The end is in sight

Well, after all the hard work and fitness opportunities, we have one more big day. The moving day! We will be moving to our newly remodeled/painted condo this weekend. As I see it, moving is a great opportunity to get a strength and cardio workout in! Lifting boxes and furniture is not for the weak. Especially when you don't have many people to help. If you're like Damian and I we also try to get it all done in warp speed and that's were the cardio comes in. I mean really, who wants to be moving the entire day!? I think that may be our type A personalities or impatience kicking in. I am super pumped and ready for my weekend workout. I am anticipating soreness since I haven't moved since last year. Hopefully, we can stop moving and enjoy one place for a couple years. For those of you who don't know, I recently tallied up my moves. Since 2001, I have lived in 11 different apartments. Now that's a whole lot of boxes, stairs, and sore legs! Sounds like fun, here we go...

Possibilities

Since I am always on the look out for fitness related movement, I find it appropriate to talk about the possibilities of remodeling a condo. As most people know, there are slight benefits to housework. However, most people would have to be fairly sedentary to really see the benefits from traditional housework. The way I see it, at least it is movement, which is better than nothing! Damian (my husband for those of you who don't know) and I recently purchased a condo. We have decided to do some light remodeling to the interior. This includes painting, which I have the pleasure of doing the majority. I find this task can be mind-numbing unless you turn it into an aerobic and strength workout. I have also found a way to incorporate ballet moves. Instead of constantly bending forward with the paint brush or roller, simply do plie's or sumo squats. Now you are incorporating your leg muscles and not just your back over and over again. Another option is to start working with your non-dominant hand so that you balance your arm movement and don't end up too sore on one arm. I have also discovered you can incorporate balance exercises by standing on one leg while painting. I suggest making sure you are working on a large portion of the wall so if you loose your balance you don't mess up your paint job. See... there are endless possibilities to turning your mind-numbing paint job into a full body workout.

Does anyone else have exercises they can think of? I have many walls to paint! I will try them out and post my results.

Reaching the End

Well, I have come to the end of my Europe tour. What is more appropriate than finishing up in Amsterdam? From a fitness prospective, I found a couple yoga studios but not much else in the sense of "traditional" gyms. By far Amsterdam has been the biggest bicycling city I have visited (see picture of commuter bike parking). To be fair, I didn't notice much "working out" aside from cycling. I don't think many people think fitness when thinking about Amsterdam. It is a very nice city with many canals and great architecture. It was fun walking around the winding streets. The favorite "thing to do" it seems is sitting at a coffee shop. Unfortunately, the goal at the coffee shop doesn't seem to motivate people to be active. I gave in and decided this leg of the trip was more for relaxation and site seeing.

It has been fun trying to discover new fitness trends around Europe. However, I have concluded that the U.S. seems to be ahead of the curve when it comes to fitness. Now, if we could only get the majority of Americans to use the fabulous fitness and nutrition options we have available, maybe we could do something about the over-weight and obesity statistics.

Ein Prosit

I made to Munich! First observation there are lots of cyclists and it is very clean. It is very interesting that most of the cities I have visited use cycling as the main mode of transportation. Maybe the US should adopt this trend. It is a much greener approach. Although, I think that would require everyone to go back to driving school. I think one of the main reason I don't ride a bike everywhere is because I don't trust drivers. Europe has very strict driving requirements before one can obtain a license. One of my friends in London said, they are not even allowed to roll back one inch in a manual vehicle when coming off a stop or they fail the driving test, wow! One might say to me, you have always lived in big cities...Yes, this is true and big cities typically have more congestion and smog/pollution. Plus after visiting Paris, I am convinced that the US could adopt the cycling trend. They have tons of people, cars, cyclists, and seems to have figured out how to co-exist.

Munich seemed to have an even better solution for cyclists. To reduce the number of accidents lets get them off the street. Brilliant! All the walking paths have a side for cyclists and another for pedestrians. If you are walking on the wrong side you will realize it very quickly because you hear a bell and if you don't move you will get hit. I moved in time but there was increased heart rate and jumping involved.

After almost a month of traveling I needed a workout myself. So I tried Anusara Yoga in German. It was interesting not knowing what the teacher was saying. It is amazing how much verbal cuing helps in yoga. When you use visual cuing I think it takes away from the mind body relaxation connection. To constantly have to watch the person in front or around you puts you just a couple seconds behind so you always feel like you are rushing through the poses. Ultimately the class served it's purpose, which was to loosen up and get some blood pumping. In the end, I felt better!

Outside of yoga, I decided to take a walk in the English Garden. It is a huge park which stretches alongside the river Isar. The park is the largest city park in Europe and larger than New York's Central Park. It was beautiful! I also had the pleasure of observing the coolest thing ever. Surfing in a river! If you had told me that people surfed in a river in Munich I wouldn't have believed it. Well seeing is believing. Check out this video.

