The gym continues to be a regular part of daily life. I missed a day a couple weeks ago when we went to Fremantle and walked everywhere but otherwise I’m there six days a week still. The Scientist has now lost about 23 kgs overall so only has a few more kilos to go before he reaches his goal. I’ve told him he needs to find some better fitting clothes as the ones he’s wearing tend to look way too baggy. My weight has gone down a little bit and it seems maybe this might become a sort of regular thing although it’s mostly tiny amounts. Overall I’m down about 6.5 kgs so I’m getting there slowly.

It’s now been eleven months since my knee surgery and my knee still isn’t at the best level I’d expect it to be as yet. I will say that the knee isn’t giving way as regularly as it once did but it often feels like it might at any time. This surely is an improvement and it gives me hope that there will be a time when it doesn’t do this any more. Meanwhile my right knee is showing more obvious issues with the continued exercise and it seems possible I will need to have it fixed at some point in the future. I hope to avoid that for at least a year or two as I’d like to be totally recovered with my left knee and also be at my ideal weight before going through this again.

I believe some of the recent improvement must be due to changes in my exercise routines. I try to change things around a lot so I don’t get into too much of a rut. Sometimes the changes are kind of forced because my shoulder/knees/back will start hurting and so I avoid exercise that aggravates that and try something different. A few weeks ago I started doing a muscle conditioning routine called Kinetics on the Fitness on Request program. The first class was 35 minutes long and included heaps of lunges and squats, exercises that I really hate and find painful. After the first class I was terribly sore for a couple of days but I did go back and tried again. I’ve since tried all the available classes, including a 50 minute class and I can sort of do most of the routine now although I still find some of the exercises quite hard to do. What I realised just this afternoon was that all those squats and lunges must be paying off because I can do a lot more without as much pain as when I started. This shift seems to have just occurred because I’ve been struggling away with them every time and wondering whether it was going to be worth all the effort…It felt like a big accomplishment. The classes also include quite a lot of abdominal work and I’ve found those muscles are a lot stronger already. My tummy doesn’t pooch out quite as much as it used to. I remember after Game Fanatic was born the midwife told me I need to tighten my abdominal muscles to get rid of the post-pregnancy pooch. I guess I had to wait until he was all grown up to get onto that issue. :D

I’ve also been doing a lot of the spin bike classes and my stamina and endurance are getting a lot better. I recently tried doing a class that includes a time trial of twenty minutes which is quite tough as it involves four periods of five minutes riding in the same position with a few seconds of break meant to allow time to check heart rate in between sessions. I’ve also noticed my legs are getting a lot stronger and I suspect if I were to get my bike serviced I might find I am considerably improved in my cycling than I was a couple of years ago. (Bike is not being used since I fell off it two or three years ago. Not afraid to ride but it didn’t feel like it was riding properly and I keep procrastinating about getting it fixed.)

I also tried out a new bike today which is an Upright Expresso bike. It looks like this and allows you to compete online and record your results with an Expresso account. I tried it out today and it was a lot of fun but hard work. Unfortunately it’s not currently connected to the internet so I wasn’t able to use the online features.