August 10, 2012: Day 9 of 30

8/10/2012: Day 9 of 30
Morning weight: 181.6
Today's calorie count: 1530
Morning exercise: Strength training as follows:
*Repeat the following set of exercises three times
---16 Side Arm Raises with 8lb dumbbells while in Wall Sit position:  Put back against wall with feet in front of you, lower yourself until you are in a sitting position with your legs at 90 degree angle.  Hold while lifting weights.
---Run up and down stairs (30 step staircase)
---30 second Wall Sit with no weights

*Repeat the following set of exercises three times
---16 Dumbbell Fly/Leg Lift combinations with 10lb dumbbells in each hand:  Lay flat on mat with legs straight up and arms straight up holding weights.  Lower arms to sides and lower legs at the same time. Raise arms and legs to starting position, so that you are doing Dumbbell Flies and Leg Lifts at the same time.
---20 Push Up Rows with 15lb dumbbells:  Place 2 15lb dumbbells about shoulder width apart on mat.  Get in a push-up position (on toes) with hands holding dumbbells instead of flat on the mat.  In the push-up position, pull the weights up, pulling your elbow to the side, alternating arms.

*Repeat the following set of exercises 4 times
---12 Hammer Rows, 70lbs:  This exercise is done on a machine.  You sit on a seat with your chest pressed against a pad with the handles of the machine in front of you, and a bit higher than shoulder height.  Grab the handles and pull them towards you.  Works those side/back muscles (lats).
---12 Hammer presses, 70lbs:  Same machine, pushing instead of pulling.  Stand up and walk around to other side of machine, behind the handles.  Bend legs slightly and grab handles.  Push them away from you.  This was harder than the pulls, for some reason.  I thought they would be easier.

*Repeat the following set of exercises 4 times
---12 Tube Walk Steps with Squats:  Strap the ends of a short elastic tube to each ankle.  Take a large side step, stretching the tube, arms in front of you, keeping feet straight.  In this wide step position, do a squat.  Stand up, bring legs together, repeat.
---16 Dead Lifts, 30lb straight bar:  Stand straight up with legs straight, then slowly bend at hips, leaning forward, and lower bar straight down, keeping it about an inch from legs all the way down.  Keep back flat.  Stand up and repeat.

I'm always sore on Saturday mornings after starting a new weight lifting routine.  Today I can feel it mostly in my lats and my hamstrings.  The abs and biceps are a little sore, too.

One of the reasons I really like working with a trainer once a week is because we change my routine every week.  I think that prevents me from over-working any one muscle group.  Jeremy is a lot more creative than I am and always puts together a well rounded set of exercises that targets slightly different muscles each week. It's expensive, but really worth it to me.  My body shape is improving much more dramatically and radically than it would be if I wasn't doing strength training or if I was doing strength training on my own.
   
Evening exercise: 30 minute walk jog - 8 minute walk, 15 minute jog, 7 minute walk.  HR walking was 105-112, jogging HR was 135-145
Alcohol consumption: None
Younger Next Year pages read: 26

Notes from book: (Quotes and very near quotes are in italics)
As I promised yesterday, I'm going to talk more about strength training today.  It's kind of handy that I get to talk about the strength training chapter on the same day that I shared this week's strength training routine.  Sometimes things just work out. 

Yesterday I read Harry's chapter on strength training which, to me, was much more impressive than Chris' chapter on the same subject.  As I said yesterday, I always knew strength training was important, but after reading this chapter over again I've become a strength training evangelist.  You just cannot skip the strength training.  It's too important for the quality of your life for the rest of you life.  You gotta do it.  Besides, it's kind of fun.  I mean, I bitch about it...I really do.  When Jeremy makes me do an exercise which is just impossible, that hurts and makes my muscles quiver, I curse.  I look at him like he's crazy.  I come home and tell Jack that Jeremy is mean to me.  Both Jeremy and Jack just laugh at me and say, "It's good for you."  I'm looking for sympathy and I don't get it.  But, actually, I kind of like weight lifting.  My strength training hours fly by, whether I am doing them on my own or with Jeremy.  It feels more like 15 minutes than an hour.  I love feeling strong and tough.  I love that feeling of being able to do things that I couldn't do a month ago.  I love that my brain has to be engaged while I'm lifting weights, making sure I am doing it just right.  I guess that is one of the things I like about lifting weights.  I find it to be totally engaging, even if it does hurt.  I hope you will like it, too, after you read, "Younger Next Year" and get motivated to lift weights 2 - 3 times a week.  If you like it, chances are you'll keep doing it.  If you don't like it, do it anyway.

