Pat’s Polemics

For over a month I’ve been coming back from a month-long hiatus in exercise. Not quite true if you count lugging luggage over an unfamiliar landscape, running for trains and buses, and adjusting to a new and often less healthy diet.
I began easy, reducing weights and raising reps (actually it turned into reducing weights and leaving reps at their previous number). Within a week though I was itching to get back to my old routine. I added an exercise I’ve wanted for some time, one where you move like you are picking up a bag on the side; that probably came from lifting suitcases on our trip but I have for a long time noticed how often one makes that move. Initially I could not find anything like that but finally I came upon it in the Delavier book; it is the “gate”move where you pull a cable at waist level to your side keeping the elbow and upper arm tight against your side but not for this particular exercise. Instead you create a space between your elbow and your side so your upper arm hangs outside your body line with your arm bent. Then you lift a light weight exactly like you are picking up a grocery bag sitting on the floor; you don’t do that with your arm and elbow tucked into your rib cage. My first performance of it felt just right.
Once I got back into my routine about a month after my return from my trip, I got two stress tests. The one involving a tread mill was done in the hospital where I got shot up with tracking chemicals and sat around for six hours interspersed by attractive nurses walking by.
What was most interesting and which I will explore with the doctor at my follow-up on Dec. 2 is that they told me we could go 3 minutes on the tread mill and if I could still go on to let them know when I was about a minute out from going to failure. So I walked and eventually they told me to get off. What happened to the one minute warning? I had barely begun to breathe hard.
This coming week I’ll do a body composition measure at the gym through the impedence technique. And I’ve yet to see the results of my blood work. I also have another lab test coming up ordered by my PCP.
The upshot is: I’ll report back here. I did start a new medication, a ‘water pill’, that has kept my blood pressure closer to normal now for over a week.