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.