Winter is No Excuse

It’s hard to get enough exercise in the winter.  Even if you’re a skier, skater or snowshoer, conditions for winter sports aren’t always good enough to count on them.  The weather can even prohibit daily walking.  You could join a gym or use an indoor swimming pool IF you have access to one, but few do, so here are some alternatives that anyone can do.

l.  Find a new interest, or start studying a subject you’ve always wanted to learn.  Mental stimulation and concentration speed the rate at which the body burns its calories, so you wouldn’t have to worry about putting on extra weight for lack of exercise.
I learned about intense mental concentration from The Amazing Kreskin in the seventies when I interviewed him for a book I did on celebrity exercise.  Others have told me the same thing. Working artists also told me that their involvement in making art every day was as healthy for them as regular exercise would be.

2.  Start singing every day.  It doesn’t matter whether you can carry a tune or not.  Most people have a natural urge to sing, and in your own home, no one cares how you sound when you give in to that urge.  Singing can be energizing and physically satisfying, but best of all it helps you lift your upper bodies and breathe deeply, which engages and exercises your inner torso.  The great opera star, Jan Peerce, told me that he marched in place every day before he sang, bringing his knees up as high as possible, because it kept his circulation in top form.  And what about jumping rope?

3.  Best of all, make up your own exercises to do every morning before you get dressed.  They don’t have to be anything special – whatever warms up your muscles and makes you feel good is what you should do, but do it every day.  

And if you need some help getting started try my “Rise and Shine” video, which is a series of seven different exercise segments, 2-4 minutes each, for each day of the week, done to delightful music.  I think you’ll like it.  

Enough people did when it first came out that it hit #l on the Amazon.com best selling exercise video in 200l.  

And it’s still available!   

Grandma Ann’s Gift

Happy New Year to all my fans and faithful blog readers!

I don’t usually deviate from what I have to say about exercise, but the following email that one of my daughters sent the rest of the family (sister, brother, children, nieces, nephews and me) about Christmas gift spending is family humor and love that I’d like to share. It was a surprise to me to be thanked for nurturing creativity in the family while I’m still alive, and it sort of erased the concern we had for one in our group who lost a job just before Christmas.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that I believe in peoples’ creativity to find a way to get exercise every day on their own without spending a lot of money (you don’t even have to buy my videos if you don’t have the $$ – you can borrow them from the library). I believe it’s possible to explore your creative instincts and come up with the solutions to most situations.

We had the best Christmas ever, and the one who lost a job has come up with the most creative website I’ve ever seen. Check it out and you should be able to activate your own creativity: www.constructivedisorder.com

Here’s what started it all:

We have all been the recipients of some “special” gifts from Grandma Ann. Those gifts, although we have often made fun of them and wondered just how she reached that “that’s just the thing for”….moment, have been the source for many great mom stories not to mention good heartfelt Christmas morning laughs.

In an effort to expand on and continue a long standing Grandma Ann Christmas tradition, I urge you all to take a moment and in these bleak economic times, look around your house and experience a ‘Grandma Ann, -that would be just perfect for ____ moment’ and experience the joy of re-gifting.

For those of you who have enjoyed summers in the Grandma Ann Making Room, I would suggest you draw inspiration from the many hours she has spent nurturing your creativity and artistic vision and, as “make something out of nothing artists”-in-training, I would like to invite you to enter our first annual Madame Pointsetta competition. (Madam Pointsetta was a doll I made for a granddaughter one Christmas that she cherishes to this day – a masterpiece if I do say so myself.)

Rules of the competition:

Make a gift for someone without spending any money other than the cost of mailing the item to the recipient. Drawings, paintings, artwork of any kind are acceptable. Gifts will be posted on the internet on Christmas Day.

A special thanks to Grandma Ann for the real gift she has continued to give all of us – teaching us to make something out of nothing.

So you guessed it. Grandma Ann grew up in the Great Depression. And my very successful exercise system is what I created in 1950 and perfected over the years when I realized my toes were too long to dance on pointe.