It's only a matter of (chibi) going

[chibi-nerd]

On 3/7/2022 at 11:34 AM, Emissary2Ornj said:

It is nice to actually have data proving that shopping does take effort!

I think it's a great idea to ease into the work. It's boring, and hard, but smarter.

Re housework: I just yesterday discovered Amanda Chung Fat on Instagram (via a GMB blog shoutout, I think). She's all about incorporating working out into cleaning. Housework definitely counts.

I googled her. If I've got the right lady, she hasn't posted since she was diagnosed with cancer some time ago.  Sad.

[chibi-nerd]

So I my actual workout schedule looks nothing like my plan. 

I did do my "arms and abs" but then went shopping, which counted for about 100 Int. Mins, so to meet my goal of 220 Int. Mins, I only have to do one or two 
small workouts this week. It feels silly, but I think this is still a good plan.
I also thought to check my pulseOx after all the meds I've been taking and its gone from its usual 95 to 97...much more normal! Yay!
CT scan tomorrow!!

[Emissary2Ornj]

17 minutes ago, chibi-nerd said:

It feels silly, but I think this is still a good plan.

Looks like you're adapting really well. "Embrace smart silliness!" (That sounds Instagram-able, right? Asking for a friend me.)

[chibi-nerd]

20 hours ago, Emissary2Ornj said:

Looks like you're adapting really well. "Embrace smart silliness!" (That sounds Instagram-able, right? Asking for a friend me.)

Sure! You could be an influencer!  😂

The combination of working lungs and the watch counting intensity minutes really stimulates me to do incidental exercise. Yesterday I walked to the doctors and got another 18, which means I only have to do one tiny workout to meet my weekly goal. I'm walking up to the radiology dept. now, so maybe I'll get a few more! Perhaps I'll take up race walking!

[chibi-nerd]

Last day of Week something or other. I think I'll stop counting.

 

To get my 220 Int Mins I did one arm workout, on teeny tiny intentional workout and everything else was incidental, although, I did set off to the shopping/hospital/doctors with the hope of garnering intensity minutes. That's the power of the watch.

 

Next week I'll aim for 240 or 34ish per day.

[chibi-nerd]

So another successful week of intensity minutes. This week the goal was 240 and I did 280!! A short leg workout gets lots of IMs because my heart rate stays high for a long time afterwards. I wonder if the CDC counts recovery time in their definition of an moderate or intense minute of exercise.

 

The week looked something like

M: rest

T :rest

W: Shopping (no car)

T: rest

F: Short Walk with Family

S: Shopping (car)

S: Legs

 

Still looking like a pretty average sort of week of exercise. So next I'll increase to 260 minutes, but on Wednesday I'm having a lung biopsy, and according to Dr Google, I wont be exercising for a week after that.

 

 

 

 

[chibi-nerd]

So despite the enforced rest due to the lung biopsy, I still got 222 Int Minutes done, consisting of one walk to the shops, one walk with my husband and a leg workout. 
Too easy! I was going to ease back into the intensity minutes, starting from 150 this week, but that is obviously unnecessary, so I'll keep the goal set at 240 this week.

M: shopping

T : legs

W: biopsy

T: rest

F: rest

S:  rest (shopping didn't accrue any minutes this week!)

S: Walk

  

The WHO recommends children get 420 Int Mins a week. I don't see why I can't do the same as a child! So that will be my ultimate goal; 420 mins.

 

[chibi-nerd]

Now what the heck is going on? Last time I did the "Chest and Side Delts" workout, I got 46 Int Mins. And this time 14!! And that's right... my heart rate hardly went up at all.
And I feel great, so it's not that my heart is tired or malfunctioning, I assume.
So theories....The double dose of symbicort has fixed my lungs up so well that my VO2Max has shot up or, the 0.9g (2 bananas worth) of potassium I've been taking for the last 6 days has made my heart work better.  So weird!

Now usually one would say that's a good thing, but I'm not going to meet my Int Min goal of 240 at this rate!! What and all to do?  My resting heart rate seems to be going down too.
Since I got the watch it averaged 63bpm, but over the last week it averaged 60bpm.

