Category: Exercise

Hubster picked up a copy of Just Dance 3 for us last week and I’ve had a few chances to play with it. I love it, just like I loved the two previous incarnations, but there are a few imperfections with this game, as with previous incarnations.

The plusses first. The game is fun, as always. I didn’t recognize a lot of the song titles but I’ve been through 2/3rds of the playlist so far and enjoyed just about all the songs. It’s dance music, for Pete’s sake! How could I not enjoy that? Also, the graphics are as colorful and kookie as always. I’ve noticed a couple songs seem to play up a steampunk theme in the animated backgrounds, especially Gwen Stefani’s “Tick Tock.” But there are plenty of other styles of graphics as well, and the music is very diverse.

The Just Sweat mode had been modified a bit, though I haven’t fully explored that yet, and there are more group dance modes that I haven’t fully gotten into either. I mostly play by myself for a work out, but I can dance to any song that comes up regardless of the mode.

As for the annoyances, they’ve been few. My two chief complaints are that the Just Sweat mode still only calculates how many “droplets” you’ve burned, but not how many calories, and there’s no indication of how to equate droplets to calories, so that bothers me. Also, anytime I play the non-stop shuffle mode, I have a problem getting it to stop. In theory, I should only have to push the plus button on the Wii-mote to get the menu to let me stop. In practice, I’ve had to hit every button on the Wii-mote multiple times before getting a response from the game. Maybe it’s my Wii-mote that’s the problem, but I can’t be sure.

I’ll talk more about Just Dance 3 in future posts, as I get more time to play the game with more people than just myself. But for now, it’s a fun game and a great workout! ‘Nuff said.

Today’s topic is about exercising during menstruation, and if the subject icks you out, my apologies, but I’m a woman, I menstruate, and I exercise, so it seems like an appropriate subject for me to write about today. Especially since I spent a good part of last week completely laid out by a visit from Aunt Flo.

I have never had an easy time with my period, even when I was young. It was always painful and messy and it made me miserable for a bout 5 days or so out of every month. I got some relief during college when I started on the pill, but when I went off the pill to get pregnant, the misery came back with a vengeance. And then of course, I spent four years dealing with hormone therapy so I could finally get pregnant, and then did more hormone therapy to have child number two, and then went back for another few rounds of hormone therapy in an attempt to have child number three that did not succeed, so you know my hormones are all screwed up. Add to that the fact that I had a bit of a scare last year when I had a pap smear come back with abnormal results that led me to briefly think I might have cervical cancer. Fortunately, it turned out I didn’t have cancer, but I do have hyperplasia, which means the lining of my uterus is rather a mess and that’s why one week out of every month I feel like my girl parts are doing their damnedest to turn themselves inside out and kill me in the process.

Are you icked out yet, or are you still with me? Good! Let’s continue.

So anyway, one week out of every month is rather unpleasant due to bleeding and intense cramping. But I’ve learned to live with it. Every now and then though, I get a really bad period, and by bad I mean BAAAAAAAAD! It starts a few days before the actual bleeding begins. My knees start to hurt to the point where I have problems getting up and down the stairs. I get a bad case of insomnia. My stress level seems to go through the roof. I get paranoid and can’t seem to pull myself out of a really crappy mood. And then the actual period hits like a sledge hammer. I end up crippled by cramps to the point where I can’t stay on my feet for any length of time. And my energy level just plummets. This is what happened to me last week, and damn was it miserable. To top it off, the kids were home from school on Thursday and Friday and the Hubster and I had a two-hour black belt review on Saturday. I had to drag myself through everything, from getting out of bed to wake up the kids to making meals and getting dressed. I’m still not sure how I made it through the black-belt review. My knees hurt so badly they were affecting my stances and balance.

How is a gal supposed to cope with periods like that? I got through it by spending most of Thursday in bed with a heating pad drapped over my abdomen and a double dose of Alieve in my system. I spent a lot of Friday the same way. I did get up and move around on Saturday, obviously, but I paid for it on Sunday by being completely wiped out. Then I spent most of last night tossing and turning whilst wrestling with insomnia before finally drifting off into some really weird and intense dreams that still have me gasping for breath even now at noon today.

The good news is, I finally seem to be free of the worst of the symptoms. I’ve got some energy back and my knees feel much better. Also, those dreams from the wee hours of dawn this morning have been typed down into the form of a rough outline for a story, so some good did come out of all that tossing and turning last night. The bad news is, this will all probably happen again at some point. Maybe not the next period or the one after that, but it will eventually hit me, and I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do about it.

