4.5 mile walk in place of cycling

Today was one of the days when we decided to replace our cycling with walking. It was such a nice spring day out and we had some errands to run. So we decided to get our exercise and do errands at the same time.

We could have actually made this about an 8-mile walk. But that seemed to me a little too large an increase in mileage. We currently walk in the range of 1-3 miles on some days and increasing that amount by more than twice so suddenly seemed unwise to me. So we drove a bit of the way toward our destination and walked the rest. In retrospect I think we could have done 6 miles without causing ourselves too much distress--mainly joint pain, at our age. But hindisght is always 20/20, as they say.

Of course the walking was nowhere near as intense as the cycling we would have done today. But that's fine: we don't need to be intense every time we do activity, we just need to remain active. I'm not trying to set any records. I'm shooting more for the sort of slow-and-steady-wins-the race philosophy

I've created a new poll on this blog but I'll wait until tomorrow to explain further about that.

Laxness in breathing exercises heightening blood pressure?

I kind of got out of my rythm of breathing exercises a couple of weeks ago when I made a trip out of town. I've had a hard time getting back to that rythm (twice a day, morning and evening is what I'd been aiming for). Today I had a higher reading than I've seen in a while (150/87): is it related to laxness in performing my breathing exercises?

Other factors could be at play. I had kind of a rough night last night for one. Then, I really rushed over for my blood pressure appointment today since I got a late start. Then, since today was strength-training day I didn't take hydrochlorothiazide.

Tough to say how much role laxness in performing breathing exercises played. What's certain is that I need to get more regular and frequent about it in order to see if it comes down at the next appointment.

To interval, or not to interval?

Somehow I only recently began to wonder to myself "is it really necessary to do intervals on every day we do our stationary bike riding?" Simple question and a simple answer occurred to me promptly: "no, it's not necessary."

According to my by-gosh by-golly technical reckoning, we should get benefits from intervals even if we do them on only 2 of our four cycling days. We're not training for the olympics here, after all, folks.

I decided to implement the new policy pronto. So from here on out we'll be doing intervals on 2 to 3 of our 4 weekly stationary-bike days. On the other days we'll do our usual ca. 30 minutes of spinning.

Anxious to see what will be the effects of the intervals--if they're noticable at all--when we'll hit the road a little later this spring. Stay tuned.

I'm still here

Was out of town for a few days so I missed a couple of cycling sessions last week. But I made up for that to some extent by doing some fairly vigorous snow shoveling. We're still here and still exercising--just tonight we did our usual strength training. And tomorrow intervals. Once I get fully settled in again I'll be posting some more substantial entries.

Back at it

Wow. The legs are feeling sore after getting back to our interval training over the weekend. We had to trim down a little our 20-minute session on Saturday but did the full thing yesterday.

Anyway, it feels good to get back at it. There was a little intertia to overcome but it was easy owing to the fact that we put such a limited amount of time into it at this time of year. The wife wanted to take an extra day but I said to her "look, we're only talking about 20 minutes here."

We jumped back on the bikes and are both glad we did. Strength-training session later today. Look for an entry soon that outlines in greater detail our current upper-body strength-training routine.

Week off continued

Just a short note to maintain some semblance of activity here. We continue with our week off, which actually ends tomorrow. We'll be back to cycling (stationary bikes) over the weekend. It's good to take a break and to get a renewed yearning for exercise.

I've also pretty much stopped doing my stretching during this week, which is probably not so good. Also have not been doing breathing exercises for the last few days, though I did do them this morning.

Also I may not be doing much blogging during the coming week. I may need to take a trip out of town, which will interfere. But as I mentioned in a previous entry, I do plan on posting at least a few times each week from here on out--though likely not daily, as I tried to do throughout January.

Break time, blogging schedule remarks

Our week off from fitness has arrived. We actually started it a little earlier: I had planned on starting the week off on Monday. But we missed our stationary bike training this past Thursday, then again yesterday. And I decided to add today as part of our time off as well. So we'll be back to exercising again only next weekend.

