Interesting new study on muscle and aging

Here's information from an interesting study on muscle growth and aging--some food for thought for those of us over a certain age. The upshot of the article seems to be that, past a certain age, muscle tissue does not grow and/or repair itself. Of course the study indicates that they're working on ways to overcome that limitation.

As you'll see, the older subjects in the study are quite a bit older than this pentagenarian, so the study seems to apply in a limited way to folks my age. I already had some sense of this since I'm certain that since I started my strength training about 1.5 years ago I've gained some muscle. Probably muscle growth rate would have been much more dramatic had I been doing what I'm now doing at, say, age 25.

But it was never and will never be my goal to get anywhere near any body-builder sort of figure. I'm happy with where I'm at in terms of physical form and have begun to cut back a bit on the intensity of my strength training sessions (more reps with lighter weight).

Anyway, without further ado, the article about the study:

Scientists Discover Clues To What Makes Human Muscle Age
Main Category: Seniors / Aging
Also Included In: Biology / Biochemistry; Stem Cell Research; Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 01 Oct 2009 - 0:00 PDT

A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified critical biochemical pathways linked to the aging of human muscle. By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself.

The findings will be reported in the Sept. 30 issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, a peer-reviewed, scientific publication of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

"Our study shows that the ability of old human muscle to be maintained and repaired by muscle stem cells can be restored to youthful vigor given the right mix of biochemical signals," said Professor Irina Conboy, a faculty member in the graduate bioengineering program that is run jointly by UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, and head of the research team conducting the study. "This provides promising new targets for forestalling the debilitating muscle atrophy that accompanies aging, and perhaps other tissue degenerative disorders as well."

Previous research in animal models led by Conboy, who is also an investigator at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center and at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), revealed that the ability of adult stem cells to do their job of repairing and replacing damaged tissue is governed by the molecular signals they get from surrounding muscle tissue, and that those signals change with age in ways that preclude productive tissue repair.

Those studies have also shown that the regenerative function in old stem cells can be revived given the appropriate biochemical signals. What was not clear until this new study was whether similar rules applied for humans. Unlike humans, laboratory animals are bred to have identical genes and are raised in similar environments, noted Conboy, who received a New Faculty Award from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) that helped fund this research. Moreover, the typical human lifespan lasts seven to eight decades, while lab mice are reaching the end of their lives by age 2.

Working in collaboration with Dr. Michael Kjaer and his research group at the Institute of Sports Medicine and Centre of Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the UC Berkeley researchers compared samples of muscle tissue from nearly 30 healthy men who participated in an exercise physiology study. The young subjects ranged from age 21 to 24 and averaged 22.6 years of age, while the old study participants averaged 71.3 years, with a span of 68 to 74 years of age.

In experiments conducted by Dr. Charlotte Suetta, a post-doctoral researcher in Kjaer's lab, muscle biopsies were taken from the quadriceps of all the subjects at the beginning of the study. The men then had the leg from which the muscle tissue was taken immobilized in a cast for two weeks to simulate muscle atrophy. After the cast was removed, the study participants exercised with weights to regain muscle mass in their newly freed legs. Additional samples of muscle tissue for each subject were taken at three days and again at four weeks after cast removal, and then sent to UC Berkeley for analysis.

Morgan Carlson and Michael Conboy, researchers at UC Berkeley, found that before the legs were immobilized, the adult stem cells responsible for muscle repair and regeneration were only half as numerous in the old muscle as they were in young tissue. That difference increased even more during the exercise phase, with younger tissue having four times more regenerative cells that were actively repairing worn tissue compared with the old muscle, in which muscle stem cells remained inactive. The researchers also observed that old muscle showed signs of inflammatory response and scar formation during immobility and again four weeks after the cast was removed.

"Two weeks of immobilization only mildly affected young muscle, in terms of tissue maintenance and functionality, whereas old muscle began to atrophy and manifest signs of rapid tissue deterioration," said Carlson, the study's first author and a UC Berkeley post-doctoral scholar funded in part by CIRM. "The old muscle also didn't recover as well with exercise. This emphasizes the importance of older populations staying active because the evidence is that for their muscle, long periods of disuse may irrevocably worsen the stem cells' regenerative environment."

