from Germany
Hi, I'm new here!
Background
As I'm starting this thing, I'm 36. I started getting weird muscle issues some time maybe 15 years ago: my calves gradually started feeling very tense (especially at rest) and somewhat painful. Obviously everyone told me to "do sports" but I never could bring myself to. I don't really enjoy it that much and then inertia does its thing... in the end, other than my 30-40 minutes of walking and stairs each day, I did pretty much nothing physical for the past... many years.
I have since discovered many ways to manage this to some extent, most importantly meditation-type techniques and trigger point massage (or something quite like it, anyway). However, over the last few years (and all throughout my life in hindsight), more small irregularities have started creeping up:
Sometimes getting back pain after as little as 20 minutes of standing (without walking), sometimes lasting for hours without.
A sense of pressure in the torso area when I'm lying on my back and not resting my arms on top of my torso (happens often but not always).
A tendency towards clenching my teeth.
Headaches that feel like my eye muscles just don't want to let go anymore.
Intermittent pain in my feet.
Aches in the neck area.
What seems to be intermittent inner ear myoclonus (tremor that creates a vibrating sensation and a low-pitched sound, but without any other hearing impairments - got that tested).
Aches and weird sensations in the chest area.
I'm sure there's more that I am forgetting right now.
I think all of this can be ascribed to muscle issues. The "symptoms" don't really line up with any of the typical systemic medical issues you might expect, so I never could bring myself to launch into an epic journey from one doctor to the next (a few initial attempts confirmed that there were no straightforward issues in my chest/torso nor legs). On the other hand, proper training seemed complicated and time-consuming and perhaps even expensive (a gym subscription is no small matter for a student with basically no income, which was my situation back then) - so I ended up figuring out these management techniques I mentioned.
However, I'm not as good at managing this stuff as I'd like to, and so it was a foregone conclusion I'd eventually turn to proper exercise... but it seemed hard to manage all of that, and I wasn't really very interested in the chiselled look that I suspected turns most people to stuff like strength training.
Then I discovered DAREBEE and some of its entirely manageable training programs - and just looked too realistic and practical to not try. So, here I am.
The idea
My main goal is to address all these muscular thingies (technical term) and general fitness and strength trainings are just extras to me for now. My hypothesis is that my muscles are getting fired up excessively due to understimulation, i.e. not enough activity. This seems reasonable given that the same very definitely happens in human perception: if we're exposed to a situation in which there is very little sensory input, the brain will amp it up, which will often result in seeing patterns or even vivid hallucinations. Same principle: understimulation leads to weird side effects in which circuitry gets activated for no real reason.
Additionally, based on my learning about trigger points / myofascial pain syndrome, I discovered that (a) often multiple groups of muscles share the same major nerves and attachments to the spine and (b) muscle-related pain is often in a different place than the actual muscle issue. In other words, you can try for a long time to help your aching wrist but the problem is actually in the muscle that flexes it and the motor end plates (where the neural pathways attach to the muscle to control it) are actually way further up the arm, near the elbow.
While looking into all that, I learned a lot about the function of most of the major muscles in the body, and which muscles support and counteract each other. As a result, I can make predictions about what exercises may have which secondary effects. While working my way through various DAREBEE training programs, I'll explain what I expect each exercise to do, and how it actually works out for me.
The plan
I want to start out simple, and initially the EPIC FIVE program looked promising, but given how weak my upper body is, the second day was just out of the question (basically, two push-ups and my arms are toast), so I turned to the Foundation program. Later I'll be wanting to do strength training only once or twice a week for each muscle group, since scientific findings suggest that there's an effect of diminishing returns and I don't care about building muscle that much - having the muscles in working order in the first place is much more important to me.
By and large, scientific findings also discount the usefulness of stretching exercises in most cases, so I'll likely exclude those from my future planning, too.
Why I'm posting here
I've been doing this for five days now and it's actually much, much easier to keep at it than I thought - maybe because I expected to have to commit a lot more time and effort than I actually need. I suspect I'm tricking myself into it by starting out easy and then gradually stepping it up, but if it works, great!
So, for me posting here is less about getting encouragement and accountability and more about sorting things out in my head, trying to understand what I'm doing and why, and keeping track of the results (which isn't so easy without logging). Likely I'll be writing a lot of text occasionally, analyzing what's happening and trying to make sense of all the weird things going on in the body. If you want to chime in for any reason whatsoever, great, happy to have you!
I'll continue right on with my very first impression after just 105 seconds of exercise, and then maybe summarize my experience with the first few days of Foundation.
