Do you struggle when exercising?

[rocketsocks]

As we get older it's often harder to exercise, and our time on trails can leave us winded and wondering why am I struggling so much, I use to do this no problem, does it warrant a trip to the doctor? Maybe! Caught early enough many of these issues aging hikers may have can be fully corrected.

http://catamounttrail.org/2014/04/16...something-bad/

[TrippLite]

[QUOTE] Diets with large amounts of fat and protein, animal-derived in particular, promote inflammation damaging arterial linings and impairing recovery of muscles, joints, and ligaments from the regular micro-trauma of exercise/QUOTE]

Interesting...
If this is a valid statement from the article you posted RocketSocks, I got it all wrong as I drink blended protein drinks before and after my weight lifting workouts as do thousands of others.

[rgarling]

Diets with large amounts of fat and protein, animal-derived in particular, promote inflammation damaging arterial linings and impairing recovery of muscles, joints, and ligaments ...

Interesting...
If this is a valid statement from the article you posted RocketSocks, I got it all wrong....

I suppose you are just being polite, but that statement is off-base. Fat is innocuous. Excessive protein intake is unnecessary, but generally won't hurt. Neither cause significant inflammation.

Inflammation is caused by consumption of vegetable oils, excessive carbohydrate, and processed foods (containing grains and sugars).

[Wise Old Owl]

Joint inflammation is really caused by very excessive hiking.

[Teacher & Snacktime]

Scary stuff, RS. I just received the possible angina diagnosis today.

[rocketsocks]

Yep, I was struggling to shovel snow this year...huffin' and a puffin' and the up hills kill me when hikin' I'm a flat lander.

[rocketsocks]

[QUOTE=TrippLite;1885699]

Diets with large amounts of fat and protein, animal-derived in particular, promote inflammation damaging arterial linings and impairing recovery of muscles, joints, and ligaments from the regular micro-trauma of exercise/QUOTE]

Interesting...
If this is a valid statement from the article you posted RocketSocks, I got it all wrong as I drink blended protein drinks before and after my weight lifting workouts as do thousands of others.

I know that's a big part of reparing for weight lifter, something I'm don't know much about. I know Pedaling Fool way into that, maybe he can offer an alternative opinion.

[Deer Hunter]

Scary stuff, RS. I just received the possible angina diagnosis today.

Sorry to hear that, Teacher.

[Wise Old Owl]

Scary stuff, RS. I just received the possible angina diagnosis today.

I hear ya hope its mild.... do your best.

[Another Kevin]

Scary stuff, RS. I just received the possible angina diagnosis today.

Gadzooks! All the best to you. At least if they're talking "possible angina" they've caught things pretty early, and there's a lot they can do nowadays to mend a broken heart (says a man married to a lady with a five-way bypass).

[Teacher & Snacktime]

My world is a little rocked, but I'm trying to keep a positive outlook. So much of Rocketsock's article hit home though. It's easy to chalk it all up to aging and a few extra pounds, since we all hope it's only that.

I hope your wife is faring well after her ordeal, Kevin. I hope we can do that slackpack suggestion you had!

[Pedaling Fool]

[QUOTE=rocketsocks;1885776]

I know Pedaling Fool way into that, maybe he can offer an alternative opinion.

No opinion, more like guesses from observations

This issue of exercise, diet and health is a mangled mess. I have no idea what causes these issues of heart disease, but it seems like no one does, including the most esteemed medical institutions.

It seems the warnings we were given on saturated fat and cholesterol were all based on junk science.

It also seems like heart disease is not so much of a 20^th century disease as we’ve been led to believe, you can see this in a recent study of mummies and clogged arteries.


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...sease/1974215/

Excerpt:

Finding plaques in the arteries of ancient peoples suggests that it is "either a basic component of aging, or that we are missing something very important that is a cause of atherosclerosis," says co-author Gregory Thomas, medical director of MemorialCare Heart and Vascular Institute in Long Beach, Calif.

More than one-third of 137 mummies sent through a CT scanner had calcification in their arteries, suggesting hardening of the arteries.

Mummies came from around the world: ancient Egypt, where people deliberately preserved the bodies of kings; as well as Peru, the southwestern United States and the Aleutian Islands, near Alaska, where the corpses were naturally mummified by dry air and other conditions. In earlier studies, researchers also have found hardened arteries and arthritis in the famous "Ice Man," a 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Alps in 1991.




