Not The Right Kind Of "Crunches"

Getting old sucks. As each year passes, I rapidly am becoming one of the oldest people I know and am none to happy about it.

I have tried to compensate for the ravages of time and gravity with diet and exercise. I have found that with the diet side of things, I at least have a little less chance of hurting myself in the process.

(Except maybe in the case of Sriracha, which some friends got me to try recently and is mislabeled in stores across America as a "hot sauce", while in fact is a dangerously addictive drug. That burns your face off.)

Culinary Crack.

The day after I finished my 2nd round of P90X (11/11/11), I walked into a gym nearby my house and signed up for a 3 month trial. Then the day after that, my obviously being serious about fitness as I have become, I went in and immediately got straight to work on the task of severely injuring myself.

It is much easier than it used to be in the old days, as they now have entire walls of very expensive, state of the art machines devoted entirely to seriously hurting yourself.

I am not sure how I did it, since I am pretty careful about form, not pushing too hard, etc. I still don't know for sure, but I think it was the bench press machine and my already having bad shoulders (one from surgery and the other from dislocating).

In P90X, all chest exercises are pushups which are typically only pushing about 75% of your body weight... so maybe 125 pounds of my 170 pounds.

Typically, I would do 12 sets of pushups, anywhere from 20 to 30 reps. Since bench press is really the only exercise I wasn't able do at home in P90X with just the dumbbells, I turned up the weight just a little on the gym machine and did 3 sets of 165 pounds, 10 times each.

I could have done more, but my shoulders were already hurting, so luckily I didn't. I think if I shot for a max weight (1 rep), I probably would not be able to type this right now. As it was, I could barely lift the right arm the next day.

I also did a bunch of sets on 7 other machines, working shoulders, biceps, triceps and legs.

Now the right shoulder crunches loud enough for others to hear it, but to be fair, it only does that if I move it.

So, I still have to see the Podiatrist about the arthritis in the right foot. Now I guess I also have to see someone about the shoulder, maybe both of them. But luckily only one hip is bad!

Today I did Day 1 of P90X, but will not do it all the way through, as in every day for 3 months again. I am just trying to do enough to keep moving through December and maybe even speed the healing of the shoulder by getting more blood flow to it (and not pushing too hard).

My shoulder hurt like crazy tonight, so I held back a little, but I still was able to do 195 pushups and 165 pullups.

So, I will hopefully just do enough to not get out of shape for when it comes time to do P90X2 in January.

Assuming of course that any of my limbs will still be connected and functional come 2012.

Maybe I should just get a juicer, like Jack LaLanne. He did live to a ripe old 96, after all.

But who knows if along the way he ever got hooked on the Sriracha.