Background
As I'm starting this thing, I'm 36. I started getting weird muscle issues some time maybe 15 years ago: my calves gradually started feeling very tense (especially at rest) and somewhat painful. Obviously everyone told me to "do sports" but I never could bring myself to. I don't really enjoy it that much and then inertia does its thing... in the end, other than my 30-40 minutes of walking and stairs each day, I did pretty much nothing physical for the past... many years.
I have since discovered many ways to manage this to some extent, most importantly meditation-type techniques and trigger point massage (or something quite like it, anyway). However, over the last few years (and all throughout my life in hindsight), more small irregularities have started creeping up:
Sometimes getting back pain after as little as 20 minutes of standing (without walking), sometimes lasting for hours without.
A sense of pressure in the torso area when I'm lying on my back and not resting my arms on top of my torso (happens often but not always).
A tendency towards clenching my teeth.
Headaches that feel like my eye muscles just don't want to let go anymore.
Intermittent pain in my feet.
Aches in the neck area.
What seems to be intermittent inner ear myoclonus (tremor that creates a vibrating sensation and a low-pitched sound, but without any other hearing impairments - got that tested).
Aches and weird sensations in the chest area.
I'm sure there's more that I am forgetting right now.
I think all of this can be ascribed to muscle issues. The "symptoms" don't really line up with any of the typical systemic medical issues you might expect, so I never could bring myself to launch into an epic journey from one doctor to the next (a few initial attempts confirmed that there were no straightforward issues in my chest/torso nor legs). On the other hand, proper training seemed complicated and time-consuming and perhaps even expensive (a gym subscription is no small matter for a student with basically no income, which was my situation back then) - so I ended up figuring out these management techniques I mentioned.
However, I'm not as good at managing this stuff as I'd like to, and so it was a foregone conclusion I'd eventually turn to proper exercise... but it seemed hard to manage all of that, and I wasn't really very interested in the chiselled look that I suspected turns most people to stuff like strength training.
Then I discovered DAREBEE and some of its entirely manageable training programs - and just looked too realistic and practical to not try. So, here I am.
The idea
My main goal is to address all these muscular thingies (technical term) and general fitness and strength trainings are just extras to me for now. My hypothesis is that my muscles are getting fired up excessively due to understimulation, i.e. not enough activity. This seems reasonable given that the same very definitely happens in human perception: if we're exposed to a situation in which there is very little sensory input, the brain will amp it up, which will often result in seeing patterns or even vivid hallucinations. Same principle: understimulation leads to weird side effects in which circuitry gets activated for no real reason.
Additionally, based on my learning about trigger points / myofascial pain syndrome, I discovered that (a) often multiple groups of muscles share the same major nerves and attachments to the spine and (b) muscle-related pain is often in a different place than the actual muscle issue. In other words, you can try for a long time to help your aching wrist but the problem is actually in the muscle that flexes it and the motor end plates (where the neural pathways attach to the muscle to control it) are actually way further up the arm, near the elbow.
While looking into all that, I learned a lot about the function of most of the major muscles in the body, and which muscles support and counteract each other. As a result, I can make predictions about what exercises may have which secondary effects. While working my way through various DAREBEE training programs, I'll explain what I expect each exercise to do, and how it actually works out for me.
The plan
I want to start out simple, and initially the EPIC FIVE program looked promising, but given how weak my upper body is, the second day was just out of the question (basically, two push-ups and my arms are toast), so I turned to the Foundation program. Later I'll be wanting to do strength training only once or twice a week for each muscle group, since scientific findings suggest that there's an effect of diminishing returns and I don't care about building muscle that much - having the muscles in working order in the first place is much more important to me.
By and large, scientific findings also discount the usefulness of stretching exercises in most cases, so I'll likely exclude those from my future planning, too.
Why I'm posting here
I've been doing this for five days now and it's actually much, much easier to keep at it than I thought - maybe because I expected to have to commit a lot more time and effort than I actually need. I suspect I'm tricking myself into it by starting out easy and then gradually stepping it up, but if it works, great!
So, for me posting here is less about getting encouragement and accountability and more about sorting things out in my head, trying to understand what I'm doing and why, and keeping track of the results (which isn't so easy without logging). Likely I'll be writing a lot of text occasionally, analyzing what's happening and trying to make sense of all the weird things going on in the body. If you want to chime in for any reason whatsoever, great, happy to have you!
I'll continue right on with my very first impression after just 105 seconds of exercise, and then maybe summarize my experience with the first few days of Foundation.
Also, the opposing sides thing for the dead bugs really confused my poor, poor brain.
from TLV
and Belated Welcome to the Hive.
Good thing the bedroom is upstairs.
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