Recently in flexibility Category

I put about 20 miles on the Schwinn on Saturday, running various errands with My Lovely Wife. That helped to work out the DOMS (delayed onset muscled soreness) lingering from Thursday's impromptu hoops session. By Saturday morning, both knees were a little creaky, my shoulders were achy and my left ankle didn't seem quite right.

So, rolling out of bed Sunday morning for a 9 a.m. yoga class actually wasn't as crazy as it might have seemed had I not been so stiff. MLW has been attending a Wednesday noon class at our neighborhood yoga studio for a few weeks now, and she had suggested (a bit tentatively) that we might want to check out Sunday's free session, which promised to give us the basics we need to start a home practice.

I was skeptical: Not because I didn't think I could break my lay-around-with-the-newspaper routine for one Sunday morning, but because I've never been very good at yoga. I'm not at all flexible, I have a great deal of difficulty following the instructor's movements, I don't inhale and exhale at the right time, and I never really relax into most of the poses the way you're supposed to. Other than that, I'm pretty much a yoga master.

Still, I'm all about trying new stuff (ha ha), so off we went Sunday morning to Nokomis Yoga, where we met the instructor, Solveig Corbin, and three other neophyte yogis. Solveig got us all situated on our backs with our legs up on a pile of rugs so we could do a little meditation before we got around to the stretchy stuff. This is the part of yoga I really like -- the relaxing part. Next, she showed us a couple of poses we could do while seated in a chair, then a lunging pose and one that had us on our backs with our legs to one side and then the other (not so much, in my case). Then more meditation (whew!) and that was it.

This particular kind of yoga (I forget the name, of course), Solveig explained, emphasizes holding the poses for a long time -- a discipline that didn't bother me too much, since I can't get into the poses very well anyway, but it didn't sit too well with MLW. On our way home after the session, she said she'd probably stick with her current teacher and her style, which doesn't tax her bum knee so much. Besides, she's been working on the Sun Salutation pose, which, once mastered and practiced every day, will allow you to live forever (or so the story goes).

I'm not angling for immortality, just a bit more flexibility, but I might actually try this stuff, in one form or another, more than occasionally. It can't hurt, right? 

Footloose? I don't think so.

A mysterious pain in my left ankle has had me scratching my head lately. This, of course, is the sort of thing that happens when you reach a certain age -- you go to bed feeling fine and wake up with a crick in your neck or a cramp in your thigh, and you spend the morning feeling vaguely troubled about your body's treasonous behavior until something somewhere else on your anatomy shifts or stretches or otherwise compensates, and the pain disappears. I've been waiting for this to happen to the ligament/tendon/muscle on the top right-hand side of my left ankle for a week or so, but no such luck.

This is the ankle I broke on Christmas Day, 1987, when my older brother, Michael (who never really liked me), drove me out of bounds after I made a nice sideline catch at the first-down marker during our annual football game. The altercation snapped a couple of bones, which a surgeon later repaired with a couple of well-placed screws. But the ankle has never been particularly mobile since then, and this latest development has me wondering whether the entire mechanism is starting to break down.

This would be a bad thing, because my stiff, immobile ankles, I've recently learned, are uniquely positioned to sabotage my calves, knees, back and even my shoulders. That would explain my creaky left knee and tight left calf, I suppose. Next up: back and shoulder troubles? Neck problems? Maybe it travels all the way up to seize my left brain, destroying my facility for detail while leaving me annoyingly creative.

So, I've been dorsiflexing like crazy lately, trying to stretch out my Achilles tendon and give my ankle some room to maneuver. It hasn't relieved the pain yet, nor does it seem to have had much effect on my tight calf, but it does give me something to do while I wait for my tea to brew.

The next step, according to this video from trainer extraordinaire Bill Hartman, is to work the calf muscle and the fascia on the bottom of my foot with a tennis ball (if I can find one in the garage). All of these muscles and tissues are connected, it seems, so I can't just dorsiflex my life away and expect anything to change.

I'll try to remember that when I hit the gym tonight.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Everyone who knows anything about fitness tells me that I need to do three things regularly to stay in shape: cardio, strength training and stretching. I've been pretty religious about practicing the first two, but positively negligent about the third. So, I've been doing some research lately to learn more about how to work this stuff into my regular workouts.

