So I'm back to commuting on my bike a couple of days a week and feeling smugly superior to the fume-choking car-commuters out there. As any cyclist knows well, traffic lights are the scourge of the devil when trying to commute by bike: there's no buzz-kill like a big 'ol red light blocking your way when you're zipping along a street with a slight downgrade. And if you're trying to put together a formal workout, well, let's just say it's tough.

But not impossible: as important as it is to be systematic when you exercise, there's also something to be said for randomness; that is, the presence of unpredictable elements in your exercise programs. I think that's a good part of why team sports can be such a kick: you have to pay attention, you have to be present and think while you play, or you'll get juked by someone who IS paying attention. At game's end, you may have burned the same number of calories as the guy on the treadmill in the cardio room, but you feel more alert, more awake, more alive at the end of your workout because you've had to be mentally active as well as physically active, tracking a ball and the movements of nine other guys with your eyes, shifting directions, sprinting, jumping, jogging.

In an ideal world, you aren't just repeating the same movements and activities every time you work out, but are actually learning something as you exercise, even if it's just a slight variation on an exercise you already know (see the video below for some thoughts about that). 

But you don't have to be doing team sports to work some randomness into your workouts. Cycling among smoking, texting, cell-phone chatting LA commuters especially, has randomness built-in. You have to react to the moron pulling out at the wrong moment and the idiot who flicks his cigarette butt out the window at you. You have to start and stop on a dime. You have to race for the light lest you get flattened once it turns red. I find that if I push at every light all the way till I hit the next one, I actually get a good interval-style workout in even if the interval lengths change every time. Back in the day, this used to be called Fartlek training. It's been largely replaced with formal interval training, but shaking up your distances, times, rest intervals, and intensity levels in this way has its place as well. Life, after all, doesn't take place in convenient one-on, two-off work/rest segments.

Couple of great movement ideas from Nick Tumminello in this video (you may have to sign up to access it but Nick doesn't inundate you with Spam, don't worry). Nick seems to have a knack, as it were, for rethinking and refining exercises most of us know to make them just a wee bit better, or at the very least, a wee bit more interesting and a wee bit less old and tired. Great examples: I like his version of the "super-dog" in the video below; I often have trouble coaching my clients to stabilize the lower back while moving at the hip joint in bird-dog iterations; this movement makes it happen. As a plank-variation junkie, I also appreciate the front-to-side version he demonstrates here; it's a killer. If you think planks are easy, give this one a try...