Pumping Irony

Domestic chores demand a strong body.

My Friday workout felt hasty and ill-conceived, sort of a circuit-training approach without the “training” part, as I wandered from treadmill to ab-cruncher to lat pull-down to chest press, etc., etc. — all crammed into about 60 minutes of low-energy grunting (I really need 90 minutes to do this right). Part of the problem was that I was still a little sore from Wednesday’s high-energy workout, and I didn’t want to hurt myself.

I have a meeting tonight, so I think it’s going to be a Tuesday-Thursday schedule this week, which suits me just fine.

I did walk to work this morning, so I managed to get 35 minutes of low-impact, bone-strengthening cardio into my day. This on the heels of a “non-workout” weekend that included a 90-minute hike through the Mississippi River gorge with a couple dozen amateur geologists (including my lovely wife), my annual mid-May trip to the cursing driving range (I have the blisters to prove it), the first lawn-mowing of the spring (long grass and a reel mower make for good cardio and resistance training), and a heroic wrestling match with a garden hose and an extension ladder, during which I managed to clean out my gutters and downspouts without falling to my death (R.I.P. Max McGee).

My lovely wife, by the way, trumped all of this activity on Mother’s day by climbing on her bicycle and pedaling 13.5 miles into a nasty north wind to visit her mother in Roseville — and then she rode all the way back home. That’s 27 miles, I reminded myself as I sipped a glass of cabernet and perused the latest issue of Utne Reader over lunch. (I did cook dinner, by the way. And washed the dishes.)

This all had me reconsidering my earlier assertion about having no fitness goals. In fact, the best reason for hitting the gym two or three times a week is because I want to be able to haul out the extension ladder every spring to clean out the gutters and I want to be able to mow the lawn and ride my bicycle and carry wet laundry out to the line in the summer and chase grandchildren around the yard (though I’m in no hurry for that. . . really, kids. . . . take your time). This is called functional fitness, a concept designed to enhance the ability of geezers like myself to remain upright and reasonably useful in our old age.

Of course, if I really want to pursue this approach, I’m probably going to have to be more strategic about my gym workout. As Gina Shaw points out in this WebMD piece, just cranking away on some resistance machine doesn’t actually work your body in a way that will be particularly helpful to your long-term functionality. In my case, all the lifting I’ve been doing has been working isolated muscle groups, which might make me feel stronger (and look less flabby), but it does little to strengthen the integrated muscle groups that we use to lift or reach or bend or squat during the course of our normal day.

At some level, I’m happy to learn of this approach, even though it will ultimately force me to ask a personal trainer about a new regimen, which to me is akin to pulling over at a gas station when I’m hopelessly lost and asking directions. It’s just not something guys like me do.

This is how it feels sometimes. Really.

I rode my bicycle to work this morning, even though I chose to wear the inexplicable sneaker-khakis combo (see “If the Shoe Fits” below) previously designed for walking. So, that means I’m destined for the dreaded treadmill tonight at the gym. Running Walking builds bone density, after all, and if I don’t hoof it to work, I try to do it on the moving rubber mat.

Except on Wednesday, when I bicycled to work and  then was mysteriously attracted to the stationary bike downstairs, where I did a sort of interval thing (pedaling at about 80 RPMs for a couple of minutes and then cranking it up to about 110 RPMs for a minute or so), which pumped my heart rate up into the high 130s. This pretty much knocked me out after about 20 minutes, but it made me think about something I read recently (and you’ll see in the magazine in September) about how adults need to really work their bodies to their maximum RPMs every day for at least a minute or so. It’s good for our vitality (if we don’t keel over from a heart attack in the process).

It does feel pretty good, I have to admit: lungs burning, lactic acid conquering the muscles in your legs, heart thumping through the wall of your chest, etc.

Not the same as pedaling through the park.

Anyway, tonight it’s the treadmill, more ab work (really — I just love that stuff!), some lifting, and a leisurely ride home on my Schwinn.

My goal this morning was to walk into work (I’d left my bike in the office due to yesterday’s thunderstorm) wearing my sneakers and schlepping my workout gear and computer in my backpack. But then I noticed how dorky my sneakers looked with these khakis (you can imagine, no?) and slipped on my regular brown office shoes, one of which (the left foot) is about a half-size too big. The last time I wore these walking to work, the shoe produced a nasty blister on the back of my foot. It also tends to roll my sock around inside the shoe, which is very annoying.

