DAN PAROBEK EXERCISE
Today I went attended my second visit to Combined Therapy Specialties and Dan Parobek, Physical Therapist. I’ve gone to him before when my neck hurt because my neck muscles were so tight. I couldn’t turn my head when backing up the car, hoping that I could see all I needed to see in the trainier mirror, driving slowly and listening carefully in case I scraped the side of the car against something, which happened a couple of times with concrete poles in parking garages. We had wonderful conversations and my neck felt much better after he massaged my back. He gave me exercises to do, which I did for a few weeks and then forgot about and returned to not turning my head.
This time it was my hips that hurt when I am sleeping on my side in a bed. I had shifted to a recliner which kept me on my back which seemed to solve the problem. But on the last trip in London when I trudged along 7 miles a day, my right hip, especially, would hurt, not a lot but enough to notice.
I told my GP Dr. Cannon about this and wondered if I needed hip replacement since so many of my friends were getting their hips or knees replaced. Dr. Cannon didn’t laugh at me, but suggested physical therapy, so off to Dan I went. I asked Dan if I was rubbing bone on bone, again wondering if I needed a hip replacement. He said that if it was bone on bone that I felt, I would be visiting him in a wheel chair. It was most likely weak muscles and little used tendons.
And at this point I made a discovery that I am probably one of the last on earth to make. When I complained to Dan that I was getting weaker each year, weaker and weaker, as a result of old age, he replied that age might have something to do with it but much more likely, as I got older and slowed down a little, when I was no no longer going to work or doing much of anything except sitting still all day it was sitting still that was making me weaker and weaker. The less I moved or got any kind of exercise the weaker I was getting, and the weaker I was getting the more I slowed down and the more I slowed down the closer I was getting to being a basket case. Probably what was keeping me going was that when I traveled for a month every two or three months I had to walk and walk and walk as I did in London. Walking was countering my tendency to get weaker and weaker. What I needed to do was to exercise the different parts of my body for a few minutes every day, and the exercises that I could do to strengthen my muscles required no equipment and were as easy to do as pushups while leaning against the wall, practicing standing on one foot and then the other, lying on my back and pulling my knees up for ten seconds at a time, or standing repeatedly from a sitting position in a chair, with my arms crossed, while not pushing myself up with my hands.
Exercise was as simple, or as hard, as that. What a dunderhead I have been, I am. It is the young, who don’t need of exercise who huff and puff in the gym or while jogging. They have seemed comic to me. The idea of going to the gym on the ground floor of my apartment building, an amenity which I Pooh-pooled, now suddenly seems like a good idea.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 