Why is strength training so damned important?  Well, let me tell you.  (I'll probably quote from the book quite a lot, because I can't say it better than Harry.  That's just the way it goes sometimes. If I could, I'd probably cut and paste the whole chapter in here, but I can't so I won't.  I'll try to just give you the best parts.)

Generally, we aren't aware of nerve decay as we get older, but it's the main reason our joints wear out, our muscles get sloppy and our ability to by physically alert and powerful begins to fade.  And it is reversible with strength training.  Each movement of our body is a coordinated cycle of actions that triggers events throughout our body, actions that involve our muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments, brain, nervous system, etc... Nothing is left out, with each movement.  Each step we take involves thousands of nerve fibers which together form a neural network.  You have millions of neural networks in your body, and you shift between them with each step.  Your body grows and your brain learns the tiniest amount from each one.  They have to, because C-6 (that decay chemical) is in the background, helping them to forget all this, just a little bit, every day.

When we are relatively sedentary, not purposefully exercising every day, our muscles, brain connections and the controlling spinal reflex arcs get sloppy and weak.  The casual movement of every day life is not enough to trigger growth.  In earlier chapters Harry talked about the threshold we need to cross to generate C-10 (the rebuilding chemical).  Well, it takes a critical amount of effort to cross that threshold and secrete enough C-6 to trigger the production of C-10.  Below that threshold, all you have is the C-6 of chronic decay.  You need to do strength training to cross that threshold for power and coordination, to get C-10 into your neural networks, into the meat of your muscles, into your joints and tendons.

Strength training creates an intimate connection between your body and your brain.  Your physical brain integrates the millions of messages coming up from your body and coordinates them with all the impulses it's sending down to move your muscles against resistance.  The neural impulses to create coordination and power blaze a trail through your neural circuits.  Each time you use them, you directly strengthen the balance, power and muscular coordination centers of the physical brain. 
Consistent strength training brings your neural connections out of hibernation.

Harry talks about the difference between slow-twitch muscles and fast-twitch muscles.  Slow-twitch muscles are built for endurance and fast-twitch muscles are built for strength.  We have nerve cells going to each muscle group, but the important thing to know is each nerve cell sends its tentacles to only one kind of muscle, either slow-twitch or fast-twitch, never both.  Therefore, each nerve cell ends up signaling for either strength or endurance.  When you do anything, walk, dance, climb steps, or do gymnastics, you are activating only a portion of your nerve cells and muscle groups, and you are activating them in a specific pattern.  Your brain controls this amazingly complex series of signals. 

When you walk, your body predominantly recruits endurance units and rotates through them so each one gets a rest period between steps, which means that each muscle unit gets only a fraction of the exercise you think you're giving it.  Certainly not enough stress to generate the powerful regeneration of C-10.

As you start to run, your body uses more endurance units with each step.  Each unit  may be used every third step now, and that's enough stress to trigger high levels of C-6 and then C-10.  If you're running up a hill, hard enough to go beyond the capacity of your endurance units, your body adds in strength units.  The longer you run, the less rest time the endurance units get. The more strength you demand, the less rest the strength units get.  As some point, you will push them beyond their recovery cycles.  They will fatigue, and the fatigue will damage them.  Taking them to fatigue is what turns on the surge of C-6 - the good stress of exercise that turns on C-10.

By the way, this is why you have to sweat when you do aerobic exercise; at low levels of demand, your endurance cells alternate too much to get fatigued.  This is also why you have to push to the point of muscle fatigue with weights - to that burning feeling in your muscles that most of us hate and would skip if it were up to us.

When you lift weights you must lift enough weight to cycle all the way through the reserve capacity of your strength cells.  You must use them 10 or 12 or more times in a row, and then do it again.  This will drain your strength cells of all their energy, and then force them to do it a few more times.  This damages your muscle cells (your cells, not your muscles), and the repair of those cells is what makes you stronger and improves your nervous system.  This damage and repair cycle is why you should have a day of rest in-between strength training sessions.  You have to give your body time to repair the cellular damage that was done the last time you lifted weights.

Harry talks about doing it right - not overloading your muscle cells.  Hire a trainer if you can.  He or she will help you set up a routine that is right for you.  Whatever you do, be careful, listen to your body, don't hurt yourself.  Injuries can take months or years to heal.

