Introduction: Don't start your own program till you've diagnosed any problems

You can reduce a lot of physical pain by strengthening your muscles. But you can also cause a lot of pain by doing things wrong, or trying to strengthen muscles the wrong way, or by exercising muscles that just aren't up to the load yet. That's what I did. I had to move into an area where I couldn't keep a car, so I walked everywhere. I figured I was doing my legs a lot of good, giving them all this wonderful exercise that they hadn't been getting in years. And as a matter of fact, I was. But my knees weren't ready for the sudden work they had to do. This housebound person didn't know it but she put a huge load of work on fifty-eight year old knees, work they hadn't seen on a regular basis since my college days, which ended when I was 26. That's thirty-two years of not getting a lot of exercise. Small wonder that a lot of pain started shooting through my legs. Now, see, I have a bit of arthritis in my hands. Just the distal knuckle in some of my fingers. They're a bit swollen, and they look ugly to me. So when my knees started hurting, I assumed they had arthritis in them, too. Especially since I would start walking, they'd be stiff, and then the pain would go away after about half a mile. Eventually the whole problem vanished. Then it came back again, with a vengeance. It seemed seasonal, so I walked even more. The knees started getting stiff when I wasn't able to stretch them out or move them around, such as happened when I was sitting at a desk in the library. I never figured out what was wrong, until I was seized by an urge to start exercising. I wanted earnestly to get into the shape I wanted to be in whilst I was in college, and now that I was free to do so, I couldn't think of anything to stop me. Except for my sore old knees and my painful old shoulder, that is. I went to the library and checked out some lovely books. I purchased a copy of "How to Keep Slender and Fit After Thirty", a book full of great, indexed exercises which I had owned since I was sixteen and which my ex had tossed out, along with everything else I owned. One of the books was the Marine Fitness manual (unofficial) that gave me permission to go slowly. "It is a myth," I'm paraphrasing, "that we work you to death in boot camp until on the last day you emerge triumphantly physically fit." Every person improves at his own rate, so uniformity in exercise didn't make a lot of sense. Instead, you will see marines working out on their own, doing the exercises and calisthenics that are most suitable to their getting in shape. Then followed a section of graduated exercise. They don't throw you to the floor and demand thirty pushups. They explained how to start at your own level, such as doing modified push-ups, then work your way up in difficulty. I'll explain this at a future date. The other book I got was one of the most valuable fitness books I've ever had in my hands. "Be Your Own Personal Trainer". Chapter One told the story of a couple of typical people who had started out on a fitness regimen while not knowing what they were doing. The husband was a former football jock, the wife his reluctant companion in what to her was a new enterprise. The husband had been out of training for fifteen years, thought he knew exactly where to begin, and ended up tearing muscles just from jogging the first day. The wife had developed tennis elbow from working muscles that had never worked before--two of the most common problems when inexpert people take up an exercise routine. Then they walked us through some self-diagnostics, which is very important. I will put in a post about the knee first, with its own section on diagnosing problems because there is a request for it. It's already got me walking without knee pain, and another older woman at my church is doing the very simple, very gentle exercise I taught her, and feeling very good results from it. I'm going to be rash and jump into Knee exercises and Back exercises right away, then write the overall diagnostic section, then come back and edit the knee and back sections. For now, the knee and back sections are going up tonight. Oh, and the reason for the haste is that I'm going to copy and paste these sections into the actual blog in just a couple of days. See you on the next two posts.