Uh oh, I do it all the time
And here I go again 
So glad your brother joined you for a workout! My son discovered golf and yoga after his scz was well established. He would have liked to play team sports, but he quickly found he couldn’t handle that many people being around.
My 60 minutes this weekend has all been walking minutes, I have found I always see muscle growth when I take a weekend off of strength workouts. Hoping I can still fit into my clothing…
@hope
I think fluctuating musculature and body weight is normal. A fact cave divers and powerlifters know well is that muscles expand with exhaustion, grow in surges and change constantly.
I hope that now matter which pair of pants you wind up wearing each day, you get to feel that strength and that pride knowing that you put the hard work in!
My girlfriend is suffering from the flu these days, so I ended up skipping the full-on routine today. Still, she managed to walk around the block with me but it was mostly just so she wouldn’t feel couped up in the house all day.
I’m glad I went ahead and spent the money on my set of resistance bands. I feel like I did a good job of preventing atrophy or loss of strength by using them sporadically throughout the day.
Tomorrow I intend to hit it hard. Putting off intense exercise now while I’m healthy will only make the next time I have to quit for whatever reason that much harder to spring back from.
My motivation us pretty simple these days, now that I am capable of working hard enough to be satisfied with the intensity:
What will my children think of me?
Will they always compare their strength to the image they had in their head of me when they are small, like I do for my own dad?
That’s my goal!
My mantra on weigh in days is your line “weight is just a number on an iron plate”
Even though I have some pants fitting tighter and others that can’t even be worn, I do know its okay, I can see the muscles and that does make me relax. Also, I have plenty of regular leggings and athletic leggings that work just fine.
So sorry about your girlfriend’s flu, my advice is - DO NOT GET IT. Hey, how is that new job going?
@hope
I’m glad someone else is using my mantra!
Makes me less of a crazy person if I’m not the only one saying it, haha!
Seems like my immune system is pretty resillient. I’ve been doctoring her through the weekend and haven’t even had as much as a sniffle. Probably means any sniffle I might catch would be grounds for quarantine, though…
Work is good! Thanks for asking!
I’m still training up, but things are going smoothly so far. The anticipation of things becoming difficult is always harder than actually working through it, I think.
At very least, I’ve managed to set up a decent work environment for myself. So, I’m not exactly suffering, haha!
As for exercise,
I am continuing to set incremental goals for myself. This is essential to sustaining a long-term fitness plan.
Small goals, big celebration.
My goal today is to crank out a moderate 2 mile run on the treadmill and then work the vanity muscles (chest, shoulders, biceps and triceps). I will celebrate with some Halloween candy afterward, haha!
That’s all it takes, track that progress, set attainable daily goals and congratulate yourself. The rest follows along naturally over time!
hehehehe! That made me laugh.
@wreklus faux pas comment made me think that in the world’s we live in just about anything seems to go sometimes.
Big rain hit early here - had to work out with Leslie Sansone instead of taking the dogs to the park - they are not happy about it, not happy at all.
@hope
Definitely true that taboo and faux pas are rarely ever helpful customs for us.
Sorry the doggies are displeased, I’m sure they’ll get over it. Most dogs are pretty good at gratitude.
I’m taking a lunch break from work.
I seem to be more lazy today as I haven’t picked up the resistance bands yet. So, I’m here to soak up some inspiration and get my pump on!
My dogs are older Labradors - we always say that as Labs age they get more like people. Mine are definitely showing signs of elderly grumpiness They are good to freestyle the rest of the day (well until dinnertime which needs to be prompt), but to them morning should start with an early park walk or run, quickly followed by breakfast.
Totally unrelated but in my thoughts today. One of my neighbors had told a friend a couple of years ago that she thought I was getting too concerned about how my yard looked. At that time my son Jeb lived inside our house with us. During the day I could get breaks from his psychosis by doing yard work. When he was feeling stressed Jeb would ask me “don’t you have something you can do outside?” Yard work and gardening have been a stress reliever for me for years.
Makes you realize how people have no idea what is actually going on in other people’s lives.
2 Likes
Yes, for me too. My yard is transformed from the empty dry lot it was 4 years ago.
1 Like
I had the opposite. For my garden the first step was clearing thorny brush and pulling vines out of trees. Reaching up high, wrapping the vine around my hands, I would pull down with all my weight and yell “let go of the tree”.
3 Likes
Maybe that is why I decorated for Halloween this year. But I can’t say that it was a lot of exercise!
2 Likes
No, maybe it wasn’t a “lot” of exercise, but any is better than none. One little step toward improvement…
I actually showed up at my gym for a pilates class yesterday. My first “real” gym day since I signed up two weeks ago. I could do maybe 30-50% of the class, but I feel better today: muscle burn isn’t bad and energy level is up. There is also this “stretching station” with pictures of various stretches which I did after class. Nice system. Just those two things will help me a lot I think. So I’ll go back in a few days.
