Some considerations for the older exercise enthusiast

I will offer here just a short entry that conveys an important point that came up in one of my physical therapy sessions. It's actually a very commonsensical point that, on later reflection, leaves me wondering why I hadn't thought of it earlier.

On undergoing some physical therapy for a back problem that recently cropped up (I havent blogged yet about this problem or the therapy I got for it, since it seemed a muscular thing that was likely to pass quickly) I described to the therapist my exercise regime. While she thought what I was doing was generally good--meaning I was leading an adequately active lifestyle--she seemed a little put off by the variety of exercises I was doing.

To backtrack a little, during the time I had that appointment we were still doing our modified P90X routines. Taken together, we probably had a repertoire of 30 or 40 different exercises we were doing twice weekly at that time. That's quite a lot of variety and the variety, I think, played some role in keeping that program interesting.

Now, contrast that variety with the exercises the physical therapist gives you. They start out with some really simple "granny exercises" that I'm reluctant even to call exercises. You do those for a week and come back, then they give you some more. And so on until you're doing a larger selection of exercises that are a bit more demanding.

Why do they do things this way? Why start with such easy exercises, gradually building up to something more challenging?

It's pretty simple, actually. They do it this way because they want to find out if there is some exercise that's causing you problems. Only after checking, following a certain period of doing the exercises, whether they are having some detrimental effect, do they add more. Essentially they try to isolate exercises to see if there are any that cause problems.

Now, that's something I can relate to well. If you read my blog entries about my shoulder problem you'll know that I couldn't put my finger on exactly what precipitated it. In fact, it would have been very difficult to do that because I was doing about 20 different types of exercises when the problem came up (that was before we started P90X, when I was mainly using the Soloflex for strength training). I found myself wondering at times how I might conduct some experiment to see if I could determine whether one of those exercises was bothering my shoulder more than some other. But I couldn't really think of a good way to do that, so I just kept on with the same set of exercises.

Anyway, back to my more recent physical therapy sessions--the ones related to some back pain I've had recently. The therapist was a bit hesitant to fully endorse our P90X routine. Thinking about why that might be, in concert with reflecting on how the physical therapists I've consulted with introduce exercises in phases, revealed why she was hesitant: they attempt to try and isolate exercises that might cause problems and to stop those that do. They sometimes provide alternate exercises in place of the offending ones. In short, the way physical therapists approach exercise is to build up a routine for you gradually, using only exercises that your body seems to tolerate well.

That sort of approach helps guard against ending up in a situation like mine, where you have developed some problem but can't quite identify what caused it. Or, it helps prevent those sorts of injury to begin with. Granted, this might seem pretty self-evident, but it comes to me as something of a revelation.

Addressing why it comes as a revelation uncovers the difficulties involved in developing an adequate exercise regime. Of course the simple way to develop an exercise regime is just to get a book or DVD like I did and follow along. Ideally, though, what we should probably be doing is getting a book or DVD and working into it gradually: just do a couple of the exercises for the first two or three weeks and see what the effect are, then add a couple more. Continue like that until you've added a sufficient number of exercises to suit your goals.

I did not follow that path, obviously. Whether through impatience or perhaps naivete about how the exercises could affect a body the age of mine, I can't say. Likely a combination of the two.

Which brings me to the moral of this entry. When you start a new exercise routine, and I think this applies especially to those approaching my age, you should think seriously about working into it gradually. Try just a couple of exercises for two or three weeks, then introduce a couple more. And so on, until you've developed your full regime. Doing so may help you to avoid injury and allow you to spend less time in doctors' offices or in physical therapy, and more in actual fitness pursuits.

Farewell (but not good riddance) P90X!

As I've been mentioning for some time now, we've been planning a move away from the modified P90X routine we started doing earlier this spring. As I hinted in my last blog entry, that change was slated to come very soon. Well, it didn't come as soon as I thought it might: I decided to give my back a little extra healing time, so we actually took about 11 days off from our upper-body workouts before doing our final P90X workout for this season. We did the last P90X routine this past Friday, and started today (the subsequent Monday) with one of the new Power 90 routines I found. Before I say more about the new Power 90 routines, though, let me recap a bit about the P90X routines we were doing.

I will miss our modified P90X routines. I usually find a really rigorous workout like that refreshing--though a small percentage of the time I do find it tedious and have to force myself to do the workout. Overall we enjoyed it and got some good health benefits from it. It's definitely not for everyone my age: you have to already be in pretty good condition before you start, or else be ready to take things really slowly. But for us it worked pretty well. I should probably reiterate on that score that, before we started our modified P90X, we had been working out with weights and some calisthenics twice weekly for several months. So we were prepared to step up the effort a bit.

So, though I'll miss our P90X workouts, I can leave them behind without much regret because I know we'll be going back to those routines. As I've previously blogged, those routines do have a place in our annual fitness plan--that place is in the cycling off-season. At the moment, I foresee us going back to our modified P90X perhaps as early as late November--or by Christmas, at the latest. We'll continue using the modified P90X until probably late February or some time in March. Then we'll switch to some less rigorous routine, perhaps back to what we plan on doing for the rest of the summer.

Which brings me to a key topic of the current blog entry: the routine we'll be doing until late November or so, and possibly for most of the year for the foreseeable future.

As I mentioned in my last entry, we are using parts of another fitness regime developed by the same company that does P90X--the regime is called Power 90 (sometimes just P90, sans the letter X). Once again, Tony Horton leads the exercises and, once again, we are excising out portions of the regime that suit well our fitness needs and goals.

