It’s Not Even Close to Over

Now that I’m finally walking almost normally and have been given the okay to go to the gym and start using some of the equipment, the real work begins. Enough of those elementary heel slides, leg raises, quad contractions, etc. Now I get to move on to squats, lunges, leg extensions, hip curls, leg presses and more. My knee needs to be better than it was before the injury to prevent injury to the other knee and to prevent arthritis and degeneration down the road.

Before the injury, I exercised almost every day averaging between 30 minutes to 1 hour. After the injury, I did the rehab every day and after surgery I did exercises 3 times a day. The problem is while these rehab exercises have been and will be difficult and tedious; they do not contribute to any type of weight loss regime. So, in addition to doing the rehab exercises, I’ll also need to do some type of aerobic exercise to maintain my weight – not to mention the few pounds I’ve added during rehab. Up until now, that has been months and months on the stationery bike after my rehab exercises. Slowly, I will move to the elliptical, treadmill and finally running and biking. But in the good old days, I would alternate between running/yoga/bike days with gym days. Now I will need to add the more time consuming rehab exercises to my running/yoga/bike days.

This bit of news, combined with the news that as women age, they need to exercise more and bump up their exercise routine (NBC 4 Report), I am wondering whether I want to devote all that time to this and whether I will have any time or energy to do other things (like going out to dinner or a cultural/art event, meeting up with friends and so on) after I undertake my rehab/maintaining weight daily regimen. I need a bag of chips and chocolate.