By Amber Rogers (Go Kaleo) I started strength training 4 years ago because my doctor told me that it can help improve function for people with osteoarthritis of the knee. At 36, I’d recently dislocated my kneecap, which exacerbated the arthritis I’d already developed from carrying around 80 extra pounds for 25 years. I was dealing with chronic pain, stiffness and reduced mobility and couldn’t even climb a flight of stairs like a normal healthy adult. I was desperate, so even though I’d hated exercise all my life I decided to give it a shot. My results far exceeded my expectations. Over the next few years my knee mobility improved and my pain started to subside, my strength and functionality returned, and I started seeing health improvements in areas I’d never… Read more »
I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately. My grandfather, age 87 and my last living grandparent, ain’t doin’ so hot. And yes, he’s old. He’s falling to pieces. He’s going to eventually die. I’m not fighting that, and tend to look at whether it happens now or several months or even years from now as pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Sure, he’ll miss a few golf tournaments and football games on tv, but from this point forward it doesn’t really matter when the big day arrives. The world will go on whether he is alive to watch The O’Reilly Factor or not (Yeah I know that’s kinda mean, but he’s at the bedridden diaper stage – the stage where most people promise themselves and their loved… Read more »
Ah, the long-awaited post on Doug McGuff and John Little’s exercise opus – Body By Science. Let me purge a few of the sour tastes out my mouth first, so we can get into the good stuff - because I do think that Body By Science offers your metabolic rehab “patient” the best of all exercise solutions. My most major complaint is the tremendous overreliance on scientific theory in coming to conclusions, as if science trumps experience and observation, or is infallible and immune to error. Not that the book really relies upon that as a crutch too much when it comes to exercise specifically, but it has that general air of scientific elitism that I find annoying. In my experience, science is the most prone to error, because of how it examines… Read more »
