On Measuring Progress in Fitness Training

Why it’s important to keep tabs no matter how old you get

My hiking poles grabbed the soft, wet earth as I pushed hard up the incline. It’s not terribly steep, just a lot of it. Just like there’s a great deal more oxygen in this atmosphere as I hike from ground level to only 300 feet.

Oregon sure is different from Denver.

My breath came in ragged gasps, as I pushed hard. The whole point was the push.

This was the first time since running on the sidewalks in Denver that I’d had a really good effort. God, it felt good.

By the time I got the to top of Spencer Butte, I’d carved fully twenty minutes off the first time I’d hiked the trail only two weeks ago. Twenty minutes.

After way too much inactivity, it’s a pleasure to see real progress.

I’d been out of the gym for four months, a record for me, and like so many of us I’d been sitting way too much in quarantine. Isolated from the pool, the stairs I loved to run and all the other normal outlets for bodywork from chiropractor to acupuncture to massage, my aging body had begun to show many of the signs that sedentary life guarantees.

I’d done what I could given my situation, most days. Others, I was just tired. Emotionally drained. Lots of us are. Moving to a new city is stressful, my house hasn’t sold, and there are tons of things I can’t do until it does. Many of you can relate.

I’d had to leave my kickboxing and yoga behind, for I had landed in Eugene at a youth hostel. There was no place to plug in my DVDs and work out, no room to do it, and even fewer options for bodywork in a brand new town still under lockdown.

There are lots of societal lessons in this, but for the sake of this article, I’m going to concentrate on what I’m learning about measuring progress. Especially as we age, being motivated and staying motivated is essential. Noticing progress not only conveys hope but it also renews our commitment. Part of that is recognizing that while our bodies may not respond with the immediacy of youth, they do indeed respond, and that alone is cause for celebration.

In other words, all hope is hardly lost. We might have to go on a treasure hunt to find it but it’s out there all right. It just takes patience and perseverance.

So far, so good

As soon as things began to open up, I joined a local gym to restart basic workouts. There was obvious muscle loss, changes in size (thanks to chocolate almonds and the sitting), and the completely predictable shifting of where weight wanders as we age. If you’re aging and a little too sedentary you’re all too familiar with this. Of course, my muscles expressed their distinct displeasure at being called forth for real work again. Three days of Really Pissed Off, then back to normal. Oh. We have to work. Okay fine. Let’s.

My real estate agent Paula expressed the same thing when she hit the tennis courts again, carrying her quarantine eight, and feeling it in her knees. I’ve got about fourteen years on her; makes no difference. Sitting is sitting, and it hurts us at all ages.

All is not lost. Not in the slightest. I might warn you that whenever you begin a workout, the very first muscle you might want to exercise is your expectations. Regaining the waist of your (possibly wasted) youth is likely not likely, especially if you’ve had kids, and especially if you cleaned up the plates when your kids left too much mashed potato. My Mom did that, too. Most of us did if we grew up with “There are kids starving in China” mantra.

While it escapes me how shoveling more spuds and butter down my gullet is going to somehow translate into a healthier Chinese child, it apparently made a compelling argument for Mom. That way she didn’t feel guilty spooning those spuds into the garbage disposal.

Of course spooning those spuds into our garbage disposals (our gullets, thanks) didn’t help us out much, either. But here we are.

What happens to our hips

I have two labral tears, one in each hip, from a combination of over-training and then hiking the significantly more technical Mount Kenya in 2018. Those injuries don’t heal. You either learn to live with them, continue to work around them, or subject yourself to some discomfort with an arthroscopic procedure. Labral tears are not an age-related injury. They are typically an overuse injury, and they can happen to anyone. They are rather painful- as anyone can attest, and that pain creates an additional irritant because as a hemophiliac I cannot use NSAIDS, nor would I.

Exercising helps a great deal in this regard. If you have hip injuries, then sitting could well make them far more painful. I’m sure your body is having a very lively conversation with you if this is the case as it is with me.

As I also have arthritis in both hips, which is in part a salute to how rough I am on my body, the lack of activity isn’t just bad news for the body overall. It’s very bad news for pain. Exercise keeps those joints warmed up, and warmth is a friend to arthritis and those tears. With that as a backdrop, quarantine and lots of enforced sitting were angry headlines for me, as it was for lots of other folks.

Here’s a great article that explains in detail why sitting all day, every day, is just evil for your body:

While you have likely already seen the headlines about how sitting is the new cancer, if I may, that’s not what I want to point out here. You and I may have found ourselves sitting far more because of quarantine- and for those of us who prefer to be active, I want to touch on what happened to my 67-year-old body as a result of way too much butt time.

This is non-scientific and strictly anecdotal, so bear with me.

