Pumping Irony

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?

Sometimes it helps to know your limitations.

True to form, when I finally got to the gym on Friday I completely overdid things — piled on the poundage and lifted to failure, just as I had promised myself. By Monday, my upper body — especially my arms — felt like I’d gone 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali in his prime.

(OK, the idea that I would last 15 seconds in the same ring with Ali — even in his current condition — is pretty ridiculous, but you know what I’m saying.)

I know all about the dangers of overtraining, the delusion that if you just push yourself past your limits you’ll get healthier and stronger faster. So, I have nobody to blame but myself. What was curious, though, was how my body’s response was so delayed. Why was I in so much more pain on Monday than I was on the weekend?

It reminded me of my old basketball-playing days, when my legs would feel crippled not on the day after the game, but two or sometimes three days later. Another few days and I was back to normal — clanging wide-open 15-footers and blowing layups.

The answer to this particular mystery is something called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (whose acronym, DOMS, sounds enough like “dumb” to be instructive), which peaks 48 or 72 hours after your foolishness at the gym.

All that pain comes from the microscopic tearing of your muscle fibers and connective tissue at the cellular level, Kermit Pattison explains in this January/February 2006 story in EL. And this tearing can be exacerbated by eccentric exercise, the lowering of weights in a strength-training regimen.

This makes sense to me, since the pain is most pronounced on the inside of my elbows and my forearms — the muscles most affected by lowering the weights during bicep curls. (Foolishly heeding my inner Schwarzenegger, I added about 10 pounds to what I usually lift on this machine.)

The result was that I couldn’t really straighten my arms without feeling some fairly excruciating pain. It seemed as if the muscles had constricted; the only way I could loosen them up was to (painfully) extend them with my elbows locked and palms facing up and then pull my fingers toward my body.

The good news is that, even as I suffer through DOMS, my poor muscles are growing stronger. It just doesn’t seem like the smartest approach.

It was kind of slow going this morning, due to the patches of glare ice hidden beneath a couple of inches of new snow. Lots of slipping and sliding on the sidewalks. At one point I could envision catastrophe — “Geezer breaks hip while foolishly walking to work in snowstorm” — but, instead of panicking, I just slowed down and practiced a little walking meditation. That’s when you mindfully place one foot in front of the other and breathe: heel to toe, heel to toe, heel to toe (you get the idea). This worked surprisingly well until a bus roared past me on the Ford Bridge and mindfully showered me with slush. After that, I picked up my pace a bit.

Anyway, I haven’t been able to get to the gym yet this week (reality intervenes. . .), so I’m jazzed about getting back on the machines. I particularly want to try out this whole idea of lifting to failure on the resistance machines. The idea, as I understand it, is that you’re supposed to put enough weight on the machine that you can’t actually complete the reps you set out to do (say, three sets of 10 reps) with good form. This approach is not without controversy, as strength training icon Charles Staley points out here. There’s a potential for injury and for developing bad form.

For me, the idea of not completing my reps with acceptable form has kept me from advancing very far in the amount of weight I’m lifting. Tonight, I’ll try adding some poundage and see what it feels like to fail.

I’m learning more about how the muscles in my body work, which is a good thing, since a lot of them are still sore today from my Wednesday workout. The most surprising news? It’s the period between workouts when your muscles really develop. Indeed, according to Fernando Pages Ruiz in this July/August 2003 story in EL, sleeping is just as important to bodybuilders as lifting.

I’m a great sleeper, but a wimpy lifter. Still, Ruiz notes that even old weaklings like myself can benefit from a regular lifting regimen. My big question today, however, is whether I should further tax my already aching pecs, biceps, lats, and triceps. So, I sought out S.W., my secret fitness guru, for his advice. He cautioned me to go easy on my poor body and work some other muscle groups instead. (Other muscle groups?)

The truth is, I’ve been neglecting my glutes and hamstrings and quads; and while my core beliefs are strong, my core muscles need a little work. So, I’ll give the rest of my body a rest and get at those tonight.

