I have had a weight lifting set now for about 10 or 15 years. I have set my weights to about 50 pounds on barbells. Since I'm now in my late 60s I don't try to lift weights every day because I don't want to tear down muscles I want to maintain my strength ongoing. So, I lift weights when I feel good and balanced and strong enough every other day. I do this mostly because I want to be able to continue to lift 50 pounds or more above my head ongoing. Also, I don't want to lose my rotator cusps which allow a person to lift their hands above their heads either. This way I'm not just tearing down muscles I am also building them up and going forward. However, I have noticed that I have more pains in some muscle groups as I have gotten older doing this where I didn't have any pains before. But, generally I can keep my stamina constant or getting better doing this every other day.
Also, if I set the NordicTrack on 2 miles per hour I can have a fairly vigorous walk even in my living room if I'm watching the news or thinking about something else. So, still in my late 60s this works quite well for me. My goal now is that I want to walk at least 30 minutes a day at a good pace so often I will set a timer on my smartphone so I can see how long I'm walking hiking with our dog in the coastal range forests or along the beach near where I live. Then I will add more time on the NordicTrack so I keep my cardio at 30 minutes at a high enough level to maintain all muscle groups and my stamina so I'm ready for snorkeling, long hikes, bicycling or whatever I want to be doing at the beach or in the wilderness somewhere on earth.
My wife has gone in a slightly different direction by being sort of addicted now to physical therapy. She prefers working with people to work specific muscle groups especially now with her full right knee replacement last Summer. she showed me last night how when she concentrates she can now walk without any type of limp at all even though climbing stairs is still pretty slow. So, each of us has our ways of staying in shape and moving forward in our lives which is a good thing. The biggest difference with a knee replacement is her pain is now only about 10% or less generally of what she experienced before her knee replacement last year.
But, I should tell you that the first 4 months (especially the first 2 months) you really need to be Hero to get through it with a full knee replacement even if you have the best doctor on the west coast doing this like my wife did.
Later: Sunday June 30th 2019: Actually I found the bar itself weighs about 10 to 15 pounds when I weighed it on top of the 50 pounds of weights I put on it. So, I'm actually lifting still above my head 60 to 65 pounds and not 50. At this age (71) I don't try to do this every day because it is strenuous because I also have a hernia around my belly button caused by a burst appendix operation in 2015. So, I wear a weight belt to hold everything together when I lift this much weight. I only do this about once or twice a week but it keeps my arms able to lift things above my head ongoing into my 70s and beyond. Often men lose this ability in their 70s and 80s because they don't continue to lift weights above their head like I continue to. I also try to walk 1 mile or more most days and I have a Nordic track so I can walk at at least 2 to 3 miles per hour on days when I don't want to walk out into the forest or out on the beach in the comfort of my living room.
Later still: I have also gone to daily use of dumbells at 8 pounds each now to lessen the strain of just lifting these weights of 65 pounds once or twice a week. By doing many repetitions with 8 pound dumbells every day it strengthens my upper body as long as I wear a weight lifting belt to protect my hernia around my belly button caused by a burst appendix laparoscopic operation. They inflate your abdomen with CO2 which is not combustible so you don't catch fire or explode when they use lasers to cut away inside you the burst appendix. However, my operation was a week after my appendix burst (because they could not define what had happened to me before this) so my body had already eaten up the appendix and created a pus pocket and had already dealt with it. So, I'm not sure how useful this operation actually was to me personally. So, the first week I just thought I was dying mostly which almost was the case. The operation was the night before Easter 2015. So, when I woke up from the operation and wasn't dead about midnight when Easter Began and I wasn't dead it was sort of like Resurrecting once again from the dead. I was happy my children wouldn't have to have a funeral for me mostly. I had to cremate my father and mother when they passed on in 1985 and 2008 respectively and push them into the crematorium and watch them burn up. This is an awful thing to have to do. So, putting that off for my children a little longer is a Godsend.
No comments:
Post a Comment