The "I Quit" Update

Remember a few weeks back when I was whining about being coerced into hitting the gym? About "quitting" the denial thing I previously had about not having to cross train in order to surf? Well, here's the update.

I have some good news and bad news for you guys about working out twice a week. The bad news is that going to the gym twice a week for 45-60 minutes a pop has had zero net effect on my weight or my waistline. The good news is that I definitely have noticed a difference in how I feel, particularly my endurance and recovery when surfing.

To recap my "workout" if you could really call it that, the boy (he's 28) and I spend about 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer. I run it at a pace that according to the machine's computer says I'm burning about 400 calories so I reckon that's probably about equal to a 4-mile walk in an hour. I also do some ab work on two machines, one where I pull into the crunch and another where I push into it. Then we usually cap off with a set of pull ups and another set of dips - for that one I'm using a machine that subsidizes my effort by counterbalancing my weight so that instead of pulling my entire 195# I'm only pulling up 135# - that enables me to get more reps.

The abdominal machine that has me pulling into the crunch has another benefit for me - it's cut down into my usage of chiropractic care from once/month to zero/month. Because of the way the seatback on that machine is positioned against my back it provides a little bit of a fulcrum for "popping" one of the vertebrae in my middle back (right between my shoulder blades) back into place. If I work that weight in the full range of motion, after about the 5th rep that vertebra pops back into place where it's supposed to be. I've had trouble with that sucker for my entire adult life, and as most people know, when one part of your spine is out of sync it tends to pull other parts of the spine out of line and sets muscles working against each other in a negative way.

Another benefit is from the elliptical in that all that movement in my hips and lower back has that area loosened up quite nicely. So now when I do a 2-hr session in the surf I don't end up with a sore lower back like I do when I'm not walking a lot or doing this. Lastly, my endurance in paddling and my recovery time from one of those sessions have both improved quite a bit.

I started noticing the onset of these benefits almost immediately after I started "working out", within the first couple weeks. It surpassed the point of providing more benefit than hassle by the end of 4 weeks. I'm still only going twice a week, so I really can't even say I'm working at it hard or that the workout represents a lifestyle change.

My point for mentioning all this on a blog is in order to provide the datapoint - you don't have to put in a lot of extra effort or change your life in order to reap some noticeable benefits in short order.

We're starting to gradually add in some extra sets and reps and adding some additional resistance as we go but neither of us are actually pushing it. Word on the street is that the addage "no pain - no gain" is currently out of vogue with a lot of the fitness folks. They've swapped in the idea that we're supposed to push hard enough to feel like we worked out, but not hard enough to be sore after quitting. Maybe buying into that is wishful thinking on my part, but one upside to it is that I don't think I'm pushing hard enough to injure anything.

Obviously, I still have lots of room for improvement. If I added another gym session and maybe started walking with my wife after dinner that would work with my efforts on the elliptical to further build my cardio and endurance. Maybe I should try to surf more - what a concept, right? If I cut down on the starches I consume I could start dropping some weight. At any rate, I feel like I'm on a slightly better track right now so that's a little bit of all right.

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