Anyway, I’m tromping awkwardly over the Intercity Bridge, admiring how the river has nearly inundated the small island below the Ford Dam, when I notice the Crapmobile zipping past me, heading east. I waved, but my lovely wife was oblivious, and for a moment I wondered whether she’d notice my shuffling gait and take pity on me by pulling over and transporting me the last half mile to the office, but, no, she just continued on. Which, of course, made me wonder whether I’d committed some domestic faux pas this morning that had left her peeved (even after 28 years of marriage, you sometimes never know . . .  especially if you’re as oblivious as I am), so I flipped open my cell phone and gave her a call and learned that she had indeed seen me on the bridge and had thought about stopping, but there was no shoulder on which to safely pause and, besides, she was anxious to get to the co-op and get some potting soil before the washing machine repair guy showed up.

Relieved that I had not somehow offended her earlier, and happy to notice that the sock on my left foot had made one complete revolution, I walked on up the hill.

No treadmill tonight.

OK, so I promised that I would report on last night’s workout — specifically focusing on my 10 goals for the evening. Overall, my goal-oriented approach took time away from stuff I would normally do (I so missed brutalizing myself on that lat pull-down machine….), but it also cajoled me into other arguably constructive — and slightly irritating — activities. Anyway, as promised, here’s my report:

1. Avoid sudden — or even gradual — cardiac arrest.
So far, so good.

2. Wipe the sweat off my face without knocking the glasses off my nose.
Mission accomplished, though I nearly tumbled off the elliptical thingy in the process.

3. “Run” for awhile on that elliptical thingy without holding onto the handles (or falling off). See if I can get my heart rate into the mid-120s. Or not.
See #2. I did manage to spend a few minutes on a couple of occasions “running” with my hands free, but it’s quite disorienting. (The “poles” you’re supposed to be holding could actually present a bonking hazard if you were to lean forward too far and just a bit to the right or left — does that sound improbable? Not to me.) Average heart rate for the 30-minute session: 111; top heart rate: 126.

4. Take time to stretch after “running” on that elliptical thingy. Try not to look like a dork, but also don’t pretend that I know anything about stretching.
Mixed results here. I found one of the little rubber stretching mats unoccupied and did my favorite “sit up with the soles of your feet together to loosen your hammies or something” stretch for awhile, before folding one leg to my side and extending the other (repeated with other leg). To my credit, I did not try to touch my toes, but I was exerting way too much energy, given that I could barely reach past my knee. On the debit side, I was seated 3 feet from a floor-to-ceiling mirror, which resoundingly confirmed my dork status.

5. Work my abs for once. Jeeze.
My fitness guru, SW, tells me that I need to work my lower back in order to strengthen my abs, so I climbed onto this back-extender machine to see what would happen. I did three series of 10 reps with 50 pounds and I was delighted to notice that my abs felt great! My lower back, on the other hand, seemed to be tightening up.

6. Resist the temptation to roll up my sleeves to expose my rippling biceps while I’m doing curls (ha ha ha ha ha. . . .).
They really shouldn’t have mirrors in the gym.

7. Abs. Really. I mean it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. . . . I did three series of 15 reps each on the ab-cruncher machine and noticed that, toward the end, my lower back was barking at me.

8. Fail. As in lifting to failure — at least some of the time. OK, twice. . . . Once? No, do it twice. . . . Because I said so. . . . Shut up.
I shall not fail! Failure is not an option! Failure is for failures! And I barely eluded failure on my third series of 10 reps with 100 lbs. on the push-the-bar-straight-up-from-a-sitting-position machine. The last three of those reps were excruciating, so I kind of short-armed them. Success!

9. Work those #@$%&*#@$ abs, you sniveling maggot!
I did three series of 10 reps on the swiveling-chair machine with, I think, 45 lbs. This is the one where you put your arms in these arm-holders and swivel first to your right (30 times) and then to your left (30 times). That’s 60 times, OK?

10. Maintain a positive frame of mind.
Not a problem.

So, there you are — 10 goals pretty much achieved, depending upon your particular point of view (succeeding at failure, for instance, is not as successful as failing to fail, as I did in #8). And, while this may prove that even a goal-less fitness regimen needs some goals in order to avoid certain failure, failing to set goals could, in fact, lead to success, in that nothing succeeds like a successful failure.

I hope we’re all clear on this now.

Are fuzzy goals worth protecting?

