…I’m doing rehab at the Y, and just a little tends to do me in, I mean like 15 reps apiece on each of about 6 machines—but I’m up from 10. The good news is (I’m working most on the leg exercises, a little on the midriff) I started out with 20 lbs and am now up in weights, up to 30 or 40. But done in! I tell you, don’t fall behind on your exercise! It’s so hard to climb out of the pit, and worst, absolute worst of all, you start getting lower back pain from the collapse of what’s been preventing you from having lower back pain. The SI joint (sacroiliac: joint combining spine with pelvis) is one of those nasty bits of engineering we assaulted very inconsiderately when we decided to stop walking on our knuckles. Most of the ills of the human frame are due to misaligment of said joint (habitually standing swaybacked), or falling and jolting it, or twisting while carrying too heavy a weight, or several other injudicious moves we can make which tax that piece of engineering that really should have several more restraint tendons but doesn’t.
On the other hand, I’m gaining on it. I’ve gotten the better of a nasty hip pain that was keeping me awake at night (SI pain), and gotten more stamina, and more general strength. Guys may not understand this, but then again maybe you will: when you exercise and gain strength you find things you were finding heavy aren’t…so you’re not surprised when they aren’t.
Which is how I ended up at the store without my billfold in my purse—an object which weighs about 8-10 pounds; and the billfold probably puts another 3/4 pound on it. Didn’t detect that it was missing—as in, lying on the kitchen table; so I trek 3 miles to the store—and discover I have no billfold. I drive illegally back home, recover same, and trek back again to get my stuff for the pond…
But it’s better than finding the purse heavy, eh?
My program: inside leg extension, outside leg extension, backward leg push, torso twist, ab crunch, triceps curl; I started on the bikes, but discovered my back/hip pain getting worse, which means I wasn’t moving evenly or symmetrically, so I laid off that and went to the inside/outside which gets the SI evened up, then the others, and funny thing, the hip pain went away, so I think I’m onto a good track.
You might try sitting in a kitchen chair with your hands on your knees, arms straight, hunching and arching your back. I find that loosens my back muscles and lets me sit upright more comfortably.
Inside leg extension?
Can you use the lower back machine where you sit and lean back against the weights.
I was talking to a friend yesterday at our Y, she teaches “Total Body Express” and is an RN. She suggested that for my lower back pain, to lie on the floor, cross one leg over the other thigh, raise the straight leg up as far as you can, then GENTLY push on the other foot. Repeat for the other side, and do it a couple of times a day. You can also do it standing up against a wall, but she said the stretch was better if you were on the floor.
Is the inside leg extension where you squeeze your legs together? That strengthens the hip adductors and the opposite machine works the abductors.
Any exercise which works your core – abs, lower back, obliques, glutes, abductors/adductors – which doesn’t cause any pain for you, is probably a good exercise. I do Pilates at my Y, we use light weights just to add a bit of resistance to certain exercises. There are some exercises I just cannot do because of my arthritis, or because my knees don’t bend that far any longer. Even so, I get pretty darned sweaty doing the exercises that I can perform.
Because we belong to the Y and are halfway between two excellent gyms with somewhat different machines, the standing back-push one varies with the lean-back machine. We just started this in January. I’m very fortunate in not having major arthritis, since grandmother Tipton on mother’s side had rheumatoid arthritis very bad; but I apparently got the Boone bones from Dad’s side. Dad was very strong and could take a fall undamaged. He had a few fingers that were iffy—so do I, from hitting one with a hammer with a hefty backswing (I was chiseling mortar)—but curiously, guitar playing helped him overcome the stiffness; and I need to get back to that, too, for the finger flexibility. The one I hit is curving. Also, since I’ve typed since I was 10, my fingers look straight when I extend them (except the one) but curve when I bend them. Life-style does shape the bones. 😉
A daiy dose of magnesium, d, and hyaluronic acid/MSM/chondroitin is helping me avoid gimping about from the exercise. Amazing how that works. Just read, too, that magnesium, as well as helping back pain, is sometimes prescribed for fibromyalgia; which I don’t have, but I do get muscle pain. Considering that my thyroid med really hammers the body’s magnesium levels, this is probably a good thing to take.
OT again, but maybe you’ll like this.
A medieval kitteh who knocked over the ink, stepped in it, and walked all over a scribe’s nice neat manuscript.
…and another mischievous medieval kitteh who did something far worse to a manuscript.
…and in the same series, a Roman kitteh who left footprints on a brick that ended up in Washington State.
(I can only put one link in a post or it goes to spam.)
Lol! Those are great! Deventer, by the way, is the town in Holland my mother’s people (van Deventers >Vandeventers) came from. 😉 Glad to know it was well-patroled by proper nightwatching cats. One was saying—this shop is MINE. It may have been the same cat, repeatedly: marking has to be done every 24 hours or so to keep it current, as the effective (to them) part of the scent fades… 😆
I thought that the Latin for cat was felis?
