Pushing the Exercise Boundaries Further

When I joined TDC mid-September last year I struggled to walk 100 yards and used to have to take painkillers as soon as I got home because of the pain in my joints. I was fed up with not being able to do the things I wanted to do like nice country walks and could only do short stints of gardening because of the pain. I knew that I needed to lose weight otherwise I was going to end up completely immobile. When I joined TDC I wanted to lose weight but the thought of exercising apart from doing the exercise I enjoy wasn’t part of the plan. The thought of the gym and exercise videos and all the rest of it gave me the heebie jeebies but as I lost weight and the pain in my joints eased off I realised that I needed to build up my muscles so that I could do the things I wanted.

I started off with exercises on my bed and chair exercise. I could only manage 5 minutes at a time to start with and did that at least twice a day and then gradually built it up. During that time my sister bought me a pedometer. I wasn’t sure that I was grateful for it to start with, exercise still gave me the chills but I found myself in competition with it wanting to reach my lowly daily goal of 2000 steps a day. The recommended is at least 10,000 steps daily, maybe if I didn’t work from home it would be easier to get there, when all I do is come downstairs to the office to start work it’s a bit more challenging. Anyway by January I’d increased my daily goal to 4,000 and then I tore the meniscus in my knee which was a backward step. I kept trying to push it but eventually at the end of February I took time off work, dropped my daily goal back to 700 steps a day, iced it did my physio exercises a lot more than I had been doing and finally it began to heal.

I got a referral through my GP for the Reactive programme at the local leisure centre and do 2 classes a week. Last week reluctantly I had to give up the Aqua class after the final bad reaction to the high levels of chlorine in the pool. I’d been reacting from the start but was hoping it wouldn’t get worse. I started a new class late last week. On the step front I’ve gradually increased since early March and this week increased again to 4,700 steps a day. I don’t always make my goal on a daily basis although I have been known to walk up and down the stairs 5 or 6 times when I’m not that short of it but over the week I’ve beaten the weekly goal for the last six weeks. I also bought a mini exercise bike and have gradually increased that from 5 mins to 30 mins a day. I do that in the evening because it seems to unwind all the stress and pain the day puts into my knee. So a reasonable amount of progress but “Could do better” as it used to say in my school reports for some subjects 😉

So after this rather long winded preamble that is my challenge to increase the daily step goal EVERY week, to increase the time on the exercise bike and to continue with my classes, get in walks when I can and of course do the garden whenever work and weather permit.

When I asked for suggestions on what my challenge could be Debbie suggested the food and chemical allergies, I replied that was part of my normal life and wasn’t a challenge. To me the pain is more of a challenge, it’s something I’ve lived with for most of my life. Pre-TDC on a scale of 1-10 it was an average of 6-8 peaking to a 10 when I had a bad allergy reaction. Now mostly it’s 3-5 on a daily basis depending what exercise or activity I do, if I have an allergy attack it peaks again but not as far and thankfully not for as long. It might be a bit unrealistic to wish for no pain but it would certainly be wonderful to get it down further.