The right way to do my exercises

My daily exercise routine consists of nine individual exercises. It starts with a 10-minute aerobic workout. It used to be an hour years ago, then a half hour and now it’s very short. Back then I ran outdoors for much longer, sometimes for to 2 or 3 hours. My posts here are about this journey that I call ‘lifelong fitness.’ It’s a long story and I have been writing about it in my posts. I’m 92 and have been exercising regularly for a very long time.

In my favorite place with a good book and my feet on the elliptical!

Decades ago I exercised mainly by running outdoors and always believed aerobics to be the foundation block of my fitness effort. Then I added pushups and slowly added other exercises, eliminated some, added some, and settled on the ones I do now. In the beginning I did much more of all of them especially aerobics.

I found out the hard way that there’s a good way and a bad way to do my nine exercises. The right way I learned is to do them in a certain sequence. The exercises vary quite a bit going from upper body strength (pushups) to stretching, balance, and aerobics. As I got older and into really old age the order became more important. It took a couple of years for me to figure out how to do them comfortably and trouble-free.

I start with the elliptical. It gets my body warmed up and is initially less strenuous than pushups. It gets my heart pumping and my body warm and loose. My heart rate is elevated, I huff and puff, and my arms, spine, hips, and knees are free from joint stress. It’s a low impact exercise and gives a full body workout. When I’m finished, I’m warmed up and ready for the other more specific exercises.

Some of my well-worn running and exercise books of long ago. A couple still have my maps and schedules stuck in them from my very early days of starting to get fit and running out on the roads.

The first of these is the toe cross stretch followed by table pushups, hamstring stretch, quad stretch, exercise ball (stretch, balance and strength), then the ab roller, half pushups, and the last one is 25 regular pushups. That’s my exercise routine, the one I do most days.

This sequence allows me to warm up, ease into the routine and gets my arms and shoulders ready for progressively more work ending with pushups. I’ve posted the handwritten page with stick drawings of the nine exercises here on this site a couple of times.           

Several of the books you see are from the 1970s. The Fitness after Forty book I bought when I was 45 in 1977. I got them after I had been running and exercising and developed all sorts of problems. They were very helpful and some still are. All still have relevant information and particularly priceless motivational material. There are many things about exercising and keeping fit and healthy as we age that haven’t changed.

I like to keep my fitness routine simple and I do it at home at my convenience. It’s become a habit with me now. I look forward to each session, it makes me feel good and I believe it helps me physically and mentally!