The last time I discussed this with my doctor, he recommended burning out the lining of my uterus, a suggestion that sent me climbing up the walls of the examing room like a cat on acid visiting the vet. No way was I going to let someone burn out the lining of one my girl parts! But now, after having gone through a couple of really miserable periods this year, I’m starting to wonder if it might not be such a bad idea. I’ll need to ask the doc about the insomnia and knee pain and see what side effects I may be looking at, but if it will somehow help with all of that as well as eliminate the painful cramping, I may tell him to do it right then and there.

We’ll see. The fact is, I’m a busy gal on the go these days, and I have no desire to be slowed down by gawd-awful periods. I certainly don’t want to be laid out flat again like that. I lost three days of work and two days of exercise to my goddam period, and that’s not something that makes me happy. I’m willing to consider my options now and see what I can do to prevent this from happening again.

So, anyone else have any thoughts? Suggestions? Or are you so totally icked out that you’ll never come back to this blog again? No? Good! Come back for next week’s Move It Mama Monday and I promise we’ll discuss something far less gruesome, like the slug I found crawling in my frying pan last night. Or not.

So I’ve been biking lately, an average of 50 miles a week. And I’ve been making it to the Y for deep water aerobics twice a week, and putting in 4 hours of class time at the dojo most weeks. My knees feel better than the have in years, my average speed on the bike keeps going up, and I’m using the big weights in the pool and not screaming in agony any more after the fifth set of triceps extensions.

So why does my weight keep going up?

That’s been the big question for a few months now. My weight started creeping up on me in February, about the time Girl Scout cookie season hit its peak. No, it was not from eating too many cookies. It was more a case of I couldn’t find time to work out. And I was probably eating more due to stress, but not cookies! I swear!

I managed to get back on track with regular workouts again this summer, though my eating habits still aren’t as strict as they should be if I want to lose weight. And thus the scale has remained steady at 10 pounds higher than I normally want to be.

And you know what? Today I decided not to worry about it.

No, I haven’t banished all my weight worry with just one decision, but it’s a case of, do I really want to start counting calories and giving up all soda and snacks and feel hungry all the time (which is what happens every time I try to lose weight)? Or would I rather just relax and keep doing what I’ve been doing in the gym, the dojo, and on the road?

I’m voting for the later. I’d rather just continue to keep up with my workouts, especially the cycling. Hubster suspects my weight is up because I’ve got more muscle mass in my legs now, due to all the miles I’ve put in on the bike. (And isn’t he just so sweet for saying that?!) I’m not so sure, but I’m really not interested in fighting it any more. The bottom line is, my jeans still fit, dammit, and I don’t feel half-starved and dead tired all the time, so what is there to really worry about? I’m 42. My metabolism was bound to start slowing down some time.

I will admit, I may, MAY, try to throw in an extra 15 minutes of working out here and there. I can always toss in Just Dance in the evenings and go for a few songs. Or if I would rather something a little easier, I can do some Wii Fit or Walk It Out. And I will probably try to do that, considering that when I get to the late afternoon, I usually do feel pretty sleepy and I need something to wake me up.

But worry about the weight? Seriously? Nah. Not this time around.

Well, it finally happened. Last week one of my best friends, Mary, showed up and whisked me away to Colonial Yorktown for a long bike ride. Yes, I finally got out of the neighborhood with my bike. We did 15 miles on the tour roads and through the historical area, and man! What a difference there is between riding on the open road versus riding through the neighborhood. I have a little problem keeping up with Mary on the hills, but then she was riding a road bike and I’m riding a cross bike, which is heavier and slower. It was most apparent on the way down a hill, because Mary would just fly down the hill while I still lagged behind even though I was pedaling like mad.

So I got my first taste of real freedom on the bike and I can’t wait to do it again. I’ve got an appointment to bring the bike in to the local shop for a tune up next week. After that, I need to get a flat tire kit. Then I should be good to go. I bought a bike rack for the back of the car a few weeks ago, so I can now get to the trails without having to risk my life biking on the local highways.

Beyond that, things are pretty much the same, which is good. I haven’t had any knee problems in weeks (YAY!), and while I’ve put on a few pounds, I have kept up with deep water aerobics and biking. I’m only getting to karate class once a week right now, due to my workload, but I’m still getting in and given my schedule I think that’s pretty good.

