A Little Exercise: Better than None

I admit it: I have started to do a little exercise.

I wrote about me doing kettle bell swings. I had to stop when I hurt my back a few days after starting (completely unrelated to the swings, btw). This past week, however, my back finally felt good enough to allow me to start something. Anything. So I did.

After reading a Reddit article, I decided to start with doing a bunch of push-ups every day. It’s not a lot, and to most people who are gym rats, it’s laughable. But remember this: I haven’t done any serious exercise since leaving the Marines in 1997. I’m not going to jump in and hit the ground running and injure myself. I’m going to gradually get back into it and take it slowly.

As it stands, I still have daily soreness from just these few push-ups I do every day. I do the few that I do and I feel like I did when I was at my physical peak after I’d run a mile and a half. Yes, I’m horribly out of shape. I know that.

I will start increasing my number of push-ups later this week. I’ll also try to make some time to possibly get back to walking every day, or at least every other day. I’ll also re-start the kettle bell regimen. I want to strengthen and tone what’s under all my excess skin so that as the skin shrinks (which it has been doing so nicely, I might add), there will be something nice to see.

This is the hardest part of the entire journey: sweating for some results. I can’t say I enjoy it, nor do I like it, but I am tolerating it. I’ll be doing my best to keep it up. I just hope I don’t injure myself anytime soon.

I will say that this little bit of exercise for the past five days has helped with me kick-starting my weight loss again. This week alone, I’ve lost 2.8 lbs and I’m down to a new low of 182.1 lbs. Just 7.1 more to go and I’m within USMC regs! That means just 17.1 to go for my final goal!!!

I’m excited, and I’m feeling good. The soreness has started to go away a little, and I’m going to up the number of pushups soon. While I have no problem going all-in and being hard core on my eating habits, exercise is something different entirely.

In the past, I would hit the gym or the pavement with full-force. As a young Marine, my body had no problem with this. Now as a seasoned older gentleman, this is not the case, and I need to be more careful when I start a new exercise regimen so that I don’t hurt myself. There’s nothing worse than being hurt early in an exercise regimen.

I feel good. I am doing well on this. I’m not breaking any records nor am I planning on anything serious and hard core right now, but in the future, I might. Maybe. We’ll see.