The company that puts out these fitness videos/DVD's is engaging in a common capitalist tactic I would call marketing obfuscation. The idea is to put out a whole lot of products very similar in character and name, but to not be very forthcoming with information about what differentiates these products from one another. This same practice plays a huge role as well in computer/tech marketing, but it is found in some degree in many capitalist enterprises. The tactic causes consumer confusion, which results in poorly-informed spending, which, the instigators of the policy understand, will result in more sales of their products and thus greater profits. Maybe I'll write a more philosophical entry at some point expanding further on this matter, but for now I just want to point out that there are a number of products sold by this company that go under the label Power 90 and I'm not entirely sure how they relate to one another.

But, by sleuthing a bit I've managed to find two that I think will suit our off-season fitness needs pretty well. These two focus on upper-body strengthening and have but a very few leg exercises. And both are advanced phases of the regimes from which they're excerpted. Both go under the label "sculpt" as well. One is level 3 and 4 from Power 90 sculpt circuit, and the other is level 5 and 6 from the Power 90 sculpt circuit.*

Though both routines are called Power 90 and they seem to be numbered consecutively, they were obviously produced at different times (don't ask me to explain beyond stating that this is an example of marketing obfuscation). The 3-4 sculpt routine looks to me to date to the 1990's, while I'm pretty sure the 5-6 sculpt routine was produced some time after the turn of the millennium--perhaps as recently as 2003 or so.

Though I've viewed both routines in their entirety, we've so far only actually done one of them: the 3-4 sculpt routine. I'll leave a fuller report for later, but preliminarily I can say that I like the routine we've tried and, furthermore, I can observe that this is a lot more cardio-intense than the P90X routines we were doing. I was pretty winded throughout the first two thirds of the workout, which I never experienced doing our modified P90X. We'll do the 5-6 sculpt routine this Friday, so I look forward to seeing how that will go.

I want to observe at this point that I was pleasantly surprised by the Power 90 routine we did today. I had just been thinking to myself that we should find something for upper body exercising that would be more aerobic, like perhaps rowing. Well, this Power 90 routine ended up being pretty intensely aerobic, so it looks like I ended up getting what I'd hoped for.

So, for the next few months we'll be doing only these two routines twice a week (on Mondays and Fridays). As for what the future holds, I can say that, in the longer term, I'm looking forward to the time when I become less reliant on exercise videos. I view myself at the moment as very much in the learning phase regarding this sort of exercise: I need to just try a lot of different routines and techniques and find out what works and what does and doesn't go well together. At that point, I should be able to cobble together my own regimens using bits and pieces from the various things I've tried and using knowledge gained through practice. More on that later.
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* Why do they combine levels like this? If 3 and 4 are essentially the same level, then they should be called just level 3 or level 4. Oh yeah, I just explained why . . . marketing obfuscation!

The costs of fitness

I just want to blog a bit today about the costs of fitness--hidden costs, if you will. The cost/benefit ratio of fitness needs to be taken into account, and the way things change with age need to be addressed. Let me begin by describing what prompts this blog entry.

As will be evident from posts I've made about a shoulder problem that cropped up some months ago and possible connections between that problem and my recent fitness endeavors, exercise, while improving health in some ways, can be degrading to it in other ways. Put another way, I could ask whether the sort of fairly decent upper body conditioning I have at the moment is worth the cost of the physical therapy I've had to undergo for the shoulder problem?

Ok, I only paid $25 (my standard co-pay) to undergo physical therapy, so it's not like I broke the bank or anything by doing that. But I do need to point out that, while physical therapy made an overall improvement in the problem, it didn't go away altogether. My shoulder still bothers me a bit. And I have to admit that now even my left shoulder (previously unaffected) is giving me a bit of discomfort at times.

What raises this cost/benefit question for me more urgently in recent weeks, however, is some back pain I've begun to experience. I'm also now undergoing physical therapy and some chiropractic manipulation for that, which introduces further costs. It leaves me asking myself: would I be having these problems and their associated costs if I were not exercising? Or maybe not exercising as intensely?

Unfortunately, I have no clear answer to that question. I do have to admit that I've had back pain off and on over the years, so that's nothing new. The shoulder pain is nothing new either, as I've stated previously: as long as 20 years ago I had some problems with it. But I could be asking whether the exercise is exacerbating some long-term problems, and thus whether not exercising, or perhaps exercising with far less intensity, would help.

How could it help? Not exercising would give the body a chance to rejuvenate any damage it has sustained from exercise. But long-term abstinence from exercise is bound to have health detriments like heightened cholesterol, perhaps heightened blood pressure, and the like.

It so happens that the timing is good for testing the other option--the option of lowering workout intensity. I have finally found a couple of exercise routines that are slightly shorter than the P90X routines we now use (ca. 40 mins. as compared to ca. 55 mins.). They are also correspondingly less intense. These are from among the Power 90 routines, by the way. And, finally, cycling season is now here in full swing, so we want to cut back a bit on upper-body exercise anyway.

The scenario we now have planned is to do our last session of P90X (DVD 12) for the season this Friday. Then, for the next few months, we will be doing the lighter-duty Power 90 routines on Mondays and Fridays. I plan to stick with those routines until probably late fall, when we'll cut way back on cycling--maybe doing as little as 15 minutes per day on the stationary bikes.

The upshot of all this? I'm the guinea pig. I know now what have been the effects on a 50 year old body of a pretty rigorous exercise regime. It's had both positive and negative effects, both health-wise and cost-wise. Now we'll see what the positive and negative effects of the less rigorous routine will be. In the final analysis, this should give me some reference points from which to better judge the cost/benefit ratio. Look for more on this over the coming weeks.

Future entries? We've begun doing our workouts first thing in the morning rather than in the evening. My wife says it helps her keep alert and awake during her workday. I may well post an entry on the issue of workout scheduling in the coming weeks.