 

 

 

 

[chibi-nerd]

This trend seems to be continuing. I did the weekly Wednesday shop and got 72 IMs where last week I got 116 IMs!! Looking at the time spent in each HR zone
I really am not working as hard as a week ago! I've checked that my MaxHR is still set at 187, so unless the watch changed the way it measures heart rate then this is
a real effect. And it feels like a real effect!

 

[Emissary2Ornj]

Curiouser and curiouser! Is there also a possibility that you're getting used to your level of fitness? Interesting happenings, for sure. Do you feel like you could reasonably challenge/push yourself and it not be to your detriment? Like, does your subjective, real-world experience match what the watch is reporting?

[chibi-nerd]

I feel great! Usually when I walk to the end of the street I have to have a rest at the top, but today I was talking to my mother on the phone and she didn't even realise I was walking.
Walking *and* talking. I suppose that could be attributed to the symbicort, but why did my resting heart rate suddenly drop  just when I started taking potassium? And why did my IM for the same workouts also drop at that time? Although actually, it was dropping from the 21st, 5 days after I started the double dose of Symbicort. Anyway, gift horse, mouth! Now I should go out and do a really brisk walk and see if my VO2Max goes up.

 

 

[Emissary2Ornj]

On 3/30/2022 at 2:06 AM, chibi-nerd said:

I feel great! Usually when I walk to the end of the street I have to have a rest at the top, but today I was talking to my mother on the phone and she didn't even realise I was walking.

Wahoo! This is really cool. Like, in a " No idea; I'm just along for the ride" kind of way.

 

[chibi-nerd]

So! Mischief managed.  272 IMinutes. My resting heart rate seems to be still getting lower. My average for the last 7 days is now 58. 
According to Dr Google I'm either very fit, or I have brachycardia. Neither seems true to me, especially considering what's going on in my lungs and my FEV1.
Actually, I have a doo dad for measuring peak flow....maybe I should be tracking that! I do love a number!

 

Anyhoo, 2 upper body workouts and a couple of days of incidental walking and I reached my goal for the week.
Next week...264 IM.

 

 

[Emissary2Ornj]

FWIW,

6 hours ago, chibi-nerd said:

My resting heart rate seems to be still getting lower. My average for the last 7 days is now 58. 

That's a good idea to get more related data points involved!

 

My dad had a notoriously low resting heart rate. That was just his normal. Back when I was a nurse (a looooong time ago; this is memories, not expert knowledge) working in critical care, I remember that we couldn't really depend on an individual's numbers compared to "normal ranges" to give us a good (complete) picture of what was going on with that individual. That's not new news, and we all know it applies in lots of philosophical ways to lots of aspects of life. But just in case your brain-anxiety wants to raise its head, I thought I'd throw that in to bring some outside reassurance. Hopefully your brain is doing the "Oh, this is neat! Shiny new odd event going on. I'm curious!" thing and not the "What's wrong with me?!?!" thing.

 

Yay for efficient hearts and lungs!!! for however long it lasts (hopefully a long while? if it's a good thing, I mean).

[chibi-nerd]

16 hours ago, Emissary2Ornj said:

Hopefully your brain is doing the "Oh, this is neat! Shiny new odd event going on. I'm curious!" thing and not the "What's wrong with me?!?!" thing.

 

Yay for efficient hearts and lungs!!! for however long it lasts (hopefully a long while? if it's a good thing, I mean).

Thank you! My brain is doing all sorts of scary things at the moment, but I don't think my heart is giving out. I think I'm getting fitter. Because of the sudden drop in sleeping heart rate, it must be due to the symbicort, not the exercise, me thinks. My heart is thinking "yay! at last there's some oxygen coming from those lungs, so I can slow down a bit!" My husbands sleeping heart rate is about 35 and he's as fit as a fiddle!

 

 

[chibi-nerd]

So the jury is back and the verdict is in...I have NTM. Just like I've been telling doctors for 9 years. I am very very  angry.
Now I have to wait for the big public hospital, the only place that treats NTM, to contact me and start treatment. That could be weeks.
I guess I should enjoy that time while I can.

