I’m in terrible shape, and one of my goals for this break is to improve that shape. I have gotten consistent in the last month in doing light exercise — I make it a point to get out for a walk every morning, nothing too strenuous, just getting into a good habit.
The last few days added a few other things on top of my routine: we bought some big bags of topsoil to repair a scar in our yard. So I was ripping up these 50 pound bags, dumping them out, and raking soil over everything. It was no big deal. Ten or twenty years ago I could have done this little chore and not even noticed. Now, today, that extra effort on top of my daily walking routine has me feeling it. My quads are burning, and this piercing ache is spiking up my back.
What I need to do this morning is get back on the horse. Not literally, of course, instead I’m going to go take an easy amble at an unchallenging rate for a while. Again. And again. With the prospect of doing it more for the foreseeable future, and trying to ramp it up a little bit every day.
My feelings exactly:
That said, I’m about to go on another stupid little walk.
It (usually) beats the alternative.
I never thought yard work could be dangerous. Five years ago I was lugging bags of soil and mulch in my yard. I hadn’t done that in a while and went about it rather cavalierly. I picked up a heavy bag of wet mulch, did a too rapid twisting motion, and the next thing I knew it felt like a sharp blade had sliced through the back of my right knee. I howled in pain and limped back inside. My doctor suspected I’d torn my meniscus. She did an MRI on the knee and confirmed it. It didn’t require surgery, but I had to wear a knee brace for three months. Walking was agony. Part of the healing process is to keep moving, but nothing extreme. Even now, I have to be careful how I use that knee. Jogging is in the past. Walking and biking are OK. Now, I’m always aware of that knee. Even sitting here at my computer, my right knee lets me know it’s there.
Tough but doable. Walking is a start. I’m 76, I had a heart attack 8 years ago. Started with slow walking, diet revision, blood pressure control. After 18 months I began strength training, in a small group with a coach, 3 times a week. By later mid-life, a good many of us are physical wrecks. Muscles are the key, the rest follows. Traditional repetitive exercises don’t work the whole body, but can be good cardiovascular workout. Serious strength training is key.
Yep, getting old sucks. And it’s not a short term condition…well, we hope not.
I’m a long time “brisk” walker (4 – 6 miles a day) as my exercise. However, I have so many minor spinal injuries I can’t count them all, plus 25-year-old broken ribs, so occasionally my back gets in a kink. That’s where physical therapy saves the day for me. I suspect PT isn’t readily available in Morris, MN, but I also suspect that the exercises I have been taught to do that relieve my back aches are readily available on the inter-tubes.
So if you’re not already doing it, do some hip internal rotation stretches before you get out of bed, then a set of standing lumbar extensions, hip hinges, and the plow for 4 or 5 minutes. Repeat throughout the day.
I threw my back out horrendously a few years ago, badly enough that I had to go to the ER to have it dealt with, and ever since then I’ve had to 1) do a comprehensive set of lower-body stretches every night and 2) go for a walk every day, even if it’s just 15 minutes on the treadmill. If I don’t do both of these things without fail, I regret it the next day. They’re not optional for me: they’re essential maintenance, like brushing your teeth or getting enough fibre.
The stretches require me to get down on the floor (on a yoga mat), and I once read some fitness expert saying that after a certain age, everyone should get down on the floor and then get back up again every day, just so they know they can. I once heard my across-the-hall neighbour calling out for help: she’d fallen off the couch, between it and the coffee table, and didn’t have the strength to extricate herself. Whatever else happens to me, at least for now I know I can get up off the floor.
robertmatthews @ #5 — Ditto. My physical therapist has strongly recommended that I make it a goal to get down on the floor to do some exercises everyday. Thanks to the arthritis (hopefully that’s what it is) in my hip, I can have a fairly painful experience getting up from the floor, but if I get down and do some floor exercises, I feel much better.
My cycle:
1. Ow, getting old sucks.
2. Few months of cardio and weight training.
3. I’m strong again! Age is just a number!
4. Slack off a few months.
5. Back to 1.
Except for lower back pain, which always follows a day of lifting chores.
I walk around the neighborhood with my dad most days. Yesterday we saw a senior with a walking stick getting his own exercise in, though considerably slower than us. Respect for him, since it clearly required extra effort on his part, and reinforces the importance of me doing it at my younger age.
Well, you’re a biologist, so you know about this sort of stuff in the abstract.
Keep remembering those sacks and beware weekend warrior syndrome!
I do weight training exercises with my physiotherapist twice a week, deadlift, shoulder press and squats (‘the Onero Program). It’s made a huge difference, when I started I could deadlift 24 kg, I worked up to 40 kg, aiming for 45 kg. It particularly helps your knees.
As others have said above, stretching every morning is the only way I get through a day of lifting and moving around freight. An electroshock TENs unit is great for anything that is sore after work. Usually a day or two of shocking the pains gets them under control.
Patrick, slightly different things.
You refer to achieving pain relief; PZ refers to improving musculoskeletal function and general body toning via exercise.
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Anecdotally, I remember back in the day one of my work colleagues went to a fortnightly chiropractic session; claimed she needed it. For years on end.
(Clearly, not exactly therapeutic)
Hand weights are good. It’s something you can do sitting down. You can be inventive. You can avoid pain or revisit it as wanted or needed.
As far as exercise goes I would highly reccomend your equivalent of Bushcare – getting out in nature and working to remove invasive weeds, learn the local native plants and plant them and tend to them in the wild or as close to a wild as you have there. It certainly helped me a lot and still does and there’s something very intangibly “special” and “right”, for want of a better word, in being out in nature working with and helping nature. Gather the Japanese call it “forest bathing” albeit slightly different thing.
68yo mate of mine who lives in Tenerife and drinks more than me if that’s even possible does a 1km swim in his pool every morning, followed by a 7km beach walk, just visited him. Extremely important to keep, not necessarily fit, but mobile. Rowing, cycling, just do something. And if your musculosceletal issues prevent a jog, get those weights going, squeeze those balls in your fist. If you can walk, try to find a route that’s up and down rather than flat, everything helps.