I am also skeptical of the primitive diet he advocates. ETS is based on the premise that negative emotions are caused by disturbances in a body's energy field. While I can't dispute that this might be the cause of some seemingly inexplicable negative emotions, experience and common sense dictate that most negative emotions are due to negative appraisals of circumstances, which are themselves perfectly natural in the face of misfortune. For example, if you're seriously injured or lose someone you love, it's natural to feel bad about it, and this isn't due to imbalances in your energy field. ETS won't help relieve such negative emotions except as a placebo or as a disguised form of cognitive therapy. As for the primitive diet, Mercola maintains that we shouldn't eat grains. Sure, humans have been eating grains for only a fraction of their time on earth, but grains are an important source of carbohydrates, and grains, more than any other food, are responsible for the large number of people now living on earth. They can't be that bad if they're responsible for a population explosion.