Progressive music can damage your health

[caddyman]

There seems to be something wrong with our email this morning, which is good. I don’t like having a gazillion emails to sift through, worry about, ignore or discard before I have properly woken up. I think it is creaking back into life, but each individual email is being patted down, having its visa checked and questioned by the server before it is let through. This takes time.

I tried out the new exercise bike last night; I got a little hot before I did the 15 minutes I had promised myself, but I did a little over 10 minutes, covered a virtual 5.05 km (I must work out how to set it to virtual miles), burnt off around 110 calories (it’s very unfair how hard it is to burn off calories, when it’s so damned easy to put them back) and managed to get a reasonable heart rate measurement that showed I was working but not killing myself. I expect that the fact I only did a little over 10 minutes and that on setting number 2 might raise the eyebrow of derision in some quarters, but in my defence, other than walking, it is the first significant exercise I have taken in 20 years (I played a game of football in the park about 25 years ago, and I once ran after someone who had dropped a necklace).

I like to think of it as a start.

I shall have to sit down and read the manual so that I can learn to program the bike to vary the resistance as if I were actually travelling somewhere, a few hard bits for uphill and a few easy bits for down. The theory is that if, in conjunction with my altered food consumption (it is NOT a diet), about 15 minutes a day on the bike (working up to 20 or 25 in due course) will mean that my slow spiralling descent towards ill health and a daily hatful of medication will be halted and reversed before I actually need them. Maybe in due course I shall be able to come off the blood pressure meds, too. Who knows? The world is my lobster.

I think tonight I shall use my MP3 player to while away the time as I pedal. Five or six songs should do it nicely, although I could kill myself if a couple of my favourite progressive bands kick up. Maybe I should take it off shuffle and pick an album with tunes about three to four minutes duration. As much as I like them, I don't want a Bill Bruford drum solo to be the last thing I hear on this earth.

Not for another forty or more years, anyway.

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Go you! Yes, exercise is boring but it will help...

[pauln.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I was about to say. We invested in a torture machine (cross-trainer variety) when we moved. Pen's a reasonably good and regular user of it. I've tried a couple of times, but just get so fecking bored on it. I should either give it another go (with mp3) or dig my bike out of the back of the garage and go cycling a couple of times a week.

The times and effort rates you report are much what I've achieved on initial efforts, by the way. Nil desperandum.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

The alternative is to find a form of exercise that doesn't bore you, of course.

Me? I've taken up rock-climbing. westernind is horse riding.

[pauln.livejournal.com]

I was just about to ask the rock-climbing peeps we know in Bristle if they'd take a novice along to try it when we moved. Cycling doesn't bore me, so it's a matter of motivating myself to get the bike out, have it serviced and then use it.

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

Geocaching and LRP are my 'incidental' forms of exercise. Yes, they're not as good as exercising 'properly' - but they're a lot better than not exercising, and I actually do them, rather tan thinking about them.

[fencingsculptor.livejournal.com]

Kudos sir !

If you stick to regular gentle exercise increasing only steadily (ask your Doctor for advice) you'll see a very fast increase in your cardiovascular fitness levels.

1) Measure your heart rate before you start exercising.

2) Measure your heart rate when you finish training.

3) Monitor how long it takes your 'increased' heart rate to reduce back to the original Beats Per Minute Rate (BPM) that you registered before training.

The is known as your 'recovery rate', and is a very immediate way of measuring your increasing fitness levels. The heart is the most adaptive muscle in the body and will respond to exercise immediately and after 10 days/two weeks you'll notice your recovery rate reducing as the heart gets fitter.

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

If you set the contraption up in front of the TV, it may be less boring. A friend of mine has one of those walking treadmills and she and her husband use it while watching something. It takes their minds off how boring the chore of exercising is.

[thalinoviel.livejournal.com]

Music is good, ideally something bouncy you could dance to. Hold back on the techno until you're a bit fitter. 5 or 6 tracks of that and you'd die. Telly's even better. They have one at the Science Museum where you have to cycle to power the telly, which is very motivating :)