Roma

I found Rome to be an interesting city. On one hand, it is a typical city with fast paced people, trash and conveniences. On the other, you could be walking along and BAM run right into a ruin. Historically it is one of the coolest cities. Fitness wise...well let's just say, we are still in Italy. I did see more runners. I could never be certain if they were Italian or expats. I did stumble upon an outdoor track facility and there were people running and working on body weight exercises, which was cool to watch. The picture to the right shows the "old school" park circuits that I used to see everywhere in parks growing up. I wonder what ever happened to them. I always thought it was a good workout. If you look at the right side of the picture below you will see a high jump with crash pad and track. I was looking down at the track facilities from a hill on the way to the Baths of Caracalla. It felt very Olympic/Gladiator (not the dying part) all at the same time. Given that Rome is a big city, I thought there would be plenty of yoga studios and gyms. I picked up a business yellow pages of sorts and looked up yoga. To my surprise there were only four studios listed. Guess where they were located...yep, you guessed it, in the touristy areas. They were amongst the Gucci, Prada, and who could forget The Hard Rock Cafe. I am not suggesting this to be a bad thing...it just figures. It may be that the Italians don't hold exercise in a studio or gym at high priority. However, they realize that other countries do, so they offer travelers their usual conveniences. Unfortunately, my goal was to see what the locals did for exercise. I think in Rome, I may have had to travel outside of the main city center to really see the fitness regime of a local Roma Italian.

The Italian Job

Well, not much fitness going on so far in the traditional sense anyway. I found that in Bologna no one was really concerned with working out. Although, I did see a couple poster sized ads for the institute naturale. It seemed this place had yoga, meditation and some healthy workshops. That was really the only thing I found. Again, there was a lot of walking done by all. My general observation was that Bologna was a much fatter city. The most disappointing fact was that the there were at least three McDonalds in a 1.5 mile radius and they were always packed. I wish I could say it was only tourists, but this time, it seemed it was a little bit of everyone. I get that it is inexpensive but so is pasta! It really showed on the children of the area. They were all overweight and borderline obese. This inspired me to go to our hotel's "fitness center" and get a work-out in. Well, not much working out happened. I don't know why I thought when the hotel said they had a fitness center it was going to actually have fitness equipment. It turned out to only have an arm bike, which was good considering my foot. However, not much of a workout. The rest of the room consisted of a lounge chair because after the strenuous arm bike one must lay down. Then if you've really exhausted yourself, you can take a nice steam and/or shower. This fitness center had more spa amenities than fitness equipment. Ha, ha, ha...my mistake, what was I thinking? Why would anyone want to actually workout in the fitness center? :-0

The next area of Italy we visited was Cinque Terre. This is where I saw a lot of non-traditional exercising. All the locals were carrying something up and down stairs all day. They were out fishing or rowing boats. None of the locals seemed to be overweight. Cinque Terre fit all my expectations of Italy. All the locals were working hard and constantly cleaning. The only time they stopped was 1-5pm everyday for their siesta. This is a well deserved rest! Then they wake up and continue until 10-11pm. It starts all over again the next day. Even with all this hard work no one seems to complain. They are always saying ciao to one another and seem to be in a cheerful mood. Cinque Terre encompasses a particular lifestyle one that would be an adjustment for me but seems to be the only place the locals could imagine living.

Next, I will be observing Rome. I am hoping to find a yoga studio or gym to explore.

To be continued…

Paris part duex

I decided to observe the Parisians as we were walking around. I have discovered that their daily lives entail a great deal of exercise. Of course there is plenty of walking, which tends to be the case in many cities. In addition, they have a bicycle rental program that is widely used by everyone; Parisians, tourists and tipsy people post bar hoping. I also saw some swing dance classes being held along la seine (river). The coolest form of exercise I observed was the Friday night rollerblading. I was told that they meet every Friday and Sunday. I was able to look up more information on their website, www.pari-roller.com. I looked at the course and it ended up going right by where we were staying, which was quite convenient. I believe the course is typically about 18km and gets fairly aggressive toward the end. It is suggested that you have some rollerblading experience. I didn’t realize that rollerblading was so big in Paris. Apparently, it just never went out of style like in the states. I remember my rollerblades and how much fun I used to have in them. It was a great form of exercise but didn’t seem like you were working so hard. This is probably why it has done so well in Paris. Maybe they will make a come-back in the states.

I would like to touch on the rumor that Parisians are so healthy yet they eat heavy food and smoke. Well, from my experience there are a couple differences. They are not obsessed with fast food like Americans. However, there were McDonalds, which was disappointing but they were typically full of tourists. It seemed that the meals were very different than I had expected. I was expecting what I had heard…heavy creamy food. What I found was small breakfast, which consisted mostly of bread, juice, tea or coffee. Lunch was a salad, cured meat and/or cheese and a baguette. Dinner almost always included mixed greens and was an appropriate proportion. Of course there is always wine with dinner but our wine glasses in the U.S. are HUGE! We can typically finish a bottle of wine with 4.5 glasses in Paris it took us 8 glasses. It seemed most Parisians ordered a half carafe with dinner. In the end, I think they do a better job of the cliché, everything in moderation. They also take their time eating and really enjoy their food and company. Dare I say it…maybe we could learn something from the French.