1 Like
When our family members live at home with us, I think getting out of the house becomes even more important. We need breaks. We took up golf when our son lived in our house with us. It was a good way to have his dad out of the house for hours on weekends. Walking 18 holes is a lot of exercise. When his psychosis was really bad on weekends (he would be stressed because his dad was home) we even golfed in cold rainy weather.
Have you done pilates before?
@oldladyblue
Congrats on doing the work!
Remember that everyone starts somewhere. You will meet goals, only to create new ones for yourself!
Today, I worked out with my girlfriend again and it was really great!
I absolutely love the fact that we can head out saying, “I’m tired, I’m sore from my last workout, I’m going to take it easy”, but it always turns out to be high intensity!
We really do a good job of challenging ourselves and getting out money’s worth out of the gym!
We both have big goals. Solid effort and consistency are going to get us there!
1 Like
Heheheh, golfing in the rain. Ahh, that makes me laugh out loud.
No, never did pilates. It was different, I will go to that class again.
1 Like
You were laughing because you could picture choosing to golf in the rain over going home and listening to a loud psychotic episodes.
I like pilates because you gain strength even when you have to do partial versions of the exercise. Like yoga you do what you can do and you keep getting able to do more.
What I really like about pilates over yoga is that most of my pilates dvds feature exercises that you do while lying down on the floor.
I’m mad at myself, I should have gone to the gym today, it’s 3 days since my first exercise class. Should go every 3 days max.
Yes, I would rather golf in the rain than listen to loud psychotic episodes. Tonight is very quiet though, so no golfing and no rain.
1 Like
@oldladyblue
It’s important not to beat yourself up about your exercise habits, especially at first. Remember that you are literally changing your lifestyle. It’s the hardest thing to do.
The challenge of achieving consistency with your workout plan is very common. Most people have more trouble being consistent than they do putting in a lot of effort while they do actually workout.
It requires a lot of adjustment to your lifestyle and a lot of figuring out what helps you make those adjustments, personally.
It’s about progress, not perfection.
Track the weeks as you continue on. Mark the days you workout on your calendar.
You stated that you don’t want to go longer than 3 days between workouts. That’s a good goal to work toward! Focus on making progress toward that goal, even if it has to be incremental over a few weeks.
@hope
I just did a set of 2 quick exercise videos like pilates in the living room with my girlfriend last night. It wasn’t a bad workout, we even ended up sweating a little bit.
My update:
It’s about the time of day where I choose my exercise goals, so…
- Run outside on pavement - no requirement for time, distance or speed (I’ve been on the treadmill too much!)
- Weightlifting - continue to focus on shoulders and arms
- Abs - leg lifts and planks
- Reward - Lots of bread
I’d really like to keep improving my cardio and also start gaining muscle again. I’ve never been able to have a lot of both, so I’ll be breaking new ground pretty soon.
For now, I’m still on the shallow end of average with both cardio and strength. I’ll get there, I have my whole life to do it.
2 Likes
@oldladyblue I was so inconsistent at first, it took a long time for me to get consistent. I just had to keep trying again and again. Things got better when I started using an old fashioned wall calendar. The most frustrating thing for me was how long it took to workout at first. I was searching for good workouts which can be tedious and really added to the workout time.
@wreklus Pilates for the abs will work those abs. People used to say that ab muscles were slow to develop - I believed that until I did pilates. Ab muscles are just like other muscles, they will develop just as quickly. My husband does not like pilates for the abs, my observations is that his yoga has not strengthened his abs noticeably.
Four months in and I am really pleased with my progress. I feel much better and much stronger. I am incredibly relieved that it has not required dieting. This last month when I began working the gluteus maximus I actually had to start eating a bigger breakfast and add in some protein snacks between meals. That’s right still not dieting. If I had tried dieting that would have just sunk me. After trying and trying I am getting the 60 minutes in nearly every day.
That hard body stuff you hear about it starting to show up.
I will not be increasing my weights or reps. I will continue to do 60 minutes a day of my mixture of:
Pilates - Mari Winsor dvds - but she is also on youtube
Leslie Sansone walking videos on youtube
Arm workouts with weights - yeah - still working on Madonna’s arms on youtube
Kim Kardashian Buttock workout with Rebecca Louise - also on youtube
Dog walking and running in the park.
Plan is to see if the next two months will have the increased muscle mass eating off enough of the fat to have me calling it good. If not, I will look at adding an extra low impact workout for one month and see where that goes. I am okay with it coming off gradually. The medical folks say if I want to lose fat I should do 90 minutes a day. I went for adding muscle to keep me from having to restrict food.
1 Like