We scheduled this trip to be here for the opening of the tapestry exhibit that includes work by Jackie’s teacher. We were completely unaware that Lollapalooza would be here this weekend as well.
I must say though, I’ve really enjoyed the sidewalk views of girls barely wearing party dresses and glitter. Particularly amusing are the girls unaccustomed to wearing such short skirts and shorts—detectable because they keep trying to tug the garment down, in a vain effort to cover their butt.
Every time before, when we were ready for lunch after visiting the Art Institute, the Berghoff had a line, but this time not, so here we are. Both of us are drinking their session ale, called Globetrotter. Good. Refreshing. Jackie likes it better than All Day IPA.
Jackie and I are in Chicago for the weekend, staying in the Palmer House. We came to attend the opening of a tapestry exhibit at an art center in the West Loop, put on by the American Tapestry Association. The exhibit includes a piece by one of Jackie’s teachers, So Jackie particularly wanted to see it.
Jackie looking at a different tapestry, this one showing a woman with a dinosaur
After a period where I was being a bit casual about them, for the past few months I’ve been doing pretty well at getting my workouts in, and I didn’t want to let that go, so I went to the fitness center here at the Palmer House. It’s pretty good!
I cranked through a slightly reduced version of my usual morning exercises, then went to the main room of the fitness center for the workout proper. They had an adequate set of kettlebells, so I did two exercises with those:
With a 35 lb (16 kg) kettlebell I did 10 x 20 swings emom
With a 20 lb (9 kg) kettlebell I did 4 x 5/5 clean&press reverse ladder
Then I found a barbell and loaded it up with a pair of 45 lb plates and did 2 x 5 deadlifts. I’m super out-of-practice with deadlifts, and would not have wanted to do more weight or more reps, but that much was okay.
Having done the tapestry thing, we’re looking to do some other Chicago stuff. Probably the Art Institute. Maybe one of the boat tours where they talk about the architecture. Maybe the Field Museum. Maybe something else! We’ll just see.
Me, thinking about how to season today’s fjord trout: Cumin and turmeric and maybe Kashmiri chili powder or hot smoked paprika? One of these days I’ll cook fish without cumin, but today is not that day.
Jackie: Why would you cook anything without cumin? I mean, maybe something… Maybe brownies?
Me: I dunno. Brownies with cumin sound awesome. Maybe spaghetti sauce?
Jackie: I dunno. Spaghetti sauce with cumin sounds pretty darned good.
So, I guess we’re just going to go on putting cumin in everything, until we think of something it doesn’t go in.
Last week’s salmon, with a honey-mustard-ginger-soy glaze, which did not, in fact, include cumin
I didn’t look closely enough to see if there were any more buds to bloom over the next few days. Usually at about this time we get a day with no lilies, and then another one or two flowers a couple of times before they’re all gone.
I resisted the urge to write about this a few months ago, when it was first published in the New York Times, but instead of the urge passing, it has persisted. I’m finally giving in.
The article is about things you can do to hurt your back, beginning with this thing to be avoided:
“… what we euphemistically call the B.L.T.,” or the bend, lift and twist, said Dr. Arthur L. Jenkins III, a neurosurgeon in New York City who specializes in spinal surgery.
Doing all three actions at once, whether by shoveling snow or extracting a child from a car seat, “maximizes the stress on the disc, making it more likely to rupture,” Dr. Jenkins said. “As a spine surgeon, I would never do it.”
I have never met Dr. Jenkins, but I bet it is false that he never does a bend, lift, and twist movement. Everyone, everywhere in the world, does this movement all the time. And it is almost always harmless, especially when the weight is very low.
The odds that you’re going to hurt yourself by bending and twisting to pick up a tissue that missed going in the trash can are pretty small. Perhaps not zero—if you are out of shape, or overweight, or have a pre-existing back injury, it does become possible to injure yourself that way.
Obviously, if you’re going to pick up a heavy weight, you always want to do that mindfully. Set yourself up facing the weight, so you don’t need to twist. Instead of bending at the waist, hinge at the hips. Then lift.
However (and this is the first half of my main point): You’re going to repeatedly do this, over and over again, over your whole life. It’s simply unavoidable.
If your toddler is about to run into traffic you are going to bend as far and twist as much as necessary to snatch him up. If you need to get your child out of his car seat, and the only parking space you can find doesn’t leave you with anyplace to stand where you can reach in and get him without twisting, you’re going to bend and twist. If there’s something heavy in the back corner of the closet, maybe you’ll spend 10 minutes shifting all the clutter in front of it so you don’t need to twist to reach it. But if there’s something light back there, you’re just going to bend and twist.
The other half of my main point is this: If you’re going to do something repeatedly, over and over again, over your whole life, you should train for that thing.
I do not mean that you should start doing your deadlifts with a bent, twisted back. I mean, you should build habits, movement patterns, and appropriate strength to do what you need to do.
I would recommend starting with videos by Mark Wildman. For this action in particular, here are two. The first is a non-twisting version of this movement, that you can use to safely build the strength:
Once you’ve got some strength, move to a lighter weight and then do this version, which first adds some rotation, and then adds more rotation:
Note that the ideal version of this exercise avoids both the bend and the twist! Instead of bending, you hinge. Instead of twisting, you rotate. But in the real world, you’re going to end up bending and twisting all the time, because nobody can be perfect about this stuff all the time.
Avoiding a whole category of movement simply makes you less ready—less capable—of doing that movement when you do it accidentally, or when it becomes necessary to do it on purpose.
