Play to Your Strongest Weakness

You know how they tell you to prepare for a job interview by anticipating a question along the lines of “What’s your greatest weakness”, and that a good approach is to come up with a weakness that’s really a ‘Strength in Disguise’. Something like “I work too hard” or “I tend to be a perfectionist.” Telling your prospective employer how you deal with this ‘weakness’ demonstrates what a winner you are!

That’s kind of what we’re doing this week on MoveGirlGO — applying the ‘Strength in Disguise’ idea to our workouts. Instead of saying ‘Play to your Strengths’, we’re saying it might be appropriate to ‘Play to your Weakness.’

My greatest weakness affecting my workouts is my borderline osteoporosis, and painful joints like knees and shoulders.

Female_skeleton_with_ostrich

To turn my greatest weakness into a strength, I’ve learned to work-out smarter. I’ve eliminated exercise that’s non-beneficial to bones and joints — no spinning, cycling, or swimming. I avoid any kind of wild and violent thrashing-around movements during classes. And finally, I avoid jerky or fast up-and-down movements with weights.

I’ve tried to combat my weakness by coming up with a winning combination to build stronger bones. Now my workouts primarily concentrate on:

  • Weight-bearing exercise — lots of daily walking on the treadmill, and urban hiking.
  • Careful placement of all my limbs during aerobics.
  • Slow-motion weight-lifting using heavier weights, to the point of muscle failure.
  • Putting stress on muscles with Pilates and yoga-type moves.
  • Using foam rollers to apply pressure to muscles, especially muscle “knots”.
  • Lots of stretching — 10 minutes or more — after each exercise session.

[Img.Src: female skeleton with ostrich 1829]

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner