Heart Patients Stamina, Energy and Exercise #50

Today is Sunday, a day I almost never have gone to my fitness center for a workout. It is normally the busiest day of the week if you go during normal hours, which I did not.  I went in very early, on purpose. First, I have been waking up early and wanted to go in early today to avoid the crowd.  You can believe there was no crowd when I went in.  Just a few yawning exercise enthusiast, or insominacs who exercise at weird hours for therapy.  I not sure which group I fall into.  I am pretty sure it is both.  I have not worked out for the last two days, and did not want to make it three consectutive days of no exercise routine.  It really felt good to be going through my routine, and tried a new exercise on an assisted chin up strength machine.  I have been wanting to use this but was not sure I could do it.  Was not sure if it would be beneficial to me, and was hesitant to use it in front of a lot of people for the first time.   It went well and after some adjustments to suit my strength level, I did pretty good on it.

The more I exercise, the more convinced I am about a regular exercise routine of some sort being critical to heart patients recovery and return to some sort of normal activity.  It has positively reduced my blood pressure.   It has firmed up muscles, contributed to weight loss, and increased my strength.  My one nagging concern is my stamina, or lack thereof.  I wonder where I would be if I had not been exercising regularly.   I need to talk to my cariologist about it when I have my next check up and exam.  I am going to give you an example of what I am experiencing.  Let's say I can easily lift 100 pounds without straining myself.  And that after doing that I can continue with doing normal stuff, like yard work, things around the house, going to Home Depot, whatever.  All of a sudden, very quickly my energy level goes to almost zero.  I have to sit and rest.  Normally I go up to my office, sit at my desk and fool around on the computer.  It becomes difficult for me to focus my thoughts, I continue to get tired and become sleepy enough to take a nap. As I have told you before, my energy level does not return to full strenght after a few hours.  Normally I need several hours of quite and rest.  You can imagine how much fun I am for Cindy to be around.  After an hour or so I begin to get some energy back, but it is not like I could go workout, or walk around the block.   I suspect this is not necessarily the same for all who have had heart problems.  I am guessing the loss of stamina has a lot to do with how much blood your coronary arteries and heart can pump through out your circulation system.

We will talk more about exercise and healthy food next posting.

Heart Patient, Exercise, #49

Cindy and I have been in Florida, so I have gotten behind in my postings.  My daughter and her family went down for fall break and to compete in a triathlon.  Michelle did very well in her division finishing 2nd.  There were over 350  participants.  Her husband did not place which is unusual for him.  I am pretty sure Michelle and he enjoy competing with each other as much as with others in their  divisions.  I think bragging rights means a lot to them both, and it motivates Michelle to train as hard as he does.   He is a natural athlete and thrives on competition.

Cindy and I spent a lot of time with our grandchildren, and really enjoyed doing that. I got to go along on a fishing trip with my grandson and watched him take over 30 minutes to land a 40 pound redfish.  It was great and really made his dad  proud to be there and watch him fight and land a fish almost as big as he.

I could not stay in my workout routine while I was gone, and I really missed that.  I was able to do some walking and weightlifting each day.  There is a small fitness center I was using that had a very limited amount of strength training equipment.  The equipment was old,  I was not sure how to use it, and didn't fell comfortable with it. As a result I opted to do more weightlifting exercises that usual.  We are back home and I am going in early tomorrow to get in a good workout session, I look forward to it.

Next Day.

My first morning back workout was great.  Being gone for a week did not goof up my routine as much as I thought it would.  I am sure my doing a lot of fast paced walking while I was gone helped.  Eating healthy was a bigger problem than exercise while gone.  It is difficult when you are going out each night in a resort area to not eat what we consider to be unhealthy.  The approach I took was try to stay close to eating vegetables and fruits, avoiding meat.  The first night was terrible.  I had a oriental salad which tasted like hot grease and sugar had been poured over it for the dressing.  Second night a pasta dish with a meatless tomato sauce and a basic salad.  Not too bad.  I won't bore you any further but these two meals pretty much represented the best of the week.   I ate a lot of oatmeal for breakfast and lunch..  Anyway my first morning back I took an extra 15 to 20 minutes to do my complete routine.  I was somewhat surprised that I didn't have any soreness or stiffness.