Everybody in the fitness biz talks about hitting plateaus in your workout regimen, times when you don’t seem to be progressing toward your goals and, thus, need to change your routine. I manage to avoid plateaus not by changing my routine, but by refusing to set any goals. Now, I know this can be a problem — at least I’ve read as much. I mean, why go to all the trouble of working out at the gym if you don’t want to tighten up your butt or break the three-hour barrier in your next marathon — or maybe run a three-hour marathon with a really tight butt.

Anyway, it occurred to me the other day that I am bereft of fitness goals. My butt is just my butt, and I’m really never going to run a marathon. Like any good Minnesotan, all I really want out of this new fitness regimen is the satisfaction of a job well done. Or something like that.

I’m not being evasive here — I like the way I feel after a good workout, and there’s evidence that I’ve dropped a few pounds and built some muscle over the past 16 months, but all I’ve really needed to get me to the gym most days is the knowledge that this stuff is keeping me healthy. For a variety of reasons — not the least of which is my desire to enjoy this world for awhile longer than my father did (he suffered a heart attack at 51 and died of cancer nine years later) — I don’t need a lot more prodding than that.

Besides, any goal I’d set for myself would be pretty arbitrary, wouldn’t it? (Joe Hart discusses arbitrariness and goal-ness here.) I mean, rather than challenging myself to hobble a mile on the treadmill twice a week — which would greatly irritate me (not to mention grind up the faltering meniscus in my left knee) — I could set as a goal pedaling in a leisurely manner three times a week on a stationary bike — an activity recently made more compelling by the little TVs that have been installed between the handgrips.

No pain, no gain, you say? I say: a tiny bit of discomfort, a small and perhaps faintly measurable reward. Or, put another way: no pain doesn’t hurt a bit.

But, if I must set goals, I must set goals. So here are 10 things I’m going to try to accomplish at tonight’s sweat-a-thon:

1. Avoid sudden — or even gradual — cardiac arrest.

2. Wipe the sweat off my face without knocking the glasses off my nose.

3. “Run” for awhile on that elliptical thingy without holding onto the handles (or falling off). See if I can get my heart rate into the mid-120s. Or not.

4. Take time to stretch after “running” on that elliptical thingy. Try not to look like a dork, but also don’t pretend that I know anything about stretching.

5. Work my abs for once. Jeeze.

6. Resist the temptation to roll up my sleeves to expose my rippling biceps while I’m doing curls (ha ha ha ha ha. . . .).

7. Abs. Really. I mean it.

8. Fail. As in lifting to failure — at least some of the time. OK, twice. . . . Once? No, do it twice. . . . Because I said so. . . . Shut up.

9. Work those #@$%&*#@$ abs, you sniveling maggot!

10. Maintain a positive frame of mind.

Unless I’m unable to achieve goal #1, I will report back tomorrow.

Maybe Popeye really ate pasta.

Two interesting questions lodged themselves in my pea brain after last night’s workout: 1.) Do certain foods make you stronger? and 2.) How hard should my heart really be beating when I’m busting my butt at the gym?

But, first, a little context. Several weeks ago, a couple of personal trainers walked by as I was laboring futilely on one of the resistance machines. “Any questions?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Why is this so hard?”

I was only partly looking for a laugh to ease my sweat-stained burden, but they didn’t take the bait. Instead, they explained how chowing down on some complex carbohydrates prior to my workout would power me to peak performance.

For some reason, I filed away that bit of information until yesterday afternoon, when I ordered up some creamy pasta dish for a late lunch. I’m not sure if I was really curious about the potential affect on my workout or if I just wanted the pasta, but I enjoyed the meal and about three hours later climbed on the treadmill (!!!!!) and started running (!!!!!).

Do complex carbohydrates go right to the brain? I hate the treadmill (vertigo), and I despise running (calf cramps), and yet I walked right out of the locker room, spied a vacant machine and climbed right on. After a five-minute walking warm-up, I started to jog and didn’t stop until I’d done a mile!!!!! It wasn’t fast, it wasn’t effortless, but it wasn’t that bad, either. My legs felt good, my heart rate soared into the mid-140s (more on that later), and I could almost imagine doing the whole routine again some time.

No, I didn’t stretch.

But I did dive into my strength-training routine with a weird sort of vigor. At each stop, I threw an extra 10 pounds above my normal load and pushed myself to the point of failure. On the chest press, in fact, I kept piling more and more weight on the machine — just to see where I landed — and found myself eventually doing a single five-rep set at 200 pounds!!!

So, later, I’m thinking: It must be the food.