It's not easy. I'm just not very flexible. To illustrate: If I bend over at the waist and keep my knees  unbent I can, with some discomfort (make that considerable discomfort), reach down to about the middle of my shins. My lower back and  hamstrings are about as flexible as a mortgage banker.

I can take some comfort knowing that most geezers my age don't fold and unfold like a jackknife. Still, I'm committed to remaking my whole body, not just my lungs and familiar muscle groups. And that means getting more limber. To that end, my wife and I will begin attending a yoga class next week, and I'm vowing publicly to begin stretching a little every day -- even at the gym!

I've armed myself with a few beginning stretches that I've actually done in the past, so it doesn't seem too exotic or painful. I'm going to take their advice and spend about 20 minutes on the mat tonight and see what happens. We'll see if I can do 20-20-20 minute split between cardio, stretching and lifting. Maybe someday I'll be able to touch the tops of my shoes.

Worshipping the rubber mat.

Bicycling on the Ford Bridge this glorious morning, I spotted a lone rower (sculler?) resting on the perfectly calm river below. It was a perfect Zen moment: a man balancing exquisitely in his knife-thin craft, oars extended, a water bug on the wide expanse of the Mississippi. . . .

I didn't do any rowing last night at the gym (it's a little hard on my twingy lower back), but -- as promised -- I finally did mix up my usual routine a little.  Ten minutes on the Elliptical Death Machine got my heart pumping pretty good, after which I moved over to the rubber mat area of the gym. There, I stretched out my quads, my hammies (ouch!) and my lower back (cobra pose) before launching into some ab work that I'm sure entertained the multitudes on the cardio machines behind me.

First, the prone cobra, which is supposed to help spinal mobility, but probably made me look like a beached whale. Then, the reverse crunch, which could be interpreted as an inability to rise after a bad fall. And, finally, the side crunch, which I frankly don't even want to talk about.

 Most people don't like to exhibit their awkwardness in front of a crowd, and I'm no different. I like to amble confidently from station to station at the gym, pretending that I really know what I'm doing. So, this whole idea of flopping clumsily through some floor exercises in a public manner is a bit of stretch (sorry) for me. I've always thought exercise, like prayer, ought to be done in private.

But, I guess I should start thinking of the gym as a sort of exercise church (The P.T.'s are the ministers?) and myself as an acolyte. That might work -- growing up as a Midwestern Lutheran, I never had to talk, really, about what I was doing in the pew or what I believed might be my reward. So, in that sense, it was a lot like my current gym experiences.

Of course, I haven't been to church in a long, long time. Hmmmm. . . .

Anyway, yesterday's workout reformation (sorry) inspired me to climb on the mysterious stair-climbing machine, which stands in the back of the cardio room like -- well -- a pulpit (sorry). I'd successfully avoided the urge to use this machine, fearing that my creaky knees would not survive more than a couple flights of mechanical stairs. But, it actually wasn't too bad on the knees -- tough on the calves, but not too bad on the knees.

Which would've allowed me to give thanks in a certain way, but I decided not to go there.

Watch your back, Jimmy.

Remember the scene in It's a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart's sitting at Martini's bar and prays for deliverance from his financial crisis only to get slugged by Mr. Welch, the school teacher's husband? (OK, so you never saw the movie . . . but stick with me here; I'm about to make a point.) Well, I've been lecturing myself for months about doing more abdominal work at the gym -- not that I need it -- and when I finally get serious about the ab crunches and twists and lower back and core work, my back seizes up like nobody's business.

Wednesday night's sweat-a-thon had me doing back extensions, "total abdominal" crunches, and moving 90 lbs. this way and that in the swivelly chair thingy. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But yesterday I climbed out of bed feeling a good deal older than I am, and today I'm stiff as a board.

This is the kind of thing that continually vexes me. I'm supposed to push myself through my strength training routine by upping the poundage and working my weaker less-strong muscle groups, but it's hard to do that without waking up the next day feeling like I've been hit by a truck. And, because I don't particularly enjoy that sensation, it tends to persuade me to stay more inside my comfort zone, which will prevent me from reaching my fitness goals -- whatever they are.