I continue to monitor and record by blood pressure daily.  You should be doing the same. It gives you insight in how you're doing and takes all the guess work out of it for your cardiologist.  He can accurately see how your medication is working, or not, without having to depend on the one reading his nurse just took of your blood pressure.

Breakfast, Weight Loss, And New Management #48

For a while I have been complaining about some things at our fitness center.  I felt at the time that management was weak at supervision, organization, and strong at selling trial memberships.  This is a large facility with a large membership.  It is not what I consider to be a typical fitness center facility.  It is more like an upscale resort with Italian marble floors, walls, counters, indoor pools and spas, and more.  You go into the lockers, showers, changing areas and it is like the Ritz-Carlton.  There are two basketball courts and a large indoor rockwall climbing area. An entire second story dedicated to workout equipment galore. I like it, I enjoy it, and I look forward to going there daily.  But... there just always has to be a but..., the cleanliness makes all of those nice amenities less glamorous.  I mean it had gotten nasty.  And the employees would walk past things that needed to be done, or congregate at the front desk with a fresh cup of coffee and visit with coming and going members.  After talking to the general manager, yes, my past management hard headiness wouldn't let it pass. I had a personal responsibility to go talk directly to the GM and tell him what needed to be done.  When Cindy and Michelle found out they were mortified. Michelle concerned about her social status quo, and Cindy said we would have to drop the membership and leave town for a couple of months.  As you can see my two principal advocates have limitations on how far they will endorse me.  Well ,without taking up further space and time here,  I will just say I decided the GM was the problem.  Well guess who is no longer general manager, or employed there?   See, I told you so.  The new GM has been there a couple of months and what a difference.  Employees better not be found hanging at the front desk and any dirty towels, or trash in their work area.  No more letting non-member friends in on the side or you're gone.  Hey, I saw the new guy in the parking lot giving a personal talk to one of his folks about why all the trash containers were not emptied.  He has certainly gotten things organized and headed in the right direction.  With a large facility, once people and responsibilities get out of control, you have problems quickly, and they multiply.  I think that is what had happened.  The new GM is having to micro manage to get things back to where they need to be and that is the way I like it.

I never completely finish telling you about oatmeal.   I credit oatmeal with helping me lose weight.  I have eaten and liked oatmeal since I was a kid.  But it was something I might eat once or twice a month.  When I started out to lose weight and change eating habits, I knew I would need to eat breakfast daily.  Something I had not done in the previous 40 years.  Eat breakfast daily that is.  Never ever did I do that in my adult life.  Breakfast was a Saturday or Sunday thing for us when our kids were growing up.  During the week I was never at home during breakfast.  If I were traveling, it was coffee and cereal or a honey bun for me.  Now oatmeal has become my breakfast of choice.  And it has been each morning for the last two years.  Why oatmeal?  I liked the taste, it is healthy, helps lower your cholesterol, blood pressure, and is very filling.   Eat a big bowl, don't skimp on it. No milk, butter, or sugar added.  just plain oatmeal, and hot.  Yum, yum.   As I have said many times, I eat it for lunch too for the same reasons.  If you are serious about losing weight, keeping it off, improving your health, and good heart condition you should make oatmeal a fundamental part of your eating healthy.  Don't laugh it off, try it.  You will be e-mailing me telling me I was right.  I am sure there are some other breakfast foods out there just as healthy, I don't know of any similar to oatmeal in benefits.  It is not easy to find a simple food that fits low calories, and all the health benefits of oatmeal.  Looking for those food traits, lead me to fruits after oatmeal when I was deciding foods to focus on when I made my changes. 

Next maybe we need to talk about exercise.