And, sure enough, it turns out that experts, like the folks at Human Kinetics, preach the virtues of complex carbohydrates in the pre-workout meal. I probably should’ve known this, given that the whole “carbo-loading” cliche is so durable (the body turns carbs into the ATP needed to contract your muscles, yada yada yada), but I’ve never actually experienced it the way I did last night. Weird — but in a good way.

I think so, anyway. I was wearing my heart-rate monitor during this whole food-to-energy experiment and was wowed by how it shot up into the mid-140s during my run and stayed in the low-to-mid 130s during much of my lifting routine. This is WAY higher than what I’ve become accustomed to in the past several months, so I’m wondering: Am I going to have a coronary or something if this keeps up?

So, I checked in at WebMD to see what numbers I should be paying attention to, and found that maybe I was over-extending myself a bit. According to their heart-rate calculator, I should be hovering between 84 and 126 beats/minute during exercise and not exceeding 162.

This seems a little wimpy to me, but soaring heart rates aren’t really that productive, I’m told. So, I’ll try to slow down on the pasta in the future.

After my Crapmobile episode on Monday, I was anxious to get back on my regular workout schedule, so last night I hit the gym after work and went through my regular routine — except I built in some time between the elliptical machine and the strength training room to actually do some stretching!!!!

It’s a stretch, of course, to say I did much loosening of the muscles — a little hamstring here, a little quadriceps there — and it was on to the weight room. The dirty little secret about Craig’s fitness regimen is that I really like how it feels when I’m lifting weights. The tightness in the muscles is a sign that something’s going on in my body that might be a good thing. I don’t get the same buzz from the cardio stuff — though all that panting can’t be a bad thing — and stretching . . . well, is just stretching.

I’ve been taking the advice/challenge from SW, my fitness guru, who’s been encouraging me to throw on some extra weight, and now I’m finding that the 80 pounds on the lat pull-down thingy that a couple of weeks ago left me exhausted after two series of 10 reps doesn’t start feeling impossible until I’m nearly done with the third series. I’m up to 120 pounds on the bench press and think I can move it to 130 next week. I did 115 on the chest press thingy last night; I hadn’t ventured beyond 105 before.

This all seems like a good thing: I’m noticing a little definition on my upper body and arms, and that’s encouraging. I’m not aiming for some statuesque physique (I’d have to do something about my abs, then, wouldn’t I?), just hoping to ward off the floppiness inherent in middle-aged saggification.

Still . . . . Check out this piece on geezer bodybuilding in today’s New York Times. It seems that a growing number of oldsters are taking up the sport (?) and entering shows around the country. These are guys who start out just wanting to get back into shape and then start thinking maybe they and Schwarzenegger have something in common.

Could this happen to me?

I trekked through the beginnings of a classic March blizzard yesterday morning, workout gear in my backpack, fully intending to hit the gym after work. Really I did. Then, about 3 p.m., my wife called me on my cell to notify me that the Crapmobile (my 17-year-old son’s not-so-affectionate moniker for our ‘91 Honda) had bit the dust in the parking ramp next door. She was on her way to an appointment with a Life Time Fitness personal trainer downstairs, but clearly that was not going to happen, since she had to call a tow truck now and it would be an hour, at least, before salvation would arrive, and because the Crapmobile’s disabled ball joints had actually led to the wheel bearings falling from wherever wheel bearings are supposed to be and the front axle collapsing there on the upward slope of the ramp, she would be standing there directing traffic around our little blue wonder for the forseeable future.

I dutifully notified the aforementioned P.T. that my wife would like to reschedule her appointment during a time when she wasn’t directing traffic in a parking ramp. Then I headed next door to survey the damage and lend moral support. Our poor little car was indeed immobilized (though a couple of fairly muscular trainers showed up later with the idea of pushing it into a less inconvenient position until they noticed that it wasn’t going anyplace unless they picked it up and that picking it up would be a problem, since it was a car . . .), and my poor wife was thus destined to resolutely await the arrival of the tow truck.

Did I mention that we were having our annual late-March blizzard? Well, by the time the tow truck had hooked up our crippled little vehicle and headed off to the auto hospital, there were about six inches of slushy snow on the ground and a rip-roaring northwest wind propelling it through the air in a particularly unpleasant manner. Was I going to let my grieving wife traverse the storm on her way home all by herself? I don’t think that’s what a guy like me does, do you? No sir. So, we tromped our way through the tempest toward the river, picked up a bottle of wine at the liquor store, caught the first bus we saw, transferred to the train heading south, and walked the last four blocks home, where we had a nice spaghetti dinner with the kids (none of whom seemed surprised that the Crapmobile had broken its leg), after which I watched the Twins game.

