The need for exercise...or not

This may be a revised version of one of my Column 8 pieces, though it seems mostly to be as originally written. 

Practice makes perfect. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. So they say.

Some time ago a member of our family purchased a set of exercise DVDs with the aim of building up her/his muscles. I'm not allowed to be more specific about which family member it was, but the DVDs gave a real boost in the physical department.

She/he disciplined him/herself, getting up at the crack of dawn every morning to chug through those demanding exercises - while the demonstrator chauntered through a flow of esteem-building speeches.

Various other members of the family gave the exercises a go - with varying degrees of success. Still, I don't think any set of DVDs has ever had more use in our house. Certainly the original purchaser got value for money.

While everyone else tackled the exercises, I didn't. I was still walking to work every morning: a sufficient, demanding-enough exercise, and pleasant. A good way to allow the early-morning-family-arousing-stresses to flit off like startled sparrows. I use to run most of the way, but my legs had begun to find pounding down the hills jarred the hips and knees.

Still, the walk was enough to keep me fit, I said.

If so, why did I find my knees creaked more when I knelt - and it was more difficult hoisting myself up again? (If I could rouse the body to such a level of enthusiasm as to want to get up again.)

Why did the floor seem further away when I bent to pick up bits of paper or safety pins? And why did it take three attempts to grasp them?

Why did I have to sit a little further back from the steering wheel than before, and find the pedals further away? Why did the plate on the meal table seem not quite where it used to be? (‘There's many a slip twixt cup and lip’ was finally starting to make sense.)

Why did I feel like a formerly deft and agile adolescent struggling with clumsy-making growth spurts?

Lack of exercise.

My family has been nagging - sorry, encouraging - me, for some time, to do some exercise. (There's particular concern that they can't see the telly if I'm standing just to one side of it.) So the other night I began the exercises, in company with a couple of other family members who'd done them before, and wanted to get back into them again.

I enjoyed the exercises which required me to lie on the floor, because at least I didn't have to keep my body vertical at the same time, but I wasn't too fussed about the exercises that seemed akin to some of the spine-dislocating, hip-unhinging and bone-crackling one of my children does in modern dancing.

I know these exercises will do me good.  (I used to have a best friend who was always telling me things he suggested would do me good.)  I know that if I play difficult music on the piano, and work at it, even if I can't play it up to speed, I'll have fingers that move when I want them to, instead of fingers that ice-skate across the keys because they can't be bothered to dig their nails in.

I know if I'd kept at that memory course that now sits gathering dust on the shelf, I'd be remembering all the names of the people I want to remember - including the name of my grandson which had gone completely from my mind when I woke last Saturday.

And I know if I write a blog post a day, (inspired or not), I'll produce new ones with half the sweat and strain they usually require.

I think.

But I don't like doing these exercises. They make me feel a hundred and fifty, they make me feel as though I'm no longer capable of any physical effort - and I am! I really am!! - they make me feel that if I have to hear that trainer's voice one more time burbling visualisation babble I'll smash his fancy face in.

Apparently Henry Ford didn't say history is bunk, he claimed exercise was. "If you're healthy," he said, "you don't need it. If you're sick, you shouldn't take it."

How (ouch! oooof!) true.

Physio

Back to the physio today, after ten days of not seeing him. I've improved and then gone backwards, and then improved and then gone backwards. Several times. A bit erratic, you might say.

I put my back out over a month ago, was in agony for a day, sort of came right, but my right leg played up as a result, and when I got an appointment with the osteopath on the Monday morning (friends in high places) he realigned me, but it didn't fix the leg. Sent me to the physio in the same clinic.

Apart from sticking several needles in me in an acupuncturist sort of way, and manipulating various muscles, the physio has given me different exercises which I've been doing quite a bit. They've helped, there's no doubt. But I think he's been taking it quietly, not wanting to overload me.

Dog in shades due to Dunedin sun

Today I went for a walk with the dog before heading down to town to see the physio. It turned out to be a disaster on one hand, because my leg, which has been behaving itself increasingly, decided to go on strike, and I struggled to get back home from the walk. The dog was very patient with my extraordinary slowness. On the other hand it meant I was able to pinpoint more readily exactly where it hurts when this walking problem occurs (it doesn't happen every time I walk, for some reason) and that was useful. For me, if not for the physio, who might have wondered if I wasn't conjuring a bunch of new pains up for him, to keep him happy.

I don't really think that's how he saw it. But he introduced a couple of new exercises, both of which involved staring at myself in the mirror while trying to do what he asked. The mirror made things doubly uninspiring: seeing some old bloke struggling to do something relatively simple is embarrassing. And I seemed to be at cross purposes with him on one of the exercises in particular - what he called forward seemed to me to be backward. Anyway, hopefully I've got the hang of it now.

Came home feeling somewhat better but worn out. Time for an afternoon kip, I think.

Exercise videos

Back in the nineties my wife and I picked up on an exercise video called Oxycise! The cover of the video shows a svelte woman apparently leaping through the air as a result of the exercises. The reality was a bit different: the svelte woman went through 15 minutes of exercise with a disparate group of half a dozen bodies (her parents, husband and next door neighbours - at least that’s what they looked like) and the result should have been that they all improved their flexibility and their posture - as well as losing weight. I don’t know that the system did much for weight loss, but it certainly was good on flexibility and posture, and there are patches of time when I still work through many of the exercises.
So I interested to see a different kind of exercise video/DVD called Yoga Booty Ballet. I kid you not! The basic exercises include modern dance, ballet and yoga for strengthening and ab work. There’s a 60 minute stretch to burn calories - 60 minutes of anything will burn calories. There are hip hop dance steps, a cardio cabaret, a 7-day diet, and something called the Goddess guide (plainly this DVD isn’t geared towards men). Oh, and don’t forget the bonus squishy toning ball.
The focus of the system is that it’s fun. Oxycise couldn’t ever have been classed as fun, but it was good for you. Maybe, if I can get past the ‘Goddess Guide’ my wife and I could have a go at the yoga booty ballet. (Booty?)

Beware the Machine

A friend had an incident with an exercise machine tonight rather like Bill Murray did in the film Lost in Translation. There was a short scene in that movie where Murray is trying to find things to do to fill in his time in Japan, so he goes on the treadmill machine. A female Japanese voice is instructing him in a rather sergeant-major way, and gets increasingly hyper about what he’s supposed to do at the same time as the machine increases its speed. Finally Murray is thrown off in a flurry of elbows and knees while the voice burbles on for him to keep on moving!!
My friend apparently got kicked off his machine, according to his wife. He then got up and it hit him and bit him at the same time. Her suggestion was that keeping fit was too dangerous.