After about a 10-day hiatus, I’m finally feeling back in the swing of things. Winter is (very, very gradually) turning into spring, so I’ve been able to resume my walking commute, and last night I hit the gym for the first time in what feels this morning like a long, long time (I’m a little sore).

It’s surprising to me how my body responds to a workout after I’ve been sedentary for a while. Last night on the stationary bike, for example, I was pretty winded after only 10 minutes of moderately fast pedaling. Usually, I’ll push through that stage and do another 10 minutes before shifting into cool-down mode, but I just wasn’t up to it last night. It’s not just that my body wasn’t willing; after a week and a half away from the gym, my mind was a little flabby, as well. That little voice that usually cheers me on just wasn’t as persuasive as usual.

Having said that, I should note that I’m pretty conscious of the signals my aging body is sending me when I’m exerting myself. It’s not like when I was in my 30s, when I would routinely push myself through exhaustion on the basketball court. These days, if I’m feeling winded, I slow down. It would be so embarrassing to have a heart attack in the midst of so many fit people.

So, with an extra 10-15 minutes to burn, I spent more time lifting than usual. And I noticed that, unlike my cardio collapse on the bike, I didn’t really suffer any major setback by staying away from the weight machines for 10 days. I could pretty much go back to lifting the same amount as I was before, without much struggling. Of course, my regimen is not exactly Herculean: three sets of 10 reps, working my upper body mostly, with weights ranging from 70 to 95 lbs. (not including bicep curls, where I’m stuck at around 35 to 40 lbs).

This makes me wonder whether strength training, in general, is easier to sustain than cardio training over the long haul. I haven’t been able to find any conclusive evidence, but it appears that muscle mass, once built, may hang around longer than the oxygen-burning capabilities built from regular aerobic exercise. As Liz Plosser puts it in this piece in Women’s Health, strength training pays dividends long after you leave the gym, because of the “metabolic spike” that occurs as your body works to help your muscles recover from all that heavy lifting. My sense is that acquiring and keeping muscle mass is a lot easier than building cardiovascular resources.

But that could just be me. I’ll get back on the treadmill (or whatever) tomorrow and see if it’s any easier.

I mentioned earlier that I’d never set foot in a health club before about a year ago, so it’s almost goes without saying that the whole strength training routine remains pretty foreign to me (that is not me in the photo). I can remember as an early teen lifting a barbell at one of my friends’ house — an exercise designed chiefly to identify the wussiest of our pack based on the amount of iron he could raise over his head. It was not a comfortable moment for a scrawny kid like myself, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that real strength training is a good deal more sophisticated — and quite a lot less intimidating.

Of course, that’s not to say I have much of a clue about this stuff. Take last night at the gym, for instance. After 25 minutes on the new elliptical machine (much easier on the knees than the treadmill), I shuffled over to the weight room and, as is my habit, surveyed the machines to see what was available. Rather than move from one machine to the next in an orderly fashion, designed to strategically work specific muscle groups, I tend to just wander from one machine to the other based on which one is open — sort of a half-hearted version of circuit training — but without a real plan.

What I have noticed in the year since I started doing this stuff semi-regularly is how good my body feels after each session, how the muscles I’ve been working seem to be generating their own kind of energy. I’m as vain as the next geezer; it’s gratifying to see a little bit of definition here and there on my formerly floppy triceps and sagging pectorals. But, what really keeps me coming back to these machines is the knowledge that strength training is vital to your overall health in a way that simply bicycling — or even walking — isn’t. All those activities are helpful, of course, but strength training does stuff at the cellular level that can boost immunity, build bone density, and even ease stress.

Plus, you don’t really have to lift hundreds of pounds of weight in order to have a good result. So, when I set the lat pull-down machine to 70 pounds and do three sets of 10 reps, I know I’m doing myself some good — even if it may not look that impressive to the guy yanking 150 pounds on the machine next door. Sure, I’m a piker compared to most of the young bucks in this room, but this isn’t really a competition — unless you count the battle between the sort-of-healthy guy I am now and the really healthy guy I’d like to become.