First- my butt got bigger. Not just because of the short-lived chocolate almond habit, which didn’t help, but because I was no longer out running and hiking stairs every other day. Between 2400 and 3600 stairs three to four days a week will go a long way to tighten the aging ass.

No workouts, the butt does the unthinkable. No butts about it. Especially if you were once larger, as I was, it recolonizes.

Second, when I started some new workouts, those loosened, lazy muscles took me out behind the tool shed and beat the holy shit out of me. Hurt. At lot. For about three days. Like my other muscles, which by this time have realized that no, I wasn’t kidding, we are now back to the gym regularly.

And while the spread hasn’t retreated as yet, at least it hasn’t sprung any more leaks, to the relief of my hard-working Lyrca workout gear. Which, BTW, was starting to look awfully weary.

Third, my hips, subjected to far too much sitting in a body used to regular movement, tightened. The mobility I am accustomed to in my yoga, which has also had to take a back seat for now, is largely gone. I can address that at the gym. I already had lower back pain from sports and disc degeneration, but the sitting exacerbated that. Worse, as the article explains, the more you sit, the more everything in the body begins to weaken and work far less efficiently. Including your brain, because of how blood flow is affected.

In other words, how you sit can age you a lot faster. For those of us dedicated writers, this is a serious head’s up.

Even taking a simple walk around the block or a quick jog up and down the stairs helped, but all too often it was easier to skip it because I’d get so engrossed in my writing.

But wait, there’s more.

For slim or thin White and Asian women in particular, osteoporosis is a real danger. Lack of weight-bearing activity along with poor diet (and smoking and alcohol, among other factors) all combine to create a perfect storm of overly-porous bone past a certain age. When I checked the results of my DEXA scan from last January, something I’d completely spaced (after all, we have had a few distractions) I was shocked to see that my bone density had taken a significant hit. THEN we had quarantine, right about the time that the one thing I most needed to do was work out, lift weights, run, run stairs, etc.

Well. At the time I wasn’t aware of the scan results, which is just as well. I hardly needed another stressor about being stuck in place and sitting too much. Osteoporosis is a deadly enemy, for hip fractures are a death sentence for the elderly. A shocking number of folks who fall and crack a hip are gone within a year.

I can’t speak for you but that’s a pretty damned good motivator. The good news is that just like your muscles, bone loss is reversible.

Rebuilding those hips

Three weeks ago my brand new handy-dandy body-building trainer, who is costing me $65 an hour (six months of gym ownership, I might note), gave me some exercises to strengthen my hips and glutes.

If you wanna know how much power your legs lose when you get engrossed in binge-watching, try this, Sparky:

Sit in any regular chair. Feet flat on the floor, back straight, eyes ahead. Lift one leg straight out in front of you.

Holding that leg out, now try to lift yourself to a standing position (look Ma, no hands) and then slowly, with complete control, lower yourself back down.

Twelve reps, each leg, three sets.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Me too. So we moved to a bench, put a four-inch step under my (spreading) ass, gave me a wooden dowel, and started me with my outstretched leg with the heel on the floor. I used the dowel to help me balance and pull myself upright.

Twenty-four hours later my quads were swearing in a language not yet invented by (wo)man. Three days later, better. Three weeks later, with regular practice, not only am I no longer using the extra height under my (no longer spreading) butt, I am now only using the dowel for balance instead of support.

Progress.

Ryan and I were both delighted with the progress, which means strength and balance. Not one to ease off, he gave me another set of exercises, at my request, to address hip mobility and strength.

I’ll deal with those later, but suffice it to say that I hurt so much right now it’s a good thing I don’t drink.

I do them because they’re hard

I am about to upend my schedule yet again. It’s four am, my car is packed, and in two days I will be back in Denver to pick up the last of my furniture. A constant, churning, changing life, with very little predictability. However, Ryan’s exercises can be done if I can find a chair, and I have the dowel already in my car. The point is that I am now unwilling to forfeit the progress (paid for in pain) I’ve made towards regaining my leg strength. I am in training for the moment that Mongolia reopens its borders. The trip I was to take in August is already repaid, and it’s simply a matter of time.

I hardly want to have that trip come available, but my body isn’t.

Which is, of course, a statement about life in general. Consider retirement: Imagine, as do so many, that retirement age is here but your health and vitality aren’t, squandered by years of bad habits.

You can get back on track any time. I am living proof of it. I’m not lucky. Just determined. My body hurts when I return to the hard stuff, but the hard stuff is precisely what prepares me for my eighties and beyond.

The best news: you can get through the hard stuff. It gets easier fast. So does aging. Small gains make you and me feel terrific, and ready for more.

See you at the gym!