If you want to be healthy, inside and out, incorporating exercise into your life is important. Research has shown that regular physical activity is a major contributor to effective weight loss, improved physical health and emotional well-being. Ready to finally commit to getting in shape?
"No thanks to the Coronavirus, or should I say the fear mongering, my gym is closed until further notice. Sadly I have no gym, but still working out at home. Resistance bands are on order. "
"Went on an itty-bitty walk this morning. Yesterday, I remembered a fitness tracking app that I had downloaded in the spring of 2018. What's cool is that it still contains records of walks that I recorded then. Now, I am starting at a lower fitness level, but it gives me something to work back towards, hopefully relatively quickly.
Of course, I have to be patient with myself and respect my body. That bears repeating, as I can sometimes be unkind with my body, which is not favourable to healing. So with that being said, the reason I hope to relatively quickly get back to my 2018 ability (i.e. time and distance) is that back then I was hoping to improve my fitness/walking endurance and ability. But first things first, I have to start where I am -which is what I am doing.
On that, I am doing well with my itty-bitty walks. Although I started at a very low ability level, I have seen improvement at every walk. Here is the breakdown:
Walk 1 - Stopped at the beginning of the yellow curb line on 4th ave/corner LaSalle
Walk 2 - Turned left onto LaSalle, stopped at beginning of yellow curb line before 3rd ave
Walk 3 - Crossed the street at 3rd and turned back and end of yellow curb line
Walk 4 - Walked further past 3rd and crossed street at telephone pole to the bus shelter.
Considered taking a quick, 1 minute rest but did not, instead turned back around
and walked home.
Walk 4 was pushing myself perhaps a tad too much, if only because of the challenge posed by stepping up and down the curb on each side of the street. My walking poles add security, but given that my wrists, shoulders, thumbs have been acting up, I don't want to put too much pressure on them. My hope is that my strengthening my lower body and core, I will use my hands, wrists, shoulders and arms less to support myself in just walking around.
A few thoughts emerge in response to this situation and reflection: 1) I should continue to prioritize strengthening my lower body and core, 2) I need to continue focusing on good posture and gait when walking inside and outside the home so as to improve lower body/core strength and function, as well as reducing pressure on my upper body to compensate, 3) when I am ready to add or replace an exercise in my routine, I should include one to improve my ability to go up and down stairs, and 4) I should integrate upper body strength exercises -eventually and slowly.
Why 'eventually and slowly'? Because I already have a lot to work on and I don't want to pull focus from the primary goal by overloading it. For now, 5 exercises per day/5 days per week is enough. And I am already seeing such improvement! I feel so much more secure just walking around. I feel like I am capable of improving fitness and ability, which is a HUGE gain. Self-efficacy for the win (FTW)!
Additionally, I don't want to forget another area of improvement that's been on my radar: Strengthening my LS adductor. By doing so, I will better be able to ride my bike. Remember, this was the impediment to my using my bike last summer, as my left knee kept wanting to fall outwards, making it difficult to pedal.
Many things to work on, many goals! But don't forget, the important thing is to exercise consistently and regularly. The fundamentals of my Commitment remain the same: 5 exercises, 5 days per week, for 6 weeks. Once this Commitment is over, I will create another. This, I pledge.
:)
Note that I wrote "the fundamentals(...) remain the same". That is because I have made a few tweaks to the specific exercises on my list after noting some challenges last week. (To be clear, the 'tweaks' entail replacing certain exercises with others that will more effectively strengthen the target muscles.) As we know, my left glute has trouble firing, and although initially I thought I should just continue with the Clamshell and Glute Bridge exercises, making sure to focus on activating my LS glute through focus, sensory feedback and visualization, I faced an unfortunate reckoning.
