Exercise Tips

Left cup is a control, and the right one was turned inside out, very carefully, by FitOldDog. Took about 10 minutes (third attempt)! Go too fast and you break the cup - you’re the cup - from Joel Friel, Going Long. Click image for link to descriptive narrative. Photo by FitOldDog.

In his excellent book, Going Long, Joe Friel said, “Successful endurance training is exactly like turning a Styrofoam cup inside out. So long as you take it slowly, you’ll be able to do it. Try to rush things and—rip!—you’ll tear the cup. You are the cup.”

Such visual metaphors are really useful for endurance athletes, or for any kind of exercise for that matter. Take them to heart, and they can certainly reduce your chances of injury, while enhancing your performance, sometimes dramatically.

FitOldDog’s exercise tips, based on such caution, are designed to help you exercise safely into old age, and thus live a more interesting and active life in your later years.

There is nothing like making mistakes to learn some valuable lessons, and that certainly describes my athletic career to a T, so I’m passing those lessons along as FitOldDog’s Exercise Tips.

First in the world with an AAA stent graft, at age 67 (or was it 68, I can’t remember, and where are my reading glasses and walker?). Click image for video of my finish, with which I am still pleased.

First a word about why you might want to listen to an athlete who is pretty average, who entered his current sport, Ironman-distance triathlons, in his mid-50s and is drifting into his dotage.

My mathematics analogy: for a number of years I took mathematics seriously, working problems for 20-30 hours per week. The only way to truly understand mathematics is to work problems. However, when I checked the solution to more advanced problems I hated it when the author would write, as he jumped from one challenging equation to another, let’s say A and B, “It’s easy to see that A implies B.” At least half of the time it was not easy for me to see that, because the author could not relate to my level of understanding - I was an amateur

My flute analogy: prior to my mathematics obsession, in fact about 30 years before, I was equally enamored of the flute, and I sought the best teachers that I could afford, which wasn’t much. I rapidly discovered that the best flautists were not the best teachers - they just could not understand why I would struggle with a phrase that they had mastered before they were 10 years old.

You have to choose a teacher who has been where you are, and as I am an amateur athlete, and I’m still learning how to stay an athlete in my 70s, maybe I have something of value to say to other mature amateurs, entering a sport or undertaking an exercise program, later in life.

Furthermore, my exercise tips are free!

Here are some examples, each linked to one of my nearly 1000 blog posts. You can just search under exercise tips, or your sport of interest, swim, bike or run:

Your First Triathlon In Your Fifties?

11 Tips On Exercise

My Favorite Swim Tips

Thoughts On High School Athletics

Why did I create the FitOldDog Training Wheel?

The FitOldDog Training Wheel sums up my exercise philosophy, whether you are an athlete or not. Start at the top, and go clockwise, whatever your challenge. Click image for related podcast.

I thought long and hard about this, and concluded that most injuries come from inadequate body awareness, which can be trained and dramatically improved with a little work. This is why I recommend that you start at the top, with body awareness training, in the form of Feldenkrais, Continuum, movement work, massage, and the like. Here is one of my favorite body awareness exercises:

More to come.

FitOldDog

 Important Note: These posts do not provide medical advice. You should always consult your physician before undertaking or significantly modifying an exercise program.

Copyright © 2010 Kevin T. Morgan aka FitOldDog, Old Dogs in Training, LLC.

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