Finding that exercise balance

I guess that I must confess here that I'm a bit of a girly-girl. I don't like to get messy and I don't like to sweat. I've never trained for a sport but I have enjoyed playing them. I was an avid tennis player and was really quite good at it but I made sure I looked cute doing it, haha. I've never been rail thin and I've never been obese and I've never had to work hard to get in shape. My moderately active lifestyle kept everything in check and I've maintained what I guess you'd call an "athletic" build.

But with Lupus, Crohn's, aging, and metabolism changes, fitness has been a challenge for me in the past several years. At times, I've lost weight without trying. When I've had to take Prednisone to settle down flares, I gained weight. That strength-sapping Lupus fatigue has been difficult to manage. I've read plenty of articles that say exercise helps the fatigue but I think there's a caveat there -- it only helps if you do the RIGHT AMOUNT and that can be difficult to discern.

I've had three shoulder surgeries in the past 2 years. Inflammation in my shoulders has caused torn tendons and cartilage/bone changes that needed to be corrected. With any sort of orthopedic surgery comes physical therapy, of course. The difficulty that my physical and occupational therapists encountered was finding the balance between doing too much and not doing enough.

When my therapy ended, I decided to keep trying to strengthen my body in hopes it would improve my mobility, pain levels, flexibility, and energy. I'm an intelligent person. I know my body, I understand my diseases, and I really thought I could figure out that balance between overdoing and not doing enough. So, I joined a gym. My Humana Medicare plan even paid for it!

I went 2-3 times per week and did about a 30-minute workout that included cardio and light weights. I really didn't feel that it was too much. But after two weeks, the dreaded fatigue hit me. Still, I pushed on. After three weeks, my right shoulder became horribly painful, appeared deformed, and was swollen to three times its size. (Correcting that problem was shoulder surgery No. 3.) I had to listen to my body; the gym was not a good idea.

So, after that surgery, and while I had both physical and occupational therapists still coming to the house for my rehab, I started to research alternatives. Whatever exercise program I did had to be done at home, had to be flexible enough to accommodate people with disabilities, and yet had to be interesting and rewarding enough to maintain my interest. One obvious choice emerged -- Wii Fit Plus.

In my never-ending quest to maintain a good quality of life but also to keep my bills at a minimum, I bought myself a Wii console. I found one at Kmart and put it on layaway (Yay for Kmart layaway!) -- in a few months, I brought it home, hooked it up, installed Netflix, and canceled satellite TV. In no time, the Wii became my entertainment center. I could play some of the sports games, even with my swollen joints and weak hands!

But I still wasn't ready to spend much money on pricey game equipment unless I was sure I could use it. So, I bought an inexpensive balance board on Ebay and a copy of the original Wii Fit software used for $3.50. And I had my physical and occupational therapists go over the games and activities with me to set up a reasonable workout that would help but not hurt. It went well. So well that I bought the Wii Fit Plus game, as well, to have more games and options.

I still have to be careful. Repetitive movements, no matter how seemingly simple, can and have hurt me. I have to quash my competitive nature of wanting to try just one more harder exercise or to beat my high score. But it's brilliant to have a fun program for balance and movement that actually provides feedback and statistics in your own home.

And thanks to Wii Fit Plus, I'm actually trying something I NEVER thought I'd be able to do -- Yoga. More on that tomorrow. ;)