So, that’s why I didn’t go to the gym last night.

In my dreams. . .

Jeeze, has it been 11 days since I last posted something here? You’re going to assume, of course, that I’ve also been derelict in my fitness regimen and simply didn’t want to pen one more pathetic post about how hard it’s been to get to the gym. But, no! I’ve been keeping up rather nicely with my workout schedule. Three days last week — cardio, resistance, yada yada yada — and Monday and Thursday this week (Wild game on Wednesday derailed my plans: beer, not better-fication).

Anyway, today I actually did some stretching — a little pretend yoga after my normal meditation session (surprise, surprise: I’ve had a Vipassana meditation practice for the past 10 years), which got me sweating and yearning for more flexible hamstrings, especially). It got me thinking about the whole flexibility thing and the “functional fitness” approach to keeping limber in my middle age.

As Fernando Pages Ruiz explains in this EL story from July/August 2002, an aging body like mine stiffens with age because it’s lost a good deal of its moisture content and is more prone to cellular micro-injuries that leave layers of scar tissue that further restrict movement. A regular stretching routine, he points out, stimulates the production of tissue lubricants and helps muscles rebuild themselves with a healthier cell structure.

There’s really no right way to stretch, of course — which is of great comfort to this geezer, who can’t actually touch his toes without curling up in a fetal position. (This morning, however, I was able to touch the floor without bending my knees — with my feet spread out just about as far as they would go. Whoo-Hoo!) The key, as I understand it, is simply to extend your muscles gradually beyond their point of comfort. When I do this, it feels pretty good, though it takes a surprising amount of effort to get there.

Monday I’ll get another opportunity to practice what Ruiz preaches.

Maybe I should take up rowing.

The great thing about Minnesota is that the weather is always pretty reliable. It’ll be mercilessly frigid for three months every winter and then insufferably sweltering (with mosquitoes) for two months every summer. It’s never a surprise — just an inexorable drifting across our meteorological River Styx (above, with apologies to Dante, et al.). But we love it here.

I’m a little obsessed with the weather today because our annual mid-March blizzard dumped 3 inches of slushy snow on the city last night, and the commute this morning was pretty slick underfoot and periodically wet from above. The trees were already shedding their snow cover from last night, and my usual arboreal bliss became more of a blitzkrieg, as great lumps of the wet stuff kept thwacking me about the head and shoulders as I walked. Plus, some doofus in a Pontiac hit a puddle just as I was passing by and gave me a refreshing slush shower. Yum.

All this misfortune, however, cannot dampen my joy at getting back to the gym last night after a week’s hiatus (yeah, yeah . . . whatever). It was the first really mindful workout I’ve done in a while — five-minute warm-up, 15 minutes of sweaty spinning on the bike (avg. heart rate: 122), five-minute cool-down, and then 25 minutes of upper-body work with the resistance machinery. And I’m not at all sore today (we’ll see about tomorrow and DOMS). I pushed myself a little on the lifting stuff, but not too much, and felt great afterward.

(One odd and totally irrelevant curiosity: I’ve run into my local Hennepin County commissioner three times in the past four days. Friday night in the park while walking home from work, Saturday night at a local bistro, and last night at the gym. Weird. I could never get in touch with this guy when I was covering politics.)

Anyway, this all once again has me thinking about the amount of time one needs to really get a decent workout. Part of the challenge for me is that I won’t even bother to go to the gym unless I can carve out at least an hour, because it’s become apparent to me that I can’t do what I think I need to do in less time than that. But that just might be me: I always like to combine cardio with strength training and each takes at least 25 minutes. And if I want to do the kind of stretching and flexibility work I need to do, I’d need another half hour (the extra five minutes is how long I need to get up off the floor).

In my not-so-exhaustive research, fitness experts like Greg Landry recommend 30-60 minutes a day. I’m getting at least that much — if you include my rather leisurely commute — but they tend to emphasize that any amount of time moving your body is time well spent. The point being: Don’t abandon your regimen simply because you can only carve out 30 minutes at the gym. (There is that 14-minute Tabata workout, which frankly scares me.) Anyway, I guess that’s a lesson I need to embrace. Maybe I can’t do the whole cardio-lifting-stretching (ha ha) thing every time. So, get off your butt (he told himself) and just do one of the three. Sheesh!