March 2008 Archives

In my dreams. . .

Jeeze, has it been 11 days since I last posted something here? You're going to assume, of course, that I've also been derelict in my fitness regimen and simply didn't want to pen one more pathetic post about how hard it's been to get to the gym. But, no! I've been keeping up rather nicely with my workout schedule. Three days last week -- cardio, resistance, yada yada yada -- and Monday and Thursday this week (Wild game on Wednesday derailed my plans: beer, not better-fication).

Anyway, today I actually did some stretching -- a little pretend yoga after my normal meditation session (surprise, surprise: I've had a Vipassana meditation practice for the past 10 years), which got me sweating and yearning for more flexible hamstrings, especially). It got me thinking about the whole flexibility thing and the "functional fitness" approach to keeping limber in my middle age. As Fernando Pages Ruiz explains in this EL story from July/August 2002, an aging body like mine stiffens with age because it's lost a good deal of its moisture content and is more prone to cellular micro-injuries that leave layers of scar tissue that further restrict movement. A regular stretching routine, he points out, stimulates the production of tissue lubricants and helps muscles rebuild themselves with a healthier cell structure.

There's really no right way to stretch, of course -- which is of great comfort to this geezer, who can't actually touch his toes without curling up in a fetal position. (This morning, however, I was able to touch the floor without bending my knees -- with my feet spread out just about as far as they would go. Whoo-Hoo!)

The key, as I understand it, is simply to extend your muscles gradually beyond their point of comfort. When I do this, it feels pretty good, though it takes a surprising amount of effort to get there. Monday I'll get another opportunity to practice what Ruiz preaches.

Maybe I should take up rowing.

The great thing about Minnesota is that the weather is always pretty reliable. It'll be mercilessly frigid for three months every winter and then insufferably sweltering (with mosquitoes) for two months every summer. It's never a surprise -- just an inexorable drifting across our meteorological River Styx (above, with apologies to Dante, et al.). But we love it here.

I'm a little obsessed with the weather today because our annual mid-March blizzard dumped 3 inches of slushy snow on the city last night, and the commute this morning was pretty slick underfoot and periodically wet from above. The trees were already shedding their snow cover from last night, and my usual arboreal bliss became more of a blitzkrieg, as great lumps of the wet stuff kept thwacking me about the head and shoulders as I walked. Plus, some doofus in a Pontiac hit a puddle just as I was passing by and gave me a refreshing slush shower. Yum.

All this misfortune, however, cannot dampen my joy at getting back to the gym last night after a week's hiatus (yeah, yeah . . . whatever). It was the first really mindful workout I've done in a while -- five-minute warm-up, 15 minutes of sweaty spinning on the bike (avg. heart rate: 122), five-minute cool-down, and then 25 minutes of upper-body work with the resistance machinery.

And I'm not at all sore today (we'll see about tomorrow and DOMS). I pushed myself a little on the lifting stuff, but not too much, and felt great afterward. (One odd and totally irrelevant curiosity: I've run into my local Hennepin County commissioner three times in the past four days. Friday night in the park while walking home from work, Saturday night at a local bistro, and last night at the gym. Weird. I could never get in touch with this guy when I was covering politics.)

Anyway, this all once again has me thinking about the amount of time one needs to really get a decent workout. Part of the challenge for me is that I won't even bother to go to the gym unless I can carve out at least an hour, because it's become apparent to me that I can't do what I think I need to do in less time than that. But that just might be me: I always like to combine cardio with strength training and each takes at least 25 minutes. And if I want to do the kind of stretching and flexibility work I need to do, I'd need another half hour (the extra five minutes is how long I need to get up off the floor).

In my not-so-exhaustive research, fitness experts like Greg Landry recommend 30-60 minutes a day. I'm getting at least that much -- if you include my rather leisurely commute -- but they tend to emphasize that any amount of time moving your body is time well spent. The point being: Don't abandon your regimen simply because you can only carve out 30 minutes at the gym. (There is that 14-minute Tabata workout, which frankly scares me.)