Yeah, yeah, I know: I should be incorporating a regular stretching routine into my weekly workout regimen. (Maybe on the off-days between my cardio-strength training sessions?) And, I'll tell you, I wouldn't mind spending a little time today working out these kinks in my back and shoulders and neck. But there's work of the income-earning kind to be done. Maybe tonight.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to treat and prevent back pain, as Gina Demillo Wagner points out in this helpful feature in the June 2007 issue of EL. The piece argues, in fact, that the best way to bounce back from a back injury is to get back into the gym, because only through strengthening your core will you head off future back troubles. This, of course, is a piece of advice I'm going to respectfully ignore today.

The stretching tips, however, sound pretty good to me right now. That and a dose of homeopathic arnica might be just the thing.

I've been riding my bike into work recently, but today, which promises thundershowers after work, I decided to hoof it. My lovely wife will drive me home after the gym if the forecast holds true.

I had almost forgotten how delightful it is to walk. Indeed, a couple of blocks into my trek, I realized that I'd almost forgotten how to walk. My gait was uneven and I actually felt a bit off-balance as I navigated the sidewalk and curbs on my way to the park. I was trying to slow down and enjoy the sights and sounds of the morning, but it seemed like my legs wanted to move at a faster pace than my eyes and ears.

Anyway, by the time I crossed Hiawatha Avenue and entered the park, I had settled into a pleasing rhythm. The falls loomed near, and I was curious to see how high the creek would be after all the rain of recent days.

Normally, I can hear the falls by the time I enter the park -- maybe 50 yards away -- but today the rushing water was drowned out by some ear-splitting mechanical noise coming from somewhere beyond the creek. So, my moment of quiet contemplation at the falls (at the spot where President Lyndon Johnson stood in 1964; his shoe prints are in the cement -- really) became more of a micro-moment. Until I realized that my calves were tightening up.

This is the thing that always kills me when I try to run (well, that and my recalcitrant left knee), and I try to remedy it by stretching it out. So, there I am: standing in LBJ's footprints overlooking majestic Minnehaha Falls, 100 decibels of industrial noise destroying my already poor hearing, leaning into the rock wall to stretch my calves.

I'm never sure how to stretch most parts of my aging body, but I generally am able to loosen my calf muscles with very little effort. Apparently, they get tight because of micro-tears in the muscle, which inhibits blood flow. Anyway, they feel fine by the time I leave LBJ's little square of concrete, though my ears are still ringing from whatever machine was making all that racket. Don't these people have any respect for the urban wilderness experience???

(Wilderness addendum: I saw two caterpillars on the asphalt path in the park and a Cooper's Hawk soaring over the river, a perfect blend of the pedestrian and the glorious.)

After my Crapmobile episode on Monday, I was anxious to get back on my regular workout schedule, so last night I hit the gym after work and went through my regular routine -- except I built in some time between the elliptical machine and the strength training room to actually do some stretching!!!! It's a stretch, of course, to say I did much loosening of the muscles -- a little hamstring here, a little quadriceps there -- and it was on to the weight room.

The dirty little secret about Craig's fitness regimen is that I really like how it feels when I'm lifting weights. The tightness in the muscles is a sign that something's going on in my body that might be a good thing. I don't get the same buzz from the cardio stuff -- though all that panting can't be a bad thing -- and stretching . . . well, is just stretching.

I've been taking the advice/challenge from SW, my fitness guru, who's been encouraging me to throw on some extra weight, and now I'm finding that the 80 pounds on the lat pull-down thingy that a couple of weeks ago left me exhausted after two series of 10 reps doesn't start feeling impossible until I'm nearly done with the third series. I'm up to 120 pounds on the bench press and think I can move it to 130 next week. I did 115 on the chest press thingy last night; I hadn't ventured beyond 105 before.

This all seems like a good thing: I'm noticing a little definition on my upper body and arms, and that's encouraging. I'm not aiming for some statuesque physique (I'd have to do something about my abs, then, wouldn't I?), just hoping to ward off the floppiness inherent in middle-aged saggification.

Still . . . . Check out this piece on geezer bodybuilding in today's New York Times. It seems that a growing number of oldsters are taking up the sport (?) and entering shows around the country. These are guys who start out just wanting to get back into shape and then start thinking maybe they and Schwarzenegger have something in common. Could this happen to me?

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.