Harry then talks about proprioception - the deceptively simple notion that you have to know where the different parts of your body are at all times.  It's how we stand up and how we move.  Your body is aware of exactly where each limb is in space every second, because each muscle, tendon, ligament and joint sends thousands of nerve fibers back to the brain through the spinal cord.  Those fibers signal every nuanced gradation of contraction, strength, muscular tone, orientation, position and movement at every moment of the day.  Strength training works on these signals.  Pushing a muscle hard sends a blaring signal back up to the brain.  Your body is making constant adjustments.  This is important stuff for your body.  If your brain slacks off for an instant, and you don't make split-second adjustments, you might get hurt.  You will pull a muscle, sprain an ankle or break a leg.  In nature, you can die from a minor injury.  The endurance predator or a forager laid up for two weeks with a sprained ankle might never come back.  So the signals to your brain from strength training are loud and important.  Priority news.  And they create growth - first in the signaling pathways themselves, blazing that direct trail through the forest of neural networks, and second in the muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints directly.  With this growth comes a new integration between your brain and body.  They have always been fused; we just forgot it.  This is how you reconnect them.  It's a literal, physical reconnection; nerve fibers you can see under the microscope, brain chemistry you can see on MRI scans, reaction time you can measure in the lab.  It's skiing better, feeling stronger, feeling better.

More important than skiing better and feeling stronger, in my book, is that it is also not falling down.  You are more likely to fall as you get older, and as you get older each fall is more likely to result in injury.  The number one way to prevent falls is to strength train.  Did you know that?  I didn't.  Strength training improves your coordination through the rebuilding of that neural superhighway.  You are not any less likely to stub your toe on that crack in the sidewalk, but that toe-stub is much less likely to end in a fall if you strength train.  Think about it.  If your neural superhighway is broad and free flowing, when you stub your toe and start to lose balance your brain quickly sends the messages to correct your momentum.  If your muscles are strong, your leg gets placed in just the right position to readjust and stay upright and it is strong enough to stop the fall.  If your neural pathway is a country road instead of a superhighway, that signal to correct is a fraction of a second slower.  If your muscles are weak, your leg, already slow to respond and behind the curve, cannot hold you up.  You fall.  And if you're old and you haven't been lifting weights, you've probably lost some significant bone mass, to boot.  Then you break a leg or a hip or an arm or a wrist.  Whatever hit the ground first has a good chance of breaking.

That brings Harry to the discussion of Osteoporosis, which for us women, is a serious concern as we age...or at least it ought to be.  Harry stresses that osteoporosis is optional.  Then he goes into the numbers:

• Twenty million American women have osteoporosis, a preventable disease
• There are one and a half million fractures each year from osteoporosis, and the large majority of them occur in women.
• You - yes you have a 50 percent lifetime risk of breaking a bone from osteoporosis, and the vast majority of those fractures are caused by falls that you would have bounced right back from in younger years.
• Americans - mostly women - suffer 300,000 hip fractures every single year.
• Hip fractures kill more women than breast cancer.
• Twenty percent of women who fall down and break a hip die within a year.
• And of those who survive, half will never live independently again.
• Twenty-five percent of women who break a hip will end up in a nursing home.
• Twenty-five percent will be at home, but dependent on a wheelchair or walker to get around the house, and dependent on someone else to get through each day.
• There are a million spine fractures each year in the United States, and about a quarter million wrist fractures, most from osteoporosis.
• Only about half of spine or wrist fractures heal back to full function, the rest become lifetime disabilities.

The stunning news is that the vast majority of these fracture never need to happen.  Almost all women can skip osteoporosis, broken bones and nursing homes altogether.

To do that, to skip those broken bones, we have to do two things.  The first is keep our bones strong.  The second is to not fall down.  We women start to lose bone mass at the rate of about 1 % a year after age thirty.  After menopause, that increases to a 2% loss of bone mass each year.  That accelerates even more after about age 60.  The thing is, you are losing this bone mass and don't even know it.  You can't feel it, Osteoporosis does not hurt.  Broken bones hurt and most of us don't know we have osteoporosis until we break our first bone.  Harry recommends two things to keep you bones strong.  First, take Vitamin D and calcium  supplements.  He admits that this provides a nominal benefit, but it can't hurt.  Personally, I am sporadic, at best, with regard to taking supplements.  This chapter reminded me that I should at least take vitamin D and calcium.  Why is that so hard for me to remember to do?

The other, more critically important thing we can do to keep our bones strong, is strength train. Pure and simple, brute-strength training.  Women who strength-train gain a little bone mass every year, as opposed to those doing aerobics alone, who are just slowing down the pace of loss.  Real strength training has stopped bone loss cold in multiple studies.  Fit women live long; strong women live well.  

The second thing we need to do to prevent broken bones is to not fall down.  Strength training reduces the chances of falling, too.  Because your neural network performs better and you correct your balance more quickly.  And your legs are strong enough to catch you, if you should start to fall.

Harry can't say it often enough, and I can't either.  If you are a women over 40, you must strength train.  If you are jogging six days a week, you will probably live a long time.  You don't want to live a long time with weak, frail bones.  Did you read that line earlier, that more women die of a fractured hip than of breast cancer?  Really???  You can prevent those broken bones.  Strength training is the key.