Anyway, I guess that's a lesson I need to embrace. Maybe I can't do the whole cardio-lifting-stretching (ha ha) thing every time. So, get off your butt (he told himself) and just do one of the three. Sheesh!

Sometimes it helps to know your limitations.

True to form, when I finally got to the gym on Friday I completely overdid things -- piled on the poundage and lifted to failure, just as I had promised myself. By Monday, my upper body -- especially my arms -- felt like I'd gone 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali in his prime. (OK, the idea that I would last 15 seconds in the same ring with Ali -- even in his current condition -- is pretty ridiculous, but you know what I'm saying.)

I know all about the dangers of overtraining, the delusion that if you just push yourself past your limits you'll get healthier and stronger faster. So, I have nobody to blame but myself. What was curious, though, was how my body's response was so delayed. Why was I in so much more pain on Monday than I was on the weekend? It reminded me of my old basketball-playing days, when my legs would feel crippled not on the day after the game, but two or sometimes three days later. Another few days and I was back to normal -- clanging wide-open 15-footers and blowing layups.

The answer to this particular mystery is something called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (whose acronym, DOMS, sounds enough like "dumb" to be instructive), which peaks 48 or 72 hours after your foolishness at the gym. All that pain comes from the microscopic tearing of your muscle fibers and connective tissue at the cellular level, Kermit Pattison explains in this January/February 2006 story in EL. And this tearing can be exacerbated by eccentric exercise, the lowering of weights in a strength-training regimen. This makes sense to me, since the pain is most pronounced on the inside of my elbows and my forearms -- the muscles most affected by lowering the weights during bicep curls. (Foolishly heeding my inner Schwarzenegger, I added about 10 pounds to what I usually lift on this machine.)

The result was that I couldn't really straighten my arms without feeling some fairly excruciating pain. It seemed as if the muscles had constricted; the only way I could loosen them up was to (painfully) extend them with my elbows locked and palms facing up and then pull my fingers toward my body. The good news is that, even as I suffer through DOMS, my poor muscles are growing stronger. It just doesn't seem like the smartest approach.

Talk about failure (see previous post). Five times this week I have schlepped my workout gear across the icy Mississippi to the office and four times I have schlepped it back home with me, unused. As I've previously mentioned, reality intervenes: domestic responsibilities, work deadlines, the list goes on. At least I've been able to get in a good long walk every day (though March in Minnesota is the cruelest month of the year -- 20 degrees one day, below zero the next). And, as the Mayo Clinic points out, 30 minutes of walking each day is enough to boost my immune system, clean out my arteries, and increase my stamina. What more could a geezer want?

Well, resistance training, if you must know -- which has its own rewards. So, the good news is that tonight the planets somehow have aligned and I will head downstairs after work and do all that stuff I've been thinking about -- but not doing -- all week. It all makes me think maybe I should get up an hour earlier and haul my butt to the gym before work in order to get back on track. You know -- show a little discipline, get into a good rhythm, really commit to this stuff. Ha. Ha. Ha.

It was kind of slow going this morning, due to the patches of glare ice hidden beneath a couple of inches of new snow. Lots of slipping and sliding on the sidewalks. At one point I could envision catastrophe -- "Geezer breaks hip while foolishly walking to work in snowstorm" -- but, instead of panicking, I just slowed down and practiced a little walking meditation. That's when you mindfully place one foot in front of the other and breathe: heel to toe, heel to toe, heel to toe (you get the idea).

This worked surprisingly well until a bus roared past me on the Ford Bridge and mindfully showered me with slush. After that, I picked up my pace a bit. Anyway, I haven't been able to get to the gym yet this week (reality intervenes. . .), so I'm jazzed about getting back on the machines.

I particularly want to try out this whole idea of lifting to failure on the resistance machines. The idea, as I understand it, is that you're supposed to put enough weight on the machine that you can't actually complete the reps you set out to do (say, three sets of 10 reps) with good form.

This approach is not without controversy, as strength training icon Charles Staley points out here. There's a potential for injury and for developing bad form. For me, the idea of not completing my reps with acceptable form has kept me from advancing very far in the amount of weight I'm lifting. Tonight, I'll try adding some poundage and see what it feels like to fail.