aches and pains
posted May 11, 2005 at 11:29 pm
I've never been much for exercise, but when I worked in a fast-paced, high-stress office environment, I at least managed to get my body moving a lot more regularly. (I'm amazed sometimes that I never had a heart attack at that place, when I think about how I used to literally whiz around the office in high-heels, heart going ninety miles an hour from one crisis to the next. I never moved slowly there, never.)
After over a year of being far more sedentary than I care to be (I literally plant my ass in a chair for hours, getting up only for potty breaks and drink or food), I dusted off my three-pound dumb-bells and my copy of Joyce Vedral's 12-Minute Total-Body Workout this week.
It's a very simple workout, requiring isometric pressure and dynamic tension on the muscles as you move through each exercise. But "simple" in this case is also deceptive: the exercises that seem the simplest when you're doing them are the ones you feel the most the day after.
Case in point: squats and lunges. Okay, when I did the squats, I felt it a little, because the unfortunate side effect of having a laptop balanced on your thighs all day is that they start to hurt after a while. And I knew already from past experience that the lunges are the most deceptive of all: the first time around when I used this workout, I got carried away with those and practically crippled myself for days after. :p
Yeah, yeah, but did I learn from that? Apparently not. Damn, my thighs are complaining right now.
The hardest exercises for me are those which require me to hold the weights over my head (no upper body strength, which is not surprising for a woman), and the abdominal ones (three children, one delivered by C-section), so right now, I'm doing fewer of those until I can build up more stamina.
My back and neck are a little bit tense too, but it's harder to distinguish that from the normal tension which comes from sitting in a chair all day troubleshooting one software support issue after another.
At any rate, I like the workout, and the fact that I'm actually doing something that involves physical improvement makes me feel less like a useless sloth. The added advantage is that I'm slender enough so that it shouldn't take weeks and weeks of effort before I notice the subtle effects of putting these unused muscles into action; and maybe quick results will help to keep me motivated, as well as inspire me to take it to a gym or something.
But oh my hell, what I wouldn't give for a great massage right about now. Waaaaaaaah!!
