Back To The Gym

The good thing about having a trainer, especially one that you’ve paid in advance, is that you have motivation and some pressure to return to training if something (i.e., “LIFE”) has derailed your training program.

The bad thing is having pressure to return to training.

Between the holidays, me getting a bad cold, me having kidney stones and then getting a bad infection, and then me taking some industrial strength antibiotics that have serious restrictions on exercise, it had been about six weeks.

Being a responsible, intelligent adult (which, for the record, often SUCKS!) my head was actually looking forward to getting back to the gym. Having slacked off for a month and a half, my body wanted to scream and run the other way.

My trainer is excellent and knew just how far to back off due to the six week layoff, and how far to push to see how much I had slipped. (It’s not that bad.) But by the time the hours was done, I did feel a lot like I had been beaten from head to toe by a squad of goons with baseball bats.

Yeah??!! Whoopie??!!

The part I’m still curious about but probably never going to figure out (I am not a doctor nor do I have a “medical” or “biological” brain – physics I can soak up like a sponge, biology and physiology and the like just bounce harmlessly off of my ears and never reach my brain) is how antibiotics can require such stringent restrictions on exercise due to the fact that they can cause tendon damage, particularly to the Achilles tendon.

Say what?

A drug I’m taking to kill an infection in my urinary tract (caused by kidney stone damage) can cause my Achilles or hamstring to rupture if I exercise while taking it? HOW? What’s the mechanism? How are the two connected?

Some things are just mysteries, I guess.

Meanwhile, how many Extra Strength Excedrin can I take before something “bad” happens? Not asking for a friend…