At the same time, the researchers warned that in the elderly, too rigorous an exercise program after immobility may also cause replacement of functional muscle by scarring and inflammation. "It's like a Catch-22," said Conboy.

The researchers further examined the response of the human muscle to biochemical signals. They learned from previous studies that adult muscle stem cells have a receptor called Notch, which triggers growth when activated. Those stem cells also have a receptor for the protein TGF-beta that, when excessively activated, sets off a chain reaction that ultimately inhibits a cell's ability to divide.

The researchers said that aging in mice is associated in part with the progressive decline of Notch and increased levels of TGF-beta, ultimately blocking the stem cells' capacity to effectively rebuild the body.

This study revealed that the same pathways are at play in human muscle, but also showed for the first time that mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase was an important positive regulator of Notch activity essential for human muscle repair, and that it was rendered inactive in old tissue. MAP kinase (MAPK) is familiar to developmental biologists since it is an important enzyme for organ formation in such diverse species as nematodes, fruit flies and mice.

For old human muscle, MAPK levels are low, so the Notch pathway is not activated and the stem cells no longer perform their muscle regeneration jobs properly, the researchers said.

When levels of MAPK were experimentally inhibited, young human muscle was no longer able to regenerate. The reverse was true when the researchers cultured old human muscle in a solution where activation of MAPK had been forced. In that case, the regenerative ability of the old muscle was significantly enhanced.

"The fact that this MAPK pathway has been conserved throughout evolution, from worms to flies to humans, shows that it is important," said Conboy. "Now we know that it plays a key role in regulation and aging of human tissue regeneration. In practical terms, we now know that to enhance regeneration of old human muscle and restore tissue health, we can either target the MAPK or the Notch pathways. The ultimate goal, of course, is to move this research toward clinical trials."

Other co-authors of the EMBO Molecular Medicine paper include Abigail Mackey at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Per Aagaard at the University of Southern Denmark.

The National Institutes of Health, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the Danish Medical Research Council and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research helped support this research.

Source:
Sarah Yang
University of California - Berkeley

Anyone who knows someone that's suffered a major injury--say a bone fracture--after age 40 or so will not be surprised by the results of this study. Those I've known to suffer such injuries at that age or later often never fully recover the strength or flexibility they formerly had in the affected area.

On a final note I need to mention that my shoulder pain is returning now that we've resumed strength training. Were I pressed to point to what's causing it, I think I'd have to say the push-ups. But I do so many different types of exercises when strength training that I'm not sure I can pinpoint the cause without doing some in-depth testing.

Also, I'm beginning to look into Pilates for men. That might be a good supplement and/or alternative, at intervals, to our strength training. More on that in a future entry.

Inspiration for a new winter cycling regimen

I'm usually on the look-out for ways to vary our fitness routine. Why? So that keeping fit won't become something boring, some kind of trudgery. The latest on that front is an article I actually read some time ago (at least 6 months back I'd say).

The original article I read had kind of a gaudy title--something like "stay fit exercising six minutes a week." Despite the snake-oil-salesman sound of it the article was based on a medical study that investigated the effects of interval training. Even more to the point, the subjects in the study rode exercise bikes. So it seemed to offer some promise with respect to my idea of regularly "changing things up" in our routine and a way to possibly cut back healthfully on our regimen for part of the year.

Anyway, without further ado, here's an article similar to the one I read:

Fitness 'takes 6 minutes a week'

Monday, June 6, 2005
Short sprints are more beneficial than long runs, the study says.

LONDON, England -- Six minutes of pure, hard exercise a week could be just as effective as an hour of daily moderate activity, according to a new study.

"Short bouts of very intense exercise improved muscle health and performance comparable to several weeks of traditional endurance training," said Martin Gibala, an associate professor at Canada's McMaster University.

The research, published in the June edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology, says that repeatedly doing very intense exercise such as sprinting resulted in unique changes in skeletal muscle and endurance capacity, similar to training that requires hours of exercise each week.

Sixteen subjects were used in the test: Eight who performed two weeks of sprinting at intervals, and eight who did no exercise training.

The program had in it four and seven 30-second bursts of "all out" cycling followed by four minutes of recovery time, three times a week for two weeks.

