Now that I’m on the mend I’ve had time to reflect on my recent medical escapade and see what I can learn from it. Here are a few things that spring to mind.
Be careful what you wish for- A couple of days before my severe vertigo incident, I remember thinking to myself that my blog was getting boring and I needed some more fuel for it!
You’re not in control as much as you think you are– I had the weeks leading up to my birthday in January planned out in exquisite detail. Needless to say that plan is out the window now. I remember hearing the saying somewhere that “when we make plans, the universe laughs” (I’m sure various cultures have their own versions of a saying like this).
Keep Training Balanced– The purpose of the training I do is healthy aging. I’ve discussed previously that I think there are multiple aspects of this. Physical training is only one part, there are also nutrition and mental and spirituals aspects. Physical is the most fun for me so I sometimes emphasize it and neglect other aspects. Further, aerobics is the part of training I enjoy most so I can overemphasize it and underemphasize things like strength, flexibility, and balance training. And I can get hung up on some sort of performance goal rather than putting health first. Lately I had been drifting towards “ultraendurance” goals, for example I went for a five hour bike ride the day before my vertigo issue. There is nothing wrong with something like that once in a while, as long as I also pay enough attention to the other components of a healthy aging plan.
https://ift.tt/aS2nC3F Fall in our area is not as spectacular as in other places but it’s nice that it lasts this long. Some trees have lost their leaves by now, but other species, such as maples, are peaking. Yesterday I enjoyed a long ride up into the hills West of town. I rode through Paradise valley then past Chesbro reservoir, and returned to town via Willow Springs road, enjoying the glorious sunshine. Long rides at an easy pace, like this one, feel like they are good for my leaky heart valve, or at least are relaxing. I won’t give them up unless my cardiologist convinces me too, but I’m pretty sure he’ll approve. The hill across Chesbro reservoir, with the dam on the left Looking down Willow Springs road Japanese Maple in our back yard
https://ift.tt/wxOr4u3 My last strength workout went really well, I was able to go pretty hard without pushing my heart rate excessively. But afterwards it occurred to me that monitoring heart rate might not be enough. Strength training can cause a temporary spike in blood pressure which is probably not a good idea. I figured there must be a lot of research on this, because there are a lot of older people with cardiac limitations besides mine which is relatively rare (including heart-attack survivors, angina sufferers, and those with valve regurgitation). And they are still encouraged to do strength training to prevent sarcopenia. So I asked Gemini deep research about it and it produced this fascinating report . It points out that a resistance training session, properly performed, is beneficial to the heart because while it temporarily raises blood pressure, there is “a phenomenon known as post-exercise hypotension, where blood pressure remains below pre-exercise resting levels for se...
https://ift.tt/V59Jb1v A recent article in Neuroscience News covers a Stanford study [1] on cell secretions during exercise. These were previously known about but it was not possible to isolate them from the blood for study. The Stanford group came up with a novel way to dive deeper into the blood to isolate these molecules, called exerkines. The study was on mice and had some surprising results. One was the high number of exerkines produced during exercise. “This means that the effects of physical activity are very widespread across many tissues and organ systems,” one of the co-authors of the study said. “We’re only just starting to understand that complexity.” A second surprise was some unexpected healthy changes (anti-obesity, anti-diabetic, and exercise performance-enhancing) related to liver cells. This new approach is promising and I’m interested in seeing it repeated in humans. References Wei, W, et al, “Organism-wide, cell-type-specific secretome mapping of exercise tr...
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