Back to the Gym

Back in May, I finally returned to the gym for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, over three years ago.  You will recall when the COVID virus began to rapidly spread and start to claim lives, many establishments were closed and here in the US, we went into lockdown mode.  Gyms were one of those establishments that were forced to close.

After the lockdown was lifted, people were allowed to go back to gyms, but they remained an environment of high COVID infection risk, what with sweating and breathing heavily in an unfiltered closed-in space.  To mitigate the risk, exercisers were encouraged to wear masks.  But how many people are willing to wear a mask when they may be struggling just to breathe at a much higher rate?

But now that I have received the latest FDA and CDC recommended COVID booster for someone over age 65, I felt it was safe to reactivate our membership at our local gym.

A bit of history is in order to understand the significance of this change.

Running has been my primary form of exercise for over 30 years, although with age, I am now barely considered a runner almost falling into that sometimes-insulting category as a “jogger” (typically considered someone who runs slower than a 10-minute mile).  And for the past 24 years, at least during warmer weather, that run has been an almost 3-mile jaunt around the lake in our subdivision.  While running kept my legs and heart in great shape, I recognized that I needed some resistance training as well to strengthen my upper body.  So, over the years, my wife and I have belonged to four different gyms.

At the third gym we belonged to, we also worked out with a personal trainer twice a week.  Thanks to this outstanding trainer’s efforts, I really feel that for the 5+ years we belonged there, that even being in my 50s, I was in the best physical shape of my entire life.  He would periodically change up our routines sometimes doing circuits and sometimes doing super sets, advancing weights as appropriate, and quarterly taking body measurements to track our progress.  Thus, it was with supreme sadness when that gym closed.

In 2017, we joined our local Y.  Here, I first started working out using the resistance machines that make such exercise almost error free.  Eventually, I felt advanced enough to move on to the free weights area.  Here, with the memories of my personal training workouts, I could give myself an unsupervised personal training.

When the pandemic closed all gyms, rather than buying my own equipment, I started doing crunches and push-ups each morning after my normal stretching that I do.  I worked up to 20 crunches with a count to five for each hold and 30 push-ups using “Perfect Push-Ups.”  My wife, meanwhile, did order some weights and she would do pre-recorded workouts.

So, how was it to return?  Well, I decided to first start again with the resistance machines since it had been three years since I did any resistance training.  To start off slowly, I decided to make two circuits of about nine or ten machines.  I had no idea how much weight to use but, on most machines, the previous person’s setting seemed reasonably challenging.  The one I especially wanted to use was the Pec Fly.

This exercise may vary depending on the particular piece of equipment you use but, if you are not familiar with a seated chest fly, picture yourself holding your arms up at shoulder height parallel to the ground with your forearms forming a right angle at the elbow (almost like showing a good field goal in football).  Then rest your forearms on the machine pads and move your arms together towards your chest with some weight resistance.  This is the one set of muscles I must never use for any everyday use as it is the one that always gets me whenever I have not done this exercise in a while.

I was sore for a week.  In fact, I went back to the gym three days later and not only did I find this machine more challenging with sore muscles, but I found other muscles sore on several of the other same machines I had used on that first day.  But I knew this was a good kind of sore as for the first time in a long time, I was stressing these muscles.

Over the next few weeks, I kept up this routine of going twice a week and doing two circuits before finishing with a 20- to 25-minute walk at the end.  Each time, I tried to use as much weight resistance as I could for a 12-rep set.  In addition to those first sore muscles from the Pec Fly, I discovered other sore muscles as I used different machines, obviously other muscles that had not been worked out to that degree.

I knew I wasn’t going to quickly get back to the level of weight resistance that I was able to use three years ago as it had taken me several years to get there.  But I was willing to make slow progress in that direction.  I knew eventually I should be able to work back up to doing three circuits and then move over to the free weight area once again.  And I was particularly pleased knowing that my cold weather days of running outdoors in the winter would be supplanted by indoor running at the gym in a nice warm environment!