Researchers found that endurance capacity in the sprint group increased on average from 26 minutes to 51 minutes, whereas the control group showed no change.

The muscles of the trained group also showed a significant increase in a chemical known as citrate synthase, an enzyme that is indicative of the tissue's power to use oxygen.

"Sprint training may offer an option for individuals who cite lack of time as a major impediment to fitness and conditioning," said Gibala.

"This type of training is very demanding and requires a high level of motivation, however less frequent, higher intensity exercise can indeed lead to improvements in health and fitness."

Extracted from McMaster university journal of Applied physiology, discovered and published by Martin Gibala.

Looks very interesting to me, and very much along the lines of the experiment I wanted to try during cycling off-season anyway. To refresh our memories a bit on that, I wondered, since riding stationary bikes one half hour four days a week seemed to keep us in pretty good cycling form over the winter months, what would be the effect of riding for only fifteen minutes four days a week during part of the cycling off-season?

Well, this article has given me an idea about how to implement that. I think we'll try riding fifteen minutes per session during a certain part of this winter--say, from December through March. But instead of the usual high rpm, steady heart-rate pace we've been keeping on our half hour rides, we'll do intervals. At the moment I'm envisioning thirty-second intervals where we go all out followed by four minutes or so of liesurely riding followed by another thirty-second burst, etc, until the 15 minute period is up.

At this point, I'm still planning exactly how we'll implement this strategy. But it should be something very close to what I've just described. I'm anxious to try it out and see what the effects will be. And you can rest assured that once I determine the particulars I'll report them in this blog--as well as the results at the end of our trial period for this method.

On other related fronts, my shoulder--even after our third strength-training session following our vacation--continues to feel ok. I'm hoping the break from exercise allowed it to fully heal. I'll keep posting here on that topic as well.

Shoulder update after fitness sabbatical

Wow, long time no post! We were on vacation for a month and, since I didn't get around to posting in August before we left, here I am posting only at the end of September.

In the way of things related to fitness that I have to report, the following on my ongoing shoulder saga. I took my latex bands with me on vacation thinking that, if I didn't have an opportunity to do any other exercising, I would at least do my physical therapy exercises for my shoulder. Well, I ended up not even doing that. So about the only exercise we got while vacationing was some walking and toting around luggage (some of which was pretty heavy and would have been a whole lot harder for me to manage had I not been doing strength training for the previous year or so). So, here's how things went with the shoulder during this hiatus from exercise.

My shoulder continued to bother me for about the first week or so but, after that the pain gradually went away altogether. I can say that up to the day when we were able to resume our strength training regime, well over a month after we had to interrupt it, my shoulder feels fine. Almost no noticeable pain when moving it in any direction or manner. Quite a contrast to when we were in the midst of our strength training regime, where it was regularly bothering me with certain movements. Not only that, but my other shoulder (left) had begun similarly to have pain.

I'm not sure what all this means. Surely it means that a break from strength training has helped to heal this problem. The big question is, of course, whether the problem will return after we resume our strength training, or whether the break allowed the shoulder to totally heal. Our first day of resuming our strength training was today and I can say, at least at this point, that I don't feel any particular discomfort in that shoulder: it feels pretty much the same as it has for the last 3 weeks or so, i.e., pretty normal. I'll be keeping tabs on this and posting the results here.

That's about it for this post. I will just mention in closing that I'm strongly considering reducing our twice-weekly strength training workouts to once-weekly. I'll post more about the logic behind that decision if and when I make it.

Heart rate monitor, 66 mile day. MyMaps

I decided to finally break down and get a heart rate monitor. My reasoning was, partly, so as to have some concrete figures to connect with my fitness endeavors when I speak with my physician. As I think I've mentioned, I've had trouble so far getting helpful input from my physician on my fitness program.

Why? Most doctors seem set up to dispense very generic fitness advice: if your health is decent but you're not sufficiently active, they'll tell you to try and do some moderate fitness activities. Take walks, ride your bike, take the stairs rather than the elevator. Most doctors seem set up to dispense this kind of advice.