Physical health is important. But spiritual health is important, too. And as Lent begins, it's time to do some more intensive training in spiritual things. The two are really closely interconnected--physical and spiritual health.

I'll also probably cut back a bit on blogging--but only partly because of Lent. I decided recently to try blogging much more regularly, sort of taking a cue from fitbomb. But having done that for a while I've come to feel that such frequent posting doesn't really fit the aims of this blog.

My main aim isn't necessarily to tell you everything I do each day. That's what some bloggers do, whether in an attempt to maximize traffic to their blogs by keeping them very active, or, in the case of fitness blogs, because posting with greater frequency provides the blogger with motivation to keep up their efforts. Neither of those factors motivate me: I'm not engaing in a commercial effort here, nor have I had much problem over the last two years sustaining interest or motivation in my fitness regimen. No, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm in fitness for the long term.

I do want to keep readers apprised of my fitness regime via this blog, but that's not something that necessarily requires daily entries. Rather, my interests lie more in providing a resource for information on pursuing fitness at a certain stage of life. And what is required for that, as best I can tell, is to blog about important information I find, to recount significance experiences in fitness, and to blog about what has worked (and hasn't worked) for me. And that doesn't require daily postings.

That said, I do intend to blog much more regularly that I did during the first year or so after starting this blog. So I hope to have new material here at least a few times each week. So, keep checking back

Day off: gotta hav'em sometimes, don't ya?

Had some errands to run this evening so we took the day off from our usual fitness routine (ab/core exercises and ca. 20 minutes of cycling intervals). I feel a bit guilty, as usual.

In fact, let me wallow in my guilt a bit to try and get it off my chest. We are, after all, taking the whole week off next week, so why an extra day now, right before the week off? Furthermore, you're only exercising for about a half hour on Thursdays anyways: couldn't you even bring yourself to do a measly half of exercise?

Ok, now that I've got that out of the way. Yes, it's good to deprive yourself of your regular fitness activities some times, in my view. It gives you some drive to get back to it--as long as your break doesn't go on for too long. And we typically don't take off more than say one day per month, if that.

And since it's winter I can somewhat allay my guilt by thinking to myself "gee, I'm so glad I did this in winter and took some time off from the stationary bike; imagine how guilty I'd feel if the weather were really nice and warm and, not only did I miss some exercise, but I missed being out in that beautiful weather!"

How do you deal with guilt feelings when you miss a workout day? C'mon, I know you miss one now and then--we all do.

(Hey, maybe I should have just hooked one of these [internal combustion engine assisted] bikes to my trainer and let it run while I was out doing errands?)

The J-660B-UB exercise regime

In this entry I want to extol the virtues of the J-660B-UB exercise regime. As you may be guessing, the guy who came up with that title name didn't exactly have a flair for merchandising gimmicks. And I can personally vouch for that fact, given that I know him very well: in fact, that guy is me.

Ok, so this entry is going to be a bit facetious. But it will be, after all, in the interest of making valid points about fitness regimes.

So, what is J-660B-UB? Since the title is not nearly as catchy as something like "P90X," we can expect it's not going to be nearly as sexy. And, well, it isn't. But it may still be something worthwhile.

No, J-660B-UB is my own fitness regime. I came up with the name partly as a way to take a jab at what I see as faults in the ways fitness is marketed and consumed, and partly as a realization about my own fitness endeavors to date.

The "J" in J-660B-UB is, of course, the first letter of my first name--indicating my role in formulating the plan. The 660 is the approximate number of days since I started my current fitness pursuits. And the "B-UB" part stands for the main components or foci of my regimen: bicycling and upper body strength training.

I have to use the phrase upper body rather than naming a device or program--as in the case of the "B" part of the moniker (for bicycle)--because I've been pretty eclectic so far in choosing what sorts of things I do for upper-body strength training. Readers of this blog will know that I've used calisthenics, the Soloflex, and various parts of some Tony Horton routines. In the future I will try yet other things--kettlebells perhaps being next.