One night last week, I woke up having trouble closing my hands, with my left hand being particularly sore. I tried slowly closing and opening my hands, but I got all clammy almost passed out at one point. I tried going back to sleep, but then my thumb, index and middle fingers started to tingle and go numb. I didn't understand what was going on, Chris woke up, as I was starting to panic. My fingers started to lose feeling completely, I didn't understand what was going on, and I worried that my circulation was being cut off for some reason. Because things were more pronounced on the left side, I worried that it might affect my heart, and simultaneously worried because I am left handed and feared that something was damaging my hand. Chris was rubbing my back to calm me down, and that's when he noticed that I had MASSIVE knots on the left side of my back, mid- to -upper back and shoulder/neck. There were some on the right side, too, but not as pronounced as on my left. As he rubbed and now massaged my back, the right side tingling subsided significantly as did the left side.
Chris worked on my back for a while, and when we went back to bed, I noticed that if I folded my hands onto my tummy, as I usually sleep, the tingling and numbness returned until I straightened out my arms by my sides. When Chris did some quick googling about this, the conclusion we came to was that something I had done led to these incredible knots in my back/shoulders/neck that pinched the nerves leading to my hands, especially on my left side. And that's when I realized the extent to which I had been compensating for my glute weakness with my upper body -which in itself is not strong. That's when I realized I needed to find alternative exercises that would better activate/target my glutes, including the LS one, without putting pressure on my upper body.
Next day, I did some research and found a wonderful video full of exercises and stretches, including very useful education by a physiotherapist. This is where I learned about the various ways that the body will try to compensate for 'lazy' or sleepy glutes, and how to deactivate or circumvent the compensators. For those who might benefit, here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh44DSmJtLw
So now, I will re-write and re-frame my exercise list by emphasizing the target area/muscles:
1) LS medius gluteus - initially clamshell, alternative standing side leg extension
2) Both glutes - initially glute bridges, replaced by glute squats
3) Hip Flexor - initially standing knee raises, additional or alternative sitting knee raises followed by lift with strap/scarf followed by slow, controlled descent
4) Drop foot - initially toe raises with strap, additional or alternative of same but keeping toes raised as long as possible with slow and controlled descent
5) Core - Abs lean back or tummy vacuums. Discussed adding bird-dog progressions, but now removing this possibility because puts too much pressure on wrists. Will consider integrating dead-bug progressions.
In summary, #1 & 2 replace the original exercises, but #3 & 4 are but giving the possibility of harder exercises in the interest of seeing better gains. #5 removes a potential source of trouble and leaves the door open to integrating something new that may bring better gains. For now, though, there is no pressure beyond the new list.
So now, go rock this day and this week! ONWARD!
"
"While working out the abs hasn’t been the main area of focus, I have been still running during these times. I still plan to meet this goal, but working out in general has still been achieved "
"I start with twice a week and hopefully go to thrice a week . But the key is just really to e able to do free style very comfortably at the end of 1500m. Slowly...and put in the hours..."
"slow cooker beef stew ✅
Flexibility exercises ✅
Day off work out - but spent two hours doing tik tok dances which had me sweating ✅
walked dogs ✅
Face is still bad - changing diet, no alcohol, 5L of water a day to keep an eye on it. Start saving for £1000 a go laser treatments (yay 😑) as it is now making me very insecure. Continue microneedling nose every other day"
"400 yards is out of my quarantine range so instead I did 20 x 175 yard runs. Got a great sweat in but need to get back into running because it wasn’t easy for me. "
"Yesterday was my 1st rest day of Week 2. Today, Sunday, I did my exercises -3 sets of 10-12 reps of 5 exercises. Earlier, I did my stretches and I went on an itty-bitty walk. There's progress there too! "
"Today I went for a 20 minute walk with my cat. He did incredible, and we both got exercise. I also spent about 20 minutes stairclimbing and another 30 minutes cleaning. "
"Was feeling a bit sick this week (hencewhy goal in workouts not reached).
Having Dota crisis as well, so practiced fundamentals a lot and didn’t play competitive. "
"its been a real change in how I am able to accomplish my weekly goal because of the quarantine period. I have found that biking has been my favorite exercise so far"
"HIIT again today, still can't go 100% on this, but definitely stretching myself. I think I'll have an elliptical available for next time so I'm not doing back to back difficult cardio workouts all the time."
"Day 2: leg day
- Split squats very challenging
- couldn’t do the shrimp squats
- leg raises on core felt good
- some rep counts were too high for me."