To top it all off, most doctors I've met with are not overly athletic folks. Ok, maybe they're not fat, and may even be fairly thin. But do they engage in intense athletic activities? Do they have a strong competitive drive when they do fitness? If they don't, I question how capable they will be in dispensing advice to those who are competitive.

I, for example, have yet to find a doctor who can give me meaningful advice about what I'm doing, at my age, for fitness. I can tell them I ride hard when I'm on my bike, but what does that mean? I went up a hill, riding as hard as I could? I submit that, if the doctor has not him/herself done some competitive athletics, they're not going to have much of a clue about what I, as a sometime competitive bicycle racer, mean when I say 'm riding hard.

The heart rate monitor is meant to help me communicate to them better what I'm doing. "You know, doctor, my heart rate on my two-hour ride yesterday was averaging about 135 beats per minute (bpm hereafter). I went up to 165 bpm and sustained that for about five minutes at one point, though." I hope by presenting the matter in those terms I might get some helpful input.

Which brings me to my results so far. I've actually only used the monitor on a couple of rides and on one upper-body workout session so far, and the results are interesting. I got a less expensive model, by the way--the Nike Triax C5 (ca. $49.00, shipping included, ordered through Amazon), a picture of which I'll include below.

I have to say that, preliminarily, I'm happy with this monitor. It's true that I don't have much to compare it with and that I've barely used it. But stay tuned to find out whether I continue to be satisfied with it.

As you can see, it looks like a wristwatch. And, as the photo indicates, it does tell time. But its significant function for my purposes is to read heart rate. It does this by wirelessly transmitting, from a corresponding strap you put around your chest, your heart-beat rate to the watch, which can be set to display that information. I will likely do a more in-depth review of this monitor in a future post.

Results so far. 120 bpm is a pretty comfortable rate for me: I feel like I'm hardly working at that rate, really. 150 bpm is a vigorous work rate, but one I can fairly easily sustain. I hit 160 bpm+ by the top of a long hill. Once I get to 170 bpm or so, I'm reaching the point where I start to go into oxygen deficit. I.e., I can hit that rate and sustain it, but my heart and lungs are just about at the point where they can't keep up with my leg muscles' demand for oxygen. Finally, on a particularly intense, but short chase, hit 190 bpm this past Saturday (and that at about the 55 mile mark of our 66 mile day!). I think my heart rate can go yet higher than that, but so far 190 bpm is the highest I've seen.

Now, contrast that with the heart-rate poster that hangs in our building's exercise room. There it says that the maximum heart rate for a 50 year old is 175 bpm. Well, I can tell you that I've exceeded that by quite a bit and lived to tell about it. Maximum heart-rate calculators found on the internet also tell you that, for a 50 year old, 170-175 bpm is supposed to be the maximum.

But according to my experiences so far, that's hogwash. And it seems there is plenty of information on the internet that calls into question the standard formula for calculating maximum heart rate as well. See the following link, for example: http://www.thefactsaboutfitness.com/research/max.htm . There is also a New York Times article, published on April 24th, 2001 in the Health section, entitled "'Maximum' Heart Rate Theory Is Challenged."

So, once again I'll be using myself as a guinea pig. I'll keep track of my own heart rates, discuss these with my doctor, and try to determine whether there are any principles that apply to aging and fitness--one of the main interests of this blog. Now, on to other concerns.

We did a 66 mile day this past weekend, so we continue building up mileage. A little stiffness and soreness developed in my left knee, so I'm a bit concerned about that. I would have guessed, if a knee problem were to crop up, it would be in my right knee, since my left foot is a little differently aligned to the knee than on my right leg (owing to a bad sprain I had in my right ankle as a kid). But it's actually my left knee that's started bothering me. Anyway, something I'll be keeping tabs on as cycling season continues.

As a final topic for this entry, I'll just mention that I've discovered how to use google's MyMaps. It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's something with great potential for cyclists. One of the really nice features is that you can draw lines wherever you want (you're not limted to following roads). In combination with Satellite view, this enables cyclists to trace out routes that follow bike paths instead of roads, and to easily calculate mileage. I'm highly pleased with and enthused about this.

