Didn’t get the usual New Year’s rush at the gym this year. Perhaps people have wised up and just gone straight from the Christmas/NY seasonal binge to the early February revenge binge without passing through the gym for an expensive and ultimately pointless detour in January.
I’m cool with that. I do most of my workouts at home now, or at least my big compound lifts. Even on a normal day at the gym you’ll be lucky to get a rack if you want to do some long heavy squats or bench or whatever. Easier to just suck up the heat and humidity and do them at home. I save the gym for stuff I can’t do in my own space.
This morning, for instance, for the first time ever, I decided to try the stair machine. I’ve always thought this to be one of the silliest pieces of equipment in any gym, but I read an article yesterday about its brutal effectiveness in burning calories and improving cardio fitness.
I’ve pretty much given up on using exercise to burn calories. I just use it to get fit or strong these days and sit in a calorie deficit if I need to lose weight. But after a couple of weeks off for that skin cancer surgery late last year, and then the usual Christmas indulgence, my cardio fitness needed some tweaking, so I thought, why not.
Jesus Christ.
I was only on there nine minutes, for a very gentle session after some overhead dumbbell presses and lat pull downs and this was the result…
Normally I don’t get out of the bottom two zones even when I’m pushing it on the treadmill or elliptical.
So I guess I better not enter any highrise fire escape races soon.
My knees have long been dodgy, now joined by feet (MTP joints), knuckles and wrists. Left shoulder felt left out, so has recently joined the party. Arthritis sucks the big one. I built a house with zero stairs, knowing that was in my future. Fortunately, the property has a 100m vertical from lowest to highest point, making every outdoor activity away from the house yard an exercise in climbing / descending. It exacerbates the pain but increases the strength of the muscles around the joints. This, and life in general, is a double edged sword. For every Elmo, there is an equal and opposite Noam.
my knees shake when the word stairs is mentioned :) . . . . .to be serious, not really that bad. We recently moved from a flat home to one with stairs and its helped. When bushwalking and i come up against NPWS stairs, my right knee eventually hurts on the way up and my left a bit sooner on the way down. Knee braces have been helping though. Plus side is that the mandatory stairs to get into work dont take my breath away anymore (they are only short, but steep, and perplex everyone, even the lady who does 20km bike rides each day). I have a weird aversion to gyms. I suspect to my detriment. I say its because they are too expensive when i can do it for free, but i think its because they are a totally alien space (my argument falls down when my partner says we can use the free work gym)