If you accidentally ask an aging athlete, “How are you feeling?” – you are likely to get a 10-minute monologue on the deterioration and pain of various body parts.
At Cardio High we are acutely focused on how exercise makes our clients feel during and after a workout. Our aim is to provide people with a pain-free cardio workout that leaves them with a high-energy buzz that lasts throughout their day.
But what about the next day? Will your chronic ailments make the morning wake-up walk to the shower a painful shuffle? Your humble correspondent recently took a February vacation in which he took a break from interval training, squash and other forms of high cardio – and exchanged them for swimming/snorkeling, walking and reading while reclined.
We expected to feel less pain on waking each day, but there’s a twist – the opposite happened. Every morning we felt the pain creeping up and it was worse than back here in the cold of Newton. True, this is a simple study with a sample size of 1, but it’s clear that less activity does not lead to lower pain.
So there are clearly other factors that can contribute to how we feel each morning. Diet? The mattress? Sleeping position? Quantity of sitting? Amount of stretching?
We will keep a pain diary during the next few months. In it we will log activity, diet, corrective exercise adherence and sitting as we hope to unlock the key to feeling ten years younger every morning.
Here is a cheat sheet we will be using for our own maladies:
Note: We do corrective exercise for the various chronic pains. If we skip our corrective exercise routine, we usually expect an uptick in pain.
