Saturday, October 18, 2014

Readers' Workouts ~ my new exercise class

Readers' Workouts is hosted by Joy's Book Blog.
Last week, I joined one of the exercise groups here in the senior apartments where I live.  We exercise an hour on Mondays and an hour on Fridays.  They took each of us into another room and put us through a "test" of our abilities so there would be a baseline to judge any improvement in strength, balance, endurance, and whatever else they measured.  I presume they'll test us again at the end of the 20 sessions we signed up for.

Part of our routine included the use of a stretchy resistance band, also called an exercise band.  I didn't take any pictures during the sessions, but I did find this photo online. The bands are different colors, indicating different strengths.  Mine is blue and says "8.0 lbs" on it.   Except for one person in a wheelchair, we were standing and twisting and stretching the bands out to each side and behind our shoulders.

The shoulder exercise really made me feel the muscles where my shoulder was broken in December 2012, even though I faithfully did all the exercises in physical therapy in 2013.  I bought the pulley that hooks over a closed door so I could work on my range of motion, and I also used my tension cord for stretches to the side, from an angle, lifting up, pulling down, and pulling from behind me.  All of that gave me almost complete use of my right shoulder again.  Now I'm working on it with this class.

3 comments:

Sheila (Bookjourney) said...

That looks like a great class!

Joy said...

Resistance bands are great exercise tools!

Emily said...

Yeah for exercise class!