And that’s the report for this week! Going back to work now.

Well, this sucks. Last night my left shoulder sort of seized up with a pinched nerve and the damn thing has extended all the way into my neck. I took a double dose of Tylenol last night and slept with a heating pad, but am still having problems with it this morning. If this goes as per usual, I’ll be suffering with this for the rest of the week. Not fun.

These pinched nerves usually happen when I’ve got too much going on and I’m stressed out. I had thought I was finally getting the schedule under control and managing to scale things back, but we’ve been out and about quite a bit the last few weeks and then I felt like crud all last week. Now this week I’m facing an endless series of meetings, most of them related to Girl Scouts. I suppose it’s true what they say, no rest for the wicked.

So what to do? Baby my left shoulder, obviously, and continue taking over-the-counter pain medication. If I can scrounge up the money, I know a very good massage therapist I can call, too. If I can’t scrounge up the money… well, we’ll see.

I’m still going to deep water aerobics today, but will be using light weights and taking things slowly. And I’ll be doing lots and lots of stretching. We’ll see how I feel by the end of the day. Hopefully this works itself out quickly. Otherwise, I’m not going to be doing much moving for a while.

I do my darnedest to eat healthy when I can, but I will admit that when my schedule gets overwhelming (as it is wont to do all to frequently) I will go long stretches of time where I fall back on eating a lot of high fat comfort foods and junk. That happened a lot this year and I’m paying for it now as I search my closet for jeans that don’t cut off all my circulation when I try to put them on. I’m not doing too badly on the weight scale, but I could stand to get back to high fiber, low cal, veggie-focused meals again.

To that end, I picked up a cookbook a few weeks ago – Cooking Light: Fresh Food Superfast. Now, I am not the greatest cook in the world, but if you give me a decent recipe that doesn’t tax my tiny brain too much, I’ll do pretty good with it, and this appears to be the case with the Cooking Light cookbook. I made a soup and sandwich combo from it last week, garbanzo-carrot soup with feta-olive sandwiches, that turned out perfect. The recipe made enough to last me all week long. This morning I just made smokey shrimp gazpacho, and again the recipe came out great and again I have enough to last me the week. That’s the thing, I am frequently so crunched for time, I usually only get to cook once a week. So what I cook has to make enough for multiple servings and it has to taste good enough that I’ll be willing to eat it all week long. Cooking Light seems to have succeeded on both accounts with this book.

So I’m investing an hour or two every Monday morning now to make my lunch for the week. Hopefully, this will prevent me from reaching for the Doritos or Ramen noodles every time lunch comes around. I’ve also asked the Hubster to stock the fridge with more fruit. We are subscribed to the Harry & David “Fruit-of-the-Month” club, and this month we got a huge box of peaches and a huge box of nectarines. Our fruit for August was delayed by Hurricane Irene, thus the two boxes of fruity goodness arriving at once. The only problem with getting both boxes at the same time is that they both then have to be eaten within the week, so now I think it will be a while before I can get anyone in the family to even look at another peach or nectarine for a while. But Hubster did get me grapes, pears, oranges and strawberries, along with some salad greens and cherry tomatoes, so I now have enough raw fruits and salad stuff to easily add one more serving of fruits and veggies to every meal.

My weight is at the highest it’s been in years, despite all the bike riding and deep water aerobics, so I really do need to rethink my diet. I’ll let you know in the coming weeks how I do. I dropped about a pound last week then went to DC and indulged in a couple meals that weren’t as healthy as they should have been, so I’ll have to work that off again this week. But I’m hopeful that a combination of veggie-heavy meals and lots of exercise will put me back on the right track.

I realize I haven’t done a Move It Mama Monday post in a while, and I apologize. Life just keeps getting busier every time I turn around. Part of this busy-ness is actually fitness related, which makes my inability to blog about my workouts kind of ironic.

Anyway, I may have mentioned that I was given a bike earlier this summer. It’s a hybrid bike that belonged to Patricia, a friend of mine, and it was given to me in hopes that I would train up to ride in long touring rides, like those mega-huge charity bike rides you hear about from time to time. Well, I’ve been pedaling steadily since July and am up to riding 15-20 miles at a shot. That’s enough for me to consider entering a local touring ride this coming October, where the longer route is 22 miles. I think I should be able to do 22 miles without trouble. However, I need to get the bike into the shop first to have it checked over and get someone to make sure it’s fitted to me just right. I think the seat is a bit off, a little too far forward, and I can’t adjust it any farther back by myself. Plus the front wheel gears won’t switch up to the highest level, so that really needs to be looked at.