It is, but when you get into regional and late Latin, all sorts of things turn up. Latin acquires ‘helping’ verbs, etc, in Germanic areas. And you get cabalus (nag) mistaken for equus (horse), etc.
Jerry-rigged joints? 🙁 Certainly the worst has to be the knees? There no joint there, just a couple bones butting end to end. If’n they were lashed properly, why am I wearing some Ace elastic sleeves to hold ’em together?
Mind spilling the beans on the magnesium? I’m beginning to wonder if low Mg levels might contribute to my IBS. 🙁
I’m not a biochemist, but I did stay in a…
No, wait. I AM a marine hobbyist, and this is what I know, which is kind of convolute, but bear with me. Water dissolves salt; and saltwater dissolves everything, — and all the creatures in the ocean, like stony coral, depend on 3 factors. 1) the ph, which rides at about 7.9 in the usual mode of measuring, with a certain carbon/oxygen content, buffered, which is usually expressed as an alkalinity of 8.3; the dissolved calcium being at a certain level that will instantly give you white stuff if the water evaporates, usually expressed at an ideal 420; and magnesium of about 1300. If the magnesium isn’t present in adequate amounts (above 1200), the whole water-balance starts going haywire. The alkalinity drops, the calcium drops (being used up in the closed space of a fishtank), and the marine creatures start starving for food because their contractile tissue can’t work without calcium: and fish start being uncomfortable, because the water is losing alkalinity and becoming more acid. Corals start consuming their own stony calcium carbonate skeletons for calcium just to go on living, even sucking the calcium from the water so thoroughly that your snail’s shells (they’re desperate too) start dissolving and getting holes in them even while your snails are still alive. (Remember I said saltwater dissolves things: when it doesn’t have ‘enough’ buffer and ‘enough’ calcium, it starts dissolving the rocks to get it. When fish and corals have excreted all they’ve got, their structure goes brittle and their contractile tissue (muscle, in fish) stops functioning. Then the corals start folding up and not affording their internal flora the exposure to sunlight that would let them work either. Death results, eventually…
If, on the other hand, the hobbyist realizes the situation and dumps in buffer to raise the alkalinity—he could dump it in all day, and the alkalinity won’t rise. He could add a whole 3 months supply of calcium and the calcium reading wouldn’t rise a bit. BUT—if he first adds magnesium to bring the magnesium reading up to at least 1200, then the buffer will raise the alkalinity and the calcium addition will raise the calcium level, and the marine creatures can ABSORB the calcium and carbon and oxygen and start laying down their calcium carbonate skeleton and having their contractile tissues pumping water and doing what they do…
So I’m no biochemist, but I do grow corals, and as in the small, so in the great, as above, so below: fish suffer bone and muscle loss from magnesium lack in the water. Snails can’t build shells. I count magnesium as important as calcium and vitamins, and many meds deplete it, laxatives deplete it, the entire human gut functions on it, and sends it right out of the body…and stops if we don’t have enough magnesium. So for a lot of reasons involving the health of muscle and bone and gut—I think its importance has been vastly overlooked in a whole host of problems with muscle aches, pains, brittle bones, and chancy digestion.
I realize our diets are different (I love garlic and cook with it often and with abandon), but in your experience what sort of supplementation with magnesium is beneficial?
I think I’ll title the above “Ode to Magnesium.”
http://www.livestrong.com/article/525776-magnesium-nausea/
Or Milk of Magnesium Kindness?
We tend to get rid of excess magnesium by excretion: your body will tell you if you’ve overdone it a tad, as you will be visiting the bathroom more than you like. If you have overdosed enough for the other effects, whoa, back way off! The sensible thing is to take a reasonable dose (by label instructions) as a supplement for a week. If you then forget to take it, you didn’t need it and you’re getting enough and not losing a lot. If on the other hand you find yourself feeling less muscle pain and your gut is happier than it was when the week started, it’s a good thing, and I’d keep doing that. Just if you’re on levothyroxine or other thyroid med, as I am, do NOT take magnesium on the same side of the clock with your prescription. I take mg in the evening, levothyroxine at dawn.
Chesse! You’re good! I have a hard time remembering to take my meds every day. I’m not so good at the concept of time… When I am spending time with my Mama, she does her meds twice a day and sees to it that her daughters do too. I don’t know what I’ll do once I get the family diabetes…
I hope you escape that.
Mama’s side, we’ve all come up with it between 45 and 60. I’m 57 and do test my fasting blood sugar, but I really do like grain foods. I suppose if I could just do with minimal starches, I would be fine. I eat five to seven servings a day, and just can’t make myself do lettuce instead of bread for sandwiches. I’ll be there one day, but my children are reared, and my mother is my sole surviving parent at 77. I think I’ll let the disease take about 40 to 60 pounds off me before I start to treat it. It may be the only way I’ll lose all that weight, knowing myself as I do! >picture of Tommie, shaking her head in disbelief at her own folly while grinning<
Have you cheked out the ADA recommended diet? Nothing fancy about it. It’s pretty good for people without diabetes too. 😉
I can tell you what one of my doctors recommended, and I turned down.
