movement

Get Moving

This time of year we often see lots of family and friends for various gatherings, often for prolonged periods of sitting and eating. While that is fun, sometimes we can miss out on our regular exercise routine because we are preparing, shopping, or prepping for meals. It means this is often the season of a lot more calories in and a lot less calories out. So how do you get your family moving?

There are fun ways to incorporate movement that can include the whole family and might actually get you all laughing together. Remember, movement shouldn’t be a chore or a bore. It can and should be fun.

Eleven Tips for Getting your Family Moving around the Holidays

Walk Between Dinner and Dessert

As an added bonus, taking a walk often gets you out of dish duty.

Play Charades or Another Physical Game

If your family needs a real challenge, show up this year with Twister.

Stretch Between Courses

Think of this like the seven inning stretch. Get up and get moving. Pick gentle stretches that feel good. Some shoulder shrugs or a group hip flexor stretch.

Dance While Washing Dishes

Put on some fun music and dance while you clean up. I think […]

Get MovingMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:07:47-05:00

Menstrual cramps or gas

This is my mom. The woman who created the chicken walk.

If you ever asked me if I knew the difference between menstrual cramps or gas, I would have definitively said, “Yes.” With that opening line, you probably realize that this blog may come with a little TMI. I’m going to talk about my bowels more than you may care to know about. I’ll try to make the process at least mildly entertaining. But if you don’t have any menstrual or bowel trouble you’ve been trying to sort out, you can feel free to skip this one. However, if you have ever confused menstrual cramps for gas, keep reading.

Menstrual Cramps or Gas

I’m familiar with gas pain. As a kid if you had gas pain in our house my mom would make you get up and move. She called it the chicken walk. You would make big, exaggerated movements and get your knees up really high, practically pulling one knee up toward one shoulder and then repeating on the other side as you strutted around the room. If you weren’t doubled over in pain from gas cramps it would have been […]

Menstrual cramps or gasMaggie Downie2019-07-31T20:45:46-04:00

Exercise of Life

We can exercise, which I highly recommend, but it’s hard for one hour a day of exercise to unravel eight hours in a chair. Even if your day isn’t spent in a chair, however you spend most of your time will start to be reflected in your body. In addition to making specific time to move every day, considering your body in space throughout the day can help you feel better in your own skin. Check in at different moments. If your back hurts when you are doing something is there a simple change you can make to relieve the pain? If you neck hurts can you make a subtle adjustment? Exercise yes. But make movement and noticing your body during simple movement the exercise of life.

Try to notice your body in the following scenarios:

When you brush your teeth, do your shoulders crunch up to your ears?

While washing dishes does your pelvis bump up against the sink?

When you bend over to scrunch your hair, do you tuck your tailbone?

When […]

Exercise of LifeMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:49:03-05:00

Just Get Started

I went to Waterford High School, where I think I was lucky to have a number of really good teachers. One of my favorites was my junior year English teacher, Gail Dimaggio. She set up classes like Socratic seminars and asked us to think about what we were reading. It’s hard to teach someone to think, but that typically seemed to be her goal. One of her regular reminders was to “just get started.”

She told us that starting is always the hardest part, but once you start to write a paper the doing gets easier. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were wrong. It’s not the waiting that’s the hardest part. It’s the starting. Mrs. Dimaggio was right. There are […]

Just Get StartedMaggie Downie2018-02-14T17:44:43-05:00

Failure is Always an Option

We put so much emphasis on failing. Lately, I keep seeing articles about revisiting our thoughts on failure. Basically, failure is all the rage. And I love it. In a nutshell the articles point out that if you never fail it’s possible you aren’t trying. Arguably not to fail is to fail. We tend to put so much emphasis on success, a term we struggle to define. What makes a person successful—happiness, money, free time, a family, a home, the right outfit? There is no standardized definition of success. And, perhaps contrary to popular belief, failure is always an option.

Thanks to Merriam Webster for the following:

Success: 1) the act of getting or achieving, wealth, respect or fame. 2) the correct or desired result of an attempt.

Failure: 1) omission of occurrence or performance. 2) a state of inability to perform a normal function. 3) lack of success.

I don’t want fame. So, I guess in not achieving fame, I’m successful in my goal. I don’t think wealth is a substantive sign of success. It’s a superficial form. Maybe it’s a way to tally and compare, but wealth is not guaranteed to bring you joy, or a life without pain, or to make […]

Failure is Always an OptionMaggie Downie2017-12-29T19:44:01-05:00