Muscle wasting and exercise.

Subject: Muscle wasting and exercise.

Muscle wasting or atrophy as the medics would term it is a condition almost as bad as the corona virus in that it eventually debilitates a person so they can hardly move about and apparently muscles which have wasted away through lack of usage can not be rehabilitated it becomes a condition for life. The resulting lifestyle is extremely curtailed, walks which used to be part of everyday activity are no longer possible, even  progress down the shopping aisle in the supermarket becomes a chore and the pleasure of a walk along the cliff, a long lost memory.

Some jobs are sedentary, long hours sitting in a chair, at a keyboard fore instance lead not only to back problems but a loss of muscular strength through not using the muscles. People confined to bed through long bouts of sickness are a nursing challenge and demand lengthy sessions of physiotherapy to get any sort of mobility.
The pandemic has kept us all indoors, we are probably glued to the television for much of our waking hours and then  we go to bed 'to take the weight off our feet'. The damage to our muscular system is a slow progressive thing. Bit by bit we lose the strength we once had and find when we do exercise how difficult it is to do what we once found quite easy. The walk to the shop is not be as pleasurable as it was, breath more laboured we will miss the pleasure of noticing the things around us as we are forced to set our mind purely on covering the distance.
We can of course take measures to avoid all this if it isn't too late. The exercise mat, the Pilate exercises, the stretches and reps designed to get at those dormant muscles are in our armoury to defeat the decline but for many the thought of a regular exercise regime doing activities which, when I remember Jane Fonder, at at her peak as a fitness Guru made us wonder which world she inhabited as she did the splits or twisted her faun like figure ( she must have been past 50) into some impossible shape to show how lithe she had become. It seems a retrograde step to join the dog on the floor lifting a leg, much as he does for a different purpose. It seems an incongruently fashionable  part of  life these days, laying flat on your back in the living room, when the chair over there sits unoccupied.
For me the gym was always a place for the self absorbed. The sweaty aroma, the treadmills to nowhere, the grunting over bulked men and women bench pressing  huge weights. Part narcissistic, this insistence for keeping in shape to look good, or the mind blowing mileage covered by the marathon runner out training. When I was young I rode a bicycle everywhere, and thought nothing of doing 120 miles on a ride into the Dales. It was a trip which took in the beauty of the Dales and the enjoyment of dancing on the peddles as we breasted a climb, hardly out of breath. Those were the days when muscle wasting was unimaginable, our daily lives and the work we did took good care of that.
Now as I sit house bound,  propped up in bed, writing my blog, I sense  a new lifestyle a lifestyle in which muscles play little or no part,  other than to propel me to the bathroom.