I have to say, though, that I've had a few issues. One is that the mileage calculator that follows the cursor as you trace out your map can interfere with your view of the map: couldn't they make this thing more transparent? Someone dropped the ball a bit on this issue. Likewise, I've created two maps which start and end in the same place, but take differing routes to get there (except the last 8 miles or so). Well, it seems that the last 8 miles of one or other route keep getting cut off. I've tried correcting this by re-extending the adumbrated route, but when I did that, the other route got shortened by 8 miles. Go figure.

There are obviously still some bugs that need to be worked out of this system, and some interface improvements are needed. But what I've seen so far looks really promising. Anyway, see below a sample map I made up to demonstrate some preliminary results (the red lines represent bike paths while the blue lines represent city streets):


View plank rd clinic <--> cedarburg in a larger map

60 mile day, preliminary review of modified Power 90

Well, we've now managed to break the 55 mile mark we set in late May--but not by much. We did 60 miles this past weekend, and I was surprised at how much it took out of me. Recalling, however, that although I took it pretty easy for the first 15 miles or so, we got into kind of a rush about 25 miles in and I really pushed it after that--especially between about miles 35 and 45. And even after that there was at least one fairly long hill, and hills are always daunting on a recumbent tandem (you can't use your body weight to help you stomp your way up the hill).

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the effort. I am building up toward something with these mileage increases: a hoped-for weekend tour later this month. I'm not sure we'll be able to pull that off though. Doing this sort of mileage also takes me back to more youthful days when I would hit the road for long-distance touring of a month or more. I may never be able to do that sort of thing again, but a guy can dream, can't he?

I'll also include in this entry a preliminary review of the modified Power 90 routine we began doing a couple of weeks ago. First, a word on what the phrase "modified Power 90" means.

As was the case with the P90X regime, we've excerpted parts of another regime(s) called Power 90 to create our own upper-body workout routine. I have parenthesis around the "s" on the word "regime" because there is more than one regime called Power 90 and because we've excerpted parts of two different Power 90 regimes.

I'm aware that this probably sounds confusing. And it is, in fact, confusing. But blame the company that puts out these video workouts for that.

I've blogged previously about how the company that puts out P90X and the Power 90 regimes is engaging in a practice I called product/market obfuscation. As I mentioned, I may later post a more philosophical entry about that practice. But suffice for now to observe that this is why my description of our modified Power 90 routine might sound confusing (a look at the wikipedia entry for Tony Horton [under the videography heading] contains a list of exercise videos he's done, which can help allay at least some of the confusion).

Not wanting to make myself a marketing organ for that company, or to support their ethically marginal practices in marketing their products, I will simply observe that one of the routines we've excerpted comes from what seems to be the standard, and older, Power 90 regime. The other comes from a newer one that has the additional label "master's series." The first is called circuit 3-4 sculpt, and the second is called circuit 5-6 sculpt.

I gather from what's said in the videos that we've excerpted some of the most advanced portions of the respective regimes. I presume that each of those regimes is likely a 90 day fitness course that builds to more lengthy and more strenuous exercises toward the end. So we've essentially skipped the introductory and intermediate portions of the two regimes and gone straight to the advanced portions.

The focus in each of the routines we've excerpted is on upper body strengthening. There are just a few leg exercises--which is what we were looking for, i.e., a minimal amount of lower body exercising (we get our lower body exercise primarily from cycling) and an emphasis on strengthening the upper body.

I observed in a previous entry that I was pleasantly surprised by the modified routine we've put together. That opinion remains. This is a nice selection of exercises, alternating between use of weights (dumbbells) and calisthenics. It's not as strenuous as P90X and doesn't take as much time (roughly 40 minutes as opposed to 55 minutes). The icing on the cake for me is that it ends up being pretty aerobic. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I had decided that we needed to switch to something that would involve aerobic upper-body activities, and this looks like a really good answer.

I should mention in that regard that it is aerobic only if you try and keep pace with the video, which we do. If you use the pause button, it won't be as aerobic, and it will also take longer.

I want to mention in closing that, when doing P90X, I was trying to build up some muscle, so I was generally using heavier weight and doing less repetitions--in cases where weights (dumbbells) are being used. Though I've been following pretty much that same practice with our modified Power 90 routines, I will begin experimenting with using less weight and doing more repetitions. This will have the dual effect of making the workout more aerobic, as well as providing me with a little bit of a break from the rigorousness of the P90X workouts I'll be doing during the shorter part of the year.