But I’m enjoying riding around my neighborhood. I’ve put in some extra miles this week and I can really feel it in my thighs. They ache just a bit, though not enough to leave me feeling crippled the way running was. Running is probably something I’m not going to be doing much of anymore, given the problems I had last spring. I tried to ease back into a regular running schedule after having been out a while, but it wasn’t working. I was having too many problems in my Achilles tendons and in my knees. With the bike riding, I don’t have those problems at all. In fact, since I started riding, I’ve discovered I can get up and down the stairs much easier than I’ve been able to in a couple years.

So, bike riding good! Bike riding very good! I’ll let you know if I sign up for that 22 mile ride, and I’ll see if I can’t get back into the swing of things here on the blog.

Last week one of my best friends gave me one of her bikes that had been sitting unused in her garage. I had not ridden a bike in almost 3 decades. I went out that evening, bought myself a helmet, and the next morning went on my first bike ride in years.

I loved it.

I was a bit wobbly at first, and rather slow, especially when it came to taking turns and corners, but after a little bit I was doing just fine. I rode half an hour that first day and then almost an hour the next. That second bike ride seemed like a breeze and I barely broke a sweat, but I was dead on my feet the next day, so I know I must have gotten a good workout. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to go on another bike ride, this time with my oldest daughter who actually couldn’t keep up with her dear old mum! I rode laps around her and she peddaled along and then stopped every few minutes. I’m obviously going to have to take us both out for a bike ride more often so we can build up our endurance.

Anyway, I really enjoy riding the bike. So far, I’m sticking to just riding around my neighborhood, hitting every cul-de-sac and side street to stretch out the ride as long as I can. Hopefully, I’ll be ready to hit the main road outside our neighborhood in a couple weeks. Then I’ll be able to ride to the Y, work out there, and ride home. Or ride through other neighborhoods that have longer stretches of road. We’ll see!

On a side note, I think my deep water aerobics instructor is secretly Ursula the Sea Witch. The woman is in her 70s and can get around the water better than a fish! She has repeatedly worked me into exhaustion and today was no exception. After getting home from the 6AM class, I managed to stay awake long enough to do a few chores. Then I made the mistake of sitting down and before you know it, I’d been asleep for an HOUR. On the plus side, I have much better muscle tone than I did a few weeks ago!

I had so much fun spending all last Monday cleaning up an old steamer trunk my neighbor gave me, I decided to do it again today. After spending an hour at deep-water aerobics and then coming home to clean house, I pulled the trunk out of the garage and went to work This time I focused on the interior, which was lined with musty old fabric that might have been stripy and blue at one time.

I tried just wetting the fabric down and then scraping it away with a paint scraper, but the trunk is so huge, that task quickly became exhausting. So I decided to carry the trunk out to the side of the yard where I then proceeded to hose the interior down. The sprayer nozzle did a good job of blasting out the old fabric and cardboard underneath without destroying the rest of the trunk, though I did have to re-clean the entire thing once I was done and apply another layer of lemon oil everywhere. However, it got the job done. One problem I discovered though was that the bottom of the pop-out drawer in the top half of the trunk was nothing but cardboard. It was also musty and stinky, so I had to tear it out. Now I’ll have to remove all the old nails in the drawer, get a new bottom cut from wood to replace the old cardboard, and then hammer that in place before I can sand, stain and finish the interior.

One other problem is the metal fixings. They need to be scrubbed, and scrubbed hard, to get rid of all the dirt and rust. It’s going to be quite a job, and I may need to invest in extra batteries for my Black & Decker hand tool to ensure it gets done before next year. My hand tool has a small wire brush attachment which does help cut through the worst of the dirt. Steel wool will finish things off. Looks like a trip to the hardware store is in order!

Here’s the pic of the trunk’s interior before I began cleaning it…

And here’s the trunk after 4 hours of hard work…

It does look better, I think.

By the way, as I was cleaning out the trunk today, my best friend Mary stopped by and dropped off this…

I plan to get a helmet later this afternoon and see a) if I can still remember how to ride a bike and b) how quickly I will wipe out and tear up my knee. Mary swears wiping out only hurts the first 4 or 5 dozen times.

Anyway, I’m tired an filthy and sweaty now and I’m going to make lunch and get cleaned up so I can go buy that helmet and then pass out for the rest of the day.

Oy!