Category Archives: Health & Medicine

Cardio isn’t enough

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A couple of years ago I added some resistance training to my workout (30 minutes a day on the treadmill). Started with little (5 pound) barbells working mostly on my upper body. Just trying to keep some muscle tone as I age. After a while I moved up to 10 pound weights and that seems about right. I had no idea if the weights were doing me any good but a piece in The Washington Post argues that cardio isn’t enough, you need resistance training, too.

The piece sites a couple of studies including research that shows weight training reduces your risk of diabetes, stroke ad heart disease. Similarly, “a 2019 study, which included nearly 13,000 people, performing resistance training for less than an hour per week was associated with roughly 40 to 70 percent decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality — independent of any aerobic exercise.” The article explains how resistance training yields these benefits.

So I’ll keep my little weight bench and my baby barbells and keep pumping till I can’t pump no more.

Day-tight Compartment

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Journalist and novelist Molly Jong-Fast calls herself “a pandemic-shutdown champion.”

I sit in my apartment day after day, week after week, focused on getting through the next few hours and not allowing myself to worry too much about, or even think too much about, the future. For this superpower, I have to thank Alcoholics Anonymous.

An older fellow in one of her AA meetings used to say he lived “in a day-tight compartment.” He only concerned himself with the activities in the current 24 hours. Back in March the author had to quarantine for two weeks but didn’t think of it as two weeks:

I thought of it as one day and then another day and another. The two weeks passed, but the pandemic did not. So I continued to live “in a day-tight compartment.” I still do. Every night at 8 p.m., I attend my Zoom AA meeting. Every morning, I think, Today I won’t drink and Today I’ll stay home and not contract the coronavirus.

Ms. Jong-Fast says she’s as obsessed with getting back to normal as everyone else is…

“…but I try not to worry about when that will be possible. I’ll lose it if I think in terms of hanging on until there’s a vaccine. Some people may find it helpful to tell themselves, It’s not forever. It’s just a few months. In my experience, though, when there’s no firm deadline for the end of an ordeal—and no one really knows when the pandemic will end—it’s better to focus on getting through the day. Life isn’t lived two weeks from now, or two months from now. Life exists in the moment and nowhere else.”

She knows this winter will be “one of the hardest, saddest winters of (her) lifetime. We all know it.”

“But it’s not winter 2020; we don’t live in winter 2020 until we do. All any of us have is right now. The only time we can possibly occupy is this moment of this day, and today I can drink my coffee, not my vodka, try to get my teenagers to talk to me, and do the next right thing.”

 

Fake Deaths

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I’ve been telling myself the pandemic would become real to people in the U.S. once X number of deaths were recorded. When the number is too high to be ignored. I’m wrong about that. The number doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it. These are “fake deaths” in the minds of a whole bunch of people. Covid won’t be “real” until everyone knows someone (family or friend) brought down (death or serious illness) by the virus. If that doesn’t do it, I’m out of ideas.

“Nothing was the same:

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“Great crises tend to bring profound social change, for good or ill. […] After the Black Death, nothing was the same,” Pomata said. “What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine but in economy and culture. Because of danger, there’s this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way.” — (How Pandemics Wreak Havoc—and Open Minds)

I seem to recall a few courses in European History during my school days but I’m pretty sure they didn’t give much space to the Black Death. Interesting days ahead here in the USofA.