Weekly:
five servings of meat, one of which may be beef, none of which may be pork
two eggs, including those included in other things, such as corn bread
Daily:
three servings of starch (one is a slice of bread, folks)
two servings of fruit
one tablespoon of oil
No:
pork, added salt, butter
Unlimited:
leaf, stem or flower vegetables
Substitutions:
1 slice of cheese for a meat and half an oil
1 cup of legumes for a meat and a starch
1/2 cup of corn for a starch
In the first place, I haven’t the self-discipline; in the second, that’s a very expensive diet; in the third, the spousal unit would never put up with me feeding him that way; in the fourth, only a restaurant has a fridge big enough for a week of that. No felicity there!
It seems that it’s mainly sugar that causes diabetes.
A new study shows this clearly.
According to this article in the New York Times,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/its-the-sugar-folks/
“The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. … This is the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see.”
Sugar causes all kinds of problems. It’s also the main factor in obesity.
Quite simply, most important thing we can do to improve our health and weight is to give up sugar – and especially sugar in the form of soda.
Here’s visual idea of just how much sugar there is in various drinks:
http://www.sugarstacks.com/beverages.htm
A good sugar substitute in hot drinks is stevia.
I mostly do without sweeteners. The spousal unit is a diabetic, and he will eat candy every single day, in spite of all I do to not bring it into the house. A five pound bag of sugar last us most of a year, but maybe I should go to splenda for all of my baking. I do a mean rhubarb-orange pie… and usually at least one pecan pie over the holidays. Do you know of a good substitute for corn syrup? I’ve been on two or fewer sodas a year for almost 20 years now, but I don’t think I can give up my pecan pie…
You can buy stevia syrup (or even make it yourself). I’ve heard it’s good for baking.
Oh, m’dear, you need some rejiggering! Stevia is pretty near non-caloric. And stay away from corn syrup!
We use Splenda.
I’m fortunate in that I don’t taste sugar in a normal way, I think: to me it tastes like rock. Salt has somewhat that characteristic, but I do get saltiness. I don’t think I really taste all varieties of sugar the same, but cane sugar to me—rock. Fruit sugar, now, that’s sweet, and I find brown sugar sweeter than white—but then I like molasses (a component of brown which is removed to make white.) Molasses to me has kind of a sour component.
But we strictly limit sugar and salt, so far as what I cook…particularly sugar. I don’t know where the Splenda is—and I do know where the brown sugar is, but we only use it when we cook acorn squash, which is about 4-5 times in the fall. The bad thing about sugar, to me, is that it has so short a satisfaction and a wicked rebound: you feel full and happy for about 2 hours and then wham! your blood sugar plummets and you feel the exact opposite even longer. This is, I think, the insulin production thing.
I remember the original panic over Saccharin and rats, and the much later retraction. So I used Aspartame, but switched back to Saccharin when Aspartame was challenged. I’m uneasy about Splenda.
As best I can determine it’s a trichlorinated glucose. I’m just not sure neither the body’s not the gut bacteria’s digestive enzymes can’t find some “point of attack” and what the metabolites and their consequences could be.
I’m beginning to think that as with the partially hydrogenated oils that make margarine and contain the trans-fats, so natural butter without the racemization is better for us (just not in any great quantities), so too natural “biological” sweetners, like sugar/honey and Stevia are better.
The thing is there’s too much commercial money behing these things. “When money speaks, the truth keeps silent.”
I have come to the conclusion that everything causes cancer, just as life causes death. I will continue to eat grilled meat, bathe with soap and shampoo and use laundry detergent, all of which I have been told cause cancer. I’ll also be using non-carbo sweeteners.
I use a honey and cinnamon syrup when I put up fruit or reconstitute dried fruit. It also makes into a lovely soft caramel. To bad that sweet does not appeal to me any more; what I adored as a child, I can no longer abide because of its cloying sweetness.
BTW, thanks for spurring me to search! I have located a zero calorie syrup which is sold locally. Since you can substitute maple for corn syrup, I intend to try this! The only question is maple flavor, or caramel? Do I hear votes?
“All things in moderation.” I’m with you on the every darn thing causing cancer, but wait a bit, and there will be more research that swings the pendulum back the other way. First butter was bad for you, then it was better than trans-fat margarines, then it was good, then… The only time I use much sugar is when I’m canning or baking, otherwise the canister largely stays untouched. Honey we use, and a little brown sugar, but I find most artificial sweeteners nasty, nasty, nasty.
Besides, DH and I both like steak. 😀
Speaking of baking, Zorro decided to investigate a frying pan I had soaking in the sink, but failed to notice the baking tray on the drainboard. There was a horrific clatter from the kitchen, the baking tray and a couple other things on the floor (fortunately no breakage), and a deliberately nonchalant cat cleaning herself in the living room. “What? No I didn’t hear anything. I have no idea why that fell…” And Smartypants looking in the back door wondering what all the ruckus was.
Lol—Our half-Bengal jumps. I used to live in terror he’d try the range—but he was too smart. OTOH, bringing stacks of things down—yep.