To further muddy the waters, there are also counterintuitive things out there, such as the Milk-drinking African tribe – Maasai http://www.wired.com/2012/09/milk-me...in-the-maasai/

Excerpt:

The Maasai are a pastoralist tribe living in Kenya and Northern Tanzania. Their traditional diet consists almost entirely of milk, meat, and blood. Two thirds of their calories come from fat, and they consume 600 – 2000 mg of cholesterol a day. To put that number in perspective, the American Heart Association recommends consuming under 300 mg of cholesterol a day. In spite of a high fat, high cholesterol diet, the Maasai have low rates of diseases typically associated with such diets. They tend to have low blood pressure, their overall cholesterol levels are low, they have low incidences of cholesterol gallstones, as well as low rates of coronary artery diseases such as atherosclerosis.

Even more remarkable are the results of a 1971 study by Taylor and Ho. Two groups of Maasai were fed a controlled diet for 8 weeks. One group – the control group – was given food rich in calories. The other group had the same diet, but with an additional 2 grams of cholesterol per day. Both diets contained small amounts of a radioactive tracer (carbon 14). (You’d never get approval for a study like this today, and for good reason.) By monitoring blood and fecal samples, the scientists discovered that the two groups had basically identical levels of total cholesterol in their blood. In spite of consuming a large dose of cholesterol, these individuals had the same cholesterol levels as the control group.



So in that light, I’ve developed my own exercise and diet regimen, which is primarily based on my observations of people, especially the old and lessons learned on the trail. Old people fall apart, weightlifting fights that and not just the simple weightlifting, such as benchpressing and curling…, but things that work the total body, such as dips on gymnastic rings… and probably most important is not maintaining a routine; routines make you very strong in certain areas and very weak in others. And I carry this anti-routine mindset in all other areas of exercise. I know a lot of people think this takes a lot of time, but it doesn’t, you can get in and get out very quickly if you don’t sit and mope around, like a lot of people do and really you don’t even need a gym.

Like I said I take this methodology into all other areas because if you get into a routine, you set yourself up for failure; you should always be testing and pushing yourself and evaluating/listening to your body.

One of the most important things in exercise is consistency, more so than pushing yourself, but consistency without routine. That’s where I’m kind of lucky, because I’ve been riding a bike for over 25 years, at one point my commute to work was a 50-mile roundtrip; therefore I was getting a workout at the same time as doing something I had to do anyway. And surprisingly (thanks to rush hour traffic) I really didn’t take much longer than riding a car to work. If you find the difference between riding my bike and driving than that worked out to less than an hour workout, the rest was commute that I had to do anyway.

My post is getting too long, so I’ll just close with diet. I don’t believe all the crap out there condemning Processed Foods and such as being the reason behind heart disease as the number one killer. I believe it’s mostly a combination of quantity of foods, lack of exercise and then the issue of genetics.

As I’ve said before, the most valuable lesson I learned on the trail was just how efficient our bodies are on such little amounts of food. People eat too much – everyone hears that, but they don’t realize just how much they must cut out of their diet to keep from falling in this category.

I have a basic rule of thumb. If I eat a large baked potato, with all the fixin’s and then can NOT go for a run or do crunches than I’ve been eaten too much. Eating too much is not something you just do in one sitting where you feel bloated. It’s an accumulative thing. If you eat (this is based on my personal experience – YMMV) 3 meals per day where you feel full, but not close to bloated, then you’re probably eating too much, especially if you are not as active as you should be. I don’t eat that much and I’m very active.

That's why there is a rule of not eating 1-hour (or whatever it is) before you go swimming, but this rule is only a rule because we all eat too much. Like I said before, I can eat a large potato and go for a run or a swim and not worry about cramps and if I do get cramps, it’s not because I ate the potato, rather because I was eating too much before that, hence, it’s accumulative. Going hungry sometimes is a good thing, but in our society that seems to be a bad thing – that’s wrong.

[rocketsocks]

PF, I knew you would come up with some good articles...you have a knack for ferreting out such jewels. Like Occams Razor says "Often the simplest answer is the correct one" I agree we can eat to much food for our inactive life styles. I think the hardest, leanest, and strongest I've ever been was when I was digging ditches for days on end for an under ground plumbing installation...give me a shovel, pocket level, some string lines and bring my check around on Fridays...loved it, so simple, not a lot of thinkin involved, head down blowin and goin. The act of digging worked all though stabilizing muscles, and at the end of the day you knew you did some work. I gotta think some of the more primitive peoples of the world with less modern destraction so many of us enjoy may have a similar life style of constant work or chores to maintain a more active life style.

Is food a poison? we need the nutrients, and get rid of the rest. When we expel what is not needed are our bodys not getting sick so to speak? and telling us I don't want this. Of coarse this is a normal function and by design, but perhaps limiting the amount of poisons we put in is best. I'm using these terms very loosely, but thinking of food intake in this way I think illustrates the point to it's the lowest common denominator quite nicely. Eating less food and limiting the amount of additives (dyes, flavor enhancers, monohydrohomblablablah) is probably not a bad idea.