As a final summary to this entry, an overview of our current annual fitness regime.

- workout 6 times a week, 4 days (Tues., Thurs., Sat., and Sun.) cycling or walking and 2 days (Mon. and Fri.) strength training.

- cycling days see us either riding on the road for between 6 and 70 miles, or riding the stationary bikes indoors for 1/2 hour, depending on weather. we have the option of replacing cycling with walking--which is more likely to happen during the colder months.

- strength training, done on Mondays and Fridays, will involve doing our modified Power 90 routine from about April through November. From December through March we'll be doing our modified P90X.

I should also mention that used copies of both these DVD's can be found on Amazon for between $5.00 and $15.00. eBay is another likely source for cheap copies of these video workouts. Stay tuned for my next entry.

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.

A 55 mile day before June!

Just a quick announcement. I've already blogged about how we're much better conditioned this cycling season than last, owing to a fairly minimal indoor training regime (stationary bikes) over the winter. I also blogged about how it seemed almost easy to ride our first 35 mile day this year. On that note, it turns out the distance is closer to 32 miles--we got a new odometer that indicates that, anyway.

Well, we were looking for a day to up the mileage yet further and that day turned out to be yesterday. Saturday shaped up to be a really beautiful day, though there was a warning about the possibility of thunderstorms. I mapped out what I thought would be about a 50 mile route. We ended up having to take a detour but, when all was said and done, that we did 55 miles. And that before the month of June even started! Had we not taken the detour, the trip would likely have been even a little longer.

I wanted to blog about this since it has some significance and might even provide a sort of benchmark for future years. I also needed to make at least one blog entry during this month!

As far as future entries go, I've begun to think a bit about body fat levels and health. The basic line of reasoning I'm following is that there is an obvious connection between one's level of body fat and one's health--generally, the lower the body fat level, the better one's health will be. But I'm curious about what the threshold is: where is the tipping-point?

I've become curious about that after doing some more reading on P90X. They recommend a low-fat diet which, obviously, can help one lose weight. As I've previously written, though, I don't need to lose any weight. I'm right at about 200 lbs. right now and I think that, were I to lose any more weight, I'd start to become skinny. So, to what extent should I consider following a particular diet--whether the P90X diet or any other?

It's true that I have a higher body-fat level now than I've probably had at any other time in my life (evidence the rudimentary love handles I've mentioned in previous blog entries). But is it any unhealthy level? Also, reading on the P90X forums has convinced me that a lot of the folks posting there are trying to lower body fat levels not for health reasons, but for vanity reasons: they want their muscle definition to be more pronounced. But is there any net health gain in getting body fat levels down to that point? I have my doubts, but do need to explore the matter further.

An example from competitive athletics may be helpful to underline the point. We generally have the impression that professional and competitive athletes are in excellent health. And in certain respects this is true. But my years of bicycle racing brought me to the realization that competitive athletics can actually worsen your health. How? One example from bicycle racing is the risk of accident: and cycling accidents run the gamut from minor, to those that result in serious injury, to those that even result in death (professional bicycle racers do occasionally die as a result of their injuries). Then, there are stress injuries incurred by basketball or football players that can result in an early end to a career (think Sandy Coufax or Dick Butkus). And the suffering associated with those injuries surely only increases with age. So, the equation of health with elite athletic pursuits should not be made facilely.

What, then, is the story with body fat? Could, for example, competitive bodybuilders, who attempt to lower their body fat levels to the extreme, actually be harming more than helping their health in the overall? And what about the average joe, who engages in training and fitness activities primarily to improve health? What is the appropriate body fat level in this case?

I hope to blog about this and more soon. Stay tuned.

Fitness revelations: off-season conditioning

This past year I vowed that we would not lapse into inactivity over the winter months. Though our favored form of fitness activity - cycling - would be ruled out due to cold and bad road conditions, we could nonetheless maintain at least some level of - even if only a minimal one - conditioning by using exercise bikes indoors. I have to say I'm a bit shocked at what I've learned from this experience.