My doctor told me I have to do 5 mins of puffed out exercise a day, so I guess I'd better add tabata on the end of every workout.
But not today, I'm too tired from being angry.

[Emissary2Ornj]

Oh, no! I'm so sorry they ignored you so.... I can't find the right adverb here. I want to say "spectacularly", but it needs way more negative than that.

I'm really sorry for the bad news.
 

[chibi-nerd]

On 4/9/2022 at 10:20 AM, Emissary2Ornj said:

Oh, no! I'm so sorry they ignored you so.... I can't find the right adverb here. I want to say "spectacularly", but it needs way more negative than that.

I'm really sorry for the bad news.
 

Thank you. I appreciate it. I am still very angry but on the other hand, my lungs are working so well now that it's hard to believe that there's an evil blob eating my them.

I did a terrific workout just now. I hadn't realised how much my dodgy lungs were preventing my from responding to exercise, and how much they were making me 
loath exercise and how much they were preventing me from even doing incidental exercise because walking up the street was so difficult. So yay for Dr Oh and symbicort!
 

So 335 Int Mins 70 over the goal of 264. .^_^. Most of that was incidental walking. And I've been doing my 4 mins of tabata every day too. When I tacked it on the

end of my leg workout my heart rate got to 186. A new record (at least since getting this watch) !!  

 

 

[chibi-nerd]

Now what did I do last week?

 

5 x 4min tabatas.

1 leg workout and 2 walks.
2x walking to the bus and around the city (which generates a lot of intensity minutes).
Only one weight workout because we were interstate for the last week.

 

 

[chibi-nerd]

This week I averaged 9min of moderate and 21 minutes of vigorous exercise a day; 30 mins a day or 3.5 hours in the week. That doesn't seem like a lot!

• 6x 4 mins of tabata.
• Walking to the doctor's and back.
• 2 x aerobics oz style (bring back AOS I say!)
• I also had some sort of weird stress attack that the watch counted as exercise too. 

 

So despite blitzing my goal of 320 Int Mins with 371, I still feel like I'm not doing enough exercise! 
This week's goal: 350.

 

 

[Emissary2Ornj]

Wow! Neat that your body or brain (whichever) seems to want to keep moving.

[chibi-nerd]

23 hours ago, Emissary2Ornj said:

Wow! Neat that your body or brain (whichever) seems to want to keep moving.

Yeah. And it turns out the Int Min goal is really good for me. If I were trying to  run a 4 minute mile, I would feel bad that I can't even jog, but since the goal is to keep
my heart rate up by whatever means I like, I don't have to feel bad that I can only bench press 13kg because I've injured my rotator cuff. Does that make sense?
If I had goals in terms of strength or speed, I'd give up.  This way I actually crave exercise and have to tell myself to rest when the watch tells me to. The watch knows all!

[Emissary2Ornj]

It makes total sense. It's like measurable flexibility. I'm guessing it's so freeing because it allows you to put a number on what's happening in real life, versus trying to stick to a structured regimen to meet a certain number, then real life happening which the regimen can't plan for. 

[chibi-nerd]

So after my streak of optimism I hit a wall this week. I have simply not been able to sleep! And every day I woke up I'd think, I'll do a workout tomorrow when I've slept, so I ended up having to desperately get my intensity minutes done on the weekend. Big mistake! I was so tired on  Sunday I couldn't get my heart rate up, so the workout went on and on. One whole set of weights added nothing to the total int mins!!  Unlike previous weeks, where I overshot the goal by at least 10% each week, this week I just managed to sneak past the goal with 5 IMs to spare.
Perhaps I should have listened to my body and not the watch!
I slept a bit better last night, but I still don't feel great. I'm going to try to push through with no nap and see if that lets me sleep tonight.

 

Anyhoo....

In the last 7 days I've done
3 weights workouts! Yay!

6 Tabata and stretch. 
About 20 mins of incidental walking.

About 30mins of aerobics.

 

Grand total 355 Int Mins.
Goal for this week ....385 IMs

This week I'm not going to wait for a good night's sleep, I'm going to get my 55 mins of activity in each day, regardless.

[Emissary2Ornj]

I spy.... Adaptation! And learning what works and what doesn't.