In the Swing of Things

Montana Mountain Ridge Ride

As one of the objects of this blog is to track my fitness and health progress, on occasion I will briefly describe my activity of the day (to include previous days as needed.)

Today, being Tuesday, I get an early and late dose of exercise. This morning I took Penny for a walk in a dense drizzle which felt like walking through wet spider webs. The temperature was pleasant enough with a light jacket and we took one of the 15 minute routes. After returning home I headed upstairs, shedding the long sleeve layers as I went, then grabbed the Kettlebell for my Tuesday swing session. (Sounds like a dance!)

On my Mon-Wed-Fri sessions I use the droid timer app to keep the tabata session on track. But on Tue-Thu I know that it takes 13 swings to cover the 20 second swing session. Being enthusiastic though, I bump that up to 15 swings and thus I performed 8 sessions of 15 swings for a total of 120 swings with a slow 8 count between each swing session. After swinging about I headed to the bedroom rug with my 10 lb barbell and did 3 Turkish Get Ups per side. One change in the TGU for today was to switch sides for each one instead of sequentially doing the 3 per side. Also, today I had a minor victory - I was able to execute the "strong man" TGU on BOTH sides. To an outside observer the procedure would have looked quite shaky, but it felt good to be able to fully support my weight with my left arm.

The second dose of exercise (?) comes courtesy of my participating in a bowling league on Tuesdays. I added the parenthetical question mark because participating in a league consisting of 5 man teams means one doesn't bowl with a frequency that really tasks one's physical abilities. But it is movement and it is fun (except nights where I just suck and have bad scores...) I tend to berate myself for sub-par performance.

As a related aside, in 1995-6 while working in Massachusetts I spent several months practicing Tai-Chi at work several days a week as this was provided as a lunch-time workout by a co-worker who was a Tai-Chi Master. I really enjoyed the practice and my balance and strength increased significantly after some time of that practice.

Coincidentally, my bowling average at that time improved to the best I've ever had including several games in which I beat my personal best score. I strongly believe the balance and strength gained through Tai-Chi directly resulted in improved bowling performance as consistently good bowling is a function of balance and timing (as well as mental focus). I moved back to Texas though and didn't find a close-by and convenient Tai-Chi practice source and lost touch with the art. This past year my bowling average has deteriorated and it is my hope that the strength and balance benefits of Kettlebell training will translate to a return to better performance in my bowling game.