[Old Hiker]

Hey, RS !!

Yep - getting older means less exercise (for me), so even a 2 mile trip around the neighborhood with 20 pounds in my backpack is leading to aching legs and ankles. The huffing and puffing, not so much. Getting ready for 2016 - evidently none too soon.

My biggest problems are the heat and humidity, and I still don't believe my second try will take place. Of course, I didn't think my FIRST try would take place. I gotta have more faith, I guess.

Too much sitting, not enough doing. Still, I look at my peers at my job and think: YIKES !! I'm MUCH better than that 30-40 year old.

I'm blessed with a nagging wife as well. She's gotten me to go to the doctor on several occasions where I might have ignored the problems until they were much more serious.

[rocketsocks]

Cool, I remember when you got pulled away off the trail with the leg injury, here's to a better and safer passage this time around....hey and on the note of sittin around...I'm off to take a long walk today...I'm getting way to freaking soft and have been tryin to make some changes.

[Pedaling Fool]

Interesting new study, which seems to indicate that there is something to the old saying: “Calm down or you’re going to have a heart attack.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2...-your-arteries

[AggieAl]

IMHO you need more exercise as you get older, not less. However, we need to reduce the intensity in order to avoid getting injured. So lower weights, reduce the speed work etc, but increase the time. Otherwise you get injured and it takes a lot more time to heal.

An example of dumb: I ran a marathon in February despite a nagging low back pain. I could barely walk about 2/3 of the way in. It turned out to be a pinched nerve. Thanks to exercise and physical therapy I am much better, but can't run much. I should have checked that out first. Dumb.

Do you need annual exams?

Yes, in March my doctor pointed out a hernia which needed surgery. This could have been a real problem on the trail!

Then in May I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which will require surgery. However, your prognosis is excellent if you catch it before it spreads. Once it spreads there is no cure.

I am 71 and start my fifth and last section of the AT at Crawford Notch next Monday. The surgery has to wait until I finish!

Getting old is a pain.

Planning on the CT for 2015 and the PCT for 2016.

[rocketsocks]

Interesting new study, which seems to indicate that there is something to the old saying: “Calm down or you’re going to have a heart attack.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2...-your-arteries

Now o'coarse I'm gonna read this article, and I agree, people can get way stressed out chasing phantom ailments, especially with the availability of information through the internet...just don't ignore warning signs (meaning tell your doctor about your concerns and don't you yourself make the call).

[rocketsocks]

IMHO you need more exercise as you get older, not less. However, we need to reduce the intensity in order to avoid getting injured. So lower weights, reduce the speed work etc, but increase the time. Otherwise you get injured and it takes a lot more time to heal.

An example of dumb: I ran a marathon in February despite a nagging low back pain. I could barely walk about 2/3 of the way in. It turned out to be a pinched nerve. Thanks to exercise and physical therapy I am much better, but can't run much. I should have checked that out first. Dumb.

Do you need annual exams?

Yes, in March my doctor pointed out a hernia which needed surgery. This could have been a real problem on the trail!

Then in May I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which will require surgery. However, your prognosis is excellent if you catch it before it spreads. Once it spreads there is no cure.

I am 71 and start my fifth and last section of the AT at Crawford Notch next Monday. The surgery has to wait until I finish!

Getting old is a pain.

Planning on the CT for 2015 and the PCT for 2016.

Glad to hear your being proactive about your decease, and that it was caught early enough to be corrected, had a friend that didn't, and a family member that...well, were just not sure yet Most of this stuff can be fixed if a person gets to the doctors soon enough. I hiked with a hernia this past Winter, and am having repaired next week, I don't recommend this for folks, but mine was pretty minor, it's letting it go that would be the big no no and having it get worse at an inopportune time. Great luck with your hike Al.

[rocketsocks]

Interesting new study, which seems to indicate that there is something to the old saying: “Calm down or you’re going to have a heart attack.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2...-your-arteries

Well now that is interesting. First let me say that, yes stress kills, I whole heartedly believe that, pun intended.

...and secondly...Small damn world...Dr. Alan Tall is a Doctor at Columbia university hospital Assoc. with Presbyterian hospital in New York City, and while he wasn't my fathers primary Doctor, he was on the team of Cardiologist that made rounds when my Pop had his heart attack while we were in the City attending a wedding. For about a week I'd set off into the city and walk up to 69th Steet from 34th and the train station to go see him. One thing I remember his doctor said/did was show us a pie chart of factors that can cause a heart attack...Stress was about 2/3 of that pie. Good article Pedalin Fool, thanks for postin.