And I feel quite justified in, and satisfied with, taking that eclectic approach. In fact, I would encourage anyone reading this blog to consider taking a similar approach. Granted, I may have something of an advantage when it comes to more or less formulating my own fitness regime--being in good shape and having done a fair amount of athletics at various points in my life--but I still think many who may not have had as much experience as I have could nonetheless do what I've done and do it just as effectively.

But let's get back to the exercise regime I'm promoting here. As I mentioned, I somewhat facetiously pose it in opposition to plans like P90X. Why? Because it seems to me the 90-day-plan approach has some serious flaws.

One of those flaws is that it's so short: do you really want an exercise regime that encompasses only a 90-day period? I'm thinking to myself, "no way. I want a 90 month plan, or maybe a 90 quarter plan" (about a 7.5 or 22 year cycle, respectively). Yeah, that's right. I want a fitness regime that will last, if not the rest of my life, at least a good portion of it.

The 90-day plan can, I think, have some appropriate applications. For example, it can motivate someone who's not too badly out of shape to get back in shape. Nothing wrong with that . . . that is, until the 90 days are up. What happens then?

Well, various things. I'll bet a lot of people who follow that cycle just end their fitness pursuits after the 90 days. They've proved to themselves they can do it. They've paraded around their results in a tank-top or swimming suit, gotten their egos stroked, and now they're going back to their old ways. Judging from the many moribund P90X blogs I've run across, this pattern may be occurring in a significant percentage of cases. In other words, as I've said before, the 90-day cycle and the marketing of it represents a sort of fast-food approach to fitness.

But don't think the marketing minds behind that hype aren't wise to the additional sales opportunities inherent in the 90-day approach. No, not at all. They understood before even shooting their first infomercial that there would be a follow-up to the 90-day saga.

Thus, we get things like P90X plus, or the latest challenge for P90X graduates--Insanity. So the 90-day approach is not just a quick-fix pitch for fitness: it's a prequel to future marketing possibilities that will keep the cash flowing into the corporate coffers of fitness empires.

But honestly speaking, how many 90-day segments is the remainder of your life going to occupy? None of us know the answer to that for sure. But most of us hold out hope that it's going to be more quarters than can be easily calculated. I've dared above to hope that 90 90-day segments remain in my life, and that I'll be able to pursue fitness during each of them.

Now, I know that fitness marketers would be happy, for the right price, to sell me a new regimen for each of the remaining 90-day segments of my life. But I hope it's become apparent by now that, no thanks, I don't think I need them to do that. No. I might need to rely on their products at the outset as I learn more about fitness, but there's going to come a point--and it's likely to be sooner than later for some of us--where we're ready to go it on our own.

That's the point at which we've made a life-long commitment to fitness, and at which we have developed some sensibility about what it's going to take to sustain our interest in continuing to do it over the long haul.

And that's the point I'm trying to get to now. So far I've kept it going for close to 2 years. Now I'm looking toward the 90-month and 90-quarter goals. I guess I'll have to come up with names for them when I reach those milestones. But for now I've been quite satisfied with J-660B-UB.

Arm toner phase begins

As I've been mentioning, we've now commenced a new phase in our fitness regime--the arm toner phase. I had actually intended to begin this phase a couple of weeks from now, but we decided to start a little early.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we found a new Tony Horton routine that we want to work into our regimen, a routine called "arm toner." We just did it for the first time tonight. We'll be using this one twice a week on our strength-training days probably until April or May.

Preliminarily I can say we both liked it. It's a bit shorter than what we've been doing--just a little over a half hour. It doesn't contain any lower-body exercises, which is what we want for most of the year, focusing instead on the upper body. And it's pretty intense.

I'll give a fuller report later, but I'll just observe for now that it's a fast-paced routine that mixes one-minute exercise periods with 30-second stretch periods. A fuller breakdown and itemization of the routine will be forthcoming.

By the way, why am I naming the phases of our exercise regimen after mostly upper-body exercise routines? Because these are the variable part of our regimen. Bicycling is the constant part, so it makes sense to name the phases after the varying parts of the regimen.