Before continuing on that theme, let me explain a bit about last season. We really had done very little cycling over the years leading up to last year's season. Summer of '07 we did very little, though we did manage to get out a bit in summer of '06. '04 and '05 we did a bit as well, though we did not put in any very long days (i.e., not more than 35 miles). So, when my high blood pressure started to become a significant issue in spring of '08, motivating me to establish and stick to an exercise regime, we were fairly out of shape.

Those first few rides late last spring and early summer were trying. I remember how tired I was after the first 25 mile day (please bear in mind that I tend to push myself pretty hard on the bike). I felt similarly drained after the first 35 and first 50 mile days of the year. In other words, I was sore for several days afterward, and the thought of doing any strenuous activity was not at all foremost in my mind. We managed to put in even a 65-70 mile day last year, and the after-effects were similar. Of course, having done quite a lot of cycling and training in my younger years, I had come to expect this sort of "plateauing" effect: each increase in mileage during the course of a season requires an adjustment for your body, and the second 35 mile day of the season is not nearly as hard on your body as the first.

I should also mention as a part of this aside that, even in my younger years when I was racing bicycles, I wasn't terribly disciplined about training. I wouldn't stick to much of a regular training schedule during racing season, but would rather just try and spend time on the bike several times a week: the main goal was to get a certain total mileage under my belt per week (say, a minimum of 150 miles). In the off-season, I was even more undisciplined. During a couple of seasons I did some riding indoors using rollers. But again I didn't have a regular schedule and was very sporadic about it: if I was more liable to train indoors, it would be more likely to be at the very end of the season (say in Nov. or Dec.). The upshot is that I didn't really take off-season training very seriously.

Fast forward to this year. I can therefore honestly say that this year, when we were pretty regular about riding the exercise bikes 4 times a week over the whole off-season, is the first year I ever actually trained with any discipline over the course of the off-season. I also want to stress another important factor: our off-season training consisted in spending mostly about 1/2 hour on the exercise bikes. We started off doing 45 minutes last fall, but reduced that to 1/2 hour since around Christmas time.

Now, this training indoors was not simply a leisurely session on the exercise bike - I should point out that. It wasn't especially strenuous, no, but I'd try to keep my rpm's up around 90 or more and sustain the heart rate at probably 130-140. So, a short but vigorous aerobic workout, one without serious strain on the leg muscles.

So, what are the effects of this, essentially minimalistic - though regular - training in the off-season? It can be best characterized with the following single word: dramatic. In our first on-road session this year we went about 17 miles. We both felt great. We went up the hills we struggled to get up all last season (try riding hills on a recumbent tandem sometime) in the same gear we were riding up them at the end of last season. It was almost as if we never got off the bike at season's end, actually. And perhaps most impressively, I hardly felt any soreness the next day. Perhaps a bit of stiffness in the backs of my legs for a day or two, but that's it. This was nothing like the "plateauing effect" I knew from training in my younger days, where each significant increase in mileage carried a new level of trauma to which the body needed to acclimate. I can honestly say that I didn't feel anything like that at all.

And last weekend we did 35 miles, and a lot of that going at a pretty good clip. I felt almost no soreness at all from that ride the next day. So, I have to say that I'm truly impressed. It really looks as though, by riding for only about a half hour four days a week over the winter, we've essentially preserved all the conditioning we gained by putting in all the miles we did last summer. Excuse me for getting excited about the obvious, but this is a real revelation. Why couldn't I do even this paltry amount of off-season training years ago, when I was racing? What a difference it would have made! I might have won the tour de France! (ha ha) Ah, the foolishness of youth.

Anyway, this subject seemed important enough to warrant a blog entry. It sure has made an impression on me. But it's also got me wanting to experiment: what's the minimal amount of off-season training we'll have to do to preserve some semblance of fitness from last season? Mind you, I don't pose this question out of laziness: rather, I'm trying to be careful that we don't get burnt out by overdoing it. We will need to take breaks, and sometimes to take it easy, for that reason.

Already I'm scheming up a new plan to test: next winter, we'll cut down to 15 minute sessions 4 times per week on the exercise bikes during deep winter (say, from Christmas to the end of Feb.). We'll pare down to that from 1/2 hour sessions in the fall and increase from 15 minutes to